New Artist Focus: Corina Copp on Deborah Stratman

Listen to the audio version of this essay on Soundcloud. (Listening time: 14 minutes 32 seconds)

 

Baby-camel calf facts: Their pee is syrupy for lack of water, and they are close with their mothers. In Deborah Stratman’s most recent short film, 2023’s ‘Otherhood’ (3 mins.), a nonhuman domestic scene is set: a camel and her dusky camel baby melt into their own movements, their purring and munching growing to growl that manages still to sound like purring, were it ever mechanised, forte-loud. I’m reminded of Lee Breuer’s stage piece, ‘The Red Horse Animation’ (1970), in which a horse’s consciousness functions apart from the actors playing the horse. Wrenched between concrete horse-images, plastered on a stage’s back wall, and horse-metaphor, which the actors have become, is a spoken transit, traditionally unspoken spirit. The horse pronounces, while crossing a desert on a camel, “There’s something wrong about a camel.”[1] ‘Otherhood’s camels, on the other hand, effect a solace “Beneath-Language.” Excerpts of an infamous conversation[2] between Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich offer a realm of the literary: sans voice, thoughts afloat, a book in midair.[3] Thoughts are the fastest thing. “I used to practice trying to think.” Birdsong, luxuriant buzzing, primary and sheer reds and yellows, peacock in high-key foliage.“Do you remember what that was like?” The gradient mellows. “Yes.”

Stratman’s hungry listening for images in tandem, ever-elusive, has been cultivated over a decades-long filmmaking life. From 1995’s ‘On the Various Nature of Things’, to 2002’s ‘In Order Not To Be Here’ (a film which scholar Genevieve Yue has noted was the first to receive the coinage, “experimental documentary”), through festival favourites ‘O’er the Land’ (2009), ‘The Illinois Parables’ (2016), ‘Last Things’ (2023) and up to ‘Otherhood’—among proliferating other works that call an earth-space dialectic a good name for home—Stratman’s attention to sonic space is tuned to a ground so the otherworldly will strike it. Otherhood’’s animal score, for instance, almost soothes anything that could be “wrong” in the world of the film; but I’m listening more for a “Ka-POW!” moment that I’ve been finding time and again in her work: murmured, musical, organic, or perceived sonic torsions that draw out an immediate feeling of the beginning of time (to re-thread the pseudonymous J.-H. Rosny in ‘Last Things’, “She made, once more, the grand voyage back toward the beginning of time”). Consider how the orchestral accompaniment of Charlie Chaplin’s 1925 film, ‘The Gold Rush’, is heightened as anachronic “optimism” in ‘Optimism’ (2018), right as the shining yellow bar of gold hisses into ice, finalising from crystalline structure its “real” (man-MADE!) form. I’ve heard from the source that vibration is everything. “Vibration is at the root of, well, pretty much everything.”[4] In ‘Otherhood’, the taut sonar of a peacock’s call—Mom?—courses slightly madly through its speaker to meet its iridescent plumage, or so we can see. These are the right animals, the camel and the peacock, for a short piece that speaks to (sorry) nonverbal communication as a forcible affect of mothering. “Vibration patterns can hold matter in place and even suspend [it].”[5] 

