Sometime in the early 1980s, this writer purchased a worn copy of »Love Between Women« by Charlotte Wolff, published in 1971, from a used bookstore in Chicago. Wolff, a Jewish lesbian doctor who fled Nazi Germany, undertook this landmark study of female homosexuality in her adopted home of London. Not finding myself in its pages, not in the terms that my generation of young lesbians understood ourselves, I shelved the book. The Freudian remnants that informed Wolff’s theory of homo-emotionality defied a climate beginning to embrace alternative possible origins of sexual orientation, and empowered by critiques of the socially constructed straightjackets of gender. But the book remained in my personal library, crisscrossing the United States several times.
I opened the book again, some two-and-a-half decades later, after seeing Matthew Buckingham’s »Everything I Need« (2007), one of two recent works by the artist shown at Murray Guy Gallery in New York City. The installation, a double video projection, pairs shots of the interior of a decommissioned passenger plane with excerpts from Wolff’s memoirs and interviews, prompted by her first trip back to Berlin, in 1978, as a guest of the lesbian group L74. The images, apparently if deceptively still, at least until sunlight spreads sumptuously across a Tang-orange seat cover, tease out, one by one — ashtray, armrest, storage bin — components of this complex mechanism. In the texts Buckingham has condensed and re-narrativized Wolff’s recollections, from childhood memories and first crushes to a crucial friendship with Walter Benjamin and brokenhearted flight from Germany in 1933, to her professional life in exile. As Buckingham’s images linger on the apparatus of flight, Wolff’s story traverses decades and borders, emerging from the provocations travel produces: escape, refuge, return, and recall, each altering the subject’s place in history, and the subject herself. A vessel of transport is revealed as a catalyst of transmutation.
If this revelation takes place in »Everything I Need« at cool, parallelistic distance, Buckingham’s other work exhibited here is structured not only by such a contingent geography, but also by pervasive motion and immersive transpositions. For »False Future« (2007), Buckingham revisited the setting of »Leeds Bridge«, an eight-second motion picture filmed in London as early as 1888 by Louis Le Prince, predating Edison and Lumière actualities usually cited as the earliest examples of the medium. In a ten-minute street scene shot at an angle similar to that of Le Prince’s film, double-decker buses, private cars, and delivery trucks replace the horse-drawn vehicles of the original; pedestrians cross the bridge and pigeons disregard the shot’s carefully reproduced perspective. Gently mesmerizing, the film was projected continuously onto a white sheet — like one that Le Prince is said to have tested his films on — hung from a line bisecting the gallery at an angle. Narration (spoken in French with English subtitles) describes an extant fragment of the film and Le Prince’s mysterious disappearance in 1890, which vastly diminished his recognition as inventor of the motion picture camera. What events, the narrator asks, might have been recorded if Le Prince had not disappeared, and the history of cinema had begun years earlier? A handsome zoological metaphor regarding the placement of an animal’s eyes, marking its status as predator or prey, centralizes the question of visual purposiveness. The direction of the gaze, the lens of the camera, the throw of the projector: each bear the aching limitation of what body and machine see and don’t see, in elegy and in eerie prescience of the persistent partiality of vision.
During the exhibition, the non-profit organization Creative Time sponsored a dozen screenings of Buckingham’s »Muhheakantuck: Everything Has a Name« (2004) aboard a New York water taxi. Muhheakantuck (the title refers to the local native name for the river, which could be translated as »the river that flows in two directions«) consists of two twenty-minute aerial shots of the Hudson River coastline, captured by Buckingham on a 16mm film camera from a helicopter. A voiceover describes the devastation wrought on the region’s native Lenni-Lenape people following European occupation, noting that Henry Hudson, sailing for the Dutch East India Company, entered New York Harbor on September 11, 1609. The resonant date, echoed in a glimpse of the former site of the World Trade Center, is one of many coincidental or causal links between this tale of colonization and a matrix of contemporary concerns. Within that matrix, magenta saturation of the film, mimicking the »red-shift« of some aging 16mm stock, unsettles viewer presumptions about the date of its making, just as the view on screen rollicked against the harbor view through the boat’s windows. The project exemplifies Buckingham’s frequent focus on historical fits and starts — ruptures and reconstitutions, absences and recuperations — abrupt changes in trajectory that are always not only spatial but also temporal. Accordingly, soon after the film ended, the boat docked. The show closed, and once again, I shelved the book, having re-envisioned, via the animation of memory made possible in Buckingham’s work, the city in which I live, the history of the cinema that I love, and an almost-forgotten artifact of my own history.