Teresa Hubbard / Alexander Birchler

In 2003 the CGAC acquired and exhibited the video piece Eight, work of artists Teresa Hubbard / Alexander Birchler (1965 and 1962 respectively). Today the CGAC is preparing the first comprehensive presentation of the artistic duo’s work to be held in Spain, and will include the videos Eight, Single Wide, Detached Building, Johnny and House With Pool, as well as the hitherto unexhibited photographic series Troop, made up of 20 large-format photographs based on Johnny.

Teresa Hubbard and Alexander Birchler’s work looks at the medium of film and questions its traditional narrative logic. Their suggestive images seek to transgress the classical construction of narrative and challenge the unity of space and time through everyday stories. Hubbard and Birchler’s stories do not follow a clearly defined or linear structure, but are characteristically multi-layered. The juxtaposition of images, voices and sounds, the relationship between inside and outside spaces, and the enigmatic role of doors and windows, all combine to create a reality imbued by an uncanny, almost surreal atmosphere.

Hubbard and Birchler have been working together for over ten years. While their earlier works betrayed a penchant for sculpture, performance, photography and installations, their current works revolve around carefully designed stage sets of interiors, which have come to form an essential part of their artistic vocabulary. Through the media of video and photography, they invent stories that are anchored in the quotidian while deeply evocative of an enigmatic and poetic world, framed together and enhanced by architectural and spatial layouts. For most of their works, the working out of a narrative and its psychological pulse has led them to physically construct a space that plays out the tension between inside and outside, past and present that pervades their pieces. Their stories take place in anonymous though familiar settings that are charged with a potential mystery. The way Hubbard and Birchler make their videos is hardly any different from that of a film director.

The videos shown in the exhibition are:

Detached Building, 2001 High-definition video with sound transferred to DVD 5 min 38 sec, loop In a seemingly endless stream of pictures the camera paces off a dimly lit tin hut and registers all the things that have accumulated there: machines, tools, scattered beer bottles, a sofa, and somewhere in between a set of drums and several guitars. This sequence, with its soundtrack of chirping crickets, comes to an abrupt end inside the room and then slowly, steadily moves backwards to its starting point in the darkness of the outside wall. But the movement does not stop there; it glides without interruption out into the night, where a young woman comes into view who is picking up and throwing stones at a deserted house. The panes of a window are heard shattering in the background and a dog begins to bark. The camera pans back to the inside of the shed, where four young men have assembled to make music. One of them is playing a bass guitar while the other three listen to him or talk to each other. The scene is filmed with the same quiet movement as before. Then the camera takes us though the dark zone of the wall and behind the house. The young woman has vanished; only the chirping and the soft strumming of the guitar are heard. These movements are repeated until the camera finally pans outside to the window. This work is designed as an ongoing loop and executed as an image floating in the dark. One is struck by the extremely gentle movement of the camera, pacing off the workshop. The soundtrack – inside, the chirping of the crickets; outside, the sound of the guitar – underscores the formal and contextual framing of the interior and exterior spaces. Hubbard/Birchler’s video loops suggest various narrative strands. Although the musicians and the woman do not appear to be related to each other in any way, a subtext of dichotomies, such as inside/outside, light/dark, man/woman, or individual/group, hints at potential narratives. These do not consolidate into a story but instead provoke unanswered questions: what is the relationship among the musicians and between them and the woman? Why is she throwing stones? Is the guitarist playing for fun or is he being tested?

Eight, 2001 High-definition video with sound transferred to DVD 3 min 35 sec, loop Eight is constructed with neither beginning nor end. The title points less to the contents of the video piece as to the background situation: the eighth birthday party of a little girl which has been rained out. All we see are the remains of the party: the food, the decorations, the plates… The movement of the camera in Eight links outside and inside in a continuous sequence. Inside and outside are tightly interwoven by means of architectural references like windows and passages. Linear time is in effect transposed into cyclical time, where there is neither beforehand nor afterwards. Due to the premise of the action, the birthday party is literally a wash-out. The film sequence has a powerful psychological component: possible expectations remain unfulfilled (as is represented by the fact that the girl never gets to eat her slice of cake), sadness, even melancholy. Time is constructed in a cycle and hinders any narrative resolution to the story, leaving in the air an endless number of possible interpretations that are only partially revealed through the many-faceted puzzle of meanings suggested to the viewer in this story.

