Serge Khripoun
GIRLS GOT RHYTHM
Why do we watch movies? I mean not «what for», or «for what sake», or «what do we get from movies», but why do we watch ‘em? Drama is not better than action, and comedy is not worse than tragedy, and there’s not much difference for a moviegoer between French, Russian, American or Italian cinema. Though any film has one important element that makes us watch it (or not to watch if there’s no such an element). That’s suspense (expectation, uncertainty, tension, anxiety) – the force that turns moving pictures into cinema. The word itself is derived from the Latin «suspendere», which means «to hang up, leave undecided». What moves and disturbs a human being more than expectation of the unknown. The whole life is an attempt to live until tomorrow and see what happens then. The same thing with cinema, which as the most lifelike art, is built on expectance of uncertainty. Alfred Hitchcock, the king of suspense, has even invented a word for the film’s suspense driving element – McGuffin, and stressed that McGuffin should be used just until it performs its task. That’s why overloaded action or disaster movies are often so dull, and no special effect effort could keep our eye at the screen. While the right doze of suspense would make us watch almost any genre, be it a sci-fi horror («Alien»), a serial killer thriller («Psycho» or «Scream»), a police action («Speed»), a courtroom drama («Primal Fear») or a TV series («Twin Peaks» or «The X-Files»).
Projects made by Aidan in the last couple of years, are built on suspense (although art critics still tend to mark her as a Moscow agent of St. Petersburg aestheticism, unbound with actual issues of psychology and perception). Aidan has shown her «brand name» demi-nude odalisque at club parties, tempting the viewers’ «decent» aesthetic feelings – as if a «9 1/2 weeks» movie shown at some highbrow video-art festival.
At the last Moscow Photobiennial beautiful girl was hidden behind the wall and forced viewers to peep – like Norman Bates in «Psycho». And having peeped into the whole (through the Polaroid viewfinder) one couldn’t resist taking a picture for the record of one’s own voyeuristic spasm in public. Ensnared in provocation, the viewer has literally hand made for Aidan the thousand-framed multiple of her work.
Developing the favorite theme Aidan has made another step beyond, showing at the late Moscow’s «Art Forum» an installation in a separate booth with a bath-tub half-veiled behind a curtain. Here the fine provocation of sensuous stereotypes is driven to the palpable limits – right up to the irresistible wish to peek in behind the curtain. Hooking the viewer with the bath bait, Aidan turns one into a killer-thriller hero creeping toward the girl, who is traditionally unaware of danger and seductively caressing herself. Thus Aidan allows anybody to become a maniac with no extra special effects.
Her present exhibit here at XL is titled simply – «Suspense». This time she is playing a kind of an «aesthete’s» film, with classical (painting) and pop-art (video) elements. Both pictures are almost monochrome, referring us back to the silent era, when intrigue was developed exclusively by the visual means. This project by Aidan has almost no trace of «beauty», but the tension between the canvas and the light beam. Changing the recumbent odalisque for the sitting pregnant, makes this tension almost sterile and free of both the spicy Oriental eroticism and the adventurous Western maniacal obsession. Which makes the suspense appalling. In the Andy Warhol’s famous film the long absence of action became a parody of energetic suspense, with the minimal – and accidental – change of static in the end. From this point Aidan’s video is very dynamic, but the nature of the seemingly trivial stir of the model is so strange, that one is smitten with sore expectancy: what will this silent weird sitting end with? Serge Shutov, who edited the video, has put in there a cunning «hi there» to both the king of suspense and the king of pop art – at some point the model’s motion is paused in a nervous hand shiver, to be continued in reverse mode. Anxiously awaiting to unravel the clue and finally perplexed viewer scarcely would recognize the cheat. So the model’s pregnancy – successfully brought to bed later – just stretches the metaphor put in the exhibit title.