The Osmosis of the Symbiotic Man
Or The Symbiosis of the Osmotic Man
By Anne Golden
I have to tell you something. I want to share some images from
Nelson Henricks’ videos that appear to me sometimes, unbidden, from the edge
of a memory. I may see the figure running through a narrow corridor plastered
by newspapers (MURDERER’S SONG), the black and white shot of a claw-like hand
from CRUSH (what animal does the narrator wish to become?), the immense full
moon traversing the screen from bottom left to top right in PLANETARIUM (reproduced
later by a flashlight against bed sheets) or the sad sack dance routine from
FAILURE (strangely uplifting). In SHIMMER (1995), Nelson places a glass against
a wall and to his ear to better hear the sounds coming from another room or,
perhaps, another dimension. His images exist where they are most likely to,
on various screens, but also take root in other spaces and places. Nelson marshals
and organizes information. He streamlines. He admits that we (and he) can enumerate
all we want, but the total amounts to the sum of nothing. Nelson often provides
us with vast and varied data. He catalogues objects and images, which he then
delivers to us in a meticulous and beat perfect barrage. Our retinas do the
rest.
The Greco-Roman alphabet is finite but in Nelson’s hands it seems to have
endless potential combinations. Games of language and word play are a significant
feature of his video works. To honour his keen language skills, I have devised
a code within this very text. Certain letters correspond to musical notes.
Once the code is unscrambled, you will be able to play music I heard in a recent
dream. The music will lull you into a kind of waking trance, the perfect state
for analysis and interpretation. It will also provide you with the title of
Nelson’s next video.
I want to tell you about a dream. A voice intones, “Welcome to the Noslen
Skirneh Theatre. This screening venue has been built to present the works of
Mr. Henricks and, occasionally, THE SHINING.” The theatre is crimson red. Plush
cherry red curtains. Scarlet red chairs. The theatre is predominantly red,
but there are touches of gleaming gold. I am in a comfortable red chair, drinking
in the splendour, hearing the colours pop as if the air pressure was changing.
I am waiting for the house lights to dim. I am trying to calculate how many
seats there are. I count out loud. The theatre is filling up. I am waiting
to watch Nelson Henricks’ new video. It is the world premiere. I spy Nelson.
He is seated a few rows away. I want to coin a phrase or invent a new word
that could be used to describe Nelsons’ artistic practice. This word, whatever
it is, would be uttered only to describe his works. It is on the tip of my
tongue, this perfect word that is just for this, for him. I notice that the
screen is not flat, but corrugated. A man begins to explain that the screen
has been custom built as a projection surface for this one video by Nelson.
This all makes perfect sense. What is the word I want? I can’t remember whether
the word exists or if I was supposed to determine it. I try to say the word
but find that it has too many consonants. Perhaps it is not an English or French
word. I can feel the meaning of the word seeping out of me. I wake up. I do
not possess the ability to distil the themes and contents of videos. I do not
know just one singular word to describe Nelson’s works. The dream has given
me clues that appear in his videos but has not provided a solution to break
the cipher.
My dream presents a flawed and unstable text. It leads me into Nelson’s work
by an entirely different path. The other texts I have considered to write
these words are Nelson’s own videos, some found in the program, some not.
Sometimes, I think that Nelson shares his video/dreams with us and that we
should give over to somnambulist logic to press out all there is to get from
them. I want to share a few impressions of a vast and cohesive body of work,
observations on the output of a prolific and meticulous artist.
Time is fluid and unstoppable just as it is measured and quantifiable. In
his work, Nelson suggests the permeability of flesh and the potential for
osmosis and symbiosis. Radical transformation is attainable. There are slender
films between our space, so called ‘reality’, and other, unnamed spaces where
ghosts and/or other beings reside. At any moment, we could tip over into
another world. Objects have potential. People, too. One could become an animal
(CRUSH). One could commune with ghosts (SHIMMER, EMISSION). One could practice
a kind of osmosis with rooms and objects (WINDOW/FENÊTRE, TIME PASSES). In
his videos, Nelson explores the Montreal-centric porous nature of French
and English by using both languages in his texts and narrations. Permeability
is also suggested by the amount of liquids that appear in his videos: milk,
water, snow, shaving cream, sperm, and coffee.
The soundtrack of CONSPIRACY OF LIES builds in complexity as the tape progresses.
The sound of a man repeatedly counting to one hundred forms the backbone
of the score. To this is added music and the voices of several different
people taking turns reading from a (mostly) anonymous text. This tape is
about numerous things concurrently: taking stock, the precariousness of communication,
art making, loneliness and consumerism. As the camera glides elegantly in
long travelling shots of books, liquor and art, we hear journal entries being
intoned. “All of my life I have never said the right things.” Amen to that,
Anonymous.
