Yoni Goldstein

The Jettisoned

“These bodily fluids…are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death. There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being. My body extricates itself, as being alive, from that border. Such wastes drop so that I might live, until, from loss to loss, nothing remains in me and my entire body falls beyond the limit — cadere, cadaver.” – Julia Kristeva

The Jettisoned references the tradition of the Tableau Vivant in painting and photography as it maps representations of identity and the bodily.

This video installation presents a multi-channel video series about sites for ritual healing and the notion of collective, conditional, and porous anatomies. Memories, histories, and physiologies become the rich and divergent territory for Yoni Goldstein and Meredith Zielke’s investigations into shared biography and shared biology. Unlike the delineated moral cartographies of traditional tableaux in painting and photography, the composition of The Jettisoned present anachronistic and subjectivized composite maps of identity, bodily mechanism, and abject recognition. The collective body challenges its host, as Julia Kristeva posits, with “a weight of meaninglessness, about which there is nothing insignificant.” (Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, 1982)

“The Jettisoned is a surveilling gaze. Bodies crowd the space, in mid-action, some performing a pieta-like pose while another takes a look at her scrapped knee beneath a magnifying glass. The scene opens with what appears to be individuals caught in acts of caring but as the camera pans over them, they and their actions are transformed into a sensual grotesquity. Water flows through the scene in distended tubes like disemboweled intestines. From the lips of one to the lips of another. From a stainless steel cup down a funnel into another mouth. The Jettisoned recreates a still-life of relation amongst the subject-made-object through an abject gaze. Through the gaze of the camera, the subject is depicted, made an image and in this state the abject nature of medical relationality is brought into visibility. The trauma produced by such a position is buffeted, however, by the sensual nature of the cinematography and in a way finds healing in the aestheticization of the traumatic. The film ends with a slow, ritual washing of the concrete floor of the space. Poured from a silver stainless steel bucket out onto the floor, the camera closes in as the water saturates and darkens the damp floor, elucidating the dark transformation of the abject into a sensual image of the beautiful.” (Joel Kuennen)

HD Video Loop, 3 Channel projection size: 8′ x 4.5′, 2010

Credits:
Directors: Meredith Zielke & Yoni Goldstein Production Manager: Elizabeth Cohen Camera Operator: Andrew Benz DIT: Robert Cauble Gaffer: Artem Avakian Best Boy: Sean Lowery Grips: Eliyahu Ungar-Sargon, Gwyneth Anderson Production Assistants: Tommy Heffron, Justyn Mainard, Jared Larson, Crispin Rosenkranz, Emily Buckler, Kathryn Grover, Emily Buckler, Chris Bradley, Amanda Eron, Rodion Galperin, Anna Kipervaser, Ronen Goldstein, Jess Turcios Make Up: Deanna Frost Special Effects Make Up: William Amaya, Jennifer Mosier Art Director: Jerzy Rose Pneumatics: Katrina Chamberlin Location provided by: Joseph Gheith Location Scout: Travis Wyche

Cast: Sebastian Alvarez, Stef Almeida, Misuzu Aoi, Nadav Assor, John Boss, Jefferson Dakota Brown, Sagar Budhe, Justin Cabrillos, Masha Chernyak, Noé Cuéllar, Erin Davette, Ehsan Ghoreshi, Elise Goldstein, Amanda Gutierrez, Jerry Heller, Nadia Hotait, Geoff Hughes, Joshua Johnson, Sharon Kluge, Kunal Kumar, Zihan Loo, Lauren Mardirosian, Hally Marlino, Jeff Matheis, Laura Meyer, Anisa Pashaj, Balta Peña, Cheryl Pope, Casilda Sanchez, Louis E. Sather, Jr., Lynn Stransky, Earl Smith, Lynn Stransky, Jaroslaw Studencki, Daniel Teafoe, Gregg Valentine, Roberto Vega-Morales, Joette Waters, Ryan Wilson, Collins Yearwood

On Set Photographers: Alexandra Dietz, Beverly Jensen, Rodion Galperin, Justyn Mainard, Academic Adviser: Frédéric Moffet

This entry was posted on Friday, July 2nd, 2010 at 10:22 am. It is filed under Director, Featured. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.