Everett, Wash.
Published: Friday, September 26, 2008

New Frye exhibit could be a challenge

The museum puts up five contemporary video displays that often push emotional hot buttons.

By Theresa Goffredo
Herald Writer

 SEATTLE -- The Olympics are over and the national election seems to be droning on. So it's understandable you might be feeling a bit numb.

But a visit to the Frye Museum's latest exhibit is sure to stir some dormant emotions -- fear, laughter, awe.

"Empire" is equal parts hypnotic and shocking. The exhibit runs through Jan. 4.

There are five installations in "Empire" and all are done in a contemporary video format, projected art on a screen described as "both metaphorical and documentary."

Curator Robin Held put it best when she called "Empire" a "very immersive video experience."

That experience is quite stimulating.

Take the installation called "Funk Staden" for instance. A large room at the Frye is dedicated to this video-in-the-round that is as compelling to watch as it is to learn about: 450 years ago, German anthropologist Hans Staden visited what is now Brazil. Staden was captured by a cannibalistic tribe who chose not to eat him. In 1557, Staden published an illustrated book about his captivity.

Artists Mauricio Dias and Walter Riedweg based their piece "Funk Staden" on a reinterpretation of Staden's story set in the funk culture of Rio de Janeiro's slums. Viewers can watch as dancers at a rooftop rave and barbecue act out nine woodcuts from Staden's book, including a simulated rape scene using a blow-up doll. This documented artwork was created with three video cameras mounted at the top of a wood stake that is passed around and spun during the filming. The stake was meant to mimic the ritual club used as a weapon by the native tribe who bludgeoned their enemies before devouring them.

Another installation has viewers sitting to watch Hungarian fans talking at a Fradi football game. In this 2002 film called "Fradi (FTC Hungary) is better," we never see the actual game, just these fanatic fans screaming obscenities and anti-Semitic and anti-Roma sentiments. The Romani are the "first nation" people of Europe who are sometimes attacked during these games. The footage is frightening as raw hatred is displayed on the screen with the potential of violence so immediate it's almost palpable.

There are three other installations. One is real-time video of wasps building a nest. Another is a single-channel DVD of close-up shots of Turkish storytellers intoning Kurdish tales.

Finally there's a looping 16 mm film that viewers can press a button to start in which a pretty woman silently moves through a museumlike room of delicate porcelain pieces displayed on pedestals. The woman caresses the objects but we know something bad is about to happen.

It does. Some viewers might react to this film with glee, watching the woman as she unleashes behavior that is deliciously wrong but vicariously satisfying.

Though art is up to interpretation, illicit behavior was not the theme of the "Empire" exhibit. The exhibit is, in fact, examining the "mechanisms of empire-building and destruction, modernity and its discontents," according to literature about the exhibit.

"Empire" is the companion exhibit to "Napoleon on the Nile," which has 90 terrifically detailed engravings and luscious, almost 3-D looking oil-on-panel paintings that are well worth seeing. "Napoleon" offers viewers a historical look at how the colonizing French mapped and documented Egypt and its resources in preparation for future takeover. As a counterpoint to "Napoleon," "Empire" offers samples "from a variety of contemporary perspectives the vision of those colonized."

"How does one create art today without re-inscribing colonial patterns of domination?" curator Held asked. "The projected art (in "Empire") offers complex, even contradictory, figures of difference; provisional notions of identity, mingled pasts and presents, and shifting boundaries of inclusion and exclusion as possible responses to this question."
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