Rubber Pencil Devil by Alex Da Corte
Catching the stream of Alex Da Corte's art-film opus Rubber Pencil Devil a third of the way through, I quickly tried to adjust my brain from my couch in Missouri that is slowly deflating during quarantine to his alternate universe. It was like watching Saturday morning Cartoons at Kenneth Anger's house while Mike Kelley pours the cereal: bright colors, skewed pop, characters staring you in the face with their intent eyes or from behind eerie, plush masks (elevated homemade Halloween Costumes), music howling like your parents stereo, a faint smell of blood, Franzia, basement, and sugar.
Da Corte's unconscious mind embodied as connections are flipped through like a TV with a remote control through commercials, reruns and memories, a vision of a very particular millennial condition. Moments of twisted subconscious fears oozed into desires: sensualness, fear, death, love, money. The film is also a swansong to a certain way of communication as Da Corte speaks to the last generation of a shared TV-language, a time before culture & commerce shifted to spoon-fed, mirror-gazing algorithms.
A jagged Bart Simpson smoking a cigar propped against a wall is pelted with (what looked like?) cream-filled eggs, punctuated with gunshot-like sounds, it was this moment (with one of my personal childhood icons) that the piece moved beyond flat eye candy and into something far deeper. In this moment, onscreen fantasy and offscreen reality combined: whatever childhood mysteries might lie ahead they are eventually met with abrupt, violent truths (extra fitting as someone fired a semi-automatic on my residential street the week I watched this piece, a street filled with kids forced home by the pandemic).
Rubber Pencil Devil is like a waking dreamy nightmare, or maybe a piñata at a kid's birthday party: a crepe paper cartoon character, filled with teeth-rotting gifts, the soft figure beaten into a bloody pulp with a broom handle or baseball bat. Da Corte, in a tradition of pop & contemporary artists, looks to seemingly simple, sweet nostalgia for meaning, taking off its wrapper to unveil something fondly remembered, sometimes tainted, and almost always some form of a lie.
Da Corte's unconscious mind embodied as connections are flipped through like a TV with a remote control through commercials, reruns and memories, a vision of a very particular millennial condition. Moments of twisted subconscious fears oozed into desires: sensualness, fear, death, love, money. The film is also a swansong to a certain way of communication as Da Corte speaks to the last generation of a shared TV-language, a time before culture & commerce shifted to spoon-fed, mirror-gazing algorithms.
A jagged Bart Simpson smoking a cigar propped against a wall is pelted with (what looked like?) cream-filled eggs, punctuated with gunshot-like sounds, it was this moment (with one of my personal childhood icons) that the piece moved beyond flat eye candy and into something far deeper. In this moment, onscreen fantasy and offscreen reality combined: whatever childhood mysteries might lie ahead they are eventually met with abrupt, violent truths (extra fitting as someone fired a semi-automatic on my residential street the week I watched this piece, a street filled with kids forced home by the pandemic).
Rubber Pencil Devil is like a waking dreamy nightmare, or maybe a piñata at a kid's birthday party: a crepe paper cartoon character, filled with teeth-rotting gifts, the soft figure beaten into a bloody pulp with a broom handle or baseball bat. Da Corte, in a tradition of pop & contemporary artists, looks to seemingly simple, sweet nostalgia for meaning, taking off its wrapper to unveil something fondly remembered, sometimes tainted, and almost always some form of a lie.
Streamed Online via Whitney Screens
Fridays/Online/7pm EST
Whitney Museum of American Art
posted by Donna K. at
9:53 PM
<< Home