Alex Prager generates a fiery enthusiasm for his Technicolor photographic tableaux, often of urban crowds staged for maximum visibility. A young blonde woman always seems to appear in these scenes. Her looks towards the camera, or the way it is lit theatrically, usually elevates her above the hustle and bustle. Throughout, this character, by turns anxious, distraught, claustrophobic, exudes an inner crisis that is never quite named. Prager’s work often resembles the beloved blurred area dramaturgy in that it too embodies the disruption of the innocuous and the conventional by unexpected occult forces, rendered as if everything is happening in a generic past. His art candidly recycles a litany of familiar tropes from visual culture: Here, a pastiche of Joel Sternfeld; there, a wink at It’s a crazy, crazy, crazy, crazy world (1963). The artwork also includes the requisite recreation of David Lynch, and more Hitchcock than one can shake a stick at. Prager’s art captivates with its shared cultural vocabulary and stylized simplification.
Yet unlike the work of other artists who fabricate images that explore cinematic language, such as Holly Andres or Stan Douglas, Prager’s output does not maneuver in the provocative arc between photographic reality and fiction (an increasingly alarming binary in our disturbing political life) but remains resolutely disguised, a diorama of mannerisms.
A short film was the centerpiece of Prager’s solo show at Lehmann Maupin. Run, 2022, begins in a wholesome beige Mayberry-type place recognizable to all from our TV lives. A large disco ball is rolled down a sidewalk by a foursome (referred to as “disturbing characters” in the film’s credits) who are known to be nefarious because of their dark sunglasses. As the camera zooms in on the insertion of a coin into a vending machine, the sphere is released, causing chaos and falls (an older woman is thrown into a trash can as she rolls). In the best cartoon tradition, the bullet comically crushes people and knocks over a fire hydrant, inevitably causing an arc of spitting water after the collision. Meanwhile, the film’s heroine, Cecily, is distracted from her task of sending a letter. After leaving the path of the malevolent orb, she discovers an intersection littered with prone and oblivious people, whom she revives. They arise in choreographed unison, each fading instead of bursting into song.
It is not clear if Run is a farce, as its goofy moments are satirical gestures that contrast with the rhetoric of heroic healing at the end of the film. The parody is reserved for the cast of supporting citizens, however: however pleasing their lucid presence, they are a chorus of central cast caricatures, like the cowboy holding a pack of Marlboros – cliches of yesteryear where ” individuality” was a theatrical construct, a holdover from the days of Gilligan’s Island. Perhaps this strategy is used to promote the purpose of the main figure in the work, but she too remains more of a stereotype than an archetype. With the exception of face in the crowd, 2013, a film by Prager that featured intriguing voiceovers and interior monologues for some of its characters, its films are silent. We recalled the importance of writing and dialogue to give depth and complexity to the narrative film.
Prager’s work is dazzling in its ambition, spectacle and commitment – indeed, she is a skilled stylist. This pantomime, however, in its apparent embrace of narrative ambiguity, seems more ill-informed or vague than anything else. Photography can preserve the past, extract a moment from the density of memory that can have a profound effect on the viewer. Yet in Prager’s exhibition here, the past is often nothing more than a display of hyperbolic and superficial production values, full of visual formulas designed to seduce. According to Oscar Wilde, “Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their life a mimicry, their passions a quotation. Unfortunately, this remarkable observation offers too succinct a coda to the work in this exhibition.
