blind man's bluff and other fictions | may 22 - june 21 2003

A movie, experience, at one remove
Globe and Mail | Gallery Going | June 14, 2003
By GARY MICHAEL DAULT

Watching Blind Man's Bluff, the DVD that constitutes the heart off artist Andrew Wright's exhibition of the same name, now at Toronto's Peak Gallery, is a little like being at a party and having some tenacious fellow guest describe a film to you in endless, excruciatingly unstoppable detail. For what you are faced with here is a wall-sized projection of an actor named Alan Sapp sitting in a chair in the artist's Kitchener, Ont., studio, watching what is purportedly a truly awful horror film called Blind Man's Bluff (also known as Cauldron of Blood) and telling us about it.

The film, made in 1967 but not released until 1971 (and once scribed as "sloth on the screen") was apparently one of Boris Karloff's last films. He plays a sculptor named Franz Badulescu, whose work consists of transposing "flat portraits to three-dimensional life," a feat accomplished by packing clay over figurative frames that are, in fact, "the bones of his wife's murder victims."

We never see the film, for which we probably ought to be grateful. What we do see and hear, however, is Alan Sapp - who Wright refers to as The Describer- watching the film and providing a moment-by-moment recounting of it (which he does by reading from Wright's carefully scripted summary). In addition, Wright has included the film's sounds (bits of dialogue, screams, gunshots, howling wind, and so forth) as an ongoing text projected like subtitles. So now we can both follow the story (lucky us!) and "hear" the film.

As Kitchener-based critic and curator Virginia Eichhorn has noted in a booklet accompanying the exhibition, Wright's resulting Blind Man's Bluff now offers a cinematic artifact "twice removed from the normal filmic experience. It is a reversal: The visual becomes auditory and the auditory becomes visual," an experience Eichhorn quite reasonably identifies as "a cinematic conundrum."
She also argues that submitting ourselves to the film via The Describer (shored up by the audio subtitles) "proves more effective and powerful an experience than watching the real film." Well, who knows? The "real film" is not available to us. But one sees her point. What Wright has done has given us all the trappings of the filmic experience, all of its elements, but in a radically deferred and wickedly displaced way. And actor Sapp's ongoing summary of the action, as Eichhorn points out, is amusingly evocative of the always weirdly fascinating "director's commentary" now available on most DVD films.

$200-$2,400. Until June 21 Morrow Ave., Toronto; 416-537-8108.

Andrew Wright is fascinated with how we perceive the world.
This preoccupation underlies and informs an exhibition at Toronto's Peak Gallery - Blind Man's Bluff and Other Fictions - and a series of large-scale photographic prints - 5 Skies for Pioneer Park - installed at Kitchener's Pioneer Park Community Library

The centrepiece of the Toronto exhibition is a feature-length video the Kitchener artist wrote, directed and taped in his studio inspired by the horror film Blind Man's Bluff, which was one of Boris Karloff's last movies. Made in 1967 and released in 1971, the film is also titled Cauldron of Blood.
Described as "a feature-length story of intrigue, art, murder and questionable filmmaking," Wright's Blind Man's Bluff subversively challenges notions of narrative, representation and interpretation.

The medium is definitely the message in Wright's engagingly provocative art.
As he explains during a brief, yet far-ranging, chat (he phoned from a pay phone), the video is a response to contemporary DVD technology especially the Descriptive Video Service (DVS) that enables blind people to "see" movies.

"It's additional text overlaid on films, which describes visual elements," Wright says. "Visual information becomes verbal information."
Another popular aspect of DVDs that concerns Wright is directors' commentaries, which he says restricts interpretation.
"These aren't only completely inane, they close down the possibilities of interpretation."

Wright says he came across the horror film by accident while looking for movies

with the word "Blind" in their titles. "It's a really bad film but I became intrigued by what makes it so bad. There's some good actors in it and, while much of the dialogue is terrible, some of it's really quite good."

As fate would have it, the film is about art. Or, at least, about a blind sculptor whose skeletal models are actually victims of his murdering wife.
It's what Wright does with this sordid, utterly forgettable B-horror flick that is interesting. He began by watching the movie and writing a text that meticulously describes everything that happens, both visually and auditorily This text acts as subtitles.

He then hired actor Alan Sapp as The Describer. Sapp is taped watching the movie and reading from Wright's descriptive text. "We never see or hear the actual film," Wright chirps gleefully "That's why I refer to it as the best film you'll never see." To complicate matters, Sapp doesn't only follow the text. He ad libs when he feels it's appropriate.

"As the film progresses, he becomes more involved," Wright adds with a chuckle. "It becomes ridiculously comical." The result is a double whammy on the ears: "You hear read what's being said and you hear what's being seen."
Sound confusing? Wright calls it a reversal.

"The auditory becomes visual and the visual becomes auditory" By deconstructing the techniques and the conventions of film, Wright produces a multi-layered, postmodern parody. The Other Fictions of the exhibition's title refers to the kind of large-scale photographic prints installed in the Pioneer Park library. The photographs were taken by Wright when he was Kitchener artist-in-residence in 2001. Using a large, homemade, pinhole camera, he took photographs of the sky outside the Reflecting Studio beside Civic Square in downtown Kitchener. The prints were developed in an improvised darkroom "under the mayor's office."

The photographs reflect Wright's compulsion to strip images down to elemental levels. "I'm intrigued by what happens when light goes through a hole," he says. The series of five 107X107-centimetre prints are mounted on the library's rafters. As a viewer looks up at the photographs, his or her eyes are drawn to a skylight that opens onto the actual sky "It turns the library into a giant camera," Wright observes, adding "it's a really fun piece."

rreid@therecord. corn

ART EXHIBIT Who: Andrew Wright What: Blind Man's Bluff and Other Fictions
Where: Peak Gallery 23 Morrow Ave., Toronto
When: Through June 21 Phone: 416 537 8108 Web: www.peakgallery.com
Opening reception today 2 p.m.- 6 p.m.

Blind Man's Bluff, showing at Peak, is based on the schlock horror film of the same name, starring Boris Karloff of Frankenstein fame. Wright has recreated the story using the technique called descriptive video, a service that allows the blind to watch TV shows like Malcolm In The Middle. The action is described rather than seen. Here, a videotaped narrator seated before a dark backdrop on a simple set reads descriptions of the film's action, with dialogue displayed as subtitles. It's odd, because you're hearing what you'd normally see, and seeing (the subtitles) what you'd normally hear. One finds oneself using the auditory cues to picture the action, as people used to do with radio dramas, as children do in the game called Blind Man's Bluff and as the blind are able to do today with television. The subtitles put words in the mouths of the imagined characters, and the tale unfolds. A blind person would hear the actions described but wouldn't be able to see the subtitled dialogue. For him or her, this would be what a silent film is to a hearing person.

- thmoas@sympatico.ca

about the exhibition