Life As Another Man's House
by Jillian SteinhauerPage 2 of 2
Still, what is there is fairly wondrous. Although the jury remains out on Green's transition from short films to feature-length (his longest prior to the 75-minute Gravity runs only 12 minutes and 35 seconds), he has moved from small-scale sets to a large one with complete success. In fact, his work benefits from its newfound bigness—the intensity of feeling previously contained in his sunken-faced creatures, which often look like they've emerged from an Edvard Munch painting, and misshapen wooden objects swells to fill the Wood house. The experience of being able to walk in and around it is immensely satisfying.
In particular, wandering through allows the viewer to appreciate Green's handicraft up close, something not easily done when watching his shadowy, stop-motion films. He has a way with wood, an ability to bend and warp it to fit his ideas, and though the construction isn't always entirely clean, it is convincing. For instance, consider a chair with a back that stretches up and then arches over the piece, ending in a lightbulb facing the sitter: bizarre, and yet completely logical in its surroundings. The crooked, jerky arch could turn sinister in someone else's hands (Tim Burton comes to mind), but in Greens' its imperfection suits the house, the angled wood echoing other bizarre constructions, such as the seemingly purposeless tower that rises in back or the brilliant handmade piano.
The trickiest part, if we care to do it, is determining whose vision we are admiring. How much of what we see is Wood's work, and how much Green's? I suspect more of the latter. Wood left behind only rough blueprints for the house on cardboard, and Green admits to taking some artistic liberties with it. Video vignettes playing in the gallery also show clips from the feature film, where Green has made Wood's story his own with a fictional script. In the shorts, he compares Wood to the biblical Noah, because, he said, "Leonard had a single-minded focus on this thing that was ridiculous. He was a joke in the neighborhood, like Noah. Noah had to chop down trees by himself and build a giant seaworthy ship to fit a world's worth of animals. That's just ridiculous, and so I like it. That seems impossible, too."
Indeed, Green and Wood seem to be just two in a long line of men who dream of, and sometimes realize, the impossible: Italian immigrant Simon Rodia, who singlehandedly built the landmarked Watts Towers in Los Angeles alone over the course of 34 years; architect Antoni Gaudí, whose La Sagrada Família is still being completed, nearly 130 years after its conception, in Barcelona; and, on a lesser-known scale, someone like Vince Hannemann in Austin, Texas, who has been building a towering cathedral of junk in his backyard since 1988 and is now fighting the city to keep it standing.
Green draws on the sense of urgency implicit in those endeavors, making most of his projects "a reminder to pay attention and do shit, and to recognize how much amazing stuff there is in the world," he said. "Because it's really easy to forget that. It's really easy to get mired down and sob for a while." Still, he unavoidably stands apart for multiple reasons—for piggybacking off of someone else's crazy dream, for installing his work in a commercial gallery and putting pieces of it up for sale, for having other projects to move on to in the future. In that way his going for broke seems a little less real. His inspiration, however, feels eminently genuine. And for better or for worse, there may be no other way to do it and stay sane.
(photos courtesy the artist, Andrew Edlin Gallery)
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Andrew Edlin Gallery
- 134 Tenth Ave., between 18th and 19th Sts (map)
- Chelsea
- 212-206-9723
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