Audio By Carbonatix
You see them all the time, on the sides of walls and buildings, rectangles a few square feet or more painted a shade noticeably different from the rest of the structure. They’ve become such a part of our urban landscape, like the graffiti they’re intended to cover up, that we may not notice them at all. Kind of like the public art statues we walk by but never really stop to take in as the sculpture pieces they are.
In fact when you get right down to it, those blocks of color on the sides of those walls look strangely like a painting by Mark Rothko. Which is exactly the point behind the short film The Subconscious Art of Graffiti Removal by Portland-based filmmaker Matt McCormick, who juxtaposes one of the abstract expressionist’s paintings against the wall “art” created by removing graffiti.
It’s a slyly interesting premise — and we never know how much McCormick is putting us on — that the government-employed workers who roll on those blocks of paint are creating public art, subconsciously of course, with the subconscious support of the powers that authorize it. He shows us the “artists,” working stiffs choosing among rows of five-gallon buckets of paint with colors like “dove” or “red,” then painting over the graffiti.
But McCormick adds weight to the argument with his own exquisite camera work, lingering on shots of Portland’s urban infrastructure and the graffiti removal art that adorns it, so that you can really see the beauty. Then even the still shot of a train slowly moving by, or a row of reddish and ochre cargo containers, or the curved lines of a freeway cloverleaf, have beauty in them. And all can be aesthetically pleasing if you look at them through the right lens.
Still another layer to the film: When the narrator explains the three types of graffiti removal art as “symmetrical,” “ghosting,” or “radical,” it’s a jab at art criticism. Using standard artistic terms and concepts, the script sounds almost like an art class lecture and you can see how the art critic’s milieu, especially in the realms of abstract expressionism, minimalism, and conceptualism, sometimes spirals into the ridiculous.
There’s something sly in all the works of McCormick, who leaves you wondering just how far the layers go and where the joke begins. But it’s a fun puzzle. And this is the case much of the time with McCormick, who seems to take the subtle absurdities in the world with a certain seriousness. You can see it in the short documentary American Nutria, where he gives a straight-faced treatment to the oddly funny subject of the Nutria — a sort of sea-otter rat — and its infestation into North America.
But seen in the context of McCormick’s other works, a clearer picture of this praiseworthy filmmaker’s vision starts to emerge. A fitting gem in the Cinema Vortex series.
