Lyn Smallwood
Nine One One Media Arts Center Theoretically, the video installation that Debla and Kurt Geissel have rigged up in the storefront window here is open for business at all hours, but the piece is definitely a nocturne. In the morning, when the winter sun slants through the windows, you can hardly see the little TV tubes' sputter light, much less hear the audio tapes above the megaroar of I-5. Anyway, in this particular neighborhood-a skewed, paved-over, vaguely triangular nonplace endowed upon us by the almighty planners-of-freeways-it's hard to focus on anything buy the human stories lined up for the next meal at the New Hope Center just down the block. Art? Schmart.
The Geissels' installation involves TV tubes shorn of their usual cabinets and containers; their guts-so to speak-are exposed, and in various ways their iniquitous power to mesmerize has been violent curtailed, or parodied. The center window is draped with red damask, and the tube boings around within, suspended on springs like a baby in a bounce chair, its flitting images (among them a list of directions for how to coin-op the set) half-obscured by a sort of metal tripod.
It's here that the soundtrack kicks in, activated by your movements. The sound is a suspended waverings of strings, sort of like a climatic chunk of the theme from General Hospital strung out for eternity. In another window, three tubes strung up sideways on s system of bars and pulleys look to be a sort of torture rack. In another, the tube finds home within a billowing, gold-slathered cabinet topped by two plaster cherubs. Every once in a while the whole affair puffs up, then deflates, like an exhausted juke box. In a final window-my favorite-you have to squint to see the tube; it's situated beyond a filmy black curtain, centered between two dangerously arcing electric candles, within a sort of black wire helmet or cage. The cage is thrust forward on a metal arm. If this malevolent-looking contraption were activated, what would it do? Jerk up and down? Burst into flames? Bash through the window? I waited and waited. Several hundred cars shot off the off-ramp. Nothing happened.