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Wednesday, April 6, 2011

Visual Art Currently Hanging: Mike Simi's Time Warp Created by Taking Nyquil and Dayquil at the Same Time

Posted by Jen Graves on Wed, Apr 6, 2011 at 10:56 AM

Simi, at Season.

In this seven-minute video, Seattle artist Mike Simi is wearing a Darth Vader T-shirt and a Darth Vader mask and rocking back and forth in a rocking chair.

With each rock, he presses a button to turn on and off a spotlight that casts him in a bright circle of light. While this is going on, he's drinking a bottle of Nyquil and a bottle of Dayquil, routed to his mouth by a beer-hat-like contraption attached to the Darth Vader mask.

He tries to keep the rhythm of the rocking and the light synchronized, but it's not easy once the medicine kicks in. He lurches forward, tips to one side, rights himself.

His pupils never get a chance to dilate, so in each flash of light his gaze is glassy. He's a parody, via Darth Vader and Grandma Moses, of self-punishing American performance artists like Chris Burden or Gary Hill. (In Hill's 2000 video Wall Piece, owned by the Henry Art Gallery, the artist, wearing a suit, utters each word of a text while throwing himself against a wall as a strobe light flashes.)

But he's not just funny. He's mesmerizingly funny. And he's not acting. He's really drinking the awful stuff while trying to abide by preset choreography, like a medicine man putting himself through a ceremony. Simi is a youngish artist, someone who came of age during the Bush years, when the president's rhetoric about the United States depended on the simpleton's contrast between "good" and "evil." Simi's silly video is also a meditation on the zone that exists beyond clarity.

Comments (4) RSS

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Click the "Season" link in the caption for where to see this work.

Posted by Jen Graves on April 6, 2011 at 10:58 AM

This is so not-funny that I'm ready to vomit. There's enough acetominophen in one bottle to cause liver failure, let alone two. Is this guy still alive, and how?

Posted by Brooklyn Reader on April 6, 2011 at 11:41 AM

He was at the opening. I hope you didn't vomit.

Posted by Jen Graves on April 6, 2011 at 11:51 AM

Oddly reminds me of an early performance work of (sp) Martrianni entitled L's GA (Kincoln's Gettysburg Address) with the on stage narrator in a space suit overprojected with angst-y films primarily anti-war images, while narrator recites (on contained helium) the Gettysburg Address which is modulated along with a synthesized track of prepared sound...painful powerful piece, but not without a dada sense of humor. I'd love to see this video (Simi's) overprojected in a resurrection of L's GA. Brain: stop. Go outside in the sun and prune things...

Posted by Jack Strubbe on April 6, 2011 at 2:01 PM