REVIEW: Julia Hechtman, “Acts of Disappearance: Environmental”
Acts of Disappearance: Environmental by Julia Hechtman, courtesy of The Video Data Bank Screening Room at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC)
REVIEW
Acts of Disappearance: Environmental
Film by Julia Hechtman
Review by Oliver Mackenzie
There is an expanse of cold, black-blue water. In the distance, snow covered mountains reaching into a white sky. The scene is imposing, almost hostile, and utterly inhuman; its framing in the camera lens feels both guerrilla and impossibly staged. If these stretches of snow, ice, and stone can be considered life, they live at a time scale far greater than our own and eclipse us in every respect. As if to underscore, or undermine, this point, an ice float drifts into frame. A woman in a red puffer jacket stands on it, arms stretched wide. She looks from the distance to the camera and steadily drifts onwards, out of frame. Appearing, disappearing, gone.
Such is Acts of Disappearance: Environmental, the 2024 video project of Boston-based visual artist Julia Hechtman. The scene in question is Object Trouvé, the third of nine vignettes selected from Hechtman’s archives and reaching as far back as 2003 to as recently as 2024. The vignettes document the artist’s own forays into the natural world and take a range of materials as their subject matter, from small, domestic pools of water to the arctic circle and Iceland, where the artist had previously filmed her video collage Not Once on a Fullbright scholarship. Stitched throughout this compilation are artifacts of the artist’s own life, foiling any reduction of the work into a simple meditation on nature or the self and challenging the viewer to find any connection between the two at the same time as it insists on their mutual presence.
The work is abstract and resistant to narrative interpretations from the beginning. Rather than providing complete subjects that develop throughout a narrative, Acts of Disappearance: Environmental is composed of partial objects, natural vistas and signs of life truncated by the camera’s frame, the duration of each clip, and the editing techniques Hechtman employs. We see this in the second clip, Disruption, which lasts for an unbroken minute and fifty-three seconds. The camera is pointed into a close-up of a pond or riverbank where a handful of reeds jut out of the water. Suddenly, the bust of a man appears in the pool’s reflection. He stares forward, unmoving, until ripples caused by something off-screen scatter his image. He recomposes, then the ripples return to scatter him again, then he recomposes and, shortly before the vignette ends, is cut out as suddenly as he came.
In Spectre, the camera is placed at the edge of a cliff, showing its edge and the waters below. What was probably a green flag during filming is now a recording of the surf beneath the cliff, superimposed over it and flapping in the wind. The “complete” environment lies beyond Hechtman’s camera. Instead, we have its most affective parts layered over or alongside eachother. Standing behind this technique is a basic proposition: such a total portrait is impossible; the subject matter too vast.
This impossibility of a total portrait is redoubled on a human level in Glory Days, the longest of the vignettes, which begins with a window view of two brick walls during snowfall before cutting to a closeup of cherries on a tree. As we watch, white text scrolls up from the bottom of the screen, snippets of messages presumably related or addressed to the artist: “How you livin’? / Remember you still owe me / a Monty Python tape” or “I remember the first time we hung out together / I said “this girl is definitely burnt.”” Here, her personhood and relationships are indexed by only the most decontextualized shards.
The interaction between the natural and the personal is a consistent theme in Hechtman’s work. The similarly structured and parallel work, Acts of Disappearance: Death opens with a message addressed to Hechtman, likely from a quarreling romantic partner, delivered word by word in chalk on a blackboard. After each word appears a hand comes to erase it. After some time, the smears of chalk on top of the blackboard begin to resemble a sheet of ice floating atop a black ocean. But neither Hechtman’s personal life nor the arctic sea metaphorize each other. Instead, they are layered atop one another, each present but distinct.
What emerges from these partial, layered objects are two figures locked in tension: the artist and the environment. These characters are not presented directly but intuited, visible only after the viewer has spent a sufficient amount of time sitting before, and considering, the particular artifacts and modalities that appear. The environment is at times quaint, small, inviting, and at other times vast, indifferent, and deadly. The artist is bold, takes center stage, then at other times is coy, self-effacing, disappeared (in Sunhead the silhouette of a head is visible, otherwise completely blacked out by the sun which shines directly above the hair).
In presenting herself in such a way, Hechtman intentionally jeopardizes her own agency before the subject matter. Especially because the vignettes were not filmed for this project but rather compiled after the fact, it’s clear that the significance between them is to some degree latent to the footage and Hechtman’s prior manipulations, emerging post hoc by Hechtman’s hand. What is at stake here is the sublime–the enormity and incomprehensibility of the environment, especially in its arctic form, by which our own narratives and self-perceptions are rendered obsolete. Instead, Hechtman considers herself from the perspective of the snow and mountains themselves: not as a self-contained individual, but a series of gestures and appearances that grace their surface. She plays with this concept in Get Lost, where a woman, presumably Hechtman, steps out from behind the camera into a field of snow, walks down it, then stumbles and disappears behind a snowbank.
However, Hechtman is not naïve as to imply she’s recused herself from the project. Her camera work testifies to her presence and the locations she chooses to film are so remote that only the most tenacious could make it there. Her own editing interventions are substantial. A cliffside is mirrored first vertically, then horizontally, mimicking a Rorschach test, and a color video of a riverbank is layered over the same bank recorded in black and white (one recording digital, the other in Super8).
There is Hechtman’s manipulation, artifacts of her life and images of herself, and there are the uncompromising mountains and streams which exist independent of her. Here the camera functions as a screen, repelling each side of the duo back into themselves at the same time as it lets each assert their presence, and perspective, over and against the other.
What Hechtman’s experiment gives us is a consideration of agency from multiple angles, both the human and inhuman. She is working not only with raw footage of nature but prior artistic choices she’s made as well. What she draws out of this is her persistent fascination not only with the world outside of her but how she appears within it and how it renders her a subject at the same time as she makes it subject matter of her own. As the agency of the artist and environment emerge and position themselves in opposition, so, too, do they intertwine.
Acts of Disappearance: Environmental asks us, through a collage of patient, focused video clips to consider the environment and the self in a new light. Just as Hechtman’s own acts find her at the foot of arctic cliffs and rivers, so, too does the viewer’s own cognizance of the video work find itself shaped by the remote scenery. Without a narrative arc, the work offers no solution–it closes with Glo War, another video set in the arctic, featuring a bright, transparent silhouette of a figure sat cross-legged on a rock. In the background, rows of conical mountains loom. The video is overlaid with close, dense audio of a person breathing. Then the breathing cuts and soon after the image fades away. The viewer can decide what to do next.
Oliver Mackenzie is a Chicago-based fiction and non-fiction writer. He has a BA in Creative Writing and German from Macalester College.
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