Patty Gone on the Video-Work of Wayne Koestenbaum
In a new piece for The Believer's "Off Brand Video" series, which "provides access to non-narrative video normally reserved for private collections, gallery spaces, one-off screenings, or personal Vimeo accounts," Patty Gone looks at the video-work of Wayne Koestenbaum. "He began his talking head career last year in videos integrating poetry and piano, notes with words, a marriage of two," writes Gone. More:
...In “Summer of Love,” he plinks at his keyboard’s vibraphone preset while wishing, in half speech half song, that we “stop separating the world into what we like and don’t like.” In “Gender Consultant for the Stars,” he lists the contents of his magically fluid carry-on while his paintings sit normally on the back wall. Koestenbaum’s musings are ever-charming, but it wasn’t until his words married music and painting, encasing his oracular head within flickering rectangles of color, that his essay film triple threat reached consummation.
Color connoisseur Josef Albers would say that if I add a blue to the right of orange and a pink to its left, the orange has changed. My eyes see it differently. Koestenbaum might say the orange feels differently, maybe more like itself. In a recent interview with Bookforum, he says, “Oil paints are never really dry—they’re always in a state of melding. Each movement of the top layer disturbs the bottom layer.” Desire can’t sit still. At one point, Henrique Romoff dances shirtless amongst abstract paintings, blending with them, chest red then magenta, his torso like a mood ring, revealing its wearer’s emotions through color, orange for unsettled, pink for cheerful, longings no longer secret. Melding with another shifts Romoff from nonchalant purple to nervous yellow, or as Koestenbaum says, “The pink fearful of the blue it might become.” As Pat Abatiell repeats this phrase, his shirt, once a nondescript blue, embraces the full spectrum and flattens into oil paint. The psychosis is mutual. No one stays one shade forever, not if you allow others inside.
Read the full essay at The Believer.