Abbas Kiarostami and Charles and Ray Eames at Andrea Rosen - New York - Brief Article

Sleepers and art films have been in bed together ever since Andy Warhol created his 8-hour masterpiece, Sleep, back in 1963, and a woman napped while a fly buzzed around her body in Yoko Ono's Fly (1970). Eschewing both Warhol's erotic gaze and Ono's pointedly irritating strategies, Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami offers his contribution to this legacy with Sleepers, a video installation originally produced for the 2001 Venice Biennale.

Free of politics and sexuality, Sleepers is characteristic of the subtle, moving films made by Kiarostami--The Wind Will Carry Us, Under the Olive Trees and Taste of Cherry, for which he won the Palme d'Or--that portray ordinary people in everyday situations while skirting issues that could bring him in conflict with government censors in Iran. Projected life-size on the gallery's floor, the 1 1/2-hour DVD simply and serenely presents a bird's-eye view of a man and a woman in bed, asleep, during the early hours of the morning. The artist creates the convincing illusion of stepping into a private bedroom, where two Strangers are caught in the act of doing very little. Other than a brief moment when the woman rouses herself to smoke a cigarette, the action is minimal. Most of the movement takes place not in the video but in the gallery, as visitors gingerly step around the edges of the projection and jokingly try to disturb these post-celluloid dreamers.

A similar balance of sophistication and naivete is found in the films of Charles and Ray Eames, best known for revolutionizing American design. From the early 1950s through the 1970s, the Eameses made over 100 films, often focusing on prosaic elements of the real world. Blacktop, 10 minutes and 47 seconds, was created in 1952 on the grounds of a schoolyard across from the Eames office in Santa Monica, Calif. While their colleague Don Albinson sprayed a hose, Charles used a 16mm handheld camera to shoot the soapy water moving across the asphalt. The resulting swirls of white foam washing over the black ground, recalling an Abstract-Expressionist painting in motion, were then synchronized with Bach's "Goldberg Variations." Unfortunately, the poor translation to video from the original color film created a pale and purplish rendition of what was once full of rich tones.

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