The noise of a pen on paper impels the soundtrack for TIME PASSES. Images
of clouds whip by in fast motion. Rooms and spaces ebb from light to dark
in seconds. Time is compressed, measured, noted. “I imagine my apartment
when I am not there’’ reads one text. In one image, Nelson draws a spiral
in a notebook, a nod to the inevitable rotation that he features over and
over in his works. The symbol reappears in different guises throughout his
videos – a Hydro Québec metre spinning too quickly (COMÉDIE), a giant spiral
drawn on a floor (EMISSION), the hypnotic rotation of a coiled whorl (PLANETARIUM,
SATELLITE) and a ring spun in a spiral by two fingers (CRUSH), among others.
Two associations come to mind, one reflecting the absurdity, humour and finesse
of Nelson’s work: the curling images and word play of Marcel Duchamp’s ANEMIC
CINEMA (1926). The other is an inevitable foreboding, a dark centre seeping
outwards, not unlike William Butler Yeats’s ‘widening gyre’.
COMÉDIE begins with a text on the loss of heat, whether on a personal level
(a narrator’s cold apartment) or a universal one (the world grows colder).
It ends with the identification of possible patterns presented by tiles in
certain métro stations and the surprising code breaking result. COMÉDIE represents
the most obvious obsession with codes and systems, but these permeate his
work. Nelson identifies patterns and engenders his own. Each of Nelson’s
videos has its own integral pace, its unique system of sounds, images and
themes. He suggests microcosms, with his apartment featured as an ever-shifting
setting and presented as the centre of genesis. Rooms he inhabits and some
of his objects stand in for the solar system (PLANETARIUM), are ‘THE SUM
OF ALL SIGHT AND SOUND’ (TIME PASSES) as well as the locus of regret (FAILURE).
Nelson offers images that exist within the space of that strange hybrid,
the future past, in SATELLITE. The video is made up of found footage from
scientific and instructional films. Words appear. Among the sayings are ‘Boom
chick a boom’ and ‘Cut a rug’. Nelson imposes potential new meanings onto
images that were once meant to instruct and, perhaps, reassure us that science
equals unassailable truth. He practices a kind of symbiosis by which new
combinations are made through the surprising interactions of text and image.
Certain phrases and words stabilize and bolster images. Others serve as quick
punctuations to the veracity and authenticity of what we are seeing.
Nelson peers over various surfaces such as a desk, a table and a chair in
the opening moments of FAILURE. There are shots of him lying prone on the
floor. Later on, as a man holds up a sign reading IMPOVERISHED AESTHETICS,
Nelson deadpans a dance that can be described as a minimalist jazz hands
side step. The failure signaled by the title is typically complex, melding
the failure of inertia, movement and language. ‘Insert subtitles in this
section’, reads text over a long take of Nelson shaving his legs with an
electric razor. He follows up with text that supplies directives on how to
read this action. In some ways, FAILURE is an instructional video displaying
incomplete gestures and half occupied spaces.
PLANETARIUM intersects with science fiction films and monster movies. There
is Theremin-like synth music, eyeball rings worn on two fingers to emulate
a scuttling beast, and a figure I call ‘The Shaving Cream Monster’. In this
video, Nelson reproduces the moon with a flashlight on sheets and on a wall,
shows us a wind up astronaut toy, a spinning ‘UFO’ light and a disco ball as
a spinning moon. He recreates planets and space-related apparatus using small
objects within finite space. The centerpiece of PLANETARIUM is a version of
The Ramones song I WANNA BE SEDATED ‘sung’ by a computer. Instead of the unctuous
smarty pants Hal from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, Nelson’s computer
voice hesitatingly talks out the song over images of an airport and the interior
of a plane. The raw high of The Ramones original becomes a funny/sad comment
on awareness, anxiety and travel. When the computer needs to be sedated, there
isn’t much hope for us. The final section seals the mix of absurdity and finesse,
combines the grotesque and prosaic. Nelson presents words made out of the letters
of his own name over images of himself slathered in shaving cream. This monster
has numerous names but only one ultimate identity.
I would like to suggest another Kubrick correlation. Towards the end of THE
SHINING, when the barrier between real and surreal is decisively breached,
figures appear. These wear tuxes, but some also wear pig or bear masks. There
is a simple link between Kubrick and Henricks. The latter has been known
to have characters dress up as animals and/or in tuxes (LEGEND, EMISSION,
MURDERER’S SONG). There is a more complex link between them, too. As I watch
Nelson’s videos, there is the sensation that surreal elements will surge
and overtake, that there is the potential for immediate and surprising alchemies
of the comprehensible and the unknowable, resulting in a sort of osmosis.
We may be in a dream after all.
All of this (and much more) is transmitted through/by/between immaculate
images fused to flawless sounds and music laced through with wit and humour.
Sound and image are equivalent and intertwined. Music is a punch line (COMÉDIE).
It is a connecting force (UNTITLED [SCORE], SATELLITE) that generates a whole.
Music and sound build, stirring and developing atmospheres (CONSPIRACY OF
LIES). Music flows over and under and is altered for specific sections (PLANETARIUM,
FAILURE). Songs written by Nelson punctuate EMISSION and CRUSH. The rhythm
and interplay between sounds and images occasion a deep pleasure: the osmosis
of the symbiotic man.