| Paul Ramirez Jonas
by Liz Brown
Superman, in an effort to thwart one of Lex Luthor’s
demonic plots, flies counterclockwise around the globe, reversing the Earth’s orbit
and his nemesis’s evildoing. In a much more subtle but no less heroic attempt, Paul
Ramirez Jonas also tries to outwit the clock in his video installation A Longer Day.
Ramirez Jonas is known for his mad-scientist experiments: he has re-created inventions
(using kites equipped with cameras), transformed pages of the dictionary into live fuses,
and meticulously arranged bottles of water that, when set in motion, sound out the
"Battle Hymn of the Republic." A Longer Day is a simpler exercise. Shot
in one day while the artist drove from Brooklyn to Indianapolis in September 1997, the
video records the onset of dusk from the front seat of his car. Ramirez Jonas captured an
extra hour of daylight on his westward journey; his only special effect, the
continuous-play function, maintains the illusion of frozen time.
In P.S.1’s brick-walled hallway, three monitors
display the same ever-moving, never-changing scene—the instantly recognizable vista
of a highway horizon at dusk. The car’s windshield, a super-sized lens spattered with
dirt, catches the day’s fleeting sunshine, sending flares of light glinting across
the glass, right to left and back as the driver continues his steady pace. Mack trucks
emerge from the viewer’s blind spot and pull ahead, magnetized by a distant vanishing
point. Peripheral vision barely absorbs the roadside trees and signs.
Ramirez Jonas employs the ordinary in his quest for lost
time. In a century in which the jet stream, high-speed trains, and fiber optics have
become commonplace, the car seems like a rudimentary apparatus for time travel. But it is
the use of an unsophisticated machine, this do-it-yourself quality, that generates so much
immediacy in A Longer Day. The driver’s seat is familiar to any viewer in the
poignant and ultimately futile race to keep time in check.
Driving offers oblivion; it requires an acute awareness,
and yet something about the fixed motion induces waking hypnosis. In Joan Didion’s Play
It As It Lays, the failed actress Maria Wyeth achieves an internal rhythm on the road:
"She drove it as a riverman runs a river, every day more attuned to its currents, its
deceptions, and just as a riverman feels the pull of the rapids in the lull between
sleeping and waking, so Maria lay at night in the still of Beverly Hills and saw the great
signs soar overhead at seventy miles an hour.…" So, too, the viewer succumbs to
the soporific effects of A Longer Day.
Ramirez Jonas freezes not just one moment but several
simultaneously. The interstate landscape, lit by three different bands of light, is past,
present, and future all in one frame. The foreground is already dark gray with the shadows
of nightfall. The golden limbo of dusk hangs in the middle ground, and farther in the
distance a stripe of bluish white foretells the fading day.
The sun always sets, of course. It did on September 27,
1997, as the driver neared Indianapolis, but A Longer Day still grants a
false victory—or a noble loss. More Sisyphus than Superman in our mission, we imagine
ourselves, foot on the gas pedal, rolling forward around the globe, time forever
suspended.
Liz Brown is the editor of Lit, the literary journal
of the New School MFA in Creative Writing Program. |