It’s a seeming comfort, returning to a place after time and artistry have passed over it, and iterating your own essay in its present-day terrain, as the filmmaker does in ‘For the Time Being’ (2021), her short response to the earthworks and research of Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson. White-dot constellation patterns are cast to the screen as if into a mirror reflecting Holt’s ‘Sun Tunnels’, “the American land artist’s four, 18-foot-long, 9-foot-in-diameter cement tunnels, [set] into a precise X in Utah’s Great Basin Desert in 1978, [with] holes drilled in[to] the sides [and tops] in precise accordance with the constellations Draco, Perseus, Columba, and Capricorn … meant to throw sun- or moonlight onto the tunnel floors, so that a visitor may ‘walk on the stars.’”[6] Stratman also shot footage on the Great Salt Lake, “a landscape where both Holt and Smithson spent a lot of time, researching and building ‘Spiral Jetty and Sun Tunnels’,”[7] and on and around Mono Lake itself, recalling Holt and Smithson’s short film, ‘Mono Lake’ (1968, 2004), where the seismic political and social shifts of 1968 are weirdly hotly rendered in absentia, supplanted by a journey to an antique and self-sustaining lake in the Eastern Sierras of California (merrily we roll down basaltic rock). Shot 53 years later, Stratman’s video-letter jettisons the road-trip narrative form, showcasing both her seriousness about nonhuman temporality—anyone who has seen ‘The Illinois Parables’ will know how supernatural this gets—and the ineffability of the nearly 3-million-year-old lake itself.[8] The hypersaline water glows in her selective frame, in no order with the sky’s same bright blue, and captures the sun across the tufa for seeming days, for the time being. To be transparent, and to bring in local time: thanks to a friend with a cabin, I’m currently revising this essay from the edge of the lake, in Mono Basin (a coincidence…).

In the 12-minute film, ‘Vever (for Barbara)’ (2019), described by Stratman as a “cross-generational binding of three filmmakers seeking alternative possibilities to power structures they’re inherently part of,” she braids Maya Deren’s texts and field recordings, Barbara Hammer’s footage and voice, and the score to ‘Meshes of the Afternoon’ composed by Deren’s widower, Japanese composer Teiji Ito, who also “completed” Deren’s own documentary, ‘Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti’, much like Nancy Holt did for herself and Smithson, editing their 1968 lake-trip footage in 2004. Stratman’s titular dedication to Hammer, in ‘Vever’, follows suit Hammer’s dedication to Deren in Hammer’s film, ‘Maya Deren’s Sink’ (2011), for which Ito’s scores were also remixed. It also reads as devotion, duty, feminist historiography: beloved Barbara Hammer wanted Stratman to complete the film, even going so far as to suggest she motorcycle to Guatemala to consider how the women’s textile market had changed since her own bike trip, taken initially to escape a lover with too many other lovers. In the spirit of Chick Strand (“film is a four-dimensional medium”[9]) and other film artists who refused the discipline of traditional ethnography, Maya Deren and Hammer were bad ethnographers. Stratman’s comeuppance on their behalf is the political heft of Vever as it is received in now-time. The film positions the “failures” of Deren and Hammer—both of whom preferred the depths of encounter over the horizontality of knowing, in 1950s Haiti and Guatemala in 1975, respectively—into and against their own historical time. The colonial unconscious that is absolutely operating in traditional ethnography is tested by Stratman as she deflects authorship yet welcomes herself as necessary outsider, a sage weaving.

 

 

Polytemporality may be an ethics for Stratman. “Only when art is fragmented, discontinuous and incomplete can we know about that vacant eternity that excludes objects [and] determined meaning,” writes Smithson. He continues: “The mirror and the transparent glass bring us to those designations that remain forever abolished in the colourless infinities of a static perception.”[10] The artist was defining his own work in the context of the museum, but he also speaks to the tetragonal or otherwise latticed shapes in Stratman’s skies, animated but non-theatrical, all-consuming; or the disc-mirrors on the hill that may or may not actually bounce the sun’s vitamins to nourish those in the dark Yukon winter, seen in ‘Optimism’. Residents of ‘Optimism’ are joyful, even as they acknowledge that their mining town’s improvements mostly harbinger more profiteers, those who cling to their static perceptions to better the extraction of previously inaccessible gold. Stratman’s mirrors in the natural landscape do what mirrors do: they expose, redirect, “bring us to those designations that remain forever abolished in the colourless infinities of a static perception.” But a light hanging indoors can also catch the sunset in a window, and reflect itself in the glass as if it’s part of the street scene. Stratman’s digital geometries ask: Isn’t it?

