Explain Your Art To Me, Please

Michele O’Marah, Character Portraits, William F. Buckley Jr. and Huey P. Newton, diptych, digital C-prints, 2007. Courtesy Rental, New York, and Sister, Los Angeles.
 

Michele O’Marah is a video artist whose works include a series of fake trailers for movies about bands like the Velvet Underground, the Runaways, the Germs, Pussy Galore, and Bikini Kill, a remake of the 80s movie Valley Girl in its entirety, and other works based on Donna Tartt’s novel The Secret History, 70s political thrillers like The Parallax View, Vietnam movies, and Elizabeth Taylor.

For her new video work entitled How Goes It With the Revolution?, Michele reenacted and filmed a 1973 interview between Black Panther leader Huey Newton and right-wing ballbuster William F. Buckley Jr. on Buckley’s long running PBS talk show, Firing Line. Here she explains why:

I was researching Black Panther footage at the Museum of TV and Radio, and most of the stuff you see are newsreels of the Panthers in their berets and matching outfits, and it’s all very provocative and dazzling. It’s basically propaganda. When I saw this interview, it was different from what I expected. I assumed Newton would be a badass but he’s actually shy and quite adorable. He smiles these big smiles and he seems nervous. And Buckley is such an iconic WASP conservative, I thought he would be an asshole, but he’s weirdly charming. He’s condescending, sure, but he’s funny. And truthfully, Newton rambles a lot and is pretty confusing. At one point Buckley says something like, “I don’t know what you’re talking about, and I don’t think you do either.” And it’s kinda true.

They talk for an hour about nothing, really. They spend 20 minutes discussing how to define “revolution.” It’s almost banal. You would never see something like this on TV now, this unstructured dialogue about the meaning of language, with no heated confrontation or political sound bites. It’s so civil and low-key. It’s remarkable for its unradicalness.

My style of videomaking is very “fake.” It’s obviously shot out of sequence and sometimes they flub their lines and their wigs don’t fit right. Buckley was a homophobe and here I use a gay man to portray him. A lot of my work is about how history gets misrepresented. Our ideas about historical events are based on how we see them portrayed on TV. They’re like myths. So here are two stereotypes being totally different from what you’d expect. And here is an intellectual debate structured around two iconic figures discussing race in America that’s provocative but also kind of stupid, and it goes on for a long, long time.

MICHELE O’MARAH
See more of Michele O’Marah on VBS.tv’s new show Art Talk!