April 09--A four-minute video called "Golden Oldies" begins with pop culture provocateur Marisa Olson standing at a table that holds ephemera from music's past: a CD boombox on one side, a child's record player on the other. Both are spray painted gold, in witty reference to the video's title. The headphones on her head (plugged into nothing) are gold, as well.
She starts by manhandling a vinyl LP (also painted gold) with a pair of what look to be garden shears, trimming it down to size. Her purpose is unclear until suddenly you realize she's trying to get the record to fit into the CD player. What is she doing?
Then she grabs a cassette -- yes, gold, what else? -- and unspools the tape from within. She collects it like ribbon into a pile and holds it up to her ear. Nothing. Then she places it on the record player turntable with equally dismal results.
"When I did that video, I almost thought of myself -- don't laugh -- as an alien who had fallen to earth and I knew there was information on these objects, but I couldn't figure how to get it out," Olson told me, speaking from her home in New York. She comes to the Siskel Film Center next week for a program featuring several of her videos, including "Golden Oldies."
She's calling her collection of work "In Praise of Garbage," which she means both literally and metaphorically.
"A lot of my work," she said, "deals with the technology that people throw away when they upgrade to a new phone or computer. I'm saying, why don't we think about what this garbage is?"
Her videos attempt to salvage these artifacts and technologies from the trash pile of our collective memory and examine what they mean -- what they say about us.
"When I give talks I'll say, 'Think about how many phones you've had in your life.' And then: 'Think about where they are now.' Every land line, every cell phone. For whatever reason, our culture is constantly compelled to make new things and to upgrade -- harder, better, faster, stronger. At the same time, the garbage that gets left behind is a time capsule that tells the story of our cultural history."
As "Golden Oldies" illustrates with a faux naif wink, the music stored on those outmoded pieces of technology -- the cassettes, the CDs, the records -- effectively becomes garbage because it is unsalvageable (unless you are the rare person who still has a compatible player). No doubt the digital cloud will be outmoded sooner than we think. (Ironically, I was tracking down a different story this week and was informed that the person I needed to reach would accept correspondence only via fax. Via fax! I might as well have been trying to get a record to play on Olson's CD boombox.)
"I'm interested in certain questions about the world," said Olson, who describes herself as a conceptual artist, meaning she elevates the exploration of ideas over what might traditionally be considered aesthetically pleasing.
"What is the relationship between pop culture and politics? What is the history of technology and how does it represent -- or inspect -- the history of culture? I'll take those questions and try to answer them in different forms -- sometimes it's a performance, sometimes it's a sculpture and sometimes it's video art."
Her investigation into pop culture led her to "American Idol." She decided to audition for the show in 2004 and blogged about the experience (at americanidolauditiontraining.blogs.com). Afterward she made a video called "The One That Got Away," a consciously artless mashup of footage that she calls a "fictional re-enactment of my 'American Idol' audition."
For three months, she put herself in training. "None of it had to do with my voice. I was critiquing gender stereotypes entrenched by the show."
The video itself features Olson describing the process, as well as footage from the audition portion of the show spliced in. "There are intentionally janky rough cuts between the clips because I wanted to make it clear that I was copying and pasting."
Her audition segment never actually aired, so I asked if the judges' comments she selected were similar to the feedback she received, or if she was using them to blast the show's tendency to tear people down.
"All of the above," she said. "I made it through multiple rounds of the process. I never really intended to get on the show. But as soon as you get locked into an arena with 20,000 people all singing Whitney Houston songs at the same time, it takes over your body. You actually do kind of want it. It's really weird." (Olson sang "I Will Always Love You," which I found hilariously stereotypical; "I was trying to keep it real," she said.)
"I went through multiple rounds, and they kept making me sign contracts saying I couldn't talk about the process, which is part of what I wanted to critique: the idea that artists are being asked to give away the rights to their work and their voice" -- not just their singing voice, but the freedom to voice their opinions about the show.
A surprising amount of people who saw "The One That Got Away" on YouTube took it at face value. (It was eventually pulled for copyright reasons, though you could argue it falls under fair use; at any rate, it is available on Vimeo). Didn't viewers realize Olson was making satirical points about the show?
"I think that is an open question," she said. "If you read the blog, one of the 'training' exercises is that I go to a tanning salon to get a tan and I ended up getting a full-body rash. When you read something like that, or watch the video, I would think that people would realize it's performative. I commonly got the question: Is this real, or is this a parody? And my answer was: yes. As in, both."
The video explores something Olson calls the aesthetics of failure. "Failure can be a lot of things. You failed your audition. But it's also, I failed to make a seamless video" -- on purpose. Failure also can be couched as a rebellion against the status quo, a failure to live up to society's standards of how a person should think or look, a failure to adhere to norms. That's a complicated idea, and it comes through pretty clearly if you watch the video carefully enough.