 

 

The answers are never cryptic. Most viewers won’t recognize particular amoebas or crystal formations, but we also somehow do know them. To gain further access to Deborah Stratman’s resources, one can often look to the end credits, where she makes her correspondences visible. A film made largely during the pandemic’s quarantine studio-time, ‘Last Things’ materials were sourced from NASA Conceptual Animation Lab, NASA GSFC/Scientific Visualization Studio, and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. Most lucidly, in Stratman’s roving of alien durations of stones, protists, and other “science-factual” matter, is the thousand-pointed star. René Descartes said, of the thousand-pointed star, that he could not imagine it, but could understand it. Intellect, then, is not dependent on imagination. He received criticism. Another philosopher said, no: he could imagine it, but not understand it. Listen: earlier, Stratman mentions in a radio interview the influence on her work of Agnès Varda’s ‘Vagabond’ and Barbara Loden’s Wanda, these kinds of classically feminist films where a figure is thrown out, or thrown against, or thrown into her scenery. I find this influence most legible in 2002’s ‘In Order Not to Be Here’, where a figure moving-toward this fall-through-the-cracks is monitored, tracked, surveilled, followed while running—the viewer’s cop voyeurism fully ensconced in a Faröckian (Stratmanian) “operational image.” While ‘Last Things’ is a studied and speculative “history of the future” concerned with scientific and artistic process, the film also throws the thousand-pointed star, as one example in a plethora of matter, into similar motion, moving-toward. Under a cinematic gaze, this glittering star that resembles a circle is arguably Wanda touching a mannequin’s rayon sleeve in a department store. A staged chase through the Santa Clarita suburbs. A flicker of non-belonging here. But it does belong. When?

 

 

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[1] Lee Breuer, “The Red Horse Animation,” 1979, The Theatre of Images, ed. Bonnie Marranca, PAJ Books/Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.
[2] Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich, “An Interview with Audre Lorde.” Signs 6, no. 4 (1981): 713–36.
[3] The book’s title, rendered from Spanish to English, reads Encyclopedia of Women.
[4] Note from DS, after I asked if she would hate a sound bath (a projection, it turns out)
[5] Note from DS: “The peacock … he was wandering oblivious on the lake shore.”
[6] Self-quoting here, from “Barely Ruined: On So Mayer’s ‘Obsolute,’” Hix Eros 8, March 2018
[7] Note from DS.
[8] As usual, there’s much more to Stratman’s non-anthropocentrism than meets the eye. “The basins of Mono and Great Salt are landscapes my partner and I have spent a lot of time in, over the last 20 years,” she’s said, “in tandem with projects we’ve worked on in conjunction with The CLUI [Center for Land Use Interpretation], including Power Exchange and Clean Livin.’ The watercraft seen a few times in the film is the TLEP (Terminal Lake Exploration Platform), originally GSLEP (Great Salt Lake Exhibition Platform), which has deployed at Salton Sea and the Great Salt with an eye on Mono in the future…” See Steve Badgett and Stratman’s TLEP descriptions at https://terminalexploration.org/.
[9] Chick Strand, “Notes on Ethnographic Film by a Film Artist,” 1978, The Documentary Film Reader: History, Theory, Criticism, eds. Jonathan Kahana and Charles Musser, Oxford University Press, 2016.
[10] Robert Smithson, “The Shape of the Future and Memory,” 1966, Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam, University of California Press, 1996.

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Corina Copp is a poet, writer, occasional maker, and doctoral candidate at the University of Southern California. Her research traces and theorizes political consciousness in works across discipline in relation to place, language, and process; and feminist, artist, and activist non-networks. Copp is the author of the poetry collection, The Green Ray (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2015); and the North American translator of the memoir, My Mother Laughs (The Song Cave, 2019), and the play, Night Lobby, by filmmaker Chantal Akerman. She has written about film, art, and literature for The Machine That Kills Bad People – ICA London, Frieze, Film Comment, BOMB, Film Quarterly, Metrograph Journal, America: Films From Elsewhere (ed. Shanay Jhaveri), and elsewhere. In Los Angeles, she programs Rotations, a screening series focused on the detours of contemporary feminist filmmaking. Rotations is participating alongside thousands of artists around the world in the cultural boycott of Israel (PACBI).