NOW SHOWİNG: Richard Phillips 'Lindsay Lohan' at IMA

[ref]This is presented for consideration into the level of consent given by celebrity in the creation of parody-, pastiche- or reference-based works, values-neutral as they might appear.[/ref]

A hackneyed phrase: to dot your is and cross your ts. The cross is a cross-stroke, the dot is a tittle. In the Latin Alphabet, the capital letter I has no tittle. The Turkish alphabet features dotted and undotted i's, both upper and lowercase. While the distinction between the two characters is important to Turkish pronunciation, the appearance of İ in Richard Phillips' Lindsay Lohan, now screening at IMA, is an entirely aesthetic decision.

The artist's name, the name of his subject and the artist's gallerist all get the dotted-I treatment[ref]It is almost a bizarre instruction that a typical New Zealander's pronunciation of the names is verboten[/ref]. Taylor Steele co-directed the production, but is not credited in the film's 90 seconds (you could facetiously suggest this is because he doesn't have an I in his name to tittle). Steele's background is in surfing films, and the shots of Lohan against an panoramic seascape are very well composed. In other moments the actress stares into the middle distance, meeting and then avoiding the camera's gaze. In these moments the work most closely resembles Phillips' paintings, close-up portraits which he has been exhibiting since the mid-nineties.



A shot that has received significant attention in the art press is one in which Lohan considers her own image. Johnathan Jones writes in the Guardian that the actress is

contemplating her own outsized image. The image is bigger than she is: the real Lindsay Lohan is dwarfed by the colossus of her fame – but this art film is not rejecting the myths of celebrity, it is fascinated and enraptured by those myths.[ref]Jones, J. (2011, May 30). A love letter to Lindsay Lohan - and the moving image. Retrieved from The Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2011/may/30/richard-phillips-lindsay-lohan[/ref]

This is an easy reading to come to, especially with this image being in such close proximity to a powerful shot in Peter Weir's The Truman Show (1998) of the reality TV mastermind Christof (Ed Harris) touching the oversized image of his sleeping star.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="1280" caption="Peter Weir 'The Truman Show' (1998)"][/caption]

However this writer thinks the decision-making surrounding this shot might be closer to self-portrait than social critique - considering the size and facial focus of Phillips' paintings, examining oversized faces in close quarters is the artist's bread and butter. Appearances on SNL (and other comedy platforms, to be discussed later), interviews and commercials notwithstanding, this is the first film Lohan has appeared in as herself - in this shot however, she could well be playing Phillips, or at the very least giving a performance that asks us to consider Phillips' embodied experience of painting[ref]Whether by design, coincidence, or this writers overattentiveness to Phillips' typographic anomaly (or a strange amalgam of the three) the eye sitting above Lohan's almost vertical forearm also takes on the appearance of a dot hanging over an i.[/ref].

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="490" caption="Richard Phillips working on 'Der Bodensee' (2008)"][/caption]

The soundtrack is compelling, but ultimately misleading - shoegaze is a genre that needs an expansive duration to grow and decay, the composition by Tamaryn and Rex John Shelverton feels cramped in the film's 90 seconds[ref]Consider the musicians' unabridged work:

[/ref]. Overall the soundtrack lends the work a complex dynamic. The heavily distorted guitar has an edge of anxiety to it while the tambourine associates the images onscreen with a new-age, psychedelic aesthetic.

The premise of the work is exciting - applying the highly-developed, highly-budgeted techniques of commercial advertising to thin air - but the closing credits complicate the work in unhelpful ways. While graphology is both inapplicable to type and a deeply junk science, it is telling that the letter I when enhanced in scale can mean an overactive ego; when enhanced with embellishments the letter can show immaturity and a desire for attention. After making this film, Phillips went on to work with Sasha Grey in a similarly composed video work. While both actresses are talented and highly photogenic, it would be concerning to this writer if Phillips made a habit of working with women conservative commentators see as needing some kind of 'redemption'. After Rebecca Black was, in some cases viciously, mocked in early 2011, she collaborated with the website Funny or Die in April to lampoon her public image herself (currently the singer Lana Del Ray seems to be caught by a public keen to flex those muscles again, but appears unlikely to have her image be similarly co-opted). Lohan herself worked with Funny or Die in a series of faux dating commercials following her split from Samantha Ronson in 2009. When introducing a news piece on her appearance on the site ABC anchorman Robin Roberts said, "It's not just getting laughs, it may get her career back on track."[ref]Adams, G. (2009, April 20). Lindsay Lohan and the irresistible rise of 'mockumentary'.Retrieved from The Independent: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/online/lindsay-lohan-and-the-irresistible-rise-of-mockumentary-1671340.html[/ref] In an eerie echo of this, Linda Yablonsky wrote for the New York Times that "thanks to the painter Richard Phillips, pop culture’s current tragic heroine is making a cogent leap from the tabloids to the art world"[ref]Yablonsky, L. (2011, May 26). Lindsay Lohan, Art Star. Retrieved from T Magazine: http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/26/artifacts-lindsay-lohan-art-star/[/ref](in the same article the film is labelled a "psychological portrait", but it is also noted that the artist and the actress had never met before the shoot).

Ultimately archetypes of jezabel and saviour aren't helpful to a reading of the work, simply to the press and markets that promote it. A serious question in response to Yablonsky's article is who should be "thanking" who?[ref]Especially given Lindsay Lohan is Phillips' first experience making film, claiming that before the production he had not even shot a video with his iPhone[/ref] Both actresses have given Phillips something many of his paintings' subjects have not: consent. While his technique of appropriating press photos and other images in creating work is one respected by this writer, when given this kind of access to a performers name, image and complicity, much more should be achievable than is actually realised by Phillips' current output.

Richard Phillips
Lindsay Lohan

Institute of Modern Art
18 February — 14 April