Wednesday, June 23, 1999
Gilligan talks to Descartes, and it's all in the name of art
BY JOHN KIESEWETTER
The Cincinnati Enquirer
Jed Clampett and Granny looked puzzled. Gilligan looked befuddled. The Skipper, too. Not that confusion on Gilligan's Island and The Beverly Hillbillies is anything usual, but this time they're reacting to the philosophical pontifications of Jean-Paul Sartre and Rene Descartes.
Artist Matt Marello has “inserted” himself Forrest Gump-style into the black-and-white TV classics as the famous philosophers for his Sitcoms exhibit at the Contemporary Arts Center.
Let's go to the video tape:
• “My first rule is to never accept anything as true, that I did not know it to be evidently so,” says Mr. Marello as Descartes on the uncharted desert isle.
Replies the Skipper: “Oh boy! You sure have a head on your shoulders!”
• “When someone looks at me, I am conscious of being an object,” says Sartre in the Clampett kitchen.
“Is that a fact?” Jed replies. “Did you hear that Granny?”
“Yeah,” she says, “and I still don't believe it.”
The New York artist also “guest stars” as Immanuel Kant in The Munsters, Georg W. F. Hegel in Bewitched and Friedrich Nietzsche in Hogan's Heroes.
His grainy, computer-generated visit to Stalag 13 results in this exchange:
Nietzsche: “Could it be possible that you have not heard anything of this, that God is dead?”
Col. Klink: “Do you have any proof? Where did you get your information?”
Nietzsche: “God died, and the sinner died with him!”
Col. Klink: “Do you think this will make the headlines?”
The 15-minute video, complete with opening theme songs and laugh tracks, will replay continuously through Aug. 22.
It's the first time all five works have been presented the way the New York artist intended — on an old TV in an exhibit which “looks like somebody's white-trash living room,” says Michelle Padilla, CAC publicist.
Staffers scoured Tristate second-hand shops to find a 1970s RCA console TV, a Roseanne-like old couch and beat-up coffee tables. But they politely declined the artist's request to litter the room with discarded cigarette butts, potato chips and open pop cans.
Sitcoms, like most television, is addictive. Patrons will be fixated on the familiar TV characters, while the intellectual icon becomes the boob on the tube.
The absurdity of all this points out the great gap between literacy, and TV literacy.
Of course, our favorite classic TV characters might disagree.
“That was mumbo-jumbo! There's nothing to it,” declares filthy rich Thurston Howell III, the Gilligan's Island hedonist millionaire, in the video.
“This is ridiculous! You must think I'm some sort of a fool!” says Col. Klink.
And to quote Granny Clampett's suggestion to Sartre: “Take my advice, and you'll forget the whole crazy business.”
Even if you aren't amused by Mr. Marello's musings, at least you'll leave the Contemporary Arts Center humming your favorite TV theme songs.
IF YOU GO
• What: Sitcoms: Video Works by Matt Marello.
• When: Through Aug. 22. Hours: 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Monday-Saturday, noon-5 p.m. Sunday.
• Where: Contemporary Arts Center, downtown.
• Admission: $3.50; $2 seniors and students. Free to members.
• Information: 721-0390.
• Also at the CAC: Atelier van Lieshout, In the Kitchen with Liza Lou and Drawing Into Sculpture: Martin Puryear.
John Kiesewetter is Enquirer TV/radio critic. His column appears Monday and Wednesday. Write: 312 Elm St., Cincinnati 45202; fax: 768-8330.
