Dr. Strangelove Dr Strangelove

by Kristan Horton
Art Gallery of York University, Toronto, 2007
208 pp., illus. b/w. US $40.00
ISBN: 978-0-921972-48-8.

Reviewed by Martha Patricia Niño
Pontificia Universidad Javeriana

ninom@javeriana.edu.co

Kristan Horton’s book has no text, and it is a collection of black and white photographs [1] that reconstruct — with quotidian objects— still frames of Stanley Kubric’s film Dr. Strangelove, Subtitled How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964). The original film displays harrowing war terms in a comedy that treats the unhealthy fascination with weapons. The movie displays manhood in way that resembles a Cowboy in love with nuclear catastrophe. The photography book has being exhibited at the Art Gallery of York University among other venues.

Horton recreates many of the scenes of the film in a way that sometimes inverts the spatial scale of the film by doing close captioned photographs of a collection of ready-made objects. Pins, old circuitry boards, and screws with small pieces of fabrics become the pilot’s cabin. The long list of objects employed also include silverware, coffee grounds, food wrapping paper, fire extinguishers, felt markers, rice grains, rubbers, cigarette packaging, video tapes, remote controls, light bulb boxes, rulers, umbrellas, toilet paper, tinfoil, razor blades, hamburger wraps, mountain climbing accesories, Polaroid Land cameras, swimming goggles, pills, parts of brushes and cans, coins, keys, rechargeable batteries, twisties, buttons, hand written paper with references to Godzilla, plastic spoons, mirrors, Christmas candy canes, maps, macramé, cardboard, polystyrene packaging foam in peanut shape, bottles of tabasco sauce, RCA video converters, plaster, laser pointers, screws with O-ring , UHU glue, pencil sharpeners, dishes, vanilla nut cream, Haagen Dazs’ Dark Chocolate Ice Cream bars, pool sticks, drills, wood saws, clothespins, plant pots, keyboards, balsa wood, stove burner, paper clips, threads, monitor cables, buckets, clocks, bowls, toolboxes, magnifying glasses, sugarcubes, socks, vinyl disks, rulers, toothpaste, VCR cameras, receipts, popcorn, teapot, and dictionaries.

Some of his compositions have great aesthetic quality while some of them are as minimal as only two pieces of paper. The use of the camera sometimes has a very deep field of view combined with a very close up plane that presents daily objects in an innovative way. Furthermore, It is interesting how pictures of quotidian objects of very small size like workshop debris are used to described scenes of the film of massive size. It is also interesting how sometimes he replaces objects in provocative way such as replacing the miniature book with a bottle of Coca-Cola. Perhaps, because in the movie describes the fate of the world depends on a coca-cola machine. The result is somewhat a new lecture of the film in which the phrase “peace is our profession” — that appears inside a military base— is emphasized. This seems to have a very different approach than the one Kubric achieves through the use of satirical humour and good graphic and cinematic skills.

In Dr. Strangelove Dr. Strangelove, Kristan Horton imitates the irony of the first movie with a softer result and creates a new world for the film by iteration of graphic terms and word games. The connections between Kubrick’s film and Horton’s photographs are done through the cultural appropiation of symbols and even well-known brands. Kristan Horton was born in Canada in 1971. He studied at Ontario College of Art and Design. He has had an international exhibition career since the late 1990’s including Glassbox, Paris; ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany; Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, Finland; and Inter Communications Center, Tokyo, Japan.

The whole book explores the reality of war and its representation and whether it is possible to analyze it or create a critique without aesthetizicing violence. That is perhaps the greatest danger of an artistic proposal such as Dr. Strangelove. It is understandable not to want to blend war and aesthetics in the same work due to political implications but this is also a topic that is often treated in art. Perhaps that is the reason why Horton does not use human characters in his re-interpretation of Kubric’s Dr. Strangelove since he claims to be more concerned with physical space and camera point of view.

Notes:

[1]http://www.themorningnews.org/archives/galleries/dr_strangelove_dr_strangelove/04ds.php.