Last Breath on the Mirror is the video that was shown in the installation. Here you will notice that the video and audio is completely synchronized. I first selected the film segments I wanted to use from the film, I then worked with a DJ with whom I created the audio sampling. Then with the video editing, I came to a realization that synchronization would put time front and center within the filmic images, with every beat or syllable the image would change, revealing the illusion that film is 24 frames per second. Yet I also added moments of complete silence implicating a real time soundtrack with the viewer’s own accidental accompaniment, with the sound of their own movement, voices, etc.
With this work and previous works, I am interested in the concept of the contemporary Readymade within the digital age. Taking cultural content, rearranging it like a collage artist with found images, I’m interested in “detouring” the information from the images, as Guy de Bord wrote about in Society of the Spectacle, to locate other meaning of images. Although the practice of appropriation is as old as art itself, intellectual property has become a real issue for artists, and this project is also about the blurred lines of authenticity, and the indiscernability of authorship in the age of information. Roland Barthes wrote an essay in 1968 called Death of the Author, in which he claims that it is the reader who creates the content, just as Duchamp had said about painting, that it is the viewer of his Readymades who creates the content in their mind. Again this is a special moment of suspension between time, space, and narrative. Just as in Graham’s Cinema model, viewing film is already a narrative that is embedded into its place in society, it is the same with this work, and in all my work dealing with film, the works take the film clip, film stills and then add to them an obsessive amount of content, from analysis, to the notion of inviting the viewer into the filmic space that was represented in the film.
The Angel of Death was coincidentally written in late 1948 and first recorded in early 1949, precisely the time that The Lady from Shanghai was released in American theaters. More than fifty years after his tragic death at age of 29, Hank Williams ranks among the most powerfully iconic figures in American music. Iconic to the point that man and myth are inextricably linked. He set the agenda for contemporary country, folk, and popular songcraft and sang his songs with such believability that we feel invited into the authenticity of his dark and brooding world. My choice to appropriate The Angel of Death for use in the installation video, is a subtle reference to the well-known legend that Rita Hayworth’s famous pinup photo from Life Magazine, that sold 5 million copies during WWII, which was painted on the sides of hundreds of war planes, ships, and just about everywhere servicemen went, was most notoriously painted on the first atomic bomb tested by the United States in 1946 on the island of Bikini Atoll.
The bomb was nicknamed Gilda after the steamy role she played that same year, referencing her “Bombshell” sex symbol status. William’s song brought on a new context to the project, as I imagined hearing it while watching bombs dropping in slow motion, just as grim as the way Stanley Kubrick ended Dr. Strangelove with the optimistically sad pop song “We’ll meet again” set to a series of real footage of atomic bomb blasts and mushroom cloudbursts.
Rita Hayworth was born Margarita Carmen Cansino in New York City on Oct. 17, 19l8. Her father, Eduardo Cansino, was a Spanish-born dancer and her mother, the former Volga Haworth, had been a broadway dancer and Ziegfeld Follies showgirl. After a brief stint dancing with her father in Tijuana, she was discovered by Fox studios and made 10 movies under the name Rita Cansino.
In 1937 she met and married Edward Judson {transation} a shrewd businessman 22 years older than her. Under his influence Rita had her eyebrows and hairline painfully altered through constant electrolysis, dramatically, culturally, and ethnically transforming her from a black-haired Latina into an auburn-haired white American bombshell. As her manager, Mr. Judson also changed his wife’s professional name, choosing her mother’s maiden name of Hayworth to further Anglicize her identity. Beginning in 1941, Miss Hayworth rapidly developed into one of Hollywood’s most glamorous stars, earning her the title ”The Great American Love Goddess.”
She achieved full star status when she was cast as Fred Astaire’s dancing partner in ”You’ll Never Get Rich.”
Many have written about Hayworth’s loss of cultural and ethnic identity, and then her loss of subjectivity due to constant commodification, which is precisely the reason the closeups of Rita’s face exist within the film, they were ordered by the studios to cash in on her seductive image.
Rita Hayworth’s Elsa Bannister, is the mysterious black hole at the center of the Lady from Shanghai. When Welles’s Michael O’Hara met her, against all reason he couldn’t help but get sucked right into her labyrinthine murder plot. So O’Hara’s story is in fact a tale of survival, and in his final words he makes it clear that surviving is forgetting. He seems more intent on forgetting Elsa’s face than her persona; it’s her image, which has been burned into his psyche, he walks out because he cannot look at her without immediately falling in love with her image once again. This is mythology, not misogyny, as some critics have argued. {translation} Yet the tragic irony of Miss Hayworth’s personal life, was the suffering from a very real case of Alzheimer’s disease from the mid to late 1970’s until her death in 1987. At the end of her life Rita Hayworth became completely dependent upon her daughter Princess Yasmin Kahn. {translation} Earlier in life she had playfully and sarcastically commented, “Men fell in love with ‘Gilda,’ but they woke up with me.” Now she would not recognize her own famous face in the mirror, regardless of any of her real or fictional personas. She had been reduced to becoming less than an image, she was a recurring “found image” that was immediately forgotten. Placing the incredibly famous pinup and “American love goddess” Rita Hayworth at the center of the mirror maze, was not just about the indiscernability of the real and the virtual within the film, but it is poses the question of whether the so called “real” Rita Hayworth, was herself an illusion, and only alive as an image. Welles’s ambitious mirror maze becomes incredibly important within the history of representation, including painting, photography, video, and installation art, because it does indeed comment on, and further predict the increasing commodification of images, beauty, and the illusion of the immortal celebrity, that Andy Warhol was to explore in more depth 20 years later. {translation}