Darren Douglas Floyd Destroyer of Dreams, Or, Container of All Future Meaning
Darren Douglass Floyd Destroyer of Dreams, Or, Container of All Future Meaning Publication © 2014 Carolyn L. Kane © 2014 Artist’s Images © Darren Douglas Floyd Van Every/Smith Galleries Davidson College 315 North Main Street Davidson, North Carolina 28035-7117 davidsoncollegeartgalleries.org All rights reserved. Printed in the United States. No part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form without the prior written permission of the publisher. This publication was produced in conjunction with Darren Douglas Floyd exhibition at the Van Every/Smith Galleries, Davidson College, March 13–April 13, 2014. Design: Graham McKinney Printing: ImageMark cover, left to right: video stills, My Life Is A Beautiful Dream; Destroyer of Dreams, Or, the Container of All Future Meaning; My Only Chance for Real Happiness opposite: Destroyer of Dreams, Or, the Container of All Future Meaning, still, 2014, 16mm film transferred to video, digital video, sound
THE VAN EVERY/SMITH GALLERIES
Darren Douglas Floyd Destroyer of Dreams, Or, Container of All Future Meaning
Introduction It is with great pleasure that the Davidson College Art Galleries presents Destroyer of Dreams, Or, Container of All Future Meaning, an exhibition featuring work by Darren Douglas Floyd. Floyd has spent the last two years as Visiting Assistant Professor of Art at Davidson College, immersing students in the field of digital art. His course offerings have added innovative digital art curricula to the College, including experimental video, animation, and 3-D printing. As his tenure comes to a close, we are pleased to be the premier venue for this new body of work. The works in Destroyer of Dreams, Or, Container of All Future Meaning are presented as a collection of related moments within a fragmented narrative. The title piece has been edited from 16mm film the artist has amassed over the past few years. Without processing or watching previous footage, Floyd continued to document his performances, building his narrative chronologically. The final work, 16mm color film transferred to video, with digital video and sound, tracks Floyd’s move from New
York to Louisiana, and ultimately to North Carolina. Throughout the work he candidly examines, or more aptly, scrutinizes his life, including various jobs, living situations, and predominantly, his relationships— with lovers, with his parents, and perhaps most significant to this body of work, with his own imaginary offspring. Destroyer of Dreams is articulated as a filmed letter intended for the artist’s future child, thus, the viewer is at once positioned as both the child as well as a voyeur; we are acutely aware that the letter is not addressed to us. The body of work presented is unique, challenging, beautiful, comical, depressing, and relatable—to anyone who has loved, hated, failed, and succeeded. The Galleries extend heartfelt gratitude to Davidson College for the interest and commitment to digital studies on campus, and of course, to artist Darren Douglas Floyd, for his dedication to this project.
