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Untitled
Fall '95. 56:58 min., color, 1995. By
Alex Bag. Ubuweb's
description:
Bag, at the time an art student, "plays" Bag the
art student. In a series of deadpan performances, Bag gathers fragments
of pop detritus, fashioning a thoroughly mediated document that is at
once a celebration and a record of loss. With the narrative
inevitability of a TV serial, the eight diaristic segments trace a
woman's struggle to make sense of her experience at art school. As each
installment marks the start of a new semester, Bag's character addresses
the camera with her latest observations and frustrations.
Interspersed
between these confessions are eight set-pieces, in which Bag performs
scenes from the background noise of her imagination: a pretentious
visiting artist, London shop-girls discussing their punk band, a Ronald
MacDonald puppet attempting to pick up a Hello Kitty doll, the singer
Bjork explaining how television works. These surreal episodes sketch out
what Bag sees as the simultaneous attraction and repulsion of
contemporary youth culture, and teeter on the divide between parody and
complicity.

How apropos I mentioned my use of Ubuweb as art school in the
previous
writeup. Not only is
Untitled Fall '95 about art school,
it's
by an art school student. You see, she's
well-known now, but
back in the days of
Melrose Place and
Beavis and Butt-head
— both of which are name-checked in the video — Alex Bag was just
another kid at NYC's School of Visual Arts. Steering by the tried and
true principle of "video what you know," she put together this saga of
urban art-school life.
The chapters of this semi-fictional
academic career, each of which takes place at the beginning of a new
semester, are sort of proto-vlogs. The first has the bright red-haired
Bag chatting into the camera about how "stoked" she is to finally be
around "people who, like, understand me." As the semesters pass, her
appearance changes and her on-camera intake of coffee and cigarettes
increases. She announces her decision to "do the fine arts thing,"
because "advertising is so evil" and "I'm not going to kiss anyone's
ass, basically." She's reasonably heartened to notice "big improvements
in my shading and foreshortening," but then finds her self stuck writing
"these really boring papers." By the time her hair assumes a bob-like
shape and she gains a pair of retro
Far Side glasses, she's met
this RISD guy who impresses her by being "into all these really specific
things."
School takes a turn for the worse around the sixth
semester. Having dyed her hair black and picked up a nose ring, she
admits to being "a little bit depressed," that "everything goes all
wrong when I'm forced to explain my work," that she thinks "I shouldn't
have to stand next to my thing and explain why I made it." She moans
about having to endure her classmates' questions during critiques,
having to explain endlessly how "my parents" and "high school" "fucked
me up." She complains about the supposed superiority of everybody else
at SVA, asking, "What is the point of making work for people who are so
smart, they don't even watch TV?"
As the end of art school
approaches, she appears to have imbibed that classic cocktail of
bitterness and negativity. She's realized that "artists are so boring."
She's been "reduced to applying for these really lame jobs." She "can't
wait for it to end." She's "scared for it to end." Her one green shoot
is the promise of the gritty but kaleidoscopic outside world, which
offers an endless array of real, tangible things that may or may not be
art-related. At least it's an escape route from the world which keeps
her head "buried in some post-structuralist, anti-Lacan, MIT Press
thing."

It's in her final couple semesters that her internal pendulum
swings to an almost sympathetic position. Despite patches of
transcendence and optimism, her history at SVA has been one of
complaint. She "decides" to pursue fine art because she can't stand
commercialism, yet she resents her professors' insufficient mastery of
current pop culture. She's wowed by the presence of other artists, yet
she also can't stand them. She works for a successful artist whose
practice of hiring students to to his gruntwork she finds loathsome yet
somehow inspiring. She doesn't care if she ever makes money from her
work, yet she does. "I'm the first to admit that I'm a mass of
self-contradictions," she says to the camera, "but I don't think there's
anything wrong with that." She finishes off with a
cri de coeur
against those most villainous of Gen-X villains, those "selling my
culture back to me."
It's kind of funny that we postmillennials
don't seem to care about that thing, though I'm not quite sure what to
make of it. Despite the generational divide, though — and despite the
fact that I go to Ubuweb, not SVA — I can feel the resonance in this
character's apparently potent combination of camaraderie and spite,
confidence and wariness, optimism and dread. True, in many ways she cuts
a ridiculous figure: taken from certain angles, she seems vapid,
bombastic, directionless, entitled, unreasonably demanding. But maybe
there's nothing wrong with that.
While these segments could hold
their own simply strung together one after the other, Bag intersperses
them with a series of bizarre vignettes. Each stars different
eccentrics, all played by Bag herself with what must have been an epic
raid on the theater department's costume closet. An unappealingly
coiffed guest lecturer medicatedly describes her 365-screen installation
and how "it's not as impactful" seeing the videos sequentially instead.
A couple slack-jawed Brits yammer on to one another about how boring
everything is except for punk rock songs whose lyrics yammer on about
how boring everything is. Androgynous teenagers have an
after-school-special moment. Bag stares, somehow both in astonishment
and with deeply dead eyes, at a video of Björk disassembling a
television set. Is the whole lesser or greater than the sum? I'm not
sure I'd want to take it apart to find out.