Grand Prix

Stephen Dean is a painter, sculptor, and video artist foremost known for a series of video works that celebrates color in the midst of exuberant chaos. These videos-whether reveling in the intensely chromatic Indian festival of Holi or in the pandemonium of a Brazilian soccer game-transform the spiritual and sociological uses of color into purely visual and auditory experiences. Dean's sculptures function in a similar mode-these include his columns of paperback books, stacked chromatically according to their colored page ends; his aluminum ladders with panes of dichroic glass that change color when viewed from different directions; or his "target" paintings, consisting of actual coiled paper targets, which Dean modifies to destabilize their structure. Their references to the "readymade" are both provocative and liberating, as they allude to a heightened perception while retaining a societal context. Ironically entitled Grand Prix, Dean's newest video, filmed during eight demolition derbies at the Columbia County Fair in Chatham, New York, trans- forms a popular weekend event into a mechanized ritual of destruction. Inspired by Paolo Uccello's triptych, The Battle of San Romanо (са. 1438-55), the work features dozens of brightly painted cars colliding into each other in muddy terrain, forming a giant battlefield singularly reminiscent of Uccello's scenes filled with jostling horses, lances, and riders. The artist's editing techniques in Grand Prix alternate between action painting, mechanical ballet, and slap-stick, constantly shifting the primary reading of references. In so doing, the work underscores a profound absurd- ity in the intensity of the destruction for the sake of destruction. Unlike the classic Grand Prix automobile races of Europe that have inspired cinema, fashion, and photography, or the American NASCAR races, which have become hugely popular televised events, demolition derbies have no destina tion, no real goal, and no real winner (the least demolished car is the "win ner"). They are more in keeping with the famous, but reckless demolition car chases in movies such as the 1968 Bullitt that features Steve McQueen ing after a black Dodge Charger in a Highland-green Ford Mustang Fastback in San Francisco, Inevitably, the chase ends with the bad guys in the Charger hitting a gas station and perishing in the flames. For his videos, Dean looks for situations that have a certain innate intensity, which he then translates visually into painterly compositions, without ever los ing their social and psychological substructure: I like the sociological aspects because it generates a certain inten sity and then when I treat the masses of imagery, that's when I liter ally work as a painter, with motions, traces, and light. I'm dealing with what's available, with 150 cars crushing themselves in the 1 mud-that's the palette. Dean's video works are first and foremost montages, in the definition of Sergei Eisenstein-the director of the epic "battle on the ice in the 1938 movie, Alexander Nevsky. For Eisenstein, montage was not so much about sequence as it was about simultaneity: In the consciousness of the perceiver, segment is piled on seg ment, and their incongruences of color, lighting, outline, scale, movement, etc., are what gives that sense of dynamic thrust an impulse, which generates a sense of movement, ranging from the perception of purely physical movement to the most complex forms of intraconceptual movement when we are dealing with a montage that juxtaposes metaphors, images, or concepts. Dean shares his innovative approach to video with another visual artist, Christian Marclay, whose 2002 Video Quartet similarly elevated the medium of video art to a new level. But while Marclay is primarily a musician, Dean is essentially a painter. His artistic process brings to mind the Hungarian-German film theorist Béla Balázs's 1926 essay "The Future of Film" in which he states: The cameraman who does in fact make the picture also becomes its author, the poet of the work, the real film artist for whom acting and staging are 'mere 3 occasion; he is "a painter to a landscape (preferably the most beautiful one!)."" Balázs saw a "hidden symbolic expressiveness" or "hidden figurative qual- ity" at work in Eisenstein's films, "that has nothing to do with "decorativeness or beauty," and is created "exclusively by the methods and possibilities of pho- tography." "Like a hymn of ecstasy," Eisenstein's cinematography evokes a "collective display of enthusiasm." There are no words more suitable to describe Dean's works than Balázs's, except for Eisenstein's own description of the montage as "the stage of the explosion of the movie frame." Dean's 4 videos add a "third meaning" to video, to use a term by Roland Barthes, which, simply put, proves that in auspicious instances the whole is indeed more than the sum of its parts.
Text written by Curator Klaus Ottmann for the exhibition catalog.