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Come Coyote (Dani and Sheilah ReStack, 2019)
🕑 Added 2019-05-18 22:53:44 +0000 UTC
In 1975, Los Angeles painter Edward Ruscha made one of his definitive works. A "drawing" made with onion juice on paper, it consisted of the piece's title stenciled in block letters, white on light beige: ROMANCE WITH LIQUIDS. I immediately thought of this piece, and this suggestive phrase, while watching Come Coyote, the newest collaborative work by the ReStacks (formerly Dani Leventhal and Sheilah Wilson). A continuation of certain themes introduced in their experimental featurette Strangely Ordinary This Devotion, Come Coyote is a smaller but equally dense video work, and marks a shift in their collaborative art and, one senses, their lives together as a family. Where SOTD to a great extent examined the struggle to come together, the breaking down of protective barriers and the forging of bonds, Come Coyote is, as the title poetically suggests, about both beckoning and ecstatic pleasure.
The video consists of 40 individual shots. Most of them are single takes around a given situation, although the middle of the piece is characterized by a couple of scenes that are formed from multiple shots. Although it would be reductive to try to unify every image and sound in Come Coyote under a handful of themes, there do seem to be two dominant ideas that run intermittently throughout the piece. One is sexuality, in particular Dani and Sheilah's plans to have a baby, and the other is the persistent presence of various works of art. While it may be tempting to try and draw some sort of parallel between the two (creative / generative processes), there's no reason to necessarily do so, as the ReStacks' method is one of concatenation, not comparison.
Come Coyote is very direct in its combination of the erotic with the comedic. In the second shot, we see Sheilah's raised thighs, and soon see Dani inseminating her with a combination of care and phallic assuredness -- nothing "artificial" about this sexual act. The fact that it immediately lapses into inadvertent humor only cements the intimacy of the moment. Later, we see Dani wearing a dildo that the family dog has apparently mistaken for a chew toy. For the viewer, these are bracing moments, because they give us an unusual kind of elation. We see sexuality (queer sexuality in particular) woven into the fabric of daily life, expressed without shame, as a gift that two people in love give to each other. Why is this such a rare sight in the cinema?
The scene with the dog is preceding by a quick clip from Claire Denis' Beau Travail and accompanied by "Simarik," the song by Tarkan that features in that film's opening scene. This is but one of several moments in Come Coyote that reference other artworks or the practices of making or exhibiting art. One shot shows a gallery space where Anthony McCall's Line Describing a Cone is being screened. (The pair accompany the shot with a skittering glitch-techno beat which is later used as the "score" for an intimate act between them.) In one shot, we see figurative wooden sculptures being positioned and counterpoised in relation to one another. In another gallery shot, an abstract film is being projected on the wall and seemed to be slipping in the gate, as the ReStacks discuss what to do about the problem. In one slightly longer rotating shot, a plastic bag of water is suspended from the ceiling, its shape and contents marking it as a sculpture of organic proportions.
As I stated above, Come Coyote is a kind of "romance with liquids." It's not just the fact that semen and (dog) slobber feature prominently in the video's amorous scenarios. In the moment where the women use the sounds from the McCall scene, a coupling that at first looks like cunnilingus is in fact revealed to be Sheilah spitting water into the concave space below Dani's throat. Towards the end of the film, we see Sheilah tromping through the snow kicking a bucket, and then a melting ice chunk being carried in a wagon. And of course, there's the hanging "bag of waters," an artwork vaguely in the idiom of Eva Hesse. By contrast, there is an extended passage in an empty swimming pool, where the lack of fluid creates a grotto for the ReStacks to occupy. (A thick rusty handle rhymes graphically with the dildo from before.)
The linkages are most likely inexhaustible. But what is important is that with Come Coyote, the ReStacks are providing a kind of texture of the everyday, which incorporates attention to the natural world, the basic elements that compose both ourselves and our surroundings. In its form and organization, Come Coyote not only implores us to find continuity where our culture of violence sees only opposition. It also creates an expansive space that is permeated by a sense of home-making, of creating a broader concept of home. The ReStacks are asking us to come on in.
