Thorsten Kirchhoff at V.M.21

Art in America, Oct, 2004 by Marcia E. Vetrocq

A mercurial talent who embraces popular culture firmly but coolly, Thorsten Kirchhoff is a performance and installation artist, rock musician, video maker and painter. He briefly tried his hand at furniture design and excels at contriving quirky contraptions and uncanny objects, some of which find their way into elaborate environments. For his latest exhibition--the first at this new space in downtown Rome, the Danish artist's adopted city--Kirchhoff's often macabre sensibility acquired a new gloss, and he abandoned the over-ploughed terrain of film noir and the grotesque (Hitchcock, Aldrich, Polanski, Kubrick and Lynch have been reference points) for an unexpected comedic muse.

The show's centerpiece was a video, 48 Crash: Jacques Taft vs. Suzi Quatro, for which Kirchhoff briskly intercut footage from the French master's four classic films (spanning 1949 to 1967) with clips of a young woman broadly impersonating the Detroit-born music legend. Kirchhoff sees them as two originals, Tati the purveyor of a humorous but plainly dystopian critique of postwar modernism, Quatro the gender-bending, self-empowered rock pioneer. Looped on a curvaceous Brionvega monitor from the 1960s that was set atop a slender white pedestal table on a low platform, the four-minute video is a compendium of vintage Tati double takes and near-pratfalls, but the incidents cumulatively delineate a sterile, disorienting Paris transformed by the new culture of progress and robotic partying. The rapid-fire reshaping of Tati, a master of leisurely timing, brings to mind Christian Marclay's split-second editing. The Quatro impersonator, costumed to evoke the office wear and cocktail dresses of Tati's films, mostly vamps on a ski-training machine, where she takes a fall of her own. More kitten than vixen, she's appealing but lacks Quatro's sexual ferocity. In this improbable contest, Tati wins.

The video's soundtrack, "48 Crash," is Quatro's signature hit from the early 1970s, updated in a convincing cover by Kirchhoff and friends. Long a source of speculation, the song's title and elliptical lyrics are thought to refer to male menopause. Indeed, repeated viewing discloses that Kirchhoff (he's 44) has gathered a number of telling incidents from Tati's films, among them a Daliesque drooping faucet, a toppling barstool, a collapsing kayak and a deflating souffle. Some compensatory phallic optimism is suggested, however, by the closing image of explosive fireworks and by a pair of black umbrellas--Tati is rarely seen without one--erect on the platform beside the monitor like a Surrealist sentinel, one atop the other, handles intertwined, the uppermost one pointing skyward.

Fleshing out the show were five grisaille paintings, based on film stills but with an almost sculptural presence, as the stretchers are up to 4 1/2 inches deep. Three scenes lifted from Tati shared the gallery's white-walled main space with the video and umbrellas. The others, portraits that recall the corporate-office effigies seen in the Tati clips (but were, in fact, based on prototypes in Truffaut's La Peau douce), hung in a sort of anteroom whose walls and vaulted ceiling had been covered with a gridded aluminum-over-asphalt roofing material. This cheesy, space-age wackiness, rather like being inside a package of Jiffy Pop, was a perfect prelude to Tati's alienated vision of Paris-from-another-planet. Individually, the paintings are less compelling than those of other purveyors of photo-derived "gristalgia," from Mark Tansey to Richard Artschwager, Gerhard Richter and Neo Rauch. But the entire ensemble, conceived as one installation, was more than satisfying as a singular if loose-limbed consideration of social--and perhaps physical--transformation.--Marcia E. Vetrocq