Tim Lee
Johnen Galerie, Berlin, Germany
Tim Lee’s films splice together figures – often musicians and comedians – plucked from North American popular culture. By either supplanting them from their own work or by using iconic portraits, Lee picks single, representative ‘frames’ from performers’ lives, material that he weaves together and manipulates in a sophisticated editing exercise.
Lee favours moments in which he perceives celebrities establishing their definitive public personas. Quietly exerting his own authority as a manipulator of images, he chooses or imagines these ‘frames’ (which sometimes have little to do with the actual public reception of the artist). In one, a private moment in front of the mirror is posited as comedian Steve Martin’s defining moment. Elsewhere, Lee’s focus on the notoriously reclusive Glenn Gould in Goldberg Variations, Aria BWV 988, Johann Sebastian Bach, 1741 (Glenn Gould, 1981) (2008) is an extraordinary meditation on notions of the impositions of celebrity and performers’ perceived obligations to a general public.
Lee’s titles follow a consistent form, linking together artists or their art works with a specific date indicating the ‘defining moment’ chosen by Lee: My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue)/Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black), Neil Young 1979 (2007). The two large-scale photographs of My My... are of Lee viewed from above, casting a long shadow. Twice, he strikes a Neil Young-style pose, seated alternately with an acoustic and an electric guitar: mirror images that reference the alternate performance styles of mirrored songs. Lee’s tone is deadly serious; the Korean-Canadian artist’s aping of rock’n’roll gestures typical of a white male-dominated canon carries the requisite whiff of critical humour. Yet even funnier is the idea that the irreverent Lee enjoys his posturing, or identifies with it – seriously.
For the accompanying installation (a vinyl record and its case), Lee adds an additional figure to the title of his photographic diptych, Steve Martin, 1977 (2008). Where before, Lee’s physical presence channelled the Neil Young associations into a humorous critique, this time he adopts the guise of a critic in order to bring his subjects into focus. In an elegant record cover text written by Lee, he argues that Martin and Young’s creative trajectories can be viewed in tandem.
The sheer quantity of Lee’s mirrorings can be overwhelming, serving at times as more of a distraction than a support to his argument – as when he finds seemingly disproportionate significance in the common factual minutiae of Martin and Young’s lives. But the artist’s consistent positioning of himself in relation to his subjects acts as an orienting force. In Goldberg Variations, two screens each show one of the artist’s hands playing the treble or bass line of Bach’s Variations. Lee is not a musician, and each hand was recorded separately in a series of visually arrhythmic jump-cuts. Yet the longer one watches, the more instances of simultaneity begin to appear. Coordinated with each other or with Bach’s harmonic intervals, at certain moments the screens realign, as with the blink of an eye or the flash of a strobe light. Dispersing the eminently systematic Bach into chaos and then back to order again, splicing himself in between Gould and the 18th-century composer, Lee continues to build up his own skewed approaches for making a body of artistic work, one frame at a time.
Sarah-Neel Smith
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