Bio

The work of Karthik Pandian (b. 1981 Los Angeles) begins with history’s refusal to stay in the past. Like his previous work in film and sculpture, Carousel (2012) takes advantage of the unruliness of time to develop an ecstatic relationship to its material—here, artistic affect across the expanse of a half century: the years 1961 and 2011. Drawing on historical references such as Jean Genet’s The Blacks, Ann-Margret’s “Bill Bailey” screen test, Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz, John Cassavetes’s Shadows, and the “structured improvisations” incubated in the Judson Dance Theater Workshop in the early 1960s, as well as contemporary reimaginings of the era epitomized by the television series Mad Men, Carousel presents fragmentary documentation of “a happening in two takes” staged for the camera by Pandian in an anonymous black-box theater. Carefully styled performers draw upon a wide range of props to play roles such as “Director,” “Boxer,” and “Poet,” improvising actions around a set of parameters put into motion by the rolling of dice. Their costumes reflect Pandian’s interest in the ways in which historically countercultural aesthetics are assimilated into the mainstream. These contemporary “looks” frame his investigation of the performance of creativity and the ever-diminishing interval between the production and consumption of culture.