The following is from 312 No. 8, October 2005 [Download Publication in .PDF format]:

Play: Andrew Bucksbarg & Julie Adler’s Chair

Most of my childhood was spent on playgrounds. Not the sterile green spaces dreamt up by well-meaning planners and architects, but the derelict lots and abandoned railway cars of my rural Canadian youth. These ‘playgrounds’ were usually covered in fractured concrete or asphalt ablaze with tall wildflowers reclaiming and reseeding a lot no longer tended to by landowners. To many, these places are the epitome of decline and blight, but, as a child, they were among the few places free of the constraining hands of adults. On these derelict lots, there were no parents worried about injuries, no grocers to shoo you off the front walk. There, the rules were implied by the space, not enforced by rigid social controls. They were places a child could actually play.

While watching Andrew Bucksbarg & Julie Adler’s Chair, I was reminded of this unfettered childhood play. Set in a deteriorating office building in downtown Los Angeles, Chair initially presents sparse images of crumbling interiors. In Bucksbarg’s atmospheric shots, I catch glimpses of computer monitors (still displaying screensavers), closing elevator doors, fluorescent lights flickering, and a mysterious omnipresent floating vapour. It’s as though the workers vanished in the midst of a wet and grimy office keg party only a short time ago. Accompanying this visual dilapidation, Bucksbarg’s electronic soundtrack trips forward like a herky-jerky robotic janitor trapped in a boiler room.

Just when it seems Chair is a video about an empty and forgotten space, a woman in a highly unusual ‘wheelchair’ scuttles past the end of a hallway. The chair is on its back, small wheels lifting it off the ground. The woman, performance artist Julie Adler, straddles the chair like a human crab, pushing with her arms against the floor to propel the chair forwards, her hampered mobility complementing the surrounding decay. This is an environment where mysterious vapours move easily, but a person cannot.

Despite the overhanging gloom of isolation and decay, Bucksbarg and Adler manage to convey a sense of play, the kind that accompanies an activity like urban exploration. Society’s unseen and usually restricted spaces—taboo monuments to civilization not doctored to plastic perfection—can be places to feel out, rather than ignore or avoid. In a statement on Infiltration, a website for the Toronto-based ‘zine of the same name, explorer Ninjalicious writes: “Too many of us think the only things worth looking at in our cities and towns are those safe and sanitized attractions that require an admission fee. It’s no wonder people feel unfulfilled as they shuffle through the maze of velvet ropes on their way out through the gift shop” (www.infiltration.org/ethics-nodisclaimer.html). Becauses places like the one in Chair usually remain behind closed—but not always guarded—doors, they can offer an unedited glimpse of society not allowed within secured ‘open door’ environments. Derelict spaces suggest rules to play by without inhibiting play.

With technology, humans extend themselves into and reflect their niche. Adler’s office chair-wheelchair does just that—it extends her body with simple technology, but also reflects the pervasive decay. She can roll about, but with awkward limitations. Adler’s wheelchair performance, edited into a loose narrative context by Bucksbarg, suggests the human fascination with and imprisonment by technology. Technology extends the body’s capabililties, but just as often is little more than an accessory to be abandoned when the latest ‘development’ arrives promising to be better, more effective. As the offices in Chair indicate, contemporary society does not practice maintenance nearly as well as consumption. Abandoned computers, desks, chairs, sinks, etc. sit silently as Adler shuffles past, caretaker to a white-collar mausoleum. Society’s most telling monuments are left behind unintentionally. The workers and the company are gone, leaving behind the refuse of their operations, but Bucksbarg and Adler have arrived to investigate, to see, to feel out, and to play.
Mark Prier.