John Smith, The Girl Chewing Gum, 1976, video still. Courtesy of the artist.

The East London artist and filmmaker has developed quite a following – one of his earliest works, The Girl Chewing Gum (1976), is a simple, yet brilliant narrative film that has spawned a host of online imitations and tributes. Smith’s version shows a street corner in Dalston, where an omnipresent voice directs the characters on camera – however it very quickly becomes apparent that the voice-over is postscripted, thereby disrupting the chain of cause and effect, and conflating fact and fiction. Laced with his notorious dry wit and anecdotal eccentricities, Smith destabilises the documentary form through his narration, driving our perception of the events through language, and exposing the conditions which determine how we read an image. The humour implicit in Smith’s films is derived from the unapologetic juxtaposition of what we know, and what he tells us – the pronounced gaps between the two rendered as sarcasm.

The assortment of homages and bootlegged versions of The Girl Chewing Gum which Smith has compiled over the years are included here within the exhibition, and inspired the artist to revisit the video himself – if everyone else could remake the video, why shouldn’t Smith do the same? Returning to the same street corner he filmed 35 years earlier, Smith traced his earlier movements to create The Man Phoning Mum (1976/2011). Layering the new footage directly on top of the original, Smith blurs the past and present creating a jarring vision of how drastically things have changed, and yet, how some things still remain the same.

John Smith, The Man Phoning Mum, 1976/2011, video still. Courtesy of the artist and PEER, London. Photo: Chris Dorley-Brown.

These individuals featured in Smith’s films – the girl with her gum, the man on the phone – become unsuspecting subjects in the narrative construction, much like the recent object of Smith’s fascination…

John Smith, unusual Red cardigan, lightbox text. Courtesy of the artist and PEER, London.

Smith’s Sherlockian investigation began by trying to piece together digital clues and culminated in bidding, winning and receiving various items from serenporfor’s eBay collection. Now in the gallery,  juxtaposed with the girl chewing gum, they are relics of an individual unaware that their discarded possessions have been recuperated as art. What can they tell us about serenpofor? What can we learn about an individual through that which they toss away? I do believe that Smith’s investigation into this particular case is far from over…

John Smith, unusual Red cardigan, installation view at PEER, London, 2011. Photo: Chris Dorley-Brown.

However, let this be a lesson leaned – when you enter the digital world, you forfeit a certain level of control. The amount of information that can be gleaned online is alarming. But then again, your image can be co-opted simply when walking down the street. Quite literally, there is nowhere to hide. I wonder what serenpofor would think if she googled herself?

John Smith, The Girl Chewing Gum. Still from film.

John Smith‘s 1976 The Girl Chewing Gum is a black and white film depicting the everyday life of a London street.  At first, the authority of the voiceover narration seems like instructions given by a film director, but over the video’s twelve minutes the narration devolves into mere description and then confusion.  What begins as a commanding presence—masterful instructions given by the voice just as each action is about to unfold—breaks down into a struggle to keep up with the crowded scene.  Finally, the view switches completely to a slow pan over English countryside, even as the traffic noise from the original scene continues.  This is an incredibly simple gesture that creates poignancy and depth.  As understanding dawns that the narrator is not, in fact, directing the actions on screen, the viewer’s recognition shifts.  What starts as the audio of a man who directs his world turns into a man desperate to control his environment (or at least maintain the illusion of doing so), until finally there is a psychic (and literal) break with the scene altogether.

Yemenwed, Episode 3. Still from video.

Smith’s thirty-year-old work still holds up conceptually, but it’s anyone’s guess how the other videos in the exhibition will fare over time.  Charles Atlas‘s Tornado Warning (2008) is a five-channel installation of strong technical proficiency.  It is the only video-based work in the building that addresses its physical space by means of a built environment and moving lights; unfortunately the projections look an awful lot like a cross between Op art and the code-drenched computer screens from The Matrix.  In another room is artist group Yemenwed‘s Episode 3, a combination of animation, painting, sculpture, and live-action video.  The visuals are cleverly done, but if there is a narrative to the meanderings of the main character, who ambles through a constructed and animated space with some kind of hobbles/casts on her legs, it is not apparent.

Christopher Miner, The Safest Place. Still from video.

Christopher Miner‘s The Safest Place features a man revolving slowly in the zero-gravity atmosphere of a space capsule.  His knees are drawn up to his chest and his arms are wrapped around his knees.  The soundtrack of a man’s voice singing is unaccompanied, but there is a heavy reverb/echo on the voice and it’s impossible to make out the words.  That’s too bad, as upon reading the exhibition booklet one learns that they comprise the lines of a modest hymn.  Part of the artistry behind The Girl Chewing Gum is that Smith sets up a very simple system and then disrupts it; Miner’s video has the same kind of confident simplicity overall, but in its present state allows no room for a secondary layer of meaning to come into play.  Clearer audio might have provided that.

Jessica Jackson Hutchins, Piano Print (2010). Wood cut print, approximately 70 x 60 inches.

Two of the rooms on the second floor contain videos as part of larger installations of more traditional visual art.  Jessica Jackson Hutchins‘s Children of the Sunshine is visually spare and elegant.  Four prints, two of which are taken from her family piano, hang on the walls.  In the center of the room is the actual baby grand: carved, scarred and careworn.  These evocative objects would be enough: the prints are beautiful, with deep black ink providing a backdrop for smeary colors and bulbous papier-mâché protrusions or large burn holes.  The piano—small, dirty, pitted with childish carvings—stands as emblem of home, family, and a middle-class childhood.  Unfortunately, the poetry of the room is completely upset by the cacophonous video on the flatscreen monitor in one corner.  In it, Hutchins’s family of singer-musicians chants a nearly atonal chorus of “we are children of the sunshine, we are children of the sunshine” over and over while banging, blowing, or plonking on various instruments.  I regret that this teeth-gritting and superfluous aural torture not only drove me out of the room, but also continues to haunt me as I write this.

The next room—blissfully quiet, but still prickly—is Storm Tharp‘s High House, an assemblage of objects that toes an uneasy line between studio and gallery. There are hand-labeled jars of paint and plants lining the windowsill; there are color-field canvases hung in a grid, and a fan that blows two silk scarves appliquéd with NOT THE LAST TIME.  A video displays a curtain billowing in the frame of a sliding-glass door.  In the middle of the room, a pristine white staircase rises above head height and leads nowhere.  Tharp has seen many successes in the last few years, including the Whitney Biennial, and this room feels like a web of clues that provide a glimpse into the mental state of an artist on the edge of something really big.  The vibe here is uncertainty; the ambiguity of being poised in a position of near-flight (up the white stairs, out the breezy video doorway), choosing between public glory and private life.