PREVIEW
THE PARADISE INSTITUTE
Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller
Runs until July 20
Walter Phillips Gallery
The Banff Centre
As we step into the cinema, walk down the aisle and seat ourselves in front of the vast emptiness of the movie screen, we look forward to the familiar but magical trompe l’oeil that will transport us into a world of dreams.
If you have ever stood at the front of a movie theatre before the house lights faded, and turned to observe your fellow audience members, you know the various expressions of anticipation and, sometimes, dejection that can take shape on the faces of expectant moviegoers.
"They’re waiting to be taken to paradise," says installation artist Janet Cardiff, who, along with her longtime collaborator George Bures Miller, has created The Paradise Institute, an interactive artwork that not only celebrates the cinematic experience but critically evaluates it at the same time. Avid cinephiles themselves, Cardiff and Miller raise many questions about cinema and spectatorship – more, even, than the average academic treatise on the topic – but their installation is also an entertaining and mind-scrambling work of art.
First, you don’t just "see" The Paradise Institute – you become part of it. The piece wreaks havoc with established notions about the formal presentation of movies and codes of conduct within the cinema. If you’re receptive to its charms, it may also cause you to question your sensory perceptions and the nature of reality itself.
"What is existence? How do we know existence? Can we trust our senses? How do we know what’s next to us?" asks Cardiff. "We can only tell through our (hearing) and our vision, so if you fool with those sorts of things, you can make people think about their state all the time and the illusory quality of life."
MASTERS OF ILLUSION
The Paradise Institute is a self-contained and somewhat oddly shaped wooden box, currently housed within the main space at the Walter Phillips Gallery on The Banff Centre campus. Inside its womb-like structure is an obsessively detailed model of an old-fashioned movie-house, complete with a 17-seat "balcony" where the participants sit. When you enter the structure, the first thing you notice is the spatial illusion, with its extremely forced perspective (Miller refers to it as a "hyper-perspective") that makes you feel as though you are inside a real cinema. As you take your place in one of the two rows of seats, you look down upon the screen and see several rows of empty seats in the miniature auditorium below.
You don the headphones that are located beneath your seat, then the house lights go down and the film begins. Immediately, it sounds like you’re in a much larger cinema than the cramped and claustrophobic box that Cardiff and Miller have built. In addition to the film’s soundtrack, ambient sounds seem to surround you. People are chatting. Footsteps approach you from the right, and someone sits down next to you. A woman’s voice whispers in your right ear, offering you popcorn. A cellphone rings, is answered, and another woman’s voice whispers, in Italian, "I can’t talk – I’m at the cinema." You are beginning to be immersed in the pseudo-cinematic environment of The Paradise Institute. And then things get strange.
FRUSTRATING EXPECTATIONS
No matter how you strive to gain critical distance from Cardiff and Miller’s piece, it’s difficult not to be alternately absorbed and distracted by it – and by your place within it. Whatever the case, it’s difficult to concentrate. For one thing, the film on the screen appears to be some variation on a noir thriller, but its narrative – if there is one – is as fractured and fragmented as the most aggressively brain-teasing works of the great surrealist filmmakers.
"We love cinema, and it’s basically all these iconic scenes strung together that you can kind of instantly recognize in a certain way," says Miller. "You know, you’ve seen that movie, you can kind of figure out who the bad guy is. (But) we’re trying to… make the audience work to figure out the story. Maybe they don’t get the story that we planned, but they get something else. It’s like a feature film compressed into 13 minutes."
Another element that frustrates our expectations of a "normal" cinematic experience is the noise of the virtual audience in the headsets, which diverts us from our attempts to piece together a story from the images we’re shown. Finally, and most perplexingly, the stories and identities of the characters in the virtual cinema begin to overlap with those of the characters in the film. This is disconcerting, to say the least.
"The audio allows us to take people into that other plane and fool with their senses – try to screw them around and pull the rug out from under them," says Miller.
"In order to do that," continues Cardiff, "you have to first lead people to believe that they’re in an environment that they understand. Cinema is that type of environment. I’m attracted to cinema because it is a format that’s established….
"One reason, I think, we wanted to play with a cinematic model is that you have this willing audience that give themselves up when they sit in the seats, but then you can really play with that. You can push or pull their expectations, almost bothering them to a certain extent."
THE COMPLETE SEDUCTION
What’s the point of all these tricks, though? Is it just to create an illusory experience that seems like a Disneyland ride designed by David Lynch? Well, yes and no.
Miller admits that he and Cardiff were extremely relieved when The Paradise Institute made its debut at the 2001 Venice Biennale, and they saw that it had the intended effect of leaving its participants dazed and confused. The piece earned the biennial art festival’s top prize, making it one of the most sought-after artworks in the world today (there are currently four of them touring Europe and North America).
But the installation’s visceral pleasures are only part of the reason for its success. Cardiff notes that the piece is, in many ways, an extension of the "Allegory of the Cave" in Plato’s Republic. By the end of the 13-minute film in The Paradise Institute, one interpretation is that the viewer is situated within the subconscious of one of the film’s characters.
"You’re sitting in a dark space, watching shadows on a wall, and he’s also dreaming these shadows," she explains. "Are you a product of his dreams?"
It’s a puzzle that may never be pieced together coherently, but somehow, in its synthesis of sculptural and cinematic elements, The Paradise Institute seems intuitively complete in a number of different configurations. Whatever the case, it’s a mind-fuck as glorious as any I’ve ever experienced.
"People ask us why we do that – I still don’t have an answer," says Cardiff.
"I think it (may be because) we like to have that done to us," speculates Miller. "It’s kind of like a magic show, as well. You’re always wondering ‘How did they do that?’ It’s this kind of fascination with things that take you to a different level, or make you puzzled, or flip you on your end (to) see the world in a different way.
"It’s entertaining, but it also flip-flops your brain and turns some switches on and off. Hopefully. If it’s working." |
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