MICAH STANSELL

The Water and The Blood

Essay by Dr. Gregory Zinman

At the end of Micah Stansell’s video installation, The Water and the Blood, five figures emerge from murky, watery depths in slow motion, their faces huge, wet, and staring straight ahead, surrounding the viewer. Their inscrutable expressions are accompanied (in one of the piece’s two narration tracks) by the sound of a man reading the words of Gertrude Stein: "Sometime there will be an orderly history of every one who ever was or is or will be living, every creature. This is then a beginning of the way of knowing everything in everyone, of knowing the complete history of each one who ever is or was or will be living." To be sure, "knowing everything in everyone" is a tall order — an impossible, utopian, one — and attempting to place every person’s story within an "orderly history" requires returning to those stories again and again, in order to fill in the gaps, to burrow deeper into the details of their individual lives, and to contextualize and re-contextualize those lives within the larger communities in which they lived.

This continual retracing, this idea of an eternal return, pervades The Water and the Blood. As installed in the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, Stansell’s piece is an eight-screen display set to two independent narrations, both of which intertwine with an oneiric score by Stansell and Ryan Huff, comprised of languorous volume swells from a pedal steel guitar, gauzy synthesizer washes, and plangent single-note piano melodies. Visitors can choose one soundtrack or the other. The first features monologues from the piece’s characters: a young boy and girl at play in Georgia forests and fields, their rancher father, a young woman who works at a dry cleaner, and a grizzled older man involved in the sale of cattle. There is a story here, but one told on the periphery of an event. Something happened in the past, probably something bad, involving the boy and girl’s father, and that older man. The older man might have taken the cattle, either by physical force or economic strong-arming. But it might have been something else. The inciting incident that triggers this memory is left unshown, unsaid. What we are left with is, in the words of one nameless narrator, "a cracked episode," a memory of the rural South, told from myriad vantage points.

The reordering of memory is the basis of The Water and the Blood’s rhythms and repetitions. It begins with images of amniotic, ochre-colored fluid of Milledgeville, Georgia’s Lake Sinclair, and ends with those head-on portraits of the film’s characters slowly rising from a black pool, a glacial array of baptismal recurrence. In between these events, we see flitting passages of a group of young people’s day and night at the lake, first in a canoe, later bobbing in darkness, illuminated by sparklers; the young rancher and his truck; his family at home; the young woman at her job, then on a bike, her hair flowing in the wind, mirrored on another screen by the hair of the girl riding in the back of her father’s pickup; the older man at a cattle auction, and an amateur wrestling match.

That other, omniscient, narration provides an aphoristic and elliptical commentary that glances off of the actions onscreen, woven together from unattributed snippets of Thoreau, Stein, poet John Harkey, and the psychoanalytic theorist D.W. Winnicott. The latter provides a particularly interesting touchstone for The Water and the Blood. Winnicott wrote about the concept of play in both children and adults, and posited the idea of a “transitional object" that, to a child, is both real and imagined at the same time, like a doll. Memories are also transitional objects, vacillating past and present, the real and the reconstructed, linearly reordered to make sense of a sprawl of events. The soundtrack tells us of the " pleasures of untangling" a stubborn knot, but there is also a solemnity to Stansell’s work, one that counters notions of play with those of struggle — most notably at the symbolically charged wrestling match, which features a rendition of national anthem, the image of an American flag, and a contestant with a version of the Confederate flag on his costume. The grappling depicted on the screens stands metaphorically for the ongoing conflicts between humans, between nations, and within societies. Stansell is savvy enough to acknowledge that a part of human nature enjoys watching or partaking in these conflicts, but also shows us that the pain inflicted often lingers well beyond the moment of battle.

Stansell’s piece also carries a more specifically Christian reading of this idea of return. Its title is a reference to the
hymn, Rock of Ages: "Rock of Ages, cleft for me / Let me hide myself in Thee / Let the water and the blood / From
Thy wounded side which flowed, / Be of sin the double cure / Save from wrath and make me pure." The "double cure" provided by Jesus’ divine-yet-corporeal fluids cleanse both the consequence of, and desire to sin. Stansell, the son of missionaries, complicates this reading by presenting us with the desire to wash away the sins of the past, while at the same time demonstrating how sins persist in both memory and history. These sins recur again and again in—to quote one of the piece’s aesthetic influences, Terrence Malick — the conflict of nature and grace, and Stansell shows how the sins of the past continue to haunt the present.

This recurrence is echoed by the mechanical nature of the installation itself, which perpetually ends and begins again, running on a loop in the gallery space. In fact, the idea of the return is inherently cinematic. Think of the reels that feed and reclaim the film from a projector, or the small loops that comprised some of the earliest moving images at the turn of the last century. Furthermore, re-viewing is an inherent in the cinematic process. One is always watching the past in the present — always watching in another time, another place, from where the image was originally composed and recorded.

The artist also revels in filmic moves that accentuate the presence and play of the camera, seemingly delighting in the lens flares which send geometric arrays of color across the screens, repeatedly refocusing shots to direct our attention to teacups and facial wrinkles. At times Stansell’s peripatetic camera rests to compose a nearly still portrait, such as the handsome rancher at dusk outside his house. These moments bring to mind Dorothea Lange’s compositions of Dust Bowl-era sharecroppers and William Eggleston’s depictions of the Southern countryside, particularly the photographer’s ability to impart a sense of beauty to the mundane. Stansell layers in cinematic references as well, framing his characters in low-angled Spielberg shots that imbue a sense of awe to the projected figures, making them even larger than they already appear onscreen. The enigmatic, autobiographical documentary impulse of fellow Southern filmmaker Ross McElwee is seen here, as is the spiritually tinged, water-based imagery of video artist Bill Viola. Hints of the lyrical filmic avant-garde occur in Stanstell’s handheld refocusing of objects and faces, bringing to mind works by Stan Brakhage, while his long following camera moves recall the long leftward pan of a fence and wildflowers in Bruce Baillie’s All My Life: hinting at something that never comes, setting up anticipation, and eliding conventional structure.

And so the past of The Water and the Blood is at once hopelessly lost and always present. We can’t grasp the enormity of everything that happened, so we have bits and pieces that spur us to remember again. As with the dry cleaner customers who leave their clothes behind, "a piece of them, hanging around," we have parts, but not the whole. Yet many of the images Stansell gathers — the wrestling match, the cattle auction — were not staged for the filmmaker: entertainment and commerce continue, injustice occurs, childhood passes into adulthood, and those fields and forests and lakes remain (for now). For Stansell, facing the immensity of the eternal return, which Nietzsche called "the heaviest weight," one could bear, doesn’t mean abdicating morality in the face of the endless and seemingly pointless repetition of the same, but rather means trying to look again, with compassion, with empathy towards different perspectives — to work toward knowing everything in everyone — and to try to tell the stories anew.