INFINITU ET CONTINI: REPEATED HISTORIES, REINVENTED RESISTANCES SMACK MELLON MULTIPLEX BROOKLYN, NEW YORK NOVEMBER 17-DECEMBER 30, 2007 Resistance is being choreographed under Brooklyn Bridge. Smack Mellon Multiplex's latest presentation, Infinitu et contini: Repeated Histories, Reinvented Resistances, began with premise that militaristic ideologies have become so entrenched in our culture that they exceed all possible delimitations of war zones. Veritably, we live in and with an army of shadows that can neither be contained nor, in many instances, ever seen. In those few moments when it is visible, it is often elided by an all-encompassing of visual consumption and nationalist desire. An incessant drum roll echoed throughout ample exhibition space, giving an eerily hypnotic and grating rhythm to viewer. This most recent curatorial project by Denise Carvalho referenced Jean-Pierre Melville's 1969 film Army of Shadows in its title, looking to inescapable anxiety, terror, overwhelming pain, and sadness of this narrative about organization and persistence of French Resistance against Nazis during World War II. As a curatorial concept, connoting the fight is a powerful gesture and, beyond any given work in exhibition, it is truly this desire that haunted space. While prescient themes of militarism are connoted and denoted by all works included in show, their position as properly political is ultimately untenable. Featuring fifteen artists, spectacle that was summoned in Debordian sense was not taken to task. In effect, shadow that remained when one left exhibition was clearly not one of hope but of increasing doubt. Gesture was subtext of this entire exhibition, a move that further attests to difficulties of articulating a clear political position in our current moment. It is a common denominator that cleverly, and in some places with effective ambiguity, points to body and its limits as not only one of central preoccupations in beginnings of video art itself, but also body as a means of interrogating how individuals reconcile what we say with what we do or what we think with how we move in world. Ultimately, a clear position was not taken anywhere in this show. This tactic is effective in sparse works such as Michael Paul Britto's Cool Pose #1 (2007), a black-and-white digital video that projects a shadowed figure against wall, gesturing in ways that blend defensive posture with aggressive antagonism. The discernible outline is of a youth in hip-hop attire, connoting hoodlum, who taunts with his hands, and at moments appears to be holding a gun. His stance is a challenge--an invitation to a duel with an enemy that is yet unclear. Perhaps it is viewers themselves. Perhaps enemy is stealthy capitalist system under shifting guises, constantly suspended in its own internal contradictions. This cliche of being cool, along with its stigmas of race and manliness, are also thematic thrust of Matthew Suib's Cocked (2003), a video that is similarly all threat, no action. …