Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby: Possibilities of Redemption
"Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby: Possibilities of Redemption," by Jon Davies, Fall 2009, pp. 106–10
Begin with a song. In Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby’s debut video, Rapt and Happy (1998), the first thing we hear is Duke’s voice singing “Doo doo doo...I’d love to keep you warm.” At the end of their most recent video work, Beauty Plus Pity: A Movie in 7 Parts (2009), a chorus of animal “Spirit Guides,” also voiced by Duke, warns us that they will preside over humanity’s punishment for the sins we have collectively committed against the natural world—and over our redemption as well.
Opening the mouth to sing means placing oneself in the position of vulnerability that attends any unabashed expression of raw emotion. From the glorious “fat birds” that come up Duke’s throat in Bad Ideas for Paradise (2002) to grotesque wet sobs, the act of singing is pleasurable and cathartic. Performance—both musical/theatrical and social/existential—is a vivid, embodied process for grappling with the beauty and horror of living.
Since first meeting in 1994, Duke, born in Halifax, and her partner, Battersby, born in Penticton, B.C., have collaboratively produced a series of openly philosophical, darkly comic videos that wrestle ambitiously with the problem of being human. At the core of their practice is a knotty, irony-soaked ambiguity; their work finds nobility within the most abject gestures, ugliness within the most splendid. When asked, in the slightly notorious Being Fucked Up (2001), if they believe in the possibility of redemption, Duke nods her head yes furiously, while Battersby equally emphatically shakes his head no.
Episodic in structure, their videos chip away at existential dilemmas from multiple vantage points. In interviews and in her writing, Duke exhibits a tendency to speak fluently and forwardly about her feelings. Her voice is urgent and sober at once; she calls it “insisting on expressive emotionality.” Duke and Battersby’s videos constantly risk teetering into excess, overindulgence and saying too much; Duke, for example, sometimes ventriloquizes teenagers, most dazzlingly in Bad Ideas for Paradise, in all their awkward, unabashed verbosity.
Each of Duke and Battersby’s works is a compendium of multiple voices. They contain witty, keenly felt songs, simple animations and found-footage vignettes brought to life by the duo’s narrations (in which voices run backwards, are manipulated to emulate children, robots and animals, or just to convey “anonymity,” and are haphazardly accented). Intertitles and aphoristic texts silently drift by, the voice of a higher authority perhaps; the artists pull faces, enact rituals, stage confessions, test limits. This dynamic polyvocality renders each work a series of provisional propositions and hypotheses: bad (and good) ideas for paradise.
The ethos seems to be: if the task of changing the entire world is too daunting, let’s transform ourselves. Hence the emphasis on language— narration, dialogue, script—which may hold the potential for transformation, but is just as likely to fail you. (The songs come the closest to using language as a form of incantation.) The artists exploit video’s ability to synthesize, recording and recycling different realities, and also bringing new ones into being through animation, which has become more and more central as their practice has matured.
Executive-produced by their self-adopted “dad,” the video artist Steve Reinke, Rapt and Happy contains the seeds of all that will come later in the duo’s practice. Ostensibly focused on the thin line that separates joy from sadness, its short-and-sweet ditties and bleak, absurd cartoons show us characters trapped by habit or by contradictory and self-destructive desires. Each episodic fragment beautifully encapsulates how the mundane can contain intimations of both great joy and great trauma.
Duke and Battersby consistently address the conundrum of reconciling what we want with what we know to be good. Both are presented as pipe dreams. At the outset of Bad Ideas, these opposing desires are voiced (sort of—the sound is manipulated) by Duke and Battersby respectively as they describe their differing views of heaven. For Duke, it is a place where one is loved best, while for Battersby it is where everybody is equal. Later, a text nicely summarizes the problem to a shark: “You have only stealth and speed/And nobody likes stealth and speed/But assholes.”
Being Fucked Up, which begins with Duke smoking crack and breathing into a plastic bag as she sings, in voice-over, “I don’t know how to be a worthy citizen,” is perhaps the duo’s most concerted effort to develop an ethical system based on recklessness, negation and danger, undisciplined and messy desire. As a robot states, “I wish I was a pervert with something inside me that burned and could never be made manifest.” Here they assert the power of self-annihilation (narcotic, religious or otherwise) in reaching new states of understanding.
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