T.J. Wilcox,
The
Funeral of Marlene Dietrich, 1999
Courtesy
of the Artist and Metro Pictures
Wilcox'
film technique is unique, both in its complexity and its effects. He
shoots a wide variety of material on Super-8, such as TV images, old
advertising photographs, his own drawings, archival material, and
architectural photographs. Then he digitizes the collected material and
arranges and manipulates his collages according to the stories he tells in
the subtitles. The last step is the conversion of the digital images onto
16-mm film. The effect of this elaborate procedure is a gradual departure
from the original image that emphasizes-and even distills-the fantasy
world residing in each picture. Wilcox' films are grainy; they have a
historical patina, even though they seem to glow from within. His
preferred palette consists of beige and brown hues as well as gradations
of grey, black, and white. His recent interest in paper collage, in which
he uses materials such as gouache, watercolor, ink, parts of photographs,
acetate, and graphite, arose from his work designing scenes for his films.
Hence the collages, such as the intertwo works from the Sissi series in
the Deutsche
Bank Collection, radiate a similar power of attraction. These, too,
are marked by a glazed-over glamour that evokes romantic feelings of
nostalgia mixed with an amused admiration.
T.J.
Wilcox, ohne Titel (Sissi from the front), 2007, © Courtesy Galerie Daniel
Buchholz,Cologne/Berlin,
Deutsche
Bank Collection
|
Like every dandy, T.J. Wilcox is a collector. A collector
of historical attitudes, bizarre stories, and literary fantasies. And like
every dandy, Wilcox is also an intellectual who is too elegant for an
intellectual's life. Seemingly playful details and funny eccentricities
acquire unexpected gravity in his work. In his film montage Garland Six
(2005), melancholy swans announce the end of the world for December 16,
2012, following a sequence on the origin of angora cats-the last survivors
of a long lost civilization of Arab antiquity. Garland Five (2005) brings
together three short films about the tragic lives of Chopin,
the Comtesse de Castiglione, and the American grande dame, Pamela
Digby Churchill. All three lived on the Place Vendôme in Paris, which
today looks almost exactly as it did during the fleeting lives of its
famous residents. In Garland One (2003), a video on the death of
the French bulldog Ortino, who was murdered and buried in a mass Siberian
grave together with his owners, the Russian Czar and his family,
underscores the randomness of the early death of Wilcox' stepmother Ann.
T.J.
Wilcox
Photograph of the film
"The Funeral of Marlene Dietrich", 1999
Courtesy
of the Artist and Metro Pictures
More
than anything else, however, Wilcox, like every dandy, is the grateful
victim of his own obsession for sad and beautiful stories. "I approach
something from a text and make it into an artwork, with my own
conceptions, prejudices and misunderstandings. They are the foundation of
my work," the artist explains as we look on while workers begin installing
for the autumn opening at Metro Pictures. "All of these stories have
become part of the fabric of my mind. It seems that through my work I want
to give my obsessions a longer life." The results are works from a clever
fantasy world that can spread to the viewer like a virus. Wilcox' films
and collages are small flights from reality that demonstrate to us our own
need to flee reality-for anyone with a heart, with the intensity of an
almost physical sensation.
T.J.
Wilcox,
Photograph of the film
"The Funeral of Marlene Dietrich", 1999
Courtesy
of the Artist and Metro Pictures
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