Single Wide, 2002 High-definition video with sound transferred to DVD 6 min 10 sec, loop This piece narrates the endless and repeated story of a woman who leaves hers prefab house in a pickup truck, returns and, after a brief but intense attack of rage, crashes her truck right through the wall of her house. The house looks like a collection of containers. She carries a large bag full of childhood memories. She goes down a few stairs, gets into her truck, and stays seated in front of the steering wheel. Her mobile phone rings. The camera crosses the wall into the house. The phone rings persistently and its shrill timbre is heard through the rooms. The sound of a car driving off is heard and then, after a brief lapse, it is heard returning. The camera goes back to the truck. It stops a few metres in front of the house. At the end of the tracking shots we see how the woman struggles to get out of the dented car door, how she walks into the destroyed room with her bag full of memories and enters her bedroom. She lays down her bag, examines her face and shoulders for scratches, smoothes her hair, picks up her bag and leaves the house through the small staircase and heads for her truck… Single Wide can also be seen as a video about formative influences, whether exerted by one’s family or based on cultural and ethnic differences. Inner and outer migrations with their dramatic and often tragic consequences are subjects which infiltrate our lethargic social body like a virus.

Johnny, 2004 High-definition video with sound transferred to DVD 3 min 51 sec, loop In their film, Johnny, Teresa Hubbard / Alexander Birchler observe with a precise, extended, almost staring gaze the young members of a marching band whom they have chosen as a microcosm of American Society. In long tracking shots and close-up views, the people in the film evolve independently of any plot, and this creates a powerful tension that makes us almost fear for a loud blast from the band, but in the end this fear is dispersed by the quiet closing of a zip. When searching for a song for the video, Hubbard and Birchler decided on When Johnny Comes Marching Home, attributed to Patrick S. Gilmore, a Boston-based trumpeter and composer who served as a band master in the Union Army during the American Civil War. The song, which is still frequently performed in different contexts, is rooted in ambiguity: the upbeat marching tempo is paired with a melancholic, mournful-sounding tune. The lyrics of the song are written in the future tense and describe events which haven’t happened yet: the inevitable military triumph and safe return home of a soldier named Johnny. The song’s political connotations reveal other ambiguities: the innocence of many young people who are brought up in a cultural tradition based on patriotism and nationalism.

House With Pool, 2004 High-definition video with sound transferred to DVD 21 min 12 sec, loop One night, a teenager returns to the house of her childhood. The girl walks to the pool, lies down in a deck chair, covers herself with her cardigan and falls asleep. In the first light of dawn, one sees roedeers passing by, grazing, not taking any notice of her. The noise of the garden sprinklers being turned on rouses her from sleep. She runs away. A woman of about forty is swimming in the pool. The gardener starts up his lawn-mower. The woman takes a shower. The girl enters the house, puts her cardigan onto an armchair in the woman’s bedroom, sits down at the grand piano in the living room and starts playing a grandiose piece of piano-music. The gardener is standing at the pool. He lies down at the side of the pool and submerges his whole upper body. At the second attempt, he heaves up a drowned roedeer. The increasing dramatics of the piano piece underscores his effort. The girl runs out of the house. The woman sits down at the piano and plays part of the same piece. The day is coming to an end. The woman puts on the girl’s cardigan, goes out onto the balcony of the bedroom, listens into the dark with tears in her eyes. She shivers, goes back into the room, carefully puts the cardigan onto the armchair, and leaves the room. Like a shadow, the girl flits by, takes the cardigan. Then we see her again, passing through the lattice fence – as she did at the beginning of the video.

The question of whether this is a mother –daughter relationship or whether the mother is encountering her own past remains unanswered. Even the camera’s pausing over family photographs of mother and daughter does not give conclusive information, since the girl in the photograph could be the woman with her mother. The drowned roedeer connects the two levels of reading: at some time in the past, something irreversibly broke into pieces. The teenager is drawn to her mother as if by a refusing, magic force. Vice versa, the mother experiences the trauma of her youth, perhaps the separation of her parents. The music constitutes the continuity, the break drowns all the love, affection, domestic warmth, confidence. The woman seems to live alone. Except for the gardener, there is no man and no father. Not even in the photographs. The mother and the music are the points of reference: the woman in the mirror of her own painful past as a teenager, or the daughter, who as a “runaway” withdraws from her mother, yet cannot break away from her.

The suspense is played out on two levels: that of the action and that of the images. The camera, moving gently and horizontally, reveals the happenings and the places, it pauses, moves on, amazes us. The cuts advance the story in an inconspicuous yet surprising way, without ever loosing sight of the image. The multi-layeredness, the profoundness, the hurt of which it tells, form overlapping levels which leave meanings undetermined.

Pressetext

Teresa Hubbard & Alexander Birchler. Little Pictures at Mrs Owen’s House
Kuratoren: Miguel Fernandez-Cid, Monique Lambie