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Stitches in time: Oliver Herring's knitted sculptures and his stop-motion videos and photos might seem unrelated. In fact, the author argues, all result from cumulative processes in which stitches or frames mark time - "Split Reverse" video exhibition at Palm Beach ICA Janet Koplos

If you missed Oliver Herring's 1999 show at Max Protetch Gallery in New York, or if you saw only the main room of that exhibition, you got a surprise last winter at his new show in the same gallery, and you probably said: He's doing video? What happened to the knitting? How did he get from there to here?

Despite Herring's international recognition during the '90s as an artist employing the unusual technique of knitting, the major new work on view was a five-channel video, Little Dances of Misfortunes (2001), which gave its name to the show as a whole. In this short but complex composition, just as in his knitted sculptures, Herring's method of making is central to the meaning. But yes, he's still knitting. In the back gallery was a squashy globe more than 5 feet in diameter knitted of silver Mylar tape. In addition, from the sidewalk outside you could look down into the gallery's basement viewing room to see two other knitted works, a pole about 12 feet long (with a rigid plastic core) and a circle of gold Mylar, which appeared to be draped over a ring of some sort that allowed the fabric to sag into its empty center.

The German-born Herring, who has his B.F.A. from the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art at Oxford and his M.F.A. from Hunter College, started out as a painter. He took up knitting for the work that first brought him widespread attention, A Flower for Ethyl Eichelberger (1991), a tribute to the performance artist of that name who had committed suicide after he was diagnosed with AIDS. Herring chose the technique because it is a traditionally female activity and because he wanted a process that would reflect the passage of time. For his material he chose not yarn with its plethora of colors but plastic tape of noncommittal transparency. For this extended project, Herring knitted coats and blankets, constructing these protective, comforting, consoling forms in this cool, contemporary, visually ethereal material. Appropriately, there was a performance aspect to the Eichelberger works. When they were shown at New York's New Museum of Contemporary Art in 1993, for example, Herring sat in the shadowy gallery, knitting. (1) His presence emphasized Eichelberger's absence. And garments are always surrogates for a person.

By the time of Herring's 1996 project room show at the Museum of Modern Art, he had shifted from surrogates to actual figures. The most striking of these was Wounded Knee (1995), in which a crouching man seems to be knitting his own body. Herring's next step was to develop a way to depict motion. His 1999 show at Protetch included two life-size sculptures that suggest movement through a sequence of connected partial figures, an approach that harks back to the stuttering image in Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase. The sculptures also recall Etienne-Jules Marey's early photographic studies of motion, in which the figure is seen in continuous, overlapping states (unlike Muybridge's more famous discrete shots in his "locomotion" series). In Soft Landing, the figure incrementally falls from his feet onto his knees and into a prone position; in Double Rocker, he is seen tipping forward and backward in a rocking chair. Herring worked out the positions by taking videos of himself. Although he knitted the sculptures, the process led him toward video.

Herring commented at the time that he had continued to employ knitting as his means in those sculptures because he could seem to bring the form into being in a continuous stream. A knitted line is, in effect, endless, since a new filament can be imperceptibly spliced in; at the same time, it can be subdivided into innumerable repetitive actions. These individual stitches in time can be compared with the photographic frames that are the integers of films; both stitches and frames remain distinguishable, even as they build into a larger whole.

n '99, along with his knitted representations of falling and rocking, Herring showed his first videos, made the previous year. Unlike conventional films or videotapes, they do not capture motion realistically but rather employ a series of briefly shown, closely related still shots of Herring alone or with his partner, the painter Peter Krashes, posing and interacting with furniture, fabric and various props in a studio setting. (2) These stop-motion sequences are compositions in color--an esthetic element significantly absent from the knitted works. The videos, with their casual, homemade look, are seemingly as low-tech as the sculptures.

Herring has worked steadily in video since then, continuing to employ the stop-motion method. In stop motion, the stills are presented far too slowly and infrequently to register on our eyes as "real" motion. They suggest movement in discrete increments, much like the hand of a clock that marks seconds in ticks instead of a sweep (thus resembling Muybridge now). As Herring has noted, motion is not actually shown in his videos but is implied by the performer's change in position from one image to the next. You fill in the blanks.

All but one of the dozen or so videos he has made involve this kind of pulsing movement. At the same time, he has been experimenting with settings, lighting, costumes and performers. And he has also begun to make sculptures based on his video productions. On display in Protetch's viewing room during the show was a foamcore relief derived from Pure Sublimation (2000-01). This video was shot outdoors, on a city street. Vividly monochrome people and vehicles--each person costumed, painted and wigged in a single intense shade, the trucks and cars wrapped in bright cloth--enact a 27-second performance of arrival and departure, including frenetic activity such as emerging from, climbing on and circling the vehicles. The relief consists of enlarged and cut-up photographic images. Its generous size, irregular blocks of protruding or cutaway surface and fragmented imagery catch the almost slapstick energy of the video.

