What can we create meaning from? What activities in life are just banal and unnecessary, and what can we find something greater in? Since the time of Marcel Duchamp, artists have declared insignificant and everyday objects as art, and whatever the reception may have been initially, a porcelain urinal is now accepted as a witty and insightful masterpiece. This groundbreaking movement at the beginning of the 20th century is now almost commonplace, but the pushing of the boundaries of art continues. Artists are still interested in the objects we take advantage of, and they have come to question even the simplest of life's actions.
New York artist Matt Sheridan Smith continues the great tradition of finding meaning in the everyday in his short film, "Untitled (open/shut)" (2008), currently displayed on Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Test Wall. The film is about seven minutes long and runs on a continuous loop in the Whittaker Building's lobby. "Untitled (open/shut)" explores the meaning of not just everyday objects but everyday actions through reworking something familiar: a film. Smith recalls the question about what constitutes art, but he also changes the nature of this questioning by doing it in a new media format.
Smith has reedited French director Robert Bresson's movie "L'Argent" (1983), which is based on Leo Tolstoy's novella "The Counterfeit Note." The movie is about a boy whose father refuses to give him an advance on his allowance, so he decides to use forged bills in a shop. The shop owner, who realizes they are fake, passes the bills on to an unknowing serviceman. Consequentially, the serviceman is arrested, and his life falls apart — eventually pushing him to murder.
Though the wall label gives the back-story of the movie, almost none of this is evident through Smith's short. Instead, what Smith has done is take every scene in the movie in which someone opens, goes through or closes a door and edits them together. What results is a series of slamming or creaking doors, with brief glances of characters in between.
The result of this experiment is a choppy and disconcerting experience. A series of slamming doors will be followed by a character who pauses and looks intently at the viewer before his door shuts. The viewer is passed from room to room in quick succession along with the characters, and one of the more striking parts of the movie is the feeling of a lack of control. There is no movement leading up to the transition from room to room or into and out of buildings — it just happens. An inexorable movement from place to place begins to feel more and more disturbing.
This lack of control reflects in many ways the lack of control of the central character in both Bresson's film and Smith's short. The serviceman's life has been changed without his consent, and the viewer is placed in his position of helplessness by Smith's work. This helplessness is reinforced by the fact that, of all the characters in the short, the serviceman is the one who opens his own door the least. Instead, his door is often opened by someone else — a policeman, a lawyer, a judge — all people who push him onward without his input.
Reflected, too, in Smith's short is a commentary on the circulation of money and freedom of movement. Most obviously, it is the passing of the counterfeit money that dooms the serviceman to his lack of freedom. Furthermore, the fact that the (rich) boy is not punished at all for his actions suggests a more sinister commentary on the modern world.
Through the depiction of an everyday and seemingly unimportant action, Smith has created an entire world of barriers and openings that reflect a key element of our society: movement. No one really stops to think about all of the doors they pass through in a day, but Smith's highlighting of this simple action is a nod to the importance of circulation — of being able or unable to enter into spaces and of maintaining or creating barriers. The barrier presented by the door becomes a metaphor for class mobility and a society which is still filled with closed doors for unfortunate individuals.
