That’s the title of the short essay by the artists Stanya Kahn and Harry (Harriet) Dodge in last November’s Modern Painters about their 25-minute video Can’t Swallow It, Can’t Spit It Out. I was bowled over by it in the Hammer Museum’s show Eden’s Edge, and for inexplicable reasons forgot to mention it in my column this week on LA.

That’s Kahn. Her character wears a Viking helmet and a green polkadotted dress, and carries a big foam Swiss cheese. Dodge is behind the camera.

At the start of the video, Kahn appears to have suffered some kind of trauma—has she just gotten off work at the Medieval Times, after a particularly medieval shift?—and she gets defensive when the camera trains on her.

But soon, she’s leading a tour of mostly deserted public spaces in LA, promising the filmmaker places where there’s “action,” surmising that the filmmaker is doing a sweep of the city for Rodney King-style abuses of power.

No action ensues. Instead, this mad, possibly divine, seemingly homeless Valkyrie regales the filmmaker with stories about her life. There was the time when a Vietnam vet got all PTSD in her backyard, or the time she saw her mother’s boyfriend get stabbed, or the other time she walked on water. “You should have been there for that” is her goofy catchphrase.

The video is hilarious and disturbing, and all of its parts are open to interpretation. What does the filmmaker want? What happened to the Valkyrie? Where is everybody in LA? How are the distant wars in Iraq and Afghanistan connected to this warrior?

In another Kahn/Dodge video also on view at the Hammer, parents and a child play together at home—all wearing neon detainee masks with smiley faces on them. The result, again, is hysterical, in both the comedic and the pathological senses of the word. It’s torture refashioned as slapstick with a veneer of cheesy horror films.

Count me a major fan of these two women. I can’t wait to see what they do next.