Life, Sliced Pepperoni Fine

Ben Coonley was in our living room on Superbowl Sunday, not just to watch the Patriots- Giants game but to record it in his own unique way.

Ben is a video artist and the creator of several memorable pieces you can see on YouTube. A couple of Februarys ago he made one of those videos that zooms all over the globe in 24 hours. It’s called “Valentine Perfect Strangers” and it stars his dead-pan formerly-feral cat Otto who is looking for love over the internet.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETQ0urHjSIk&rel=1]

He’s also famous for his Pony series, with such works as “ One Trick Pony” and “Every Pony Plays the Fool,” both starring a blissed-out looking Hobby Horse scored from everybody’s favorite big-box toy store.

Ben has been making these videos for years and years and in a way my kids were in on the ground floor with him. Meaning that my oldest girl with her three-foot-long fall of maple-syrup colored hair appears briefly in his “documentary” of a middle school rock concert that gets shut down when certain of the musicians start yelling bad words out at the audience. (“Don’t point that thing at ME!” she is heard to exclaim in the quick shot that shows her.) And, speaking of bad words, our youngest is the out-and-out star of “The Homework Diaries” in which, over a period of months, he disgustedly recites the list of all he has to do for school the next day. Even our middle girl worked behind the scenes on a couple of pieces not yet orbiting in the vast junk-filled Internet asteroid belt.

But the technique of his that I love best is the ones where he uses the “intermittent record” feature on his camera, which allows him to set it up on a tripod and capture one-half of one second of every 30 seconds of lived life. He used this feature to document our kids and their pals as they watched the three other Superbowls that the Patriots played in and he used it again last week. And I have to admit I just love watching these very short works, where the unattended camera just takes tiny biopsy-sized chunks out of life and serves them sliced up fine.

Take this year’s effort: people appear and then instantly disappear. This chair has a person in it and now it is empty. It is bright sunny and it is utterly dark. The lamps are off and the lamps are lit. There is a truncated whoop of joy and a bark of dismay; leaps of exaltation and dejected slumps. Now here comes someone’s pants walking toward the camera. Now a Bud Light passes by in somebody’s hand. A baby’s head flashes in the foreground and is gone. A small child in footed pj's does a nano-second of hula dancing and is also gone (but gone where? To college and a career?) And we are all shown continually eating and drinking and eating and drinking; flashing into existence and out again and all I can think is: this must be what we look like to God.

Take a peek at these stills to get the idea. Clicking on them blows them up, natch.

Ben may be doing an installation using this technique in the future and then you maybe can see all these pieces. They’re all just five or six minutes long.

Life is short but art is long they used to say but maybe all the best art is short too. A good lesson for all us bloggers!