The cuts in her The Singles 1999-Now videos are almost visible like sharp glass. In effect its like that torture chamber where any movement in one direction means you will be pierced with a spike, which causes you to quickly withdraw in the opposite direction, into another spike, and so on, until you are worn down to a prodded victim of the device. Aïda Ruilova's art isn't exactly like something from the SAW movies, but the abrupt cuts happen fast and repetitively, and blunt your senses which try to follow time in a continual flow. This shifts your senses, and your sense of reason, around in a flurry of reactionary flinches within the tight space between you and the TV monitor. The metal music-inspired edits are more intense because of the perpetually moving, unsteady camera, and its picture limited to blips of body parts or close-ups of interior landscapes. You can't understand this percussive production without work; it's a cool medium in the McLuhanian sense.

Aïda Ruilova, I Have to Stop (still), 2002. Single-channel video. Courtesy of the artist and Salon 94, New York.

The first attempt to watch what's going on leaves you with a sense of unspecified panic or nonsense- a woman with a bruised face (Ruilova) rocks against a mirror as she rhythmically shouts "beat-ba-beat..." in "Beat & Perv" (1999). In "You're Pretty" a half-naked man whimpers in a concrete garage with an amp. Before having time to reflect on these upsetting provocations, while other pieces comprising The Singles cut in and out on staggered monitors like a mad peek-a-boo game, the first one you tried comes on again. You get only slightly further this time in your efforts to ascertain the troubled emotions of the actors. The sounds of scratching vinyl against cement, grating, jiggling, and banging are irritating while being something constant to grasp on to. There is some truth, after all, to the work intentionally "hurting" or more accurately, distancing its viewer. Implicating the viewer in such a physical way, jerking between multiple screens, scenarios and audio-visual cues, the videos seem to want something. The structure itself resembles the vampires and torturess' of later works. It also summons up the spirit and social undertones of early performance work of the 70's such as Vito Acconci's Seedbed, or other pieces eliciting something along the lines of a persecuted reaction in viewers. These political pieces were sometimes meant to provoke unrest, self-awareness and subsequent action. But in Ruilova's time, where chaos is attributable to familiar youth cultures of noise and punk habits, the spirit of unrest and physical agitation is perhaps more inviting, or even liberating for some.

Aïda Ruilova, You're Pretty (still), 1999. Single-channel video. Courtesy of the artist and Salon 94, New York.

The videos source the cinematic styles of montage and experimental films, the objective framing devices and body-as-subject of early video and performance art, and rock music. Her melding of these styles is her own trope, but familiar in its resulting aura of anxiety, ennui and anger. This reading is reinforced by the connection between the blast-beat, syncopated and intercut form- and the content of the pieces. In "Oh No," "Do it," "The stun," "Beat & Perv," "Hey," "I have to stop," "Come here," "Almost," and "You're Pretty," each stages a threesome between individual, prison and fixation or object as surrogate lover. They echo the synopsis for a Jean Rollin (see below) film where victims fall prey to a social experiment or environmental hazard: "their thoughts, memories and emotions are slowly eaten away by disease, turning them into sad, helpless creatures." 1 Close-ups of the body show quick segments of limp, pale limbs, which suggest bodies drained of life, held up or bounced around mechanically by unseen animators. Otherwise the young, bed-haired, glamorized protagonists are in fight-or-flight mode, or cradling electric musical instruments like rhesus monkeys and their chicken wire mothers. Sadly and somewhat comically, it seems that a technocratic culture- amps, fake nails, a desolate apartment, rock bands and iconography aren't ersatz for love or belonging. These cultural manifestations as bedfellows seem to worsen the pain and mental disquiet of a larger, prevalent but unmentioned cause. A musician raised in the Tampa "Death Metal" scene herself, Ruilova treats contemporary Goth culture in all its standardized signs and codes as a social response to banal domestic enclosures and other dreary dead ends.

Aïda Ruilova, Come Here (still), 2002.. Single-channel video. Courtesy of the artist and Salon 94, New York.

Exploring the Gothic themes in a more atmospheric, fictional and filmic way, her longer videos "Tuning" (2001), "Untitled" (2002), "life like" (2006), and "Lulu" (2007) develop scenes of castle and apartment interiors, cemeteries, seascapes and beaches that become dramatic "characters" as in the B movies of French film auteur Jean Rollin. Rollin's sexploitation Vampire films specialize in all things sex and death where to elaborate would mean listing off foreseeable Gothic revival imagery such as red sashes, candles, and daggers. In Ruilova's "life like" as well, she unleashes a repertory of affective imagery stripped down from Rollin's footage and her own camera work, through the same distancing edits and repetition as in The Singles. Unlike Rollin's preference for atmosphere under the guise of narrative coherence, life like is unabashedly a collage work of favored symbols and themes. The pairing down of this genre to a saturated aesthetic and its occult rituals seems like an un-ironic testament to the allure of "emo" in its popular inception and the late 18th century gothic literature in a more academic sense. The graveyard girl, eroticized, vulnerable and in touch with magic, the cosmos and spirits is at the forefront of this utopia.

In "life like" a young woman desires to act in one of these roles, rather than unwillingly being paid to for the benefits of male fantasy- as she mourns over the supposedly dead body of Jean Rollin. The edits chop up a sequence of her touching the rough skin of his face and trying to revive him through seduction, expanding the sense of time in which she is exhaustively doing this by splitting up and repeating the real-time footage. The line between art and life is erased as she visits the sites where Rollin's films were made- doing strange and witchy things to imagine herself as a reified character in one of his films. Perhaps Ruilova similarly mourns the death of romantic cinema or true superstition, as she self-awaredly revives aspects of seduction and the symbolism of the natural and metaphysical worlds, while disclosing them as artful escape implicated in a fully social context.

1 www.shockingimages.com/rollin/intro.html

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Walter Phillips Gallery
Aïda Ruilova