Spirit of '76
2007
Single-channel video
DVD format, shot on HD digital video
Duration 6 mins 24 secs, sound
Berni Searle is one of three artists selected for the Museum of Modern Art’s annual New Photography exhibition, and prints from her About to forget and Night Fall series are on view at MoMA until 1 January 2008. A survey of her work, curated by the Contemporary Art Museum, University of South Florida, is currently at the Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois. She participated in the 2007 residency programme at the ISCP in New York, and is 2007/8 visiting artist in residence at Rutgers University, New Jersey.
Her latest work, Spirit of ’76, was commissioned by the printmaking initiative Philagraphika for Re:Print Re:Present Re:View, curated by Salah Hassan, at the Temple Gallery, Philadelphia. In this video, Searle continues her meditations around history, memory and place, and draws on the idea of a vortex which engulfs everything in its reach and ultimately destroys all the elements in its centre.
Searle’s imagery of six silhouettes, cut out of red crępe paper, is based on the three figures leading a march in The Spirit of ‘76 by Archibald M Willard, said to be the most reproduced painting in the United States. In the video the silhouettes, circling a central rosette, slowly bleed their colour into the water. Searle then places a wreath of black crępe paper flowers around the figures; gradually the colours intermingle in the whirling water, and the silhouettes fragment and collapse. The sound for the sequence is Richard Wagner’s American Centennial March, commissioned in 1876 by the city of Philadelphia in honour of the centenary of US independence. Searle has dramatically slowed the tempo of this march to provide a brooding and ominous accompaniment.
Despite the near universality of the imagery, the title of the work evokes very different associations for different audiences: for Americans, their immediate connection would be US independence in 1776; for South Africans it would be the Soweto uprising of 1976. Yet the patriotic and revolutionary associations of the flag-bearing figures, and the shadows of nationalism embodied by the wreath, resonate powerfully across continents and specific contexts.
© 2007 Michael Stevenson. All rights reserved.