The early videotapes, performances and explorations of color now seem to have been a run-up to Little Dances of Misfortunes. In this five-monitor work, Herring simultaneously presents different stop-motion videotapes of a group of performers in dark costumes against a dark background, photographed in near darkness. They are made visible primarily by black light on fluorescent paint that is strategically applied to sets, props and various parts of bodies.

The work's title is playfully misleading. For one thing, these are not really dances, and the performers are not dancers. Also, "misfortunes" seems overstated, since no tragedy is involved. But that word "little" sets the right tone. These are Chaplinesque or Keatonesque moments, farces with just a tinge of melancholy--melancholy presented as another face of farce.

The monitors were spaced down the long wall of Protetch's main room. One three-minute-six-second piece of music accompanied all five tapes. The composition, by the 18th-century Czech composer Johann Baptiste Krumpholz, is based on a medieval theme; it was sampled, layered and rearranged by Herring, who has made the soundtracks for all his videos. The tapes begin and end together, in accordance with this musical timetable, but their images and rhythms are independent. Watching the videos, you are carried along by a flow of events, free of narrative, much as you follow the abstract patterns of instrumental music. Herring uses various systems of choreographic order, such as multiplication, mirroring or rhythmic repetition.

Some of the activities are simple. A woman rolls a green ball with her head. People climb a staircase of boxes that grows before them, step by step. Other actions appear to be more athletic or even fantastical: two people are silhouetted on chairs, standing on the seats, tipping, falling, climbing over one another, diving off as if into a swimming pool or jumping upward so that they disappear off the top of the monitor screen. In another scene, multiple legs somehow rotate around a circle.

Sometimes, the interest is primarily light or color. In one sequence, a nearly naked, curly-haired male gradually turns green from head to toe, except for a red loincloth; as he turns away, he is revealed to be green only on his front, with his back being the strange pink of bare, pale skin. His subsequent maneuvering, seen from front, side or back, plays with this surprising reddish/green division.

Other sequences don't appear to involve people. Green squares are reconfigured as in a college-stadium flash-card section, but no hands are seen. A green linear tree with large pink buds seems to grow upward and outward from one image to the next. Part of the fascination in such scenes is trying to figure out how the swaths of fluorescent paint might relate to a body and a setting that cannot be seen. The paint reduces form to line, so it sometimes conceals actuality as much as darkness does. For instance, that growing "tree" eventually becomes perceptible as an increasing number of performers. All have fluorescent stripes painted on their black leotards and are using their arms expansively; their unpainted faces suggest buds.

In the end, Herring reveals his methods. Displayed on the walls in the gallery's second room were photographs taken with the studio lights on, and what you see in them is, amusingly, more mess than magic. The settings are cardboard, the paint slapdash. A few stills from the videos' most mysterious scenes were paired with illuminated views. For instance, it turns out that one inexplicable scene consists of a seated man in a black leotard with a broad fluorescent stripe on his arms and legs, while three other painted legs and one arm emerge from behind a black curtain that conceals the rest of other people's bodies. In these pictures you discover, if you have not already guessed while watching, that frequently the performers have posed on the floor and been photographed from above. That's why, in the videos, gravity often seems to have been suspended and the orientation of the imagery is hard to determine. And that, whether consciously or subliminally, contributes to the lightness of mood in the videos: falling off a ladder is comic if you're miming it when you're already on the floor.

If these videotapes had been shot conventionally, the activity would seem acrobatic and showy, and a few actions would have to be faked. But posing makes it easy, even as it creates meaning by suggesting the tentative, provisional, momentary and, in this case, sequential.

Increments of motion have engaged Herring in every phase of his work. Although videotape and knitting tape are both linear, there is one sharp contrast between his two bodies of work. The sculptures are motionless, their bits of time always in the past. In the videos, the increments of movement are forever in present tense. Yet the halted differentiation of each moment in the stop-motion process only makes their brevity more poignant.

(1.) Herring has continued to perform occasionally. In the 1995 Framed by Darkness, he sat in a hole dug in the Israeli desert, knitting. For New Deal Yucca Patch (2001), at Texas Tech University, Lubbock, he expanded the concept to four knitters.

(2.) The posing atop boxes and furniture recalls the British artist Bruce McLean and his "Pose Band" of the 1970s, who perched on pedestals for photos and did related performances.

"Oliver Herring: Little Dances of Misfortunes" appeared at Max Protetch Gallery in New York [Feb. 21-Mar. 23, 2002]. Herring had an earlier exhibition at the Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art [Sept. 14-Nov. 25, 2001], for which he produced an artist's book, Sleepless Nights, that includes his handwritten commentary on his works and an interview by curator Kristin Chambers. He showed last spring at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris [Apr. 20-May 25, 2002]. The artist performed on Oct. 4 at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris, and will exhibit with Galeria Leyendecker in Santa Crus de Tenerife, Canary Islands, this year. A new multiscreen video, Split Reverse, is currently on view at the Palm Beach ICA (Dec. 3, 2002-Mar. 23, 2003).

COPYRIGHT 2003 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group

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