ARTIST STATEMENT
EMIL MEMON, “1983/BLUE MOVIE”, 1982 / 2004
The “Blue Movie” deals with a couple of basic elements: the body, literature, and the city (New York), as well as the inner structure of an image, and cinematic rhythm. The nature of the image itself produced a static offshoot of this work that consists of large photographs and metal panels. At that time, I wanted to merge music with my work, so at different occasions I presented my movie with three guitar players performing live (mostly noise) as a background to the projection. The imagery is a bit apocalyptic--merging urban decay with deconstruction of the image itself. There is electronic snow over a blue Manhattan skyline which are almost like electrons of nuclear radiation after an atomic blast. The reason for this metaphor is that at that time there was dangerous tension between the U.S. and the ex-Soviet Union: the U.S. was deploying anti ballistic missiles in Western Europe, and Reagan remarked that he would “start bombing in 5 minutes”.
The “Blue Movie” deals with a couple of basic elements: the body, literature, and the city (New York), as well as the inner structure of an image, and cinematic rhythm. The nature of the image itself produced a static offshoot of this work that consists of large photographs and metal panels. At that time, I wanted to merge music with my work, so at different occasions I presented my movie with three guitar players performing live (mostly noise) as a background to the projection. The imagery is a bit apocalyptic--merging urban decay with deconstruction of the image itself. There is electronic snow over a blue Manhattan skyline which are almost like electrons of nuclear radiation after an atomic blast. The reason for this metaphor is that at that time there was dangerous tension between the U.S. and the ex-Soviet Union: the U.S. was deploying anti ballistic missiles in Western Europe, and Reagan remarked that he would “start bombing in 5 minutes”.
Revisiting this movie twenty years later, this apocalyptic urban vision has unfortunately a new resonance, because apocalypse became reality, so the images from the movie of the twin towers and electronic snow over Manhattan skyline in our age of terror and paranoia have a new meaning. Next to the images of the monumental decaying city, is an experience of a New York City that in retrospect, is hard to remember. This vast, spectacular decay, inspired street culture and art based on it (especially graffiti.) There was also the myth of New York City best represented by Warhol with his movies and the velvet underground; contrasting with the city is my own body in a basic counterpoint to the concrete jungle. To this basic duality I insert a third element--that of literature. I started to work on the movie the moment I arrived in NYC as a Fulbright scholar doing my MFA at Pratt institute. I had no expectations about what this city will be for me. I had one vision of New York formed in my head based on my fascination with what I perceived as underground culture emanating from this town. Very quickly I found my natural stomping grounds in the East Village, where countless other kids followed the same muse. It was fantastic: they were from everyway, from Europe, Japan, Florida or any other spot on the globe. It was glorious and sinister at the same time, because the city was there like Rome already shaped in timelessness, and we were just new flesh and blood feeding this cold pulsating monster. Later on, I was making jokes about new arrivals and how quickly the fresh rouge on theirs cheeks transformed itself into gray patina that transcends all the classes, from rich to the poor. Experiences were condensed, in a short time you lived years. Things could turn ugly very fast. Suddenly people you knew, your young friends started to die of a strange disease. It was as if a nightmare became a reality or biological science fiction; the most outrageous one became reality. That autonomy, that space of freedom that was trying to be carved in lawlessness and decay of Lower Manhattan held a serpent and an apple. In a way, those shots of the city in my movie, driving across the bridges are clichés , but are sincere ones and now are documents of time that is no more and gone. Those cars, WTC, trash in Dumbo, the mother with a child crossing the street on a gloomy Bowery.
When I used my own body instead of my friend’s, I was sensing my own and others fragility. My naked body is surrounded by long shots of a flickering, menacing urban landscape. This machine caught my body, a lady waiting for a bus under the bridge, an old Chinese couple, and a mother in its all fragility trying to bring her baby to safety on the other side of the Bowery. I was alone with the camera in my room with a collection of German Expressionistic poems in my hand. I knew Rimbaud was the big muse of the New York punk and art scene, but I preferred George Trakel, a young Austrian expressionistic poet, who in disgust with the horrors of WWI on the Russian front, committed suicide with an overdose of cocaine. So I was reading those poems in that doctor Caligari room. My words are mute, because they are not meant to be heard, what is supposed to be heard is the hum of the film projector, the noise of 3 or 4 electric guitars my friends were playing, or just silence and the thoughts of the viewers. Standing there with the light coming through my window and washing over my body, I was thinking of a couple of years earlier in Florence as an art student and of Leonardo’s chiaroscuro. I reduced everything to basic turning on and off of the camera and my body on auto-erotic mode.
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