– Lia Newman, Director/Curator, Van Every/Smith Galleries
opposite: Another Xmas Alone, still, 2014, 10:00, digital video, silent 3
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Blackened Narcissism It is rare to find a film or video artist—from the 1960s through the present— who does not in some way use the moving image to reflect our culture’s obsession with the self, which is to say, a particular brand of American narcissism. Consider the work of Bruce Nauman, Vito Acconci, Peter Campus, Lisa Steele, Nam June Paik, or Colin Campbell through Ryan Trecartin and Linzy Kalup (to name only a few). To be even more precise, I have in mind the profile of an artist who features themself in close to all of the work they make, and further, this self is featured not only as the subject of the work but also, as the object of the work, literally and conceptually. In turn, the prevalence of the moving image artist’s “self” as subject and object of the work continues to invoke what Rosalind Krauss theorized
almost 40 years ago in her pivotal essay, “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism” (1976).1 In this essay, Krauss analyzed several installation, performance, and video artworks from the late 1960s and early 1970s, in order to align the video medium—through its capabilities for real-time feedback and signal processing—with the psychological condition of narcissism. Narcissism, in Krauss’s account, refers to the way in which a video artist or performer’s body is situated in the circuit between monitor and camera. When the circuit is turned on, his or her own image is re-projected on a cathode-ray tube (or, to put it in more contemporary terms, an LCD or cell phone screen), like a mirror reflecting the “self” back to oneself. As a result, Krauss argues—deploying the central tenants of psychoanalysis—the subject severs all relations to the past or future creating an auto amputated and closedfeedback system wherein one is looped into a hypnotic, narcotic-like spell through one’s (misrecognized) selfimage. Krauss concludes that narcissism is so endemic to works of video, it may be “generalize[d] as the condition of the entire genre.” That such narcissistic video practices remain valid in contemporary mainstream, independent, and artistic media cultures is beside the point; the acceleration of exhibitionist and voyeuristic tendencies engendered through miniaturized and increasingly flexible video and Internet Technologies have in fact intensified Krauss’s notion of video narcissism. In the twenty-first century, video narcissism opposite: My Only Chance For Real Happiness, video still, 2014, 5:20, digital video, sound
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continues, albeit with a slight twist (what I have elsewhere theorized as “hyperdividuation”),2 wherein the human subject is in constant flux and disarray in conjunction with the hypermediated technologies of the present. Such is the case with the recent work of film and video artist Darren Douglas Floyd, on display in Floyd’s solo exhibition, Destroyer of Dreams, Or, Container of All Future Meaning (March 2014, Van Every Gallery, Davidson College, Davidson, NC). However, instead of emphasizing the dispersion and destabilization of positive and productive aspects of identity and selfhood through technology, Floyd’s subjectivity is transmuted and funneled through a blackened mirror of failed dreams and desires. In other words, his narcissism is inverted and imploded. Where narcissism, in its original articulation by Sigmund Freud implies, broadly speaking, a form of self-love and preoccupation with one’s self image, an imploded or blackened narcissism implies instead a kind of self-negation and hatred of self, but a body of work that nonetheless remains fully preoccupied and obsessed with the “self.” For example, consider the feature piece in the exhibition of the same title, Destroyer of Dreams, Or, Container of All Future Meaning (2014, 30:00, 16mm color film transferred to video, digital video, sound). Destroyer of Dreams opens with a rock-shaped cutout composited over a background of rocks. In the center rock-shaped composite, the hands and upper torso of the artist (who also figures as the narrator, protagonist, and presumably editor and director of the piece), is seen walking through the woods. He stops and takes out a lighter and sparkler, mumbling, “Where are we? Where are you? Where are we? Well, I don’t know if there’s much to celebrate… [He lights a sparkler, or tries to] “Even our celebration is a failure.” The viewer is transported from nature into a psychological portrait
of uncertainty and gloom. The narrator/subject continues: “Dear you, dear me I’m thirty-seven…. I’m childless, jobless, not hopeless, but concerned…. what am I doing out here?” The piece continues in this vein for the next thirty minutes. The narrator covers topics such as how his future child will resemble his father’s face (“…to know who you will be…look at your dad’s face, look at your dad’s face, look at your dad’s face look…”), at which point, one becomes aware the video is a journal entry intended for the artist’s future child (as is also the case in I Have No Children, (2014, 1:06, 16mm color film, transferred to video, digital video, sound), simultaneously inciting issues of nature versus nurture, and of course, identity, or more specifically, identity constituted through progeny. In sum, the piece, alongside similar others in the exhibition explore issues of dreaming and desire for a better future, within a distorted and blackened present. Vacuousness and ambivalence take on conceptual and visual roles throughout the work in the exhibition, such as in slow and sadly animated colored bubbles floating across the screen in Another Xmas Alone, (2014, 10:00, digital video, silent). Colors mirror—through a kind of blackened class—the narrator’s psychological condition of loneliness and alienation, bound within frames and lines; a blackened narcissism never fails to see an obsession with the self. Accordingly, Journal of Forgotten Dreams (2014, 1:40, digital video, sound) features analogous glimpses at Polaroid photographs of the artist as an angst-ridden filmmaker, unsure of his own identity, but focused on seeing it above all else. Throughout Journal of Forgotten Dreams, speckled dots slowly move across the screen, suggesting little bugs or crickets, echoed in the soundtrack. These little creatures remind the viewer, and the narrator as he views images of himself, that the past and one’s memory of it are always mediated, which is to say crooked 5
Future Meaning, or various other works in the Van Every Gallery exhibition, one becomes acutely aware that while the narrator no longer dreams of this particular fantasy, he is, to be sure, fully saturated with fantasy and dreams as such, which, like the fantasy of burning down a barn, remain more than a few steps away.
