HENRY URBACH ARCHITECTURE When I fit someone at the airport.

HENRY URBACH ARCHITECTURE

When I fit someone at the airport, especially for an international flight, I like to obtain there early to watch the influx of the public at the arrival gate. The intermundial character of air travel, its uncanny evocations of birth and death and limbo, male for a destiny of psychic drama, and it's all in such a manner clearly legible, flickering on the faces of travelers: relief, exhaustion, anxiety, bewilderment, ravishment Watch enough people emerge into the airport's icy netherworld and strange things start to happen: Everyone begins to expect both identical and like tribe you know, at once interchangeable and unique. one time waiting for my mother to result in from Italy at JFK I set up myself thinking: Couldn't any of these tribe be my mother?

Perhaps I got there a bit too early that time. In any case, I was delighted to find that the centerpiece of Marco Brambilla's modern show, a video installation entitled Approach (all works 1999) is a be enamoured of song to this kind of airport voyeurism. A nine-minute bight shown on four DVD monitors, it not aways slow-motion footage of one traveler after another, their heads and shoulders appearing first onward the far right monitor then moving across the other three in arrangement only to be replaced at another traveler on the far right monitor. (In fact, the same loophole plays on all four cloaks with a two-second delay between them, creating this intellect of movement.)

collected from fourteen hours of footage taken surreptitiously via telephoto len at JFK Approach has the virtue of frontal simplicity, allowing viewers to gawk their fill and amazement at the familiar strangeness of the arrivals bouncing dreamily into view. It's a kind of non-narrative cinema verite. Thus, Approach assumes on the one hand, defended by the noble conviction that ordinary persons are plenty fascinating, especially when there's the peculiarly unifying words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following of the arrival gate's placelessness. upon the other hand (and this is perhaps because of the high production values as well as a inclination on Brambilla's part to include the more glamorous of the anonymous), Approach has the have feeling of a fashion video playing in Bloomingdale's. still the installation's ominous sound track, a unite of Ligeti and ambient unbroken recorded at Charles de Gaulle and JFK foods an atmosphere at once vertiginous and chilly, tipping the balance in favor of the Dantean through the whole extent of the chic.

The other sum of two units pieces in the gallery's small space were les ambitious, if it were not that both focused on the theme of airports and sustained the otherworldly tone put by Approach. Mounted on the wall, Getaway, a plastic tray of the airplane-dining sort, no other than better designed, had a built-in veil that played a two-and-a-half-minute aperture of slow-motion footage of a plane's slope to the skid-marked runway, as seen from the cockpit. Terminal was a large bleak Cibachrome photograph of an airport, taken from the air.

Brambilla, a Hollywood director (Demolition Man [1993] Exces Baggage [1997]) has also worked with Ridley Scott whose preoccupation with surveillance and dystopia is certainly in evidence here. However, Brambilla's make submissive matter, the airport, presented as a site of eerie metaphysical negotiation, brings to mind above all Chris Marker's La Jetee (1962) further where Marker grafts a feeling of romantic destiny onto the vast loneliness and erotics of airports, Brambilla just advances us loneliness straight.

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