F-Scale (a collaboration between Sarah Ross and Steven Lam)
2003-04
Images: F-scale, 2003-4. 4-channel video, monitor, DVD, 15 minutes looped, color, sound. (clockwise): Installation detail of two monitors, (Parents panning) and (Cosby: Advantage Mart), video still of Cosby Show: Advantage Mart, video still of Maxine Quirk (Gray Panther), video still of Classroom Pink Floyd, video still of Panning Pictures.
The F-scale project ('f-scale" is derived from a social experiment test Adorno developed which attempted to quantify one's 'fascistic character') is an exploration of activism within art. Four looped monitors consist of (far left) an episode of the Cosby Show, (middle left) an interview with a Gray Panther, (middle right) a panning shot of pictures, (right) a classroom of students singing karaoke to Pink Floyd's "Another Brick in the Wall." The project attempts to locate where and how political agency and identification becomes reproduced and dispersed through the domestic, personal, to institutional.
On one screen is a looped clip of an appropriated Cosby episode. On this episode, the friends of the Huxtables are trying to plan a protest against a grocery store conglomerate. We reenunciated the script (ala Situationist filmmaker Rene Vienet). Taking the original script, we redubbed it with our voices and took turns reciting "what was already there." The displacement of sound from image, the degendering of the bodies, and the lag of dubbing contribute to a generational undoing of race, representation employed by Cosby and others. Perhaps it is less about blackness and more about whiteness, and the limitations of that series in failing "to make whiteness strange."
On the other, a panning shot of picture with actual family relatives juxtaposed with fabricated ones include an audio track of a Socratic dialog my collaborator and I wrote-- a text flooded with critiques of consumer culture, but we had our parents read the text in an attempt to displace our authorship, our politicized positions. The video is a tribute to Yvonne Rainer's Journeys From Berlin/1971 and is also about political proximity--closeness and farness. You have the most intimate relationship with your parents but when it comes to sharing a political viewpoint one feels distance.
Another documents a classroom intervention in which the collaboration asked 400 students to participate in an impromptu Karaoke session of Pink Floyd from memory. The lack of enthusiasm, social embarrassment, and hesitant singing is then grafted onto the text of the video, short circuiting a historical emblematic marker of anti-establishment youth culture.
The fourth and last chapter of the F-scale project is an experimental interview with Gray Panther Maxine Quirk. Flickers of black accompany Quirk who discusses the origin of the Gray Panthers (it stemmed from Maggie Kuhn watching the Black Panthers on TV).