Eve Sussman’s 80-minute video The Rape of the Sabine Women has its New York premiere tonight. Three years ago Sussman had everybody’s favorite piece at an otherwise negligible Whitney Biennial, 89 Seconds at Alcazar, a kind of “making of” video for the Velazquez canvas Las Meninas. For 12 murmurous minutes, we spy on members of the Spanish royal household just before and after they assume their poses within that painting’s webwork of psychological and optical intricacies. By showing us ordinary mortals as they prepare–without realizing it–to take their places in eternity, Sussman not only made good on the claim that every picture tells a story, she also offered a poignant reflection on time itself.
The Sabine Women video (actually a combination of video and film) is a more ambitious piece that links five of what Sussman calls “implied narrratives”, all having something to do with the birth traumas of civilization and the false promises of utopia, all filtered loosely through the story of the Sabine women who were abducted and raped by ancient Romans who had unusual ideas about what constitutes acceptable party behavior.
From The Rape of the Sabine Women/Eve Sussman/The Rufus Corporation — Photo: Ricoh Gerbl
I visited Sussman at her Brooklyn studio last fall, where she showed me a nearly completed cut. As I wrote at the time:
Sussman’s point of departure is a 1799 canvas by Jacques-Louis David. It shows us the moment when the Sabine women attempt to intervene in a battle between their Roman abductors and the Sabine men. But this time Sussman, who works with a creative collective called the Rufus Corporation, uses the painting as the very loosest framework for meditations on loneliness, longing and the failure of Modernist utopian schemes. Men in dark suits wander enigmatically among Greek statuary in Berlin. Women in dresses from the 1960s arrive by subway. There’s no dialogue, though there is a cocktail party at a sleek International Style house and a climactic free-for-all in a Greek amphitheater.
I’m expecting to get to the premier tonight for a second look. For now I’ll just note my initial reaction, which is that long form video is moving ever faster away from its sources in conceptual art and converging with the psychologically charged stage pictures of Robert Wilson and Pina Bausch — and let’s also add the very idiosyncratic Canadian film maker Guy Maddin — to make something new, a hybrid of painting, theater, film and dance and of the ways that each of them operate to convey meaning and feeling. I can’t say that everything in the Sabine Women came together for me, but as I watched it I felt as though Sussman was creating not just a work of art but a genre.
(And if her images are less obsessive and ferocious than some in Matthew Barney’s Cremaster series, the Ring Cycle of personal cosmologies, they’re also less obscure and — dare I say it? — less monotonous.
I did! I said it! I feel free!)