Filmmaker and artist James N. Kienitz Wilkins is in the unlikely but well-deserved position of having two retrospectives of his work running concurrently below 14th street: One at Metrograph and another at Anthology Film Archive. I saw two of his at Metrograph in early August, Special Features (2014) and Mediums (2017). Special Features is a twelve-minute retelling of a dream, in which the three actors playing the same protagonist read their lines from a teleprompter for the first time. The second, Mediums, is comparatively high-concept: It is a medium-length movie (forty minutes) with a medium-sized cast (six) made entirely from medium-length shots (waist-up).
Like Kienitz Wilkins’s other work, this one is a thoughtful send-up of white-collar work and the deformities of language and behavior it inflicts. One realizes that in less skilled hands the same material would be extremely annoying. Approximately half of the movie is scripted with original writing, while the balance is drawn from sources like a Dunkin’ Donuts franchise charter, a Volkswagen Passat repair manual, and poetry about fatherhood gleaned from a defunct personal website (www.championofbirds.com). It’s hilarious because it exposes the otherworldly substrate of second-hand language that structures all kinds of ordinary activity: Here, three conversations among a few people at jury duty. The best part? Both films include T-Pain’s Up Down as their only music.
I joined a few friends at the Nova Exhibition in the Financial District in June. There’s a skewed sense of triumphalism in the choice of location: 23 Wall Street, the J.P. Morgan headquarters until a few years ago, was the target of a political bombing in the 1920s. Its owners refused to make repairs and instead left the damage visible as a monument. Its full name is actually October 7th 6:29 AM/The Day Music Stood Still: The Nova Music Festival Exhibition, which approximates the full name of the festival: Tribe of Nova Presents Supernova: Universo Paralello World Tour Israel Edition. The exhibit began in Tel Aviv, but its two-month run in New York drew, by its own account, 110,000 visitors.
We still don’t know everything that happened. Repeating what we do know never degrades a sense of astonishment: A trance music festival was held about three miles from Gaza, beginning on October 6th. Around sunrise on the second day, fighters including members of the al-Qassam Brigades attacked the festival during their invasion of Israel.
It isn’t possible to represent the relationship of the festival to its exhibition easily. It does not do what one imagines it will, by comparison with other institutions for remembrance. At a minimum, memorials are ambitious: They exhort you to imagine things otherwise, or assert a belief, or, most broadly, engage a sense of historical proportion. Even the Oculus, which is experienced primarily as a mall, makes a claim about the kind of response we should have to 9/11 simply because it is close to the World Trade Center memorial. I approached the Nova exhibition expecting to have my views about the events at the festival unsettled. It seemed likely that I would feel sad, or even guilty. That didn’t happen.
The exhibition was not a memorial, a museum, or a monument. Its main feature is an endless, undifferentiated pile of real objects from the festival, tents and camping chairs and clothing and trash, organized in a way that was realistic but that no one would suppose was facsimile. There are fake trees. Sticks of generic incense burn on the floor and anywhere else they will stand up, and this smoke combines with the even more cloying smell of smoke machines. There is something familiar that uses the same technologies as the Nova exhibition: anxiogenic lighting, sudden noises, small spaces, representations chosen purely for their potential to frighten, narrative-as-omission. The Nova exhibition is a haunted house.
Every appeal it made was marred by solecism or vulgarity. I was truly frustrated and upset by this; I think it is inhumane. There was nothing there to identify who this water bottle belonged to, or who took the video on the iPad outside the tent or what it showed, or why a picture of this person’s face was displayed on the inside of a real Porta-Potty taken from the festival grounds.
The large central exhibition room is dominated in the center by several large white sheets of fabric stretching to the ceiling, backed by a projector screen showing the Nova logo. At the edges of the room are several of the famous burned-up cars. There is oppressively loud, inane trance music. A quarter of the room is taken up by a restaging of the festival’s bar, with a menu and half-full bottles of liquor. Some of the bottles had stickers of victims’ faces pasted over the original labels.
The fake bar was right next to tables full of Nova attendees’ belongings, hundreds of pieces of clothing available to examine and touch. Maybe it is an attempt at activating the discourse of actual memorials, like the wall of shoes at the Holocaust Museum in D.C., or the resemblance of the windowless exhibition space to the museum under Berlin’s field of stelae. Smaller objects were collected in plastic bags mounded on the tables. I picked up a bag, containing only a Casio watch identical to the one I wear, shakily labelled in Sharpie with the English word “terrorist.”
Apart from two videos—one of the famous bulldozer collapsing the border fence, and another of a man walking in an empty field who announces his kunya and his militant group affiliation—the plastic bag was the closest the otherwise textless exhibition came to acknowledging with words that there were histories, individual and collective, preceding what happened at the trance festival. You exit into a large room with a cafe and a gift shop, but otherwise dominated by an enormous neon sign reading “We will dance again.”
A week earlier I’d been in D.C. for another national protest organized by the Shut It Down for Palestine Coalition. We woke up to news of the Nuseirat massacre, in which the IDF, with U.S. assistance, killed nearly three hundred Palestinians in a refugee camp in an attempt to recover captives taken from the Nova festival. Biden had claimed for months that an attack on Rafah would trigger the end of arms shipments to Israel, but his administration failed to resist the IDF’s air assault on the so-called “safe zone” in Gaza’s south. We would be the red line: Thousands of activists and organizers, most of us dressed in red, surrounded the White House carrying a red cloth banner. We marched in a circle around the tall, metal mesh fences erected after January 6th, which occluded the White House just enough to make it not worth looking at. Shortly after we left D.C. there was a protest at the Nova exhibit in New York, which would be censured by Kathy Hochul, Eric Adams, and Israel’s Twitter account.
I thought, anxiously, of going to see where Aaron Bushnell died. Instead I followed my friends and the enormous red banner to a nearby lawn, where at the organizers’ direction we coiled it into a surprisingly regular wave on the grass. What happened next was a people’s court trial of Israel, staging the same case that was currently ongoing at the ICJ and the one everyone present decried as compromised and inadequate. We listened to hours of horrifying testimony collected from people in Palestine, in which a narrative could begin “I am the only surviving member of my family,” and, impossibly, become worse. That day, the Lancet released a study proposing a revised death toll of more than 180,000. Dispersing with everyone else, we walked to the Watergate Hotel and went to its bar named after a line from Bertolt Brecht’s Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. A month later, Netanyahu would address Congress and break his own record for ovations received: Seventy-nine.