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You can hear James N. Kienitz Wilkins’ new solo show at Spike Island before you can see it. Audible from outside the gallery space is the booming, frenetic monologue delivered by Kienitz Wilkins over his film This Action Lies (2018). The film itself consists of three ten-minute shots of a Styrofoam coffee cup, which are spliced together to form a mostly static visual experience that occasionally changes lighting the cup from different perspectives.
This Action Lies is concerned with the act of looking and what it means to observe something, and as Kienitz Wilkins rapidly shifts through subjects, and statements that could either be of his own construction or lifted straight off some web page, the cup is an anchor in all these thoughts. The cup also becomes a case study in his ramblings. Concerned by how real a film can be in its portrayal of its subject, Kienitz Wilkins asks how you can know what is going on with the cup. It is cooling, he says, but how can you be sure? It is supposedly from Dunkin’ Donuts, but he reveals he bought it directly from the cup manufacturer.
Kienitz Wilkins explains how the film you are watching was shot on 16mm, but asks what you would think if he told you that it had been converted to 35mm film before then being made into a digital projection. Similar to his film Indefinite Pitch (2016) where he is trying to gain a commission for an unmade film, Kienitz Wilkins wants to figure out how to sell This Action Lies to MoMA. If it is a material object that has been through several conversions between different types of film, surely it will have more value. The digital version can move around different galleries and show, but MoMA will hold the real object with its layers of graininess developed through the conversion process safely in their vaults. He wants to make back the $10,000 it cost to make This Action Lies, and to put his new born baby through college one day.
Through double meaning, constant hesitation, and referring to himself in the third person, calling into doubt who is narrating and from what position, This Action Lies does convincingly and refreshingly delve into questions around the veracity of film and the stability (or instability) of meaning more generally.
The strength of the telling however feels slightly undercut by the only other work on display, titled in a very matter-of-fact manner 35mm motion picture film canisters lying on a plinth (2019). The white canisters which are spot lit and sit just off to the side and behind the film projection are meant to offer another provocation to the supposed authenticity of analogue film, however it renders the subtleties of what is said in This Action Lies in quite a blunt form. There is, it seems, a desire to firm up the uncertainty expressed in This Action Lies, as if even the state of ambiguity Kienitz Wilkins asks the viewer to exist in proves too much. The slipperiness of the film is set in solid terms. At least – hopefully – something can be.
– reviewed for Photomonitor by Stan Portus
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Notes:
This Action Lies by James N. Kienitz Wilkins continues at Spike Island Bristol until 8 September 2019.
Image: James N. Kienitz Wilkins ‘This Action Lies’ (2018, 32 mins).
