Review: David Ian Griess “Remote Control”
David Ian Griess-Remote Control

I’m not sure how the brilliantly difficult David Ian Griess would want to be described. But I’m sure hje won’t agree with however I decide to describe him, Performance artist? He’d probably object to both performance and artist being used. My understanding is that after doing performances in the gallery system, he now performs only on video and most often in public spaces like the alleyway in the first piece of “Remote Control”: “We love our customers”.Here Griess chains together coat hangers with the aforementioned slogan off of one of fetishy homemade pvc dog masks he usually performs in. ( the download for this video packet includes a schematic to make your own) Staggering around the alley, carrying a large and so fancy looking sci-fi-fi print, he is mostly unseen in the European looking city that surrounds him. One of the only interactions is with a man attempting to unobtrusevly pass by, he slows to check out what Griess is doing and then visibly quickens his pace. Griess winds up standing in a broken aquarium, sensually grinding his doc Martens into the cubified glass, The chain of coat hangers reading “we love our customers” ends up lying in the aquarium adding a slightly old fashioned painterly touch
In “Neighborhood Watch”, Griess is dolled up in a tight pvc skirt, an open breasted shirt with restraints holding his arms behind his back and another dog mask. In a shot not unlike Pasolini’s “Teorema”, the camera gradually pans out as he paces in a wide circle around a deserted and wet beach revealing the semi-circle made by his footprints.
“Lot’s” begins in a very oppressively furnished bare apartment following Griess as he moves around, with a wobbly ceiling fan in the background.The fan’s tremors cause the lightbulbs to flash with a strobe like effect. Griess breathes into the camera in a tight closeup and places it on a surface and suddenly closes a refrigerator door on it, we realize the scene has been filmed from inside a refridgerator. We are back in front of the ceiling fan then in an inexplicable but effective cut, Griess is wandering on all fours through dense tropical vegetation (in Mexico?). The video ends with Griess dancing more lethargically around a desolate strip mall.
The final video “Lifegurd” shows Griess, this time wearing clunky high heels and a heavy black dress in addition to his usual attire walking around at a beach perhaps at Coney Island. The dress is eventually pulled over his head and hangs by his feet as the camera closes in on his high heels walking in the sand.
Is public art without a public part of what Griess is going for? Or confronting people with the unexpected as they go about their day to day buisness? In a way the work rejects so much of what we expect from watching a video, from seeing a performance, from getting meaning out of a piece of art that what is left only makes sense when we think of what is not present. Like would a person outside of the performance background understand what Griess is rejecting and does that even matter?
In another way though by stripping his work of all sorts of the meaning we rely on to navigate art enjoyment, Griess also creates work that is a lot more joyful in it’s childlike perversity and utter lack of the distancing devices of irony and cynicism which have crippled the art world.
My only objection would be an objection to the style of performance videos in general. I think the form is stuck in the 1970’s where everyone had to use in-camera editing and churned out “endurance” videos. This beginning plus the habit of screening art videos just playing in the background of a gallery where people wander in and out, has lead to a lot of dull aesthetic choices. While I think the ultra slow style and aesthetic beauty serve Griess’s anti-style, I’d be very curious to see what he could do if employed a more filmic style of editing.
One could read Griess’s work as being dark and despairing but that might be overburdening it which is tempting because you’re given so little to go on. The aesthetic ugliness that he surrounds his opulent style with in itself seems a rejection of the concept of aesthetics and hence a rejection of judgement including this one from me.
