There’s A Price for Everything by Pat Molella (review)

0 D THERE BUT FOR can be created and it applies to this tape,. too. In There But For there are two sets (a living room and a bathroom) and five players. The camera (John Sanborn) observes the players' Interaction (usually hostile) and alienation Irom each other, along with being a sixth player at times when the players interact with It. Music is composed and performed during the taping by PeterGordon. It accompanies the players in a way similar to soap opera music. There are other allusions In There But For to soap opera. Half hour TV shows usually have ten minutes of commercials and twenty minutes of show. In this tape one could easily Imagine commercials Inserted between the edits. Soaps tend to focus visually or aurally on an object or subject at the end of one scene and then begin the next scene In a different set, focused on the same object or, subject In a different context and point of view. In this tape, for example, Leslie Schiff Is standing before the bathroom mirror shav-. Ing with a steak knife. After she Is finished, she sticks the knife In the waistband of her skirt. The camera begins the next scene focused on her holding the knife while eating. T/here But For Is edited so that there Is a, switching back and forth from one set to the other as In'soaps. HoWeV6r, In Wirier's tape all of the players are In the same set at the same time. In soaps, this almost never occurs because characters exist within a continuous present and it would be impossible for a character to be in two places at the same time. Another major difference between There But For and soap opera is that soap opera characters never acknowledge their structure. In this piece, the players refer to Weiner, the camera and the script. Also, the players initiate how they relate to the situation to show what they want to the viewer. In the beginning of the tape Schiff wants to leave. Weiner enters into the tape (situation) and convinces her to stay. Her departure would challenge the structure-the proposition-and change Lawrence's initial decisions (judgments). Except for Schiff, the other players never challenge the structure or piece; they do judge each other, the camera, Weiner, and the script. Britta Le Va calls Peter Downsborough disgusting when he pisses in a plant holder. Peter Nadin is annoyed with Weiner for telling Michael H. Shamberg to say "mediocrity is Its own reward." Like logical positivism on which It draws, There But For doesn't acknowledge values (because they are not objects which can be empirically perceived). Therefore, as an Ideal viewer I don't think It is important or interesting whether or not I liked the tape. Cowzan Grayson Pat Molella, There's A Price forEverything. WPA, Washington, D.C. (January). Pat Mollella's slide performance There's a Price for Everything, looks the way an Alain Robbe-Grillet novel reads. Objects in Molella's performance piece function as though they were objects in Robbe-Grillet's stories: flexing their substance, they stretch and shake in an undulating landscape of transient meanings. Objects no longer exist merely for themselves or to accentuate their own "thereness," but to build a kaleidoscopic narrative through variation. The performance primarily consists of slides projected through a dissolve unit onto a large screen. Molella has photographed "immobile" objects-a gate and garden path, lawns, trees and shrubbery- and "mobile" objects-a jet of water, soap bubbles and an inflating balloon. Like Robbe-Grillet, Molella thwarts the expectations "mobile" and "immobile" objects create when seen in a "real" context. in their objective presence, the objects are concretely "there," but their properties act as materials for shifting and sinuous vistas. Two moments in the twenty-minute performance are particularly effective because each juxtaposes "immobile" objects and animated performers to renovate our percepa , in the process of inflating. Here, the still images immobilize the live image. To recreate the coincidence between photographic image and live image, to restore a "real" context, the balloon deflates beside a video image of melting butter. J. Garret Glover THERE'S...