It was too, too hot and humid today, which made it a good day to behave like a leisured, cultured bourgeoise and repair to the New Museum in Chelsea, where I could enjoy several hours of air conditioning. I’d been wanting to go anyway since reading a review of Dutch video artist Aernout Mik’s “Refraction,” which can be seen there until September 10. The piece, which depicts official “responders” and accidental bystanders at the site of a traffic emergency, had been described as an unnervingly cool, bloodless disaster narrative. It definitely sounded like an instance of “imagination on the brink.”

Before I could get to the museum, I traveled to Park Slope to shop for new glasses, my old frames being bent past the possibility of repair, and I having wearied of walking around with one lens two thirds of an inch higher on my face than the other. To get to Manhattan from the optometrist’s South Slope location, I needed to take the F train, something I was not especially keen on doing because, unlike my usual train (the Q), which travels over the Manhattan Bridge, the F train goes under the river. In the aftermath of the London bombings, we were informed that the bombing of a train in an underwater tunnel could, in the opinion of some experts, rupture the tunnel and flood it, greatly boosting the death rate. Without feeling especially worried about the number of deaths in this scenario, I decided immediately that I would much prefer to die or be injured in a bombing that took place on a bridge, elevated tracks, or a land-based tunnel—in other words, anything but an enclosed space liable to be flooded. I have not discussed this with Winston, who travels to his job in lower Manhattan by switching from the Q to the R at DeKalb (the R goes through the tunnel, not over the bridge). There is no point in discussing it; he would not change his habits, nor would I ask him to. I know that avoiding tunnels will not actually keep me or anyone else safe; I just would prefer not to have to make use of them at the present time.

In the event, on this particular day, the F train’s passage under the East River was swift and uneventful. Upon arriving at East Broadway, I felt invulnerable. I switched for the C at West 4th Street, rode to 23rd, and trudged west along 22nd in the awful humidity until I hit New Jersey (or it felt like I should have, anyway), passing under the old West Side elevated line that is going to be made into a park, and so came to the museum. It was cool inside.

Here are some of my very rudimentary notes on “Refraction” (which is projected on a wall divided by angles that create three planes for a single wide image):

the dun colors of shit, mud, swine rooting, sheep—
the rescue workers “rooting” but in bright synthetic clothing—slow priests—the comedy and tragedy of the swine—
the self-insulation of the “rescue workers”—a detective story—dogs—digging—tweezing of “evidence” into plastic bags—plastic gloves—choreography of disaster—suited—the bright orange tent standing empty like 9/11—the several afflicted in their badge of blue blanket or silver “space blanket”—the panoramas—sky—towers and large buildings in distance—panning around horizon—then inside—workers crouched each over his/her bit of disaster—orange vests, yellow vests—the seething backs of brown black white sheep, and a few bearded goats.
Textures of nature and culture—aluminum boxes, big red crosses on them—mud and vegetation—sky a blank—soldier boys in khaki, a face out of Kafka, abandoned bus seats on a mud bank, German shepherds—broken sticks—empty stretchers—acceptance of their role on part of the blue blanketed—the purposeful rooting of pigs in shitty mud not utterly unlike the purposeful rooting of disaster detectives….

The brochure I took home with me emphasizes the purported social moral of Mik’s piece: that it’s about our growing inability to respond spontaneously and with appropriate fellow feeling to emergency situations. My take was a little different. Because there is no visible “disaster” in the video—a two-part bus, once joined by accordion pleating now ripped apart, lies on its side in the middle of the road, but there’s no blood and no direct evidence of injury—the disengagement of the disaster “responders” and spectators from each other and from the sense of urgency that their uniforms and equipment mandate seems to make a kind of sense. At any rate, I did not feel I was witnessing anything so simple as a literal bad accident that elicited a numbed response.

The camera moves incessantly, showing close-ups and long shots of the disarticulated bus, the halted motorists, and a Byzantine array of first responders, from the vaguely military types with their German shepherds to the forensics people with their tweezers to the medics with their boxes stamped with that officially, officiously mercuful Red Cross. When you really think about it, the various uniforms and articles of equipment suggest different branches of the management of emergency without really being quite specifiable; activities associated with direct social control, knowledge production, and “helping” or curing blur into one another. Because, with all this, “disaster” seems so theoretical and distanced, I sometimes felt the piece was less “about” what this array of people was up to than it was “about” the visual and atmospheric contrast between, say, the bus’s filthy, chaotic-looking undercarriage and the shiny authority of the huge fire engine flanked by smaller but equally sparkling emergency vehicles. Or the parallel contrast between the blatant synthetic colors of the emergency workers’ outfits and the drab, depressing, yet softer and more welcoming browns, greys, and blacks of the natural world on either side of the highway.

