Alex Prager’s newest film, Play the Wind, showing now through 26 October at Lehmann Maupin’s 22nd Street gallery in New York, opens with a quote from Ray Bradbury about the dangers of nostalgia. ‘You will never understand time, will you? ... Why do you save those ticket stubs and theater programs? They’ll only hurt you later.’
And then the film really opens, or so we think, with Los Angeles, as seen through a car, driven by a man (played by Dimitri Chamblas, dean of the Sharon Disney Lund School of Dance), which is the way everyone knows to see the city but which is somehow – as becomes increasingly clear – different through Prager’s lens. The driver rolls through parking lots, past an accident, into a group of people running from an unseen horror. Women see him.
This film is about Los Angeles but also about the ideal of California itself: the golden state, the legend of Calafia, the place where dreams are made and shattered, where the everyday is special and vice versa. Three minutes in, we see the actress Riley Keough standing on a corner and then, immediately, locking eyes with the driver. She’s wearing a red dress; they make eye contact.
Play the Wind Film Still #2, 2019, by Alex Prager, archival pigment print. ourtesy of Alex Prager Studio and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, and Seoul
And then, an extraordinary sequence, on the verge of uncannily and physically too difficult to watch: Keough falls and falls and falls and falls through space and then, we think, time. She bursts through boxes and her clothes disappear. The feeling – and it’s a phenomenological feeling – is one of nightmarish vertigo. She falls, white sky turning to blue turning to clouds turning to the most verdant landscape, and she lands, in a green suit she’s picked up in the air along the way.
But this is just an account of what happens in the film, and what really happens is that the viewer is constantly invited to know better, to see more clearly, to pay closer attention and to think. Watching the film in the gallery is essential. The film audience watching Keough step in front of a screen reminds the gallery audience of what they’re doing, which is watching an artist.
The rest of the show comprises large-format photographs, stills from the film. It’s hard not to think of shades of Cindy Sherman in the visceral brightness of it all, or maverick director David Lynch. But it’s also hard not to think of Prager as someone forging brand-new territory amid well-trodden ground. Her film is a little sharper, a little brighter, a little more elusive, a little more terrifying (okay, a lot more terrifying). It’s more of the now – in its intimations of offscreen violence, in the happenstance of tragedy. The film is of today, purely, in that it articulates and capitalises on the fact that our world is ending, and our world is beautiful. It will only hurt you later.
An excerpt from Play the Wind, exclusive to Wallpaper.com. Courtesy of Alex Prager Studio and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, and Seoul
Yellow Pages, 2019, by Alex Prager, archival pigment print. Courtesy of Alex Prager Studio and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, and Seoul
Installation view of ‘Alex Prager: Play the Wind’ at Lehmann Maupin, New York.Courtesy of the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, and Seoul.
INFORMATION
‘Play the Wind’, 5 September – 26 October, Lehmann Maupin. lehmannmaupin.com
ADDRESS
Lehmann Maupin
536 West 22nd Street
New York
-
Audi launches AUDI, a China-only sub-brand, with a handsome new EV conceptThe AUDI E previews a new range of China-specific electric vehicles from the German carmaker’s new local sub-brand
-
Inside Izza Marrakech: A new riad where art and bohemian luxury meetHonouring the late Bill Willis’ hedonistic style, Izza Marrakech fuses traditional Moroccan craftsmanship with the best of contemporary art
-
Clocking on: the bedside analogue timepieces that won’t alarm your aestheticWe track down the only tick-tocks that matter, nine traditional alarm clocks that tell the time with minimum fuss and maximum visual impact
-
Henni Alftan’s paintings frame everyday moments in cinematic renditionsConcurrent exhibitions in New York and Shanghai celebrate the mesmerising mystery in Henni Alftan’s paintings
-
Brutalism in film: the beautiful house that forms the backdrop to The Room Next DoorThe Room Next Door's production designer discusses mood-boarding and scene-setting for a moving film about friendship, fragility and the final curtain
-
'There’s an anxiety under all of it': Violet Dennison in New YorkViolet Dennison debuts abstract paintings with new show 'Damaged Self' at Tara Downs Gallery
-
‘Gas Tank City’, a new monograph by Andrew Holmes, is a photorealist eye on the American West‘Gas Tank City’ chronicles the artist’s journey across truck-stop America, creating meticulous drawings of fleeting moments
-
Mark Armijo McKnight’s bodily landscapes capture the tactile serenity of the American WestThe artist’s new exhibition at the Whitney Museum, which is organised by the museum curator Drew Sawyer, offers a succinct window into his contemplative suggestion of queering a landscape
-
Dark, glamorous and hedonistic: a photography book captures New York in the 1990sNew York: High Life, Low Life, by Dafydd Jones, goes behind the scenes of New York society
-
Derrick Alexis Coard’s portraits are a sensitive, positive testimony to Black menThe late artist Derrick Alexis Coard’s retrospective ‘I Am That I Am’, at New York’s Salon 94, honours his ‘symbolic expression for possible change for the African-American male community’
-
Intimacy, violence and the uncanny: Joanna Piotrowska in PhiladelphiaArtist and photographer Joanna Piotrowska stages surreal scenes at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania
