|
Video Review
Landspeed presents CKY
A film by Bam Margera
VHS. 1999
| These are the last words Daryl Smith wrote before his tragic death in a freak nude jogging-supermarket cart accident. |
| The Dialectic of the Sponsored and Bored; a critical reading.
The spectacle cannot be understood as an abuse of the world of vision, as a product of the techniques of mass dissemination of images. It is, rather, a Weltanschauung which has become actual, materially translated. It is a world vision which has become objectified.
-Guy Debord
|
 |
| Somewhere in Pennsylvania are the remains of many shattered illusions about haircuts. Supermarket-carts and fast-food employees lie scattered as the detritus of a whimsical tornado that we might label the collective efforts of Mr. Margera and his team of Situationists. In this latest audio-visual concretion we find a more compacted and honed vision than was allowed in the group showing entitled "jump off a building" curated by fellow Tum Yeto artists Foundation.
Margera's deconstruction of roles within society is prevalently espoused by the documented public performances of various troupe members and unwitting members of the public. He and his fellows' continual abusive acts, to themselves and each other, both mental and physical are consistent reiterations throughout the work. Dissonant in the formation of subsections, the underlying superstructure is perhaps in reflection of the dissolute nature of modern life. We find conventionally organized and edited "skits" segueing into apparently random footage from the shock-tactic public performances put on at various urban and rural locations. Documentation of experiments both sonic and physical are merged successfully on many occasions as might be exemplified by the shopping-cart-ram-human-catapult passage in which we find a strong resonance of Cervantes' seminal figure of modernity's alienation; Don Quixote.
Stratified within this multilayered work is the self-supporting sono-visual diptych we might tentatively entitle "Santa Vs Funky Chicken", we begin to see the true nature of Margera's iconoclasm and a restructuring of the roles of heroic figures in the urban milieu. The cyclical nature of patria / fratricidal engagement is dissembled. We can see evidence of the pseudo-pessimistic structure of this piece in such lyrical accompaniment as:
"Bad tidings we bring,
and a Sack-full of Gore,"
and furthermore;
"You'd better be good, you'd better not cry.
You'd better not pout, I'm telling you why...
'Cuz I'm gonna kill you!!!" (sic)
|
|
 |
Anyone who has skated at the SkateLab, loacted in Simi Valley, CA. will know how fuckin crazy this transfer is.
Well in CKY, Chris Senn flies the gap both ways - from mini to bowl, and bowl to mini!!!
|
|
More questions arise than answers given. Clearly this is the artist's reasoned triumph in understatement, in reflection to an entire era's relationship to the phenomena we call "life"; Why should we be nurtured by these figures? What was the inception of this fractious relationship? Why a chicken? What does society owe to the Kurtz-like figure that is this "Santa"? He carries a 'book of "Fuckers"' and is clearly not interested in engaging a restitution of consumerist values in this post-codified, self-disinherited generation. The true meaning of the artist's message is opaque, and richly so.
Most puzzling is the continual, brief-but-persistent inclusion of skateboarding figures. We see them engage in activities both comically hapless and dexterously ballet-like, in environs both urban and staged. One character, a Mr. "Getz" is clearly singled out as full of critical self-loathing, and violent natured against the helpless inanimate object he so clearly physically dominates most of the time. Again, I suspect, the activities portrayed symbolize our conduct in post / modern western society. The calculated rally against the gravity of our natural chaotic animal being, to an artificed position, which ultimately, gains nothing.
the review "is, like, not about stars man..." but I give the fucker about 5 stars outta 5,
"kerry Getz can't skate for shit..." hows that for contro-fuckin-versial (sp?)
|
|
|
