Update: Please plan to catch Federico Solmi this week at VOLTA NY, the cutting-edge satellite art fair, featuring only 92 artists by invitation, which is being held in tandem during the Armory Show, at 7 West 34th Street, 11th floor. www.voltashow.com

Without further ado, we welcome our newest Your It List columnist, Theodore Bouloukos.

As an actor whose performance origins reside in video art, I’m often at pains to define this genre for even the most reasonably sophisticated friends. Video art, as a medium distinct from, say, early artistic cinematic experiments in 35-mm film (such as Buñuel’s 16-minute silent surrealist short, Un Chien Andalou), is thought to owe its latter-day roots to Fluxus artist Nam June Paik and the portable video-audio experimental pieces that he created on his Sony Portapak in the mid 1960s. Contemporaneously, Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey, employing both film and video, manipulated both medium and content in their work to either imitate and extricate the conventions of its motion picture and television brethren; in so doing, their collaborations have long influenced the visual vocabulary of what we see in a gallery and what we see on TV. The introduction of digital video in the 1990s enabled many artists to expand their artistic practices, engulfing such previously discrete media as design, sculpture, installation and electronic arts. In so doing, video art itself became more variegated, amplifying its boundaries while rigorously challenging the viewer’s expectations of video as an enterprise of either narrative or entertainment. The preponderant use of home video these days for the sake of the Internet alone has only added to this heterogeneity of hybrid practice, wherein everyone can be the director and the distributor of his own movie.

If the fluid relationship between art and cinema (viz. Cocteau) sees its tradition extended in Matthew Barney’s five feature-film Cremaster series (in which the interstitial plot lines serve as metaphors for the descension of the suspensory muscle of the testis); or in The Rape of the Sabine Women, Eve Sussman’s gorgeous epic, in which the myth of Romulus’s founding of Rome, depicted famously in in Jacques-Louis David’s 1799 painting, is re-envisioned as a 1960s allegorical musical with a cast of hundreds, shot on location in Berlin and on the isle of Hydra, Greece, then so, too, might animation, itself the womb of the video game, find companionable conflation in the work of Federico Solmi (1973), whose second solo exhibition at LMAK projects, entitled “From Uterus to Grave with no Happy Ending,” can be seen at the gallery through February 14. In it, he has combined traditional, hand-drawn animation with digital models, utilizing computer gaming engines to create a real-time 3D framework, thanks to his long-time collaborator, 3D artist Russell Lowe, a New Zealander who is also a senior lecturer at the University of New South Wales, in Australia.

If the title of his show is provocative, so too has Solmi gained currency as something of an enfant terrible; although not in the masturbatory way of, say, Sebastian Horsley, the British dandy-memoirist-artist of self-crucifixion fame, denied entry to the States for previous controlled-substance violations a couple of years ago, forfeiting his only New York book-signing appearance in the bargain. No, no, for Signor Solmi, the offense was creatively crucifying–depending on one’s stridency of commitment to religious dogma–and more in the vein of a good old-fashioned duel with the Roman Catholic Church. Solmi’s an Italian, after all, and his native land is one in which it’s A-okay to elect a porn star to Parliament just as long as you don’t fuck with the Pope. Brought to trial for “obscenity, blasphemy and offense to religion,” after his work, The Evil Empire (2007)–seen at his first solo show at LMAK Projects in 2008, coincidental with the visit of Pope Benedict XVI to New York–appeared at the Arte Fiera Bologna art fair a year later. While Solmi was being absolved of the “religious offense” charge, the work in question was sold for $7,000 at the fair, but remained in custody. Since that time, these censorship charges have all been dismissed, and Solmi, a 2009 Guggenheim Fellowship recipient for Video Art, has moved to New York; and he has since been invited to exhibit his work at the upcoming Santa Fe Biennale in New Mexico. Through his media of video, drawings, mechanical sculptures and paintings, Solmi has infused the imagery he plucks from pop culture with art-historical references to realize his irreverently rambunctious manifestations as depictions of gorgeous phantasm. His is a place where extravagance and irony are the collaborative devices in showing us why moral decay might be our only legacy.

The Evil Empire, which returns to the current show, is perfectly expressive of Solmi’s intricately lurid wit, wherein a porn-addled Pope Urban LXIX of “Vatic-Anal City”–His Holiness shod in Prada as befitting any hedonistic consumer–is throttled by the various trials and tribulations of being mortal, and pace, randy; and for it, must be sent on a journey to hell. To atone, endlessly, of course: a recrimination as repetitive as the soundtrack, the maniacal melody of Michael Oldfield’s eerie “Tubular Bells,” better known as the “Theme from The Exorcist.” Comically set in 2046, just being carnal is still all it takes to send you to the Inferno; and so especially heretical are pervert popes who allow their libido a bit of voyeuristic wanderlust amid the frescoes of St. Peter’s Basilica. But just as Goya and other Enlightenment reformers were often accused of being anti-clerical for their opprobrium of the vices of the clergy, so too does Solmi offer up a mordant critique of the Vatican’s excesses: wherein papal infallibility is a handmaiden to their corruptive control, and the abuses therefrom that serve as both an attitudinal nemesis and a consistent thematic strain. Genuflection here is reserved for the pope’s swollen cock, a sceptor, of sorts, and the culprit of his eternal damnation. If his degringolade is this loop of continual misery that recalls Dante’s second circle of hell, it also reminds me of that horrific enchantment from Neil Gaiman, called “Other People.”

The centerpiece of the show, Douche Bag City (2009) is a video installation of nine single-channel, hand-drawn animated films (and available in an edition of eight), hung as a montage of ornately framed screens, as if to reinforce this Baroque alter of gaming excess. A satire about the current world economic crisis, Douche Bag City proffers a delicious fantasy: a place where Wall Street grifters are imprisoned with no hope for justice or escape; where mercy and salvation are delivered as punishment and torture like three-square meals. This frenzied spectacle with its bombastic strains (composed by Solmi’s wife, Jennifer) booming in their triumphant lullaby for the extermination of greed, stars the Madoff-esque, Dick Richman, a punny and now-puny little soul who has been banished and made to pay for his atrocities through a constant battle of challenges, or missions, with the barbaric demons who are just as avaricious in their thirst for annihilating the likes of these bloodless financiers, and will defeat him every time. Yes, in Solmi’s world, there is a God.

Douche Bag City, (Zombie Attack) 2010 from bart keijsers koning on Vimeo.

Please plan to catch Federico Solmi this week at VOLTA NY, the cutting-edge satellite art fair, featuring only 92 artists by invitation, which is being held in tandem during the Armory Show, at 7 West 34th Street, 11th floor. www.voltashow.com

Theodore Bouloukos is a New York-based actor and writer, whose performance work is divided equally between independent narrative cinema and myriad projects in video, painting and photography, live-performance and tableaux vivants, which have been exhibited at festivals, museums and galleries around the world, including recent shows at the Venice Biennale and Art Basel Miami. Theo’s films include the Sundance hit, Moonshine and Bulldog in the Whitehouse; and he recently completed two other features in which he stars, Public Hearing and The Evangelist. His credits and additional information can be found on IMDB and Myspace. He can be reached here.

Video courtesy of LMAK projects:

The Douche Bag City Installation, 2009
Color and sound
1.30 min
Edition of 5 (each)
(8 LCD, 8 inches, 8 frame)