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Cameron Jamie - Openings - his films - Critical Essay

ArtForum, Summer, 2001 by Gary Indiana

Years before I saw any of Cameron Jamie's work, the artist Larry Johnson had told me about "this guy who does 'apartment wrestling'"--or at least performance that takes that softcore-porn subgenre as its point of departure. Eventually I met the artist and he agreed to send me a copy of his film BB, 2000, but it would be months-- and many missed connections--before the eighteen-minute extravaganza of suburban teenage acting-out would arrive in the mail with two shorter videos, La Baguette, 1997, and The New Life, 1996. Wildly different from whatever I'd imagined, they were truly odd, riveting in a bewildering way.

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BB, I knew, documented the "backyard wrestling" phenomenon that had sprung up among working-class kids in the San Fernando Valley. I had the wrong idea that backyard wrestling had somehow evolved from apartment wrestling, but it's clear from the films that the only connection between the two genres is Jamie's interest in wrestling as theatrical spectacle. Apartment wrestling was part of his performance art: He staged fights in various domestic interiors with well-chosen strangers and filmed them. The Valley kids in their backyards were staging their performance art, a kind of tract-home art a povera suffused by a spirited sense of absurdist theater. Cameron documented this ingeniously clumsy suburban mayhem on video for several years (long before the art-school ingenues who've exploited it recently), assembling myriad fancy edits before deciding to shoot an afternoon's matches straight, with two Super-8 cameras, letting the thing speak for itself, more or less. It looks like it was cut with a razor blade, giv ing it a nice raw feel that allows quite a few overlaps and repetitions to slip in. These are hard to notice, though, because everything in BB is an unassimilable surprise, even when you see something again from a different angle.

BB immediately reminded me of Jean Rouch's Les Maitres fous (The mad masters; 1955). Rouch, a seminal filmmaker and pioneering ethnographer, was fascinated by the surreally real and the expressive impulses of people not generally considered "artists." Les Maitres fous documents the Sunday rituals of the Haouka sect of Accra, whose initiates went into trances during which they incarnated figures of the white ruling elite (the governor, officers of the army), a mimicry heightened and metaphorized by wild, lunging movements with fake rifles, foaming at the mouth, and animal sacrifices. Rouch's film records the folkloric, "naive" theater of the Third World. BB records a comparable phenomenon in the domestic Third World that is the hidden underbelly of America's suburbs. The "mad masters" of BB mimic, in a loose way, the gods of the World Wrestling Federation.

With its repetitively ominous metal score by The Melvins, BB is a low-rent, complex choreography of injury. The jerky rhythms, the shifts between "serious" blows and whimsical show-biz mayhem (boys leaping on prone bodies from the garage roof, knocking each other's heads with folding chairs), the makeshift props contestants use to clobber each other, jump from, and throw people into (a stepladder, a sheet of plywood, an ice chest, a garbage can), and the unstylized, camera-indifferent expressions passing over the faces of wrestlers and spectators (anomie-stricken teens all) give this film, despite the eventual crescendo of the sound track, the quality of a loop rather than a linear narrative: The body collisions could go on forever. Yet BB also has the visceral effect of a classical drama, with a distinct arc of events, ending at exactly the right moment.

The wrestling in The New Life and La Baguette happens in more intimate spaces, without an audience. In The New Life, Jamie wears a mask, black fright wig, and white long johns slashed at the ass to expose rubbery prosthetic buttocks. His partner is a professional Michael Jackson impersonator who normally performs on the sidewalk outside Frederick's of Hollywood. The arena is a cramped apartment bedroom. The wrestlers struggle, lock each other in various awkward holds, break apart, pause in momentary triumph or defeat; everything passes quickly; the action is almost desultory. In La Baguette, Jamie appears in the same costume, while his opponent, a young French ex-con, wears ordinary street clothes. This encounter has more violence in it and works over more space, in something like a school commissary, with a lot of wooden furniture that gets knocked over.

As the wrestlers move and twist into unpredictable configurations, always in medium shot, they remain at all times figures instead of characters, archetypes of something just beyond legibility. All three films have an unaccountable quality, a cryptic absence of expositional detail that makes each work so open to interpretation that it's also completely closed to it.

What went past me in early conversations with Jamie was the fact that he comes from the Valley, and the backyard wrestling documentation is one of several ongoing projects that record life in a place that has, for him, a heavily negative psychic charge. (If you know the Valley only from films like Magnolia or a lecture gig at CalArts, count yourself lucky.) When I saw him recently he made this abundantly clear, citing a horrendous childhood that he compared, without getting into details, to life in a maximum-security prison. He called his displacement by the 1994 Northridge quake the most liberating event of his life--which makes his eternal return "for material" seem dementedly brave. (He now lives and shows his work principally in Europe. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art's "Contemporary Projects" series currently offers, through July 29, an opportunity to view Jamie's work on his semi-abandoned home turf.)

Cameron Jamie - Openings - his films - Critical Essay

ArtForum, Summer, 2001 by Gary Indiana

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