The Water On Venus Won't Help You A Bit: Films of Michael Robinson

The Water On Venus Won't Help You A Bit: Films of Michael Robinson

Michael Robinson’s moving image works explore personal and collective experience in a mediated world gone weird. His films estrange popular music, television, and internet sources, reconfiguring them into uncannily emotional forms. The Water On Venus Won't Help You A Bit: Films of Michael Robinson traces a line from 2007’s Victory Over the Sun - where the decaying architecture of a better tomorrow squares off against the hollow seduction of a cold November Rain - to 2017’s Onward Lossless Follows, in which a Venus-skeptical preacher, a woozy abduction romance, and an airlifted horse with no name unite in strange communion, hatching plans of ecstatic escape.

In addition to the film program, we are thrilled to host a wide-ranging conversation between Michael Robinson and Wexner Center for the Arts Film/Video Curator Chris Stults.

Michael Robinson is a filmmaker and artist whose work explores the emotional mechanics of popular media, the nature of heartache, and the instability of the reality we inhabit. Riding the line between nostalgia and contempt, these works invoke a queer balancing of dark humor and bald sentiment - indulging the seductions of dramatic formulas and aesthetic excess amidst heavy doses of manipulation, abstraction, and damnation.

Robinson’s work has shown internationally in both solo and group shows at venues including London’s National Portrait Gallery, The 2012 Whitney Biennial, The Austrian Film Museum, The Walker Art Center, R.H.A. Dublin, REDCAT, MoMA P.S.1, and MMCA Seoul, and has been regularly included in major film festivals like Rotterdam, New York, Berlinale, London BFI, Melbourne, Hong Kong, Sundance, Oberhausen and Toronto.  He has been supported by Creative Capital, The Wexner Center for the Arts, Teton ArtLab, MacDowell, The Kazuko Trust, FIDlab Marseille, Headlands Center for the Arts, and his films have received awards from numerous festivals.  Robinson’s work has been discussed in publications such as Art In America, Frieze, Artforum, Film Comment, Cinema Scope, The Irish Times, and The Brooklyn Rail.  He holds a BFA from Ithaca College and an MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Robinson lives and works in Los Angeles, is represented by Carrie Secrist Gallery in Chicago, and distributed by Video Data Bank.

Chris Stults has been an associate curator in the Wexner Center for the Arts’ Film/Video department since 2002. Planning visits and events with filmmakers such as Joe Dante, Yance Ford, Kirsten Johnson, Kelly Reichert, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, he has organized hundreds of screenings, festivals, and retrospectives with a focus on documentary and experimental film. In 2012, he curated the touring series Cruzamentos: Contemporary Brazilian Documentary, the largest North American film survey on the topic and, along with Genevieve Yue, he co-curated the 2016 Flaherty NYC series “Wild Sounds,” exploring films about gender and voice. His writing has appeared in ArtForum, Cinema Scope, Film Comment, and the Viennale catalogue, among others.

In 2011, Michael Robinson received the Wexner Center’s Artist Residency Award to support the production of his film Circle in the Sand and he worked on the post-production of that film in the Wexner Center’s Film/Video Studio.

Total Program Running Time: 70 min.

Victory Over the Sun
(Michael Robinson, 2007, 12.5 min)

Dormant sites of past World's Fairs breed an eruptive struggle between spirit and matter, ego and industry, futurism and failure. The film takes its title from the 1913 Russian Futurist opera, and incorporates chanted text from Ayn Rand’s 1937 novella, “Anthem”, a villainous monologue from the 1987 film, “Masters Of the Universe”, and an orchestral version of Guns N’ Roses’ 1992 ballad, “November Rain”. Shot on 16mm film in Montreal, Seattle, New York, and New Orleans.


All Through the Night 
(Michael Robinson, 2008, 4.5 min)

A charred visitation with an icy language of control: "there is no room for love". Splinters of Nordic fairy tales and ecological disaster films are ground down into a prism of contradictions in this hopeful container for hopelessness.

