Everyday Miracles: The Videos of Oliver Herring

Oliver Herring, Little Dances of Misfortunes, Max Protetch Gallery, New York, February 21-March 23, 2002.

Perched on a ladder, Oliver Herring asks a few friends to lie down on a carpet of phosphorescent cardboard and pretend to walk. He turns out the light and films a few seconds of video. Lights back on, his performers awkwardly shift to prepare for the next shot. An hour of incremental progress is needed for a moment in which human bodies resting on the floor become black silhouettes leaping in the air, freed from gravity, against a background of pale iridescent green.

Creating movement from stillness, weightlessness from weight, Herring is a specialist of transformation. His first exhibited work was a memorial for Ethyl Eichelberger, the drag performer who committed suicide in 1991 after being diagnosed with AIDS. An enormous flower made from transparent mylar tape was anchored to the walls of a room with wire, like a blown-up blossom from a funeral bouquet prevented from flying out of this world. A poignant echo of Eichelberger's raucously colorful presence, the flower united a stripped-down aesthetic of mourning with the glittering reflectiveness of costume jewelry. It was followed by a series of empty coats knitted from transparent or silver mylar, lying upon knitted beds, sometimes buried under another rectangular layer of knitting. More simple knitted mylar rectangles at once recalled minimal sculptures, icy blankets, and screens. Herring's time-consuming labor can be followed in the passage of stitches across sculptures that combine extreme stillness with the implied motion of his hands.

Subsequently, the work has undergone a gradual metamorphosis that could be described as an evolution from memorial to rebirth. Bodies emerged, like a parade of amorphous entertainers fighting to be released from knitting's confining inexactitude. At first crouching indistinctly, as in Multiple Fake (1997)—five layers of mylar knitted over an armature modeled from a child—the figures soon grew more assertive. One even repairs its own knee with a pair of needles: a process of self-healing is implied.

The transition to actual movement and color through video was a natural step in this evolution. In 1998, Herring's explorations of the moving figure began. One of his earliest videos, Videosketch #5 (1998-2001), marked the beginning of a consistent fascination with silhouettes and shadows that was heralded by the permeability of his previous insubstantial sculptures. Inspired by the child's game of turning the shadow of a fist into silhouettes of faces and animals, he filmed himself crouching silently in the corner of a room. Seen in reverse projection, Herring's body became the pale ghost of an owl swaying against darkness. He rises once to reveal his humanity, then quickly crouches down again. His fearful posture plays off the humorous expressions on the illusory owl's face.

In another early video, Videosketch #1 (1998), Herring sits poker-faced in a favorite armchair, holding a small knitted silver mylar apron in his lap. A strand of the mylar goes up his shirt, winds around his neck and enters his mouth, and then the whole apron rises up to rest on his chest like a bib. He looks down in surprise and leans back his head. The apron covers his face, goes back down between his legs and begins to open his shirt. Finally, it unravels completely, oozing under his shirt and down to the floor in a pile, as if Herring's material is enveloping him with caresses.

The simple stop-action technique Herring has contrived to create such illusions is as repetitious and disciplined as knitting. Still shots, as equal in duration as knitted stitches are in size, are spliced together, like the hundreds of drawings that make up an animated cartoon. Flashing along in rapid succession, they mimic the illusory action of flip books—the original moving pictures. There are no close-ups or pans, and almost...