Movie Title
Vexation Island
Artist/Director
Year
1997
Country
USA
Added
Genre
Description
Vexation Island made Graham’s rep when it premiered at the 1997 Venice Biennale, and it fits most neatly into his corpus of somnolence. It provides yet another glimpse of the artist at rest, here dressed like an 18th-century buccaneer. On a desert island, lying beneath a palm tree, presumably knocked out (a large gash defaces his forehead), Graham slowly awakes to the squawking of his pet parrot. But as soon as he wakes and stands, he tries to dislodge a coconut from the tree. The coconut falls, hitting him on the head and rendering him unconscious again. The loop begins again, with a bird’s eye view of the island. This simple set-up is complicated by a number of factors: the vanquishing of causality caused by the loop (did the falling coconut create the head wound?); the rapid shifts in POV or “consciousness” (Graham’s, the parrot’s, the tree’s); and the intransigent refusal of both cinematic and “real” time (the film is designed to run for eight minutes, the average length of time a viewer spends with an artwork at the Biennale, but the looping permits theoretically infinite repetitions).
Movie Image
Duration
0:09:13