This off-highway world, with its dark little pigs rooting in a tumbledown sty, feels so different from the world of the highway that it almost seems to represent the agrarian past, as if the two spaces were on two different planes of time. The planes, however, continually overlap, in that some of the emergency workers toil among the weeds of the embankment, while a couple of herdsmen twice drive their enormous flock of sheep (with a few goats mixed in) right through the “rescue” scene, without attracting the attention of participants in the latter, who remain as oblivious of this intrusion as they seem to be of each other or of any emotional impact from the work they’re engaged in.

I found myself drawn to the animals whenever Mik’s camera let me near them. They offered relief from the obsessive, emotionally blank activities of the emergency workers and the equally blank spectatorship of the bystanders. While the rooting of the pigs parallels the rooting of the apparent searchers-for-evidence, the pigs are clearly just doing what pigs do; the humans lack that excuse. There’s a lovely fluidity in the jostling backs of the sheep as they flood across the highway, and a subtle variation in their drab coats, that relieves the eye accustomed to the hard angles and siren colors of the disaster scene.

But what strikes me most about the piece is its representation of “disaster” as a ubiquitous absence. Perhaps the blurred border between mercy (the Red Crosses) and research (the tweezers and plastic bags) has to do with the fact that the emergency itself has gone missing—which is not the same as saying that there is no emergency. “Refraction” strongly reminded me of two earlier disaster narratives: Jean-Luc Godard’s film “Weekend,” in which a pleasure trip turns into an obstacle course of vehicles mangled in accidents, and Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise, in which the citizens of a small college town volunteer for a disaster simulation (the book was published in the 1980’s, when such a scenario could still seem outlandish) and are later visited by an “airborne toxic event” that prompts an evacuation but leaves them very unsure of the extent of their exposure and consequent jeopardy.

What I admire most about White Noise is its uncanny, and often hilarious, manipulation of tone and event such that one cannot properly distinguish between the conviction that the dreadful only happens to other people and the realization that the dreadful is happening to oneself. “Refraction” isn’t funny, most of the time (I did think a herd of sheep barging through the vacuous rescue operation was funny), but it left me with a similar sense that disaster has reached a whole new level of simultaneous presence and absence.

One review I read comments that the refusal of a clear narrative line in “Refraction” prods the viewer to make ceaseless efforts to supply one. What I would like to add to what’s there on the screen is this: we get the uncanny feeling that the disaster has gone missing because the totality of the activity—what is happening to/being done by everyone in the scene—is the real disaster. The “victims” are the dog handlers, medics, folks in HazMat suits, and bored gawkers, who only think they are responding to something outside themselves. It is their own wreck—the “normal accident” that defines their way of life—which they search for, without the ability to see the big picture for the fragements. And it is, in turn, this inability to touch their own disaster—despite, or because of, their absurdly high level of “preparedness”—that keeps them hermetically sealed in their solipsistic worlds of ritual activity and ritual spectatorship.

Running Tab

7/18/05: Free Speech Radio News, on the Pacifica Network, reports on an observance of the 60th anniversary of the Trinity explosion (the first atomic blast), sponsored by the Atomic Bomb Museum in Albuquerque. Faced with protesters, the museum’s director denies that the event is a “celebration” of the advent of the atomic age. It is merely the marking of a historical event that people growing up today should know about.

7/19/05: The New York Times describes an agreement between the Bush administration and the Indian government of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh that would afford India easier access to supposedly peaceful forms of nuclear technology while keeping its nuclear weapons as “bringing India a step closer to joining the club of nuclear-weapons states.” The article does not say this, but the “club” is presumably composed of those nations whose possession of nukes the U.S. has signed off on. All others are “nuclear pariahs.”

7/19/05: Recent days have seen: the first recorded category 4 hurricane ever to hit the Caribbean in July; a typhoon in Taiwan; withering heat and locusts in Europe. A Swiss glacier’s melting has disgorged the corpse of a climber who disappeared two decades ago.