ArtSeen
If you lived here you would be dead now
ROEBLING HALL | September 20 - October 15, 2001
Christoph Draeger’s work, which has previously been shown at Roebling Hall in Dystopia/Babel (1998) and in Out of Order (1999), is at once apocalyptic and bitingly sardonic, while remaining carefully orchestrated and politically subtle.
In the videos accompanying Apocalypso Place (1999) and again in Apocalypso Place, Fall Season (2000), a family soap opera unfolds in a shattered house, the roof caved in, the walls crumbling, the furniture broken and upturned. The actors sit on a sofa, happy and incognizant, watching a hilarious mock 24-hour disaster news channel, the wacky commentator getting more and more excited with each devastating tornado, hurricane, earthquake, and flood he reports. The family’s disconcerting, absurdist prattle consists of vacuous slogans mimicked from commercials blasting on television. Eventually the disaster newsman and his crew arrive at the ruined house and elaborately pose the family in a model disaster victim tableau. Installed in the gallery, the set for Apocalypso Place, the video projected against the back and running on monitors, is almost sumptuous, appealing to our fascination with the ruined, with chaos. Draeger’s ironical references to television programs, his use of a hybrid of performance and installation, and his sheer destructiveness, evokes Paul McCarthy’s Bossy Burger and McCarthy and Mike Kelley’s collaboration, Heidi, but whereas McCarthy and Kelley are interested in a messy, Reichean regression to infantility, Draeger’s darkly comic installation is about the circular trance of a society of spectacle and fantasy in which there is no space left for either self or void.
If you lived here you would be dead now (2001) marks a departure from Draeger’s interest in film and television narratives represented by Apocalypso Now and the equally impressive Toutou Tuer Ne (Natural Born Killers) (2000) and Crash (2000). The video for If you lived here you would be dead now is set in a trailer in which a lone woman is systematically destroying her household possessions. There is no dialogue, apart from an occasional expostulation; the focus is on the private, melancholic, yet liberating destruction. Draeger plans on concluding the video by burning the trailer, alluding to the conclusion of Robert Altman’s film version of Sam Shepard’s Fool for Love. Part of the iconography of white trash America, the trailer home is also the ultimate American domestic space, unanchored to the land, mobile, ready to be hitched up and taken out on the road. Draeger’s previous work engages our numb collective addiction to the spectacle of disaster; If you lived here you would be dead now, installed in Roebling Hall with a wrecked trailer park and a projected virtual landscape, is a more intimate work about the celebratory, self-immolating violence that rises from within.
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES

Looking Back, and Forward, as Ma-Yi Celebrates 30 Years of Innovative Work
By Billy McEnteeMAR 2020 | Theater
The Obie and Lucille Lortel award-winning theater company started out in 1989 producing solely the work of Filipino American writers; while that has evolved, so has the theaters definition of what a Ma-Yi play is. And thats a strength: in a company whose ethos and blessings are fortified by its creators, each new playwright brings with themto Ma-Yis numerous productions and artistic programstheir own world and experiences to expand and delight the companys evolving landscape of thought-provoking, envelope-pushing American plays.

Printmaking and Studio Work
DEC 19-JAN 20 | Critics Page
I have difficulty imagining what my work today might be, or look like, if I had never made prints. I take for granted so much of the experience made possible by the printing process that subsequently circled back into my studio, that I find it impossible to sort it all out and remember, let alone understand, what comes from where.
Grace Notes: Pam Tanowitz and Simone Dinnerstein’s New Work for Goldberg Variations
By Rachel StoneFEB 2020 | Dance
The ushers at the New York City premiere of choreographer Pam Tanowitz and pianist Simone Dinnersteins New Work for Goldberg Variations at The Joyce Theater warn me that the program is 75 minutes75 minutes!with no intermission. Its possible they have to tell me this, but either way, the length of Bachs Goldberg Variations (which, apocrypha alleges, he composed in 1741 as an anti-Scheherazade to help an insomniac count finally sleep) intimidates.

Tattfoo Tan: Heal the Man in Order to Heal the Land
By Kristen RacanielloMAY 2019 | ArtSeen
Heal the Man in Order to Heal the Land breaks from Tattfoo Tans past focus on environmental consciousness. Here mental health and self-awareness supersede environment, indicating a new avenue in his exploration of ecological activism.