2018–2020
Video, sound, painting
36 minutes
Courtesy the artist and Greene Naftali,
New York
The outgrowth of a collective ceramics studio in 2018, Winters Spring consists of many layered elements. Part video document, part painting, and part musical performance about the International Space Station. Conceived by Trisha Baga, Pam Lins and Halsey Rodman, Ceramics Club (CC) was a collaborative project producing ceramics out of the Greenwich House Pottery Studio. Each ceramic piece was worked on by many different artists who passed through the studio over the course of the project. The artworks were then exhibited in the show, “International Space Station Ceramics Sale,” at MoMA PS1. All of the proceeds benefited organizations including Wide Rainbow, Gays Against Guns, Critical Resistance, Greenwich House Pottery, Earth Day Initiative, and the Immigrant Defense Project.
The intense communal ceramics practice also produced a musical. Performed by many of the participating artists, “International Space Station” also premiered at MoMA PS1 in 2018. After an initial video countdown promising IMAX technology the performance began with the narrator setting the scene, “We find ourselves in the abandoned archives wing of a former public school building turned art institution. Outside a rally is going on because the art institution needs to start paying its art handlers a fair wage.” This scene was a close match to reality as PS1 is former New York City Public School 1 and at the time its art handlers were holding an action in response to the museum’s wage policies.
From here the narrative departs into the space station where the karaoke bar is closed for repair and where Joan Didion, played by a child, has been living for the past two hundred years. Later a character pretends to sing karaoke while actually lipsyncing to ABBA’s “Fernando” (1976) while Lin Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton is projected in the background. Baga co-wrote the script with Samuel Lang Budin capturing the stories and humor produced by the group alongside their ceramics production. As Baga describes it was “a product of its own making.”
In the live production the narrator read live from the script and the rest of the audio was pre-recorded reducing the need for any rehearsal time for the actors. At several points the narrator makes reference to video being out-of-sync and to other technical difficulties manifesting on the space station. The script prefigures the actual technical problems that occurred on stage during the show. Baga typically plays with the veracity of diegesis in her work. Her installations merge objects and images of objects, 2D and 3D video projections, and she often utilizes a narrator who weaves in and out of the world being projected and its instantaneous technical re-production.
Winters Springs is lo-fi 3D. A twist on her other more elaborate installations, this 2D video is projected onto a newly completed painting hung on the projection screen in the gallery. The painting, rendered by Baga in the style of “idiot Luc Tuymans,” displaces the ground of the video onto another surface. Barely in three dimensions, the painting adds another frame and further stratifies the image adding to the uncertainty of depth already present in the video. Making use of the full breadth of possible space available in the image, the footage moves between a surface of dust grains on a camera lens to the projected images of a scanner bed. Every aspect of the production contains multitudes, its editing, the sound recording stitched together from multiple sources, and the artist herself appears “live” on stage as a surrogate, a stand-in “Dolly Parton.” Manifesting through it all is the promise of the musical’s subtitle, “There’s space for everyone!”
Winters Spring was screened in the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery and streamed online from October 3-15, 2020.
Further viewing:
Trisha Baga, “the eye, the eye and the ear,” Pirelli HangarBicocca