Justin Lieberman’s The Corrector in the High Castle, his latest solo exhibition at Zach Feuer Gallery, is a den of resin-encased pop-culture trash and treasure. The exhibition was inspired by Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, an alternate history in which the Axis forces win World War II. In the novel, the protagonist Nobusuke Tagomi is an avid collector of American pop culture, and Lieberman transforms the gallery into Tagomi’s apartment, the littered nest of a pop-culture pack rat.

Videocassettes, LPs, baseball cards, self-help books, Beanie Babies, and cereal boxes are piled in absurd groupings, whose logic is familiar to anyone with a suburban tchochke addict in the family. The objects are coated in dripping resin, decaying plastic consumables that (like Beanie Babies) are long past their sell-by date. Lieberman has also created hand-made reproductions, ‘placeholders’, of more rarefied items to fill in gaps in Tagomi’s collection: the Gutenberg Bible, the inverted Jenny 1¢ stamp, and the commemorative Princess Diana Beanie Baby. These recreations contain the mistakes and misunderstandings of a creator with no access to the original, like the twisted phrase at the end of a long game of Telephone. Lieberman’s Gutenberg Bible Placeholder, for example is strangely bulbous and contains only the page to which it is open, as if viewed for so long in a museum case, it might have been forgotten that the bible had other pages.

Another reconstruction, ‘The Day the Clown Cried’ Bootleg Placeholder is a recreation of the notorious 1972 Holocaust film, The Day the Clown Cried. Again, the object has come so far in translation that there is only a film box and no film to view. Here is the sort of clever turn one comes to enjoy in a Lieberman show, for this is a film that could never be viewed in the first place. The Day the Clown Cried was shot but never released. It is infamous both for its deliciously wrong premise (Jerry Lewis as a circus clown imprisoned in a concentration camp) and for the fact that it cannot be viewed. Since the tapes were never released, the film is known in concept alone. (The scene for instance where the clown entertains the children within the gas chamber can only be imagined.) Each placeholder and each carefully curated pile of junk is an attempt to concretize such concepts and to reconstruct a version of 20th century history through its crap.

In The Corrector in the High Castle, history is a construct that is up for grabs, able to be translated, changed, misunderstood, and reconstructed in alternate histories and futures. The exhibition expands into an entire environment, the game of imagining how archaeologists, aliens or future generations, the inheritors of this vast quantity of plastic, will give meaning to this period of history. From this sampling the outlook is dystopic. Most of the stuff, the Froot Loops, Beanie Babies, and Breast Cancer for Dummies book aggregate to little more than absurdity. Winston Churchill quipped that history would be kind to him, since he intended to write it. Yet standing amidst Lieberman’s piles of plastic, there is little doubt that the most inane and absurd objects of the 20th century, our Beanie Babies, our regrettable fads, will be our most lasting record, and will survive us all to do the telling.

In his first solo exhibition at Sean Kelly Gallery, Johan Grimonprez unveils his second film essay Double Take. Born in 1962, a child of the television generation, Grimonprez reconstructs a history of the years before his birth through their media. It’s a stunning array of stock footage: the Nixon-Kruschev ‘Kitchen Summit’, Sputnik and the space race, the Kennedy debates, footage of Hitchcock and The Birds, vintage Folgers ads, and nuclear test explosions. Clips are repeated, hazy, interrupted, blurry and stuttering, as if watching someone try to tell (and retell) a joke they’d only half-heard somewhere, in an earnest attempt to get the punch line right. Rather, than a document of truth, Double Take is a history told by the inheritor of its record, not by the witness, a documentary that presents history as multi-perspectival, unreliable and open to manipulation.

Double Take defies categorization. It is a succinct history of the Cold War, but also a portrait of Alfred Hitchcock, a biography of a Hitchcock impersonator, a retelling of Borges’ August 25, 1983, and a metaphor for the years following September 11th, all woven seamlessly by novelist Tom McCarthy’s deft script. To unify the elements, McCarthy uses Hitchcock to narrate the film. Though Hitchcock was the subject of Grimonprez’s 2005 film, Looking for Alfred, there is nothing arbitrary or lazy about the conjunction here. The film is an exploration of the Cold War, of the rise of television, of the role of media in the institutionalization of fear and who better to describe the machinations of terror on television than the master of the genre?

Take for example the definition of a MacGuffin, which Grimonprez evokes throughout Double Take. A MacGuffin is a classic Hitchcock plot device that advances the story and compels both hero and villain into action, but which is essentially meaningless and arbitrary. It doesn’t matter what the MacGuffin is (spy papers, ancient map, ruby necklace), so long as the characters accept its importance. As Hitchcock stated, “The only thing that really matters is that in the picture, the plans, documents or secrets, must seem to be of vital importance to the characters. To me, they’re of no importance whatsoever.” It’s hollow, but as long as the characters seem generally driven by it, the audience follows the trajectory of the plot without questioning. Hold Hitchcock and his MacGuffin in relation to Cold War media and suddenly the space race, the H-bomb, the missile crisis, and the first man on the moon, are all cast as MacGuffins in the longest running reality show on television.

Double Take is an insightful, haunting and beautiful film, an impressive work of both art and scholarship, not to be missed. As unemployment rates creep towards double digits, hopefully more of us will have the time to enjoy a full 80-minute screening, and contemplate if the stimulus package might not just be the latest MacGuffin.

The Corrector in the High Castle on View through March 7th at Zach Feuer, 530 W. 24th, Tuesday – Saturday 10-6, 212 989 7700, in conjunction with The Corrector’s Custom Pre-Fab House at Marc Jancou Contemporary.

Double Take on view through March 21st at Sean Kelly Gallery, 528 W. 29th. Weekly Approximate Screening Times for Double Take (with additional night screenings TBA).

Tuesday-Friday – 11:00am, 12:20pm, 1:40pm, 3:00pm, 4:20pm
Saturday – 10:00am, 11:20am, 12:40pm, 2:00pm, 3:20pm, 4:40pm

Grimonprez’s film Double Take will have also an avant-premiere at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles March 12, 2009. It has also been selected for the 59th Berlinale International Forum 2009 in Berlin. Double Take will be included in the following exhibitions: Un Certain Etat du Monde?, at The Garage, Center for Contemporary Culture in Moscow, Russia, March 19 2009, Magazin 3 in Stockholm, Sweden, March 28, 2009 and the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh, Scotland in May, 2010.

Copyright Last Exit 2009

Cynthia Daignault is an independent artist, writer and curator, living and working in Brooklyn, NY. She is the associate director of the Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation and a researcher on the forthcoming Robert Motherwell Catalogue Raisonne. Additionally, she works with a number of prominent artists’ studios to design database technology to archive their inventory and documentation. Her paintings have been the subjects of recent exhibitions at Plane Space Gallery, NY and Glenn Horowitz, East Hampton, NY.