REVIEWS BROCK ENRIGHT
BROCK ENRIGHT
PERRY RUBINSTEIN GALLERY, NEW YORK
20 FEBRUARY – 31 MARCH
The opening of the Brock Enright show at Perry Rubenstein Gallery was a weird, intense af_f air with Enright performing, on a
trash-strewn makeshift plywood stage in fi lthy clothes, holding himself up against a broomstick and sobbing for the duration
of the event. At one point an unseen performer on the opposite side of the wall next to him started forcing fi rst boards and
then logs, plastic toys and trash, including a jar of Skippy peanut butter, through the drywall partition, smashing holes in the
thin plywood veneer and leaving some objects half-emerged and wedged into the wall as others fl ew across the room. The
whole thing was strangely af_f ecting, pathetic, mesmerising and manipulative.
Odder still was the audience’s reaction; blithe indif_f erence, opening night/cocktail-party chit-chat on autopilot. The
objects crashing and fl ying across the room – by virtue of their visceral proximity and air of potential danger – ef_f ectively
heightened awareness of this context (both social and physical), turning the whole thing, perhaps accidentally, into an
overloaded metaphor: a dichotomy of abject tableaux and well-coif_f ed audience, an archetypal ‘haves and have-nots’
opposition, audience as prop. Poverty, abjection, danger and despair are all too obvious as signifi ers of authenticity, but they
didn’t entirely miss their mark. Enright’s world may be juvenile or reprobate but at least it seems real.
Still, as with the videos and objects displayed elsewhere here, it was also deeply fl awed. Revisiting the scene after
the event is disappointing; the spilled, broken, splattered ephemera of the performance look more like a big mess (the anti-
aesthetic as style) than the residue of some real psychic catharsis or voodoo.
The fi lm here, Blackgoat (2007) – too long at 68 minutes – follows, according to the press release’s brief and incoherent
explanation, ‘the myth of the black goat’. At any rate, the casually connected fragments feature recurring characters and
motifs without having much narrative coherence. Stylistically it’s The Blair Witch Project (1999) meets the Brothers Grimm,
with generous overtones of David Lynch and Paul McCarthy, and allusions to Apocalypse Now (1979), The Evil Dead (1981)
and The Shining (1980). The repeated ef_f ects – from portentously gruesome fl ash-cuts and supernatural-point-of-view
chase scenes to the soundtrack of dissonant piano clinks and foreboding drones – are so familiar as clichés and used so
repeatedly that they became monotonously anodyne, almost comforting. An ironic ef_f ect for techniques invented to induce
fear or apprehension.
Blackgoat was at its worst when it seemed at its most narrative, and downright hokey when the actors spoke their lines
or seemed to be acting. At its best, it approached a sort of abstraction and provoked consideration of the light sources and
complementary darkness as characters. Though an improvement upon last year’s Forest, a better fi lm was hiding inside this
one; one that has inspired, unpleasant things to say about horror movies and how we look at them, and what it is about the
grotesque, abject and debased that we fi nd so irresistible. Elwyn Palmerton
Blackgoat, 2007,
high-defi nition digital
video, edition of 3 + 2AP.
Courtesy the artist and
Perry Rubenstein Gallery,
New York
ARTREVIEW one.linthree.linfour.lin
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