16777: (Hermantin) Miami-Herald-You can expect to be surprised at Mario Benjamin's MOCA (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: leonie hermantin <lhermantin@hotmail.com>

Posted on Sat, Sep. 20, 2003


EXHIBITS
'Project' defies what's typical of Haitian art
You can expect to be surprised at Mario Benjamin's MOCA show.
BY ELISA TURNER
elisaturn@aol.com

A cartoon girl and cat zip with manic speed among rows of golden seashells,
all laid out in the methodical rows of cemetery plots.

As you watch these playful figures' swerving antics in the new video
installation by Haitian artist Mario Benjamin at the Museum of Contemporary
Art, your ears are assaulted with a thunderous din. It sounds like a
deafening mix of apocalyptic traffic jams and hurricane-powered surf.

Bathing the installation is a heavenly, Caribbean blue light, another
instance of the clash between the chaotic and sweet that gives Benjamin's
Project at MOCA its discombobulating aura.

AS SEEN ON TV

Project adapts a real-time feed from television stations, such as FOX News
and PBS, but makes the images of talking heads and afternoon cartoons swirl
through the installation with the fevered pace of a hand-held camera taping
a roller-coaster ride.

Recognizable bits from television land race past viewers. Then they morph
into a weird and even aquatic designs, floating mysterious shadows
throughout MOCA's Pavilion Gallery, where Project is presented.

And about those golden seashells. They march across Benjamin's distinctly
low-tech screen displaying the truncated television feed.

It's a screen made from yards of transparent blue plastic sheeting, a sort
of gigantic shower curtain, that's stamped with the vacuous rows of
seashells.

This blue plastic vision of sand and sea is ubiquitous in Haiti. The artist
describes it as a kitschy staple used throughout the country for cheap
coverings of doors and windows.

''This material is not made in Haiti,'' he said in an interview at MOCA.
``It's a cliché that is sent to us.''

But it's the kind of cliché that adapts easily to Benjamin's approach to
contemporary art, which involves challenging the tropical but repetitive
charms of so-called nave landscape painting, the kind of isolated art that's
most often associated with his country.

''American TV dominates a lot of Haitian life,'' he said. ``I'm not a
political statement-kind of artist, but there is a Haiti in the middle of
CNN.''

''I travel a lot in the process of trying to invent a new language. I don't
want to be the typical Haitian artist they expect,'' he said.

PORTRAITS AND BEYOND

A self-taught artist and son of a prosperous architect in Haiti, Benjamin
started out making portraits of wealthy families, but later moved into more
complex, disconcerting work.

He lives in Port-au-Prince and has exhibited his installations at bienniales
in Havana, Santo Domingo, Sao Paulo, Venice and Johannesburg.

Despite the clever confluence of high and low tech, Project is almost too
frantic. It inundates viewers with a psychedelic barrage of stimuli that
fizzles into static. It can squander opportunities to question the authority
of recognizable allusions to mass media, even while it distorts Caribbean
clichés with a frightening but trance-like giddiness.

''I had a very minimalist but at the same time violent atmosphere in my
head,'' said Benjamin, speaking about the making of Project in a later phone
interview from his home.

''An immense part of my installation is the chaos of Port-au-Prince. It's a
creative thing to live in such chaos,'' he added. ``Haiti is a noisy place
to be, you hear horns in the street, people screaming things.''

To convey this pandemonium, he asked Laurence Magloire, a Haitian TV
producer, to create a sound collage that's a pivotal part of Project.
Magloire was co-director of the 2002 film Of Men and Gods, a documentary
about how many Haitian gay men have embraced Vodou spirits and rituals.

Benjamin, who is openly gay in a country where homosexuality is taboo, said
that another inspiration for the otherworldly vertigo of his work at MOCA
was ``the fancy gay club when it's 4 in the morning and there's a crazy
performance with black lights. When I become manic I just take myself for a
spirit.''

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