(above) Live at Red Square!, 2006. Installation detail at Aljira Center for Contemporary Art, Newark, NJ. 2-channel DVD, LCD monitors, color, sound, 8 minutes, unlimited edition 2-sided posters.

Live at Red Square consists of 2 videos fusing concert footage from Paul McCartney's DVD, "In Red Square," (shot in Moscow, 2003) with footage of the Red Square Building, a luxury apartment complex in the Lower East Side. Scrambling the phrase " Live at Red Square!" (adverb, as in immediate) with " Live at Red Square!" (verb, to reside), the project traces the flow of information within a globalized media-scape conflating a "concert for the free" with free-market real estate. A subtext to the project is the aftermath of a modernist communist state and its eventual western co-option and/or adoption.

The Red Square Building was one of several urban development projects in the late 80s that triggered heated racial and class antagonisms between existing and new residents. The property owner hired a design firm known for its blurring of high and low culture to develop a brand for the building. The firm named the complex after the one in Moscow and mounted a displaced statue of Vladimir Lenin on its roof, marketing the apartments to the affluent creative class who were compelled to move to the LES.

Concurrently, Gorbachev initiated his Perestroika which signified the transition of a centrally planned economy to a market economy in the Soviet Union. Prior to the economic reform, all Beatles materials were banned. Thirty years later, Paul McCartney played a concert in the Red Square. He sang to a Moscow crowd, revisiting classic Beatles hits, facing Lenin's Mausoleum.   

The building and concert are symptomatic to our cultural moment- both are surface expressions of shifting economic forces. What interests me, beyond the ironic and linguistic associations, is their double function as markers and sites for identification. The concert is a staged ritual intended to be recorded and broadcasted. It is a retroactive celebration of the free-market in the form of a pop song: the audience is not only invited to listen and participate, they are encouraged to sing along (from repressed memory!).The statue of Lenin placed on the roof also serves as a marker for the radical chic; it is reduced to a mummified and empty sign, a logo.

I am interested in the space between the two video surfaces- the infra-thin distance between the skin of the projections/screens, the metaphoric/linguistic space between the concert and the building. Utilizing a mix of Flash Animation, found/shot footage, and appropriated music, the 2-screen projection/video illustrates a world of flatness, an aphasic display in which one cannot recognize Lenin from Lennon. Informed by Barthes and Vertov: "..this is just not pop music."

By destabilizing the branding logic of " Live w/ live at Red Square" and collapsing two socio/cultural moments onto two adjacent surfaces, the video maps the flow of identification embodied within the monument, totem, and ritual. Short-circuiting the logic of pastiche, the project scrutinizes the role of entertainment and lifestyle consumption in its relationship to the formation of cultural memory and subjectivity.

THANK YOU TO THE TRANSLATORS!: Alex B., Jennifer L., Brian, and Wanda A.