I Dont Think That Way Anymore, still, 2014, 3:50, 16mm color film, transferred to video, digital video, sound
and incorrect (like noise and static overwhelming the feedback circuit) belonging to no one nor any single perspective with any definitive certainty. I Don’t Think That Way Anymore (2014, 3:50, 16mm color film, transferred to video, digital video, sound) similarly features apathy and ambivalence in the attempt to distance oneself from one’s self-reflected past (including one’s hometown, parents, and circumstances of one’s upbringing), yet, as with the other works, distantiation ultimately fails to take hold, resulting in a self imploded feedback loop. I Don’t Think That Way Anymore ends with the narrator’s recollection of a fantasy of burning down a neighborhood barn. However, the narrator informs the viewer, “I don’t think that way anymore,” implying the fantasy no longer exists. But such an assertion is futile: when viewed in conjunction with Destroyer of Dreams, Or, Container of All 6
Overall, the work in this exhibition articulates the common and perhaps dominant cultural desire to have something, for oneself. In contrast, very little is uttered today (in television, film, advertising, webpages, or perhaps any other venue) about what one would or could give to the world in return. And herein lies the crux of our culture’s imploded and blackened narcissism: the object of one’s desire is most often one’s self (satisfaction). And what better image to invoke this cultural condition of an imploded narcissistic feedback loop than the ongoing and far off dreams for one’s biological progeny—that perfect mirror of the self, both internally and externally—that trumps video in its capacity to reflect back only the surface of the image. Carolyn Kane writes about media aesthetics and the history and philosophy of digital technology. She is the author of Chromatic Algorithms: Synthetic Color, Computer Art, and Aesthetics after Code, published by University of Chicago Press, 2014. 1
Rosalind Krauss, “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism,” October Vol. 1, 52 (1976).
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See Carolyn Kane, Chromatic Algorithms: Synthetic Color, Computer Art, and Aesthetics after Code (University of Chicago Press, 2014).
opposite: Journal of Forgotten Dreams, still, 2014, 1:40, digital video, sound 7
left: My Life Is A Beautiful Dream, still, 2013, :55, digital video, sound right: Destroyer of Dreams, Or, the Container of All Future Meaning, still, 2014, 20:00, 16mm color film transferred to video, digital video, sound
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left: She Might Have Been Your Mother, still, 2013, 2:20, digital video, sound right: My Life Is A Hideous Nightmare, still, 2013, 1:10, digital video, sound
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left: My Life Is A Beautiful Dream, still, 2013, :55, digital video, sound right: I Have No Children, still, 2014, 1:06, 16mm color film transferred to video, digital video, sound
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Darren Douglas Floyd EDUCATION: 2001 MFA, Temple University, Film and Media Arts 1994 BA, The College of Wooster, Women’s Studies SOLO EXHIBITIONS: 2014 Destroyer of Dreams, Or, Container of All Future Meaning, Van Every Gallery, Davidson College, Davidson, NC 2010 Motion Portraiture, Willard-Straight Gallery, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY
Exhibition Statement Work in this exhibition is organized around the simple idea of a filmed letter to my imaginary future child. Between 2010 and 2013, I shot about three minutes of 16mm film every two or three months, accumulating a series of confessional performances. I continued this practice through two relationships and moves from New York to Louisiana and North Carolina. These changes in my life alternately focused and obliterated my imagination of the future child.
