Exhibition (Mary Helena Clark, 2022) (Patreon)

Mary Helena Clark has consistently been one of the most compelling avant-garde filmmakers on the current scene. A large part of the success of her films -- particularly Orpheus (Outtakes) (2012), The Glass Note (2018), and Figure Minus Fact (2020) -- owes to her vaguely surreal poetic sensibility. Rather than organizing her work around specific themes or even visual or aural motifs, Clark constructs cinematic constellations, force fields in which a number of ideas and intimations remain suspended in orbit but..."refuse" is too strong, so instead I'll say "decline"...they decline to mesh according to any overt logic.

In short, there has been a definite poetic orientation in her work, particularly that of late modernists like George Oppen, Lynn Hejinian, and Jack Spicer. Like these poets, Clark treats words, sounds, and images not as metaphors but as themselves, placed in dialogue with other objective pieces of material. Put another way, an image in a Clark film (say, the disembodied pair of eyes in Orpheus) exists both as itself and as a formal object, darkened orbs within a neutral gray field.

With this aesthetic history in mind, Exhibition marks a significant shift for Clark. For one thing, it has narration. Although it is composed to sound like one continuous stream of thought, it is drawn from various sources, including Jack Spicer. But the most predominant verbal material comes from one Mary Richardson, a British suffragette who became notorious for literally taking an ax to the male gaze in Western art, attacking Velazquez's Rokeby Venus in 1914. The narrator who embodies Richardson's words is critic Audrey Wollen, whose parentage seems relevant to the project. Her father is Peter Wollen (filmmaking partner of Laura Mulvey) and her mother is feminist novelist Leslie Dick.

In Richardson's words, Velazquez's Venus was being intensely studied by two "detectives," their rapt amazement seemingly confirming the painting's nefarious powers of seduction. Exhibition places Richardson's act within a larger metaphysics of art's material basis, comparing it with "cam" movie piracy or a Swedish artist's performative gesture of marrying the Berlin Wall. What is our lived relationship to the artwork, and who controls who? If art is presumably potent enough to induce "hysteria," or Stendhal Syndrome, or sublime rapture, how can such an object become private property? Isn't the gaze a form of legitimate ownership?

If there seems to be an unusually clear through-line in Exhibition, it nevertheless touches on phenomenological questions that have been implicit in Clark's film work for years. And although at nineteen minutes it arguably has some at-least-tangential relationship to the current essay-film trend, Clark's patient, allusive manner demonstrates just how much one can bend that form to non-didactic ends. We come away from Exhibition not knowing how Clark feels about Richardson's action. The film wisely refrains from mentioning the way her feminism became triangulated through the British fascism of Oswald Mosely. It doesn't matter why Richardson attacked the Velazquez. What matters is the durability of the gaze, a system that can withstand the injury or elimination of any given node.