"All Through the Night contains no original footage and no nature photography, thus composing a completely interior, psychological landscape reminiscent of a dream that is sweet and ominous at the same time. In that sense it is emblematic of Robinson’s approach as a whole, combining far-flung imagery that doesn’t cohere in any conventional narrative or stylistic way but creates its own, oneiric logic." - Henriette Huldisch, Aurora: The Infinite Measure
 

Hold Me Now
(Michael Robinson, 2008, 5 min)

Plagued by blindness, sloth, and devotion, a troubled scene from Little House On The Prairie offers itself up to karaoke exorcism. 

“[T]he often ingratiating nostalgia of the long-running drama Little House On The Prairie takes a free fall in an unsettling sequence of agony metamorphosing into Exorcist-like bodily possession. Made for the PDX Film Festival’s ‘Karaoke Throwdown’ and thus featuring another instrumental track of the Thompson Twin’s eponymous song, the longing lyrics absurdly subtitle a slowed-down passage of Melissa Sue Anderson’s character rising upon waking, shaking in convulsions, and smashing a bedroom window with her hands (all while her husband tries in vain to hold her).” – Henriette Huldisch, Aurora: The Infinite Measure
 

Carol Anne Is Dead
(Michael Robinson, 2008, 7.5 min)

A family embraces the heart of evil in this Poltergeist re-make/drag show circa 1992.

"Robinson recycles his family's home movie version of Poltergeist, made when he was ten, into a raw look at the performative.” - Onion City Film Festival

These Hammers Don't Hurt Us
(Michael Robinson, 2010, 13 min)

Tired of underworld and overworld alike, Isis escorts her favorite son on their final curtain call down the Nile, leaving a neon wake of shattered tombs and sparkling sarcophagi.

"Perhaps the advent of the internet, and its promise of the instant retrieval of past media, means that from now on we’ll all live in a kind of perpetual cultural present. That, at least, was the half-nightmarish, half-enchanting sentiment behind one of the most cogent works in the show, Michael Robinson’s video projection These Hammers Don’t Hurt Us (2010). A strobing, psychedelic montage of sampled footage, it recombines various ancient Egyptian themed excerpts—History Channel documentaries, mummy films, several of Jackson’s most deliriously spectacular videos and live concerts—to recast Jackson as a kind of deathless deity, mummified within media, awaiting his apotheosis. Finally, accompanied by Elizabeth Taylor in her title role from Cleopatra (1963), Jackson ascends, entering into his afterlife as an ethereal, virtual entity, incandescent, omnipresent, famous forever.” - Gabriel Cohead, Art In America
 

The Dark, Krystle
(Michael Robinson, 2013, 9.5 min)

The cabin is on fire! Krystle can't stop crying, Alexis won't stop drinking, and the fabric of existence hangs in the balance, again and again and again.

"The Dark, Krystle brilliantly re-purposes the artificiality of stock gesture, allowing viewers to see its hollowness and to feel it recharging with new emotional power. Equal parts archival fashion show and feminist morality play, Robinson’s montage rekindles the unfinished business of identity, consumption, and excess in 1980s pop culture.” - Carrie Secrist Gallery, Chicago
 

Onward Lossless Follows
(Michael Robinson, 2017, 17 min)

A password-protected love affair, a little vapor on Venus, and a horse with no name ride out in search of a better world. Against the mounting darkness, a willing abduction offers a stab at tomorrow.

"By slowing down and overlaying footage, distending language, and pairing otherwise mundane imagery with unexpected music cues (a personal favorite: a horse being airlifted to the tune of America’s 1971 hit “A Horse with No Name”), Robinson turns remnants of some half-remembered past into an odd and unsettling trip through the American unconscious. On first pass it struck me as perhaps the filmmaker’s richest work to date; five viewings later and I’m no closer to exhausting its strangely seductive pleasures." - Jordan Cronk, Film Comment
 

Michael Robinson and Chris Stults in Conversation
(Recorded March 29, 2021; 64 min)


Wexner Center for the Arts Curator Chris Stults joins Michael Robinson for a wide-ranging discussion about Michael's filmography, his evolving creative workflow, and how the emotional states in Michael's films are as compulsively repeatable as a favorite song.

Introduced by Shambhavi Kaul, Associate Professor of the Practice of Art, Art History & Visual Studies, Duke University.

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