Alex Da Corte had a hundred dollars in the bank when, in 2010, he accepted an invitation from Leonard Cohen and his daughter to make a video to go with Cohen’s beloved song “Chelsea Hotel No. 2.”
Da Corte took his $100 to the grocery store. Reflecting on food and love and sandwich-making, and on what becomes of love when you have, so to speak, eaten the sandwich, he came back with a loaf of sliced white bread, bologna and ketchup, as well as bananas, cherries, a cabbage, food dye, a soft drink bottle, dishwashing liquid, a wastebasket, masking tape, a broom, a bucket, nail polish, sequins, aluminum foil, soil and flour.
The resulting three-minute video has the feel of an art school assignment completed an hour before deadline. But it’s also a masterpiece — a breathtakingly deft visual poem, fired with tenderness, eroticism, heartbreak, humor, violence and mortality.
This was Da Corte’s first real attempt at video art, and it was filmed over two days. But every frame feels exquisitely calibrated to a specific mood, a body part or a state of the heart. There’s something almost fetishistic about its intensity. But all this poetic precision — when set against the work’s overall nonchalance, its cheap, improvised tackiness — is charged with pathos.
We’re of course free to interpret it any way we like. But I take Da Corte (who has gone on to become one of contemporary art’s leading lights) to be posing a question about how one might exist in the world with nothing more than a body, a bunch of cheap, take-it-or-leave-it stuff and a heart brimming with feeling.
He’s made a work, in other words, about life. About all our lives.
One of the most striking things about the video — and this holds for all of Da Corte’s work — is its intoxicating use of vivid, saturated color. As the footage of cherries being painted with red nail polish suggests, Da Corte makes a lot from his sense that colors are at once superficial and of the essence.
And, of course, Cohen’s wistful song is not to be taken for granted in all of this. It’s an authentic classic — a mournful, mischievous song about his brief fling with Janis Joplin. It functions as both an ode to sexual solidarity (“And clenching your fist for the ones like us who are oppressed by the figures of beauty”) and to the fleeting, illusory nature of love (“That was called love for the workers in song”).
Da Corte converts all of this into a homoerotic register, semi-submerged, as I read it, in loss and solitude, haunted by the shadow of AIDS.
I’ve watched this video dozens of times since I first saw it at Mass MoCA in 2016. (The piece is owned by the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and is a promised gift to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.) It sometimes reminds me of a late poem by Raymond Carver called “Thermopylae.” The poem draws on Herodotus’s account of the small band of Greek soldiers “whose duty it was to hold the Gates against the Persian army.” They did, for four days, a stand that became legendary.
But before the battle, the Persian ruler Xerxes observed the Greek soldiers, “sprawled as if uncaring,” “combing and combing their long hair, as if it were simply another day in an otherwise unremarkable campaign.” He demanded an explanation. “When these men are about to leave their lives,” he was told, “they first make their heads beautiful.”
Perhaps it’s a stretch, but I find Da Corte’s video shares with Carver’s poem the same laconic matter-of-factness, the same feeling for beauty and the same acute awareness of mortality. It communicates, too, a similar sense of things that matter being carefully, almost ritualistically, doled out, like doses of methadone, or long, beautiful hair being brushed and brushed in preparation for … what?
The question collapses, like Cohen’s ever-descending voice, before any answer presents itself. But other questions remain, like: Whose dirty hands are choreographing this bright, glamorous cacophony of color?
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