In Synecdoche, New York, Caden Cotard is directing a regional theater production of Death of a Salesman. On the day of its opening, when Caden wants to use the toilet in his home, the plumber is working on fixtures in the bathroom. The plumber nods at the toilet and says, “Go ahead, I’ve seen boy parts,” but Caden is too self-conscious. He goes downstairs to his wife Adele’s studio, in the cellar of their house. Caden moves in close and blocks her light with his head as Adele is working, asking “Can I take a piss in your sink?”
The Basement Take
Zipping himself up, he lumbers past his four-year-old daughter, Olive, painting at her own table behind Adele. Throwing another glance at her work Caden says, “It’s gorgeous, Ad.”
Adele asks him how his rehearsal went.
“Awful. We have five hundred and sixty lighting cues. I don’t know why I made it so complicated.”
“It’s what you do,” she answers.
The ninety-second scene is like the micro-portraits Adele paints, a miniature character study of Caden. In the hands of screenwriter/ director Charlie Kaufman, it’s a set piece as compact as the cramped space of the basement itself. We don’t quite regret Caden’s disappointment that Adele will miss his opening tonight, though we share in the unreconciled tensions. We peer through the dingy gloom as Caden creaks away up the basement stairs.
Caden loses us when he leans in to look at the work Adele is painting, and we are drawn in magnetically to a momentary view of her canvas. It’s no larger than a matchbook. Several bright lamps are turned toward it, set at angles that eliminate shadows. Adele wears steampunk-looking jeweler’s-loupe eyeglasses. Her apron is flecked with paint—evidence of time, of commitment. Her slender brushes bear only a few hairs of fine bristle, allowing her to touch in minute detail.
Adele focuses intently but with palpable familiarity in the deep space of the world she creates. She makes deft strokes adding color and shape as though she is tuned to reach and move between dimensions of existence as well as those of scale, into another place altogether. When Caden compliments her glibly then abruptly and predictably returns to the subject of his play, we feel ourselves unwilling to go with him, wanting instead to watch Adele work. Even the camera doesn’t go along with Caden, but stays with us and Adele, wishing him out of the way.
We were Beavis and Butthead go to the Art World. -Walter Robinson, Gallery Beat co-founder.
In the world according Guest of Cindy Sherman, videographer Paul Hasegawa-Overacker’s instrument was autobiography, not a paintbrush. Though he’d moved to New York to be a sculptor, H-O was soon using his woodworking tools to earn a living as a carpenter. In the early 1990s he and two painter friends working at Art in America created Gallery Beat, a scrappy public-access show bringing the New York art world to late-night community television.
Like thousands of other New York public-access programs it was democratic, lo-fi counter-media—part document, part performance, mostly personality.
New York Times art critic Roberta Smith described the gallery parties, “Paul, with his camera on his shoulder, was quite a regular fixture. He had a distinct style—sort of, you know, right in your face.”
Then he met Cindy Sherman
In 1995 Cindy Sherman was a rising star in the pantheon of significant artists Paul H-O had been filming from the fringe. True to form, the first thing he did was put himself in the picture, a precursor to today’s me-and-a-celebrity selfies.
“This is Cindy Sherman,” H-O says, narrating her head shot.
Then he slants the camera at himself, stepping in close to her. “This is Paul H-O,” he continues, in self-congratulation, putting himself center screen, framing Sherman off to his left, “I just wanna, you know--” he says, then with instant ennui, he looks away, dismisses the moment. “My hair is dirty,” he says.
“I need chapstick,” Sherman replies, entirely up on his game.
Several years pass before they meet again.
They are now both divorced, and Paul has been taken to court by his landlord. By this point in his directorial turn, his health isn’t great and he’s “running out of steam,” he tells a friend. Fortunately, Cindy Sherman helps him out by allowing him to make a program about her work process.
Between various interviews they begin to date.
H-O moves in with her; Sherman pays his “tens of thousands of dollars” of debt, nurses him back to health, even gives him a video studio. His new work crashes in oblivion.
Once he becomes Cindy Sherman’s boyfriend, he no longer needs the video camera to put himself in the picture.
He’s no longer the insouciant king’s fool, tolerated—sometimes affectionately—by smart people in an in-crowd only too aware they’re taking themselves a bit seriously. An ironic, perhaps inevitable reversal occurs.
Now that he has access, he is more of an art-world outsider, not less. Because he’s with Cindy Sherman he can be places he hardly knew existed—not as part of the scene but as a “plus one” in it. Hands in his pockets, he stands much closer and much farther away at the same time.
An instrument is not a sleight of hand, it’s a discipline
Both Adele and Paul work through instruments meant to reach beyond limitation. The jeweler’s loupe, the handheld video camera—each promises proximity, a finer focus, the power to choose and frame the subject, to edit what the audience perceives.
Adele’s lenses multiply intimacy, drawing the gaze inward like an object of meditation. A world at the scale of life, rendered at a size we fall into. It opens out again into a world whose boundaries are as indistinct as the receding space where the viewers in their jeweler’s loupes forget themselves to be.
Paul’s video camera, by contrast, collapses intimacy to superficiality. It turns desire to belong into a kind of surveillance. When he lives through the viewfinder, he’s part of the scene he composes; when he lives with Cindy Sherman, he’s excluded from it. Adele’s work keeps expanding outward, while Paul’s world-making contracts to needling.
Adele’s scale grants her freedom because she accepts the limits of perception; she builds within them. Paul’s scale devours him because he confuses access with authorship, longing with doing. Both are artists of replication, but only one has learned that their path isn’t through an enchanted door—it’s through a discipline.
Near the end of Guest of Cindy Sherman, Paul H-O is driving through Los Angeles, having handed his video camera to Sherman in the passenger seat. For the first time, she films the flowing road, the breezy passing palms, the sunlight rippling through glass.
“It’s fun to look through, isn’t it?” he says. “It’s like you walked into this little replication of life.”
It’s an uncanny moment of vision, like the green flash at sunset when light fractures and night arrives.