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Sean Baker’s Tangerine is a little like some of the
creatures it describes the chicks with dicks who hangout at a place called Donut Time at the corner of Santa Monica and Highland in Hollywood. Remember Algebra I where you plotted graphs made up of
equations in two variables or unknowns, x and y, plotting their coordinates.
Tangerine is a mishmash of plots, one major
thread having to do with a pre-op
transsexual Sin-Dee (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez) who is looking for her lover and pimp, Chester (James Ransone) who has run
away with “a real bitch vagina and everything” and the other, the story of an
Armenian cabby Rizmat (Karren Karagulian) who likes to go down on ladyboys and is unmasked by his mother-in-law, Ashken (Alla Rumanian). But the movie is also like the evolution of our
attitudes towards transgenderism. The bizarre, perverse and in case of the
movie’s form, crude and improbable yesterday may be understood as normative or
even inspired tomorrow. Tangerine titters on the line where found objects
become Duchamp’s “Fountain,” both literally and metaphorically since one of
the most touching scenes in the film occurs in a restroom. Chester functions a
little like Hickey in the Iceman and also like the lost bicycle in the De
Sica’s masterpiece. Tangerine, of course, owes a good deal to Italian neorealist
cinema which used non professional actors (people playing their own lives) and
to cinema verite and there is a bit of Midnight Cowboy in the settings with their pantheon of down at their heels hustlers
whose fleshy commodification is underscored with street signs like the one which
reads “collateral not always necessary.” But is Tangerine, the end of the line
or the beginning of a new life? Just when you think the film’s besotted pair
have reached the lowest rung on the food chain, on Xmas Eve in LA, they
rise mightily for the occasion. By the way, speaking of new devices and
techniques sexual and otherwise, the film was shot with iPhones.
Jeff Koons has two things in common with the great
Renaissance painters like Rembrandt and Titian. He maintained a studio filled
with helpers and he produced self-portraits. Where Koons differs from a
Renaissance painter is in his use of the assembly line approach to both
painting and sculpture in which individual artists are only involved in a small
part of the final product. Marx wrote about alienation resulting from this kind
of division of labor and it is hard to figure out of if many of Koons
readymade sculptures can be classified as
commodities of the type that are produced en masse in a factory or artistic
works that are reflective of a brooding sensibility characterized by a singular vision of
the world. This is, in fact, what separates them from Duchampian readymades which
never quite seem to attain the status of commodities. However, just when you're about to
dismiss Koons, you begin to realize this very dichotomy between commerce and art
poses itself as one of the aims or dialectics of the work and you're somewhat
calmed into an acceptance verging on pleasure. It’s easy to say that neither
the early vacuum cleaners nor the famous "Play-Doh" sculpture are art, but then
you become fascinated by the production of a piece which looks like plastic,
but is actually heavy metal. One of the guards manning the recent Whitney retrospective of Koons’s work fenced off with a spectator who
insisted on her right to touch and test one of the sculptures to make sure that
indeed what she was seeing was not what it seemed to be. Koons elicits this
kind of theater. “Made in Heaven” is the pornographic series featuring his
former wife the Italian actress and politican La Cicciolina (aka Ilona Staller)
and comprising paintings like “Exaltation,” (1991) where Koons comes on her face and
another “Ilona’s Asshole,” which is self-explanatory. Koons says
about the series, “It’s not porn. Made in Heaven dealt with the shame of
masturbation in our society. It was a metaphor for cultural guilt. I wanted to
reproduce the Garden of Eden, and sexual penetration like a hummingbird
encounters a flower.” The series is introduced by poster for the film that
Koons was originally going to make with his former wife. She’s in his arms, but he’s
staring out at his audience. Again you are caught up short. Could it be that
the artist is saying that he cares more about himself than his lover and that the imminence of a potential product trumps emotion? The
answer is undoubtedly yes. Narcissism is a much bandied about word, but can we
say that for good or bad Koons is caught in the narcissistic delusion that
the world is indeed real?
