A text scrolls past on a small monitor: "I am writing this letter to let you know that you suck… I do not know why you even exist." The sneering 'darling' in the title says enough. Someone's heart is broken and we're going to hear about it. The initial somewhat constrained abuse gradually becomes more vindictive and imaginative. "I wish that all of your hair on your head would fall out then slowly grow back on your tongue." At the end of the 'hate mail' the abuse is so hilarious that the reader can only laugh at the pain the writer has been unable to come to grips with.
The 'love letter' is part of the installation 'With someone I love 'Darling', otherwise, nothing'. In front of the monitor is a miniature tableau of policemen and police dogs, and you assume that the inevitable tragic end of the ex-lover in question has taken place: a crime passionnel on television scale.
Jennifer Reeder was born and bred in the Midwest and she is proud of it. After getting her BA at Ohio State University she moved to Chicago, but as the Dutch saying goes "you can take the girl out of the country, but not the country out of the girl." The Midwest and Midwestern culture is an inexhaustible source of inspiration for Reeder and is representative for all social situations foreign to big city life. When the Midwest serves as setting, or when Midwestern culture is portrayed for instance in films, it generally has the stereotypic connotations of boredom and middle-class narrow-mindedness. It is the dull counterpart to the dazzling, hectic life of the big city. But as Reeder herself says, "The middle is not per definition mediocre."
We find traces of her Midwestern roots in most of her work. Reeder returned to her native soil to make 'A Room with the Walls Blasted to Shreds and Falling'. The video documents one day in the life of the Midwest, in Ohio to be precise. From a half hour's swim in the morning, to shopping at the mall to a nocturnal visit to the 24-hour shop: nothing special, just the usual everyday activities in suburbia… And yes, our image is confirmed: the identical prefab houses with their neatly mown lawns bordering on the cleanly swept pavement, each with the exact same letterbox fronting the drives…
'A Room with the Walls…' tells no story, there are hardly any leading figures, there is hardly any action. Reeder has kept the technical side of filming to a minimum. Sometimes the camera slowly turns a hundred and eighty degrees to chart the surroundings; sometimes the surroundings seem to pass by the camera. The subtle framing, the camera work and the intentional slowdown in the editing recall the imagery of 'Cinema vérité' and the real-time video of the seventies. The video soundtrack is minimalist, ambient music by Autopoieses, Tortoise and Jon Leone among others. In combination with the poetic, atmospheric images 'A Room with the Walls…' seems to be an ode to middle-class suburbia, an image of a modern Arcadia where the viewer is carried along, listless and relaxed.
But as is revealed in the film 'American Beauty' (US ° 1999), quite a lot is going on behind the tidy house fronts. Reeder's view of the Midwest is not all roses either.
The title, which literally describes the decayed, flaking idealized image, anticipates several incidents in the video, at which point the idyll is subtly disrupted. For instance the scene with cars racing past on the motorway – commuters returning home from work – carries on just a bit too long. The shot of the commuter with car trouble standing on the side of the road shows the impatient boredom of the viewer being provoked into a feeling of recognition: if you don't end up in a bloody tailback, you get car trouble. The dogged skipping of the LP with salon music underneath the scene in the teenager's room is briefly symbolic for the monotonous tedium of every day the same – boredom.
In this context the 'hate mail' in 'With you 'Darling'…' takes on an extra dimension: this love letter can only have been written by a frustrated teenager. By a younger version of the 'she-devil' as played by Roseanne Barr in the film of the same name. A woman who spends her afternoons in her pink teenager's room day in and day out, hoping that one day she will escape her boring life and make it as a film star in the Big City.
In many of her videos Reeder portrays this middle-class, suburban youth, and thus her own, the grunge generation, referred to in the media as having 'no goals and no ambitions'.
The miniature crime scene carried out in front of the monitor humorously refers to the other side of this particular segment of American society: to narrow-minded and repressive culture (walk straight and walk in line) as being the perfect breeding ground for dangerous psychopaths and teenagers who take up weapons out of frustration and gun down their schoolmates in the schoolyard.
Reeder's view of the Midwest is biased, but it is precisely this combination of her partly romantic, partly cynical, partly humorous sentiments that gives a good alternative portrait of not only Midwestern society, but also of one of the inhabitants who did leave.
– Christel Vesters
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Specs
A Room with the Walls blasted to Shreds and Falling
USA 2001 - Single screen video installation
MiniDV, 34:00, colour, stereo
Music by Stars of the Lid, Autopoieses, Brokeback (Doug McCombs of Tortoise) Jon Leone and Kit Clayton, commissioned by INOVA
With someone I love, 'Darling', otherwise nothing
USA 2000 - Single channel video installation
Video monitor 9'x13', miniature landscape of cast plastic figures and foliage, computer-generated videotext, DVD, 18:44, black&white, no sound
Jennifer Reeder ° 1971 Columbus, Ohio, USA
Lives and works in Chicago
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