RAIR | 2007-08

Politzer, David | Houston, Tx

 David Politzer makes videos and photographs about the nexus between consumer technology, nature and social interactions. He was born in Washington, DC, and earned an MFA from Syracuse University. His solo exhibitions include those at the Museum of Northern Arizona, Artspace in North Carolina, Artspace in Connecticut, Real Art Ways in Connecticut, Lawndale Art Center in Texas, Houston Center for Photography, Galveston Art Center and Western Georgia University in Carrollton. David was an artist-in-residence at Yaddo in New York, Djerassi Resident Artists Program in California, the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in Maine, Artspace in North Carolina and the Museum of Northern Arizona. He lives in Houston, Texas, with his wife and daughter. He is associate professor of photography and digital media at the University of Houston.

www.davideology.com

David Politzer's video works are frankly intimate, straightforward, and at times hilarious.  The vagaries of contemporary social interaction and the overlooked questions that they raise form the point of departure for this work.  Politzer works with images of himself speaking on a monitor that he may or may not interact with. The talking head within the video acts like an alter ego for the artist with a kind of innocent and detached irony.  Politzer poses himself as an "every man", navigating the do's and don'ts of the world he finds himself adrift within.

With the installation piece Hanging Baggage, Politzer creates two alter egos that duel for our attention on opposing outdated or obsolete television sets suspended by a series of pulleys and ropes.  Under obvious gravitational stress, the two tubes examine duel stains in American popular culture.  A maudlin loser confessing all in a "reality" television styled piece competes with a self-help, get-rich-quick, esteem building huckster's infomercial who serves as his doppelganger.  Nearly unrecognizably the same person, the viewer is left to wonder if the competing personalities represent a progression over time or merely two sides of America's neurotic obsession with success, and an almost prurient interest in the mundane minutiae of personal failure.

In Rio Macho Politzer tackles the manly virtues associated with the American West while examining modern society's inability to differentiate between the actual historical West and the long list of Hollywood Westerns that have shaped the myth.  In an off-beat variation of the "buddy picture", Politzer and his video partner visit the scenic splendors of Monument Valley, riff on John Ford and John Wayne films, reflect on horsemanship, and finally share a duet around the old campfire.

Politzer manages to make video art that is both engaging and substantive without resorting to operatic excess, tedium, rarefied intellectualism or the post-modern polemics that often plague the medium.  He happily acknowledges the connection between movies, television and video.  He is not interested in distancing himself from videos popular predecessors, but rather in using video as a window within a window, to reveal these popular mediums inherent weaknesses and our own addiction to them.

Stephen Fleming, 2008

Roswell Museum and Art Center

Rair exhibition •  David Politzer • March 28 - May 9, 2008