On the Photography of Alix Pearlstein

Once relegated to a single monitor in a darkened room, media in both institutional and commercial art contexts has been spectacularized, eating up coveted wall space once reserved for objects and attracting an enraptured public. As we increasingly navigate a fragmented world of constructed realities in the palm of our hands or at MOMA, what lures us into stopping and watching? Perhaps it is something we recognize. Few artists hold my attention more than Alix Pearlstein, who has been producing media works since the early '90s. Commissioned for specific art contexts, her video installations are a hybrid of performance art, experimental theater, commercial advertising, acting workshops, “reality” television, “games people play”-era encounter groups, and the hectic contactimprovization choreography that emerged out of instructional tendencies in postminimal art. Notably absent from this list is “cinema,” a deep category that other artists mine to exhaustion. Pearlstein's performers are often an intergenerational mix of body types “acting out” scripted encounters, with the both the camera and its director participating in a maelstrom of action and language. The still photograph for Pearlstein is a byproduct of events orchestrated to mimic behavior and could operate as either pure document or promotional tool. Freezing the action in any Pearlstein production situates us between the highbrow (recalling Tina Barney's anxious portraiture of the affluent) and the low (the furious, staged confrontations of daytime TV); set into motion, Alix Pearlstein's group dynamics issue sparks across gallery walls, or screens. Alix Pearlstein is represented by On Stellar Rays

Tim Maul