Holidays are times when people go where they need to be, where they belong. With no where I need to be, I spend holidays with other people’s families or find myself accidentally spending the holidays alone. On Christmas Eve, bonfires are lit along the Mississippi River outside of New Orleans to light the way for Papa Noel and lights adorn the homes of families everywhere. Both interest me as phenomena of color and light and represent fleeting joys, out of reach.
Having moved twice, living alone for the first time in my life, my belongings pared down to what can fit in a car, my apartment was full of boxes and messes. I began to observe the messes around me, the shapes and structures of the messes I make when I live alone, and to document them. These shapes, digitally processed, are the visual basis of the future children that appear in the exhibition.
It was my desire to make a document that would describe me, an imaginary future father, as I wish I could have known my own father— from before he knew me. The accumulation of this desire is Destroyer of Dreams, Or, Container of All Future Meaning.
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– Darren Douglas Floyd
GROUP EXHIBITIONS: 2012 Faculty Show, Davidson College, Davidson, NC Travel Movie, AC Institute, New York, NY Faculty Show, Southeastern Louisiana University Contemporary Art Gallery, Hammond, LA 2009 Screen Burns, JCIA Video, Brooklyn, NY Mother/mother, AIR Gallery, Brooklyn, NY Iconoscope, Good Question Gallery, Milford, PA DigitalArt.LA, Los Angeles Center for Digital Art, Los Angeles, CA Dreams of Babies, Senko Studio, Viborg, Denmark Dreams of Babies, Visual Studies Workshop, Rochester, NY 2002 Video Rodeo, CANADA, New York, NY 1996 FUBAR, Temple University’s Project Space, Philadelphia, PA SCREENINGS 2009 Self-Portrait with Fast Moon, Gallery 138, New York, NY When How To Live Was Undecided, Moving Image Film Festival, Toronto, Ontario, Canada When How To Live Was Undecided, Video Dumbo 2009, Brooklyn, NY When How To Live Was Undecided, Method Lab’s Playdate, Risley Theatre, Ithaca, NY When How To Live Was Undecided, Summer Screenings CANADA, New York, NY When How To Live Was Undecided, Anthology Film Archives, New York, NY
The Hope EP #4, Birthday, Secret Project Robot, Brooklyn, NY When How To Live Was Undecided, Visual Studies Workshop, Rochester, NY 2008 When How To Live Was Undecided, chashama North Open Studios, Pine Plains, NY 2004 Dreams of Babies, as intermission for Superheroes, a two-act play by Amo Gulinello, Brooklyn, NY 2003 Agent Flizzo in The Man Who Loves Love, Manchester Fantastic Film Festival, Manchester, England 1997 Crime, Termite TV’s Crime and Punishment episode, WHYY, Philadelphia, PA RESIDENCIES 2011 chashama North, Pine Plains, NY 2010 Experimental Television Center, Owego, NY Yaddo, Saratoga Springs, NY 2009 Millay Colony for the Arts, Austerlitz, NY The Artists’ Enclave at I-Park, East Haddam, CT Visual Studies Workshop, Rochester, NY 2008 chashama North, Pine Plains, NY CURATORIAL 2014 State of Emergency Video Exhibition with Lia Newman and Rosemary Gardner, Davidson College Art Galleries, Davidson, NC Still Rendering Student Animation Festival, Southeastern Louisiana 2012 University Contemporary Art Gallery, Hammond, LA 2010 Motion Portraiture and Self-Portraiture, Cornell Cinema, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 2009 Face and Ass, co-curated with Zefrey Throwell, Summer Screenings, CANADA, New York, NY
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opposite: She Might Have Been Your Mother, still, 2013, 2:20, digital video, sound
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THE VAN EVERY/SMITH GALLERIES