Rick Barot

Two Video Installations

The elephant in the white room

is told to play dead, and she falls

 

to the gray floor, rocking a little

before going completely still,

 

only to wake again, rocking again

a few times to find momentum

 

and push herself onto a splayed

position on the floor, her legs

 

spread like a skirt, and then

the methodical lifting of each leg

 

so that each gains its footing,

each lifting her a little until she is

 

fully up, wholly still once more

until some voice in the room

 

tells her to die again, all of her

wrinkled bulk made blank canvas,

 

wet stone for an eye, the camera

moving around her as though

 

she were the center of a carousel

around which the other animals

 

galloped and leapt up and brayed.

On another screen, one man’s

 

rapture of grief is told in a face

gone blurry as paint sliding

 

down a wall, a woman’s crying is

an open mouth black with depth,

 

a woman prays, her hands knotted

into white roots, while another

 

man standing behind the others

cannot decide whether a howl or

 

a laugh is what’s needed in this

moment after they have been told

 

to think the worst thing they can

remember, the moment then slowed

 

to sixteen minutes of quiet film,

so that even the thoughtless blink

 

of an eye takes a few minutes

to satisfy itself, the pixels changing

 

like cells under a lens, the last

woman an opera of disbelief about

 

what has come to pass for them

in the dim room, her face a metal

 

of rage, the voice somewhere

demanding every form of sorrow

 

from them, and, having been asked,

this is how they had to answer.

 

 


“Two Video Installations” is from the collection Want (Sarabande Books, 2008).