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Showing Up
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The
official A24 trailer for Showing Up performs some delicate surgery
(which is not uncommon in the trailer business): it manages to make this film
seem more of a snappy, punchline-oriented comedy-of-manners than it actually
is. Its subtle pleasures and charm, however, lie elsewhere.
“Things
usually get done – just not on time.” Those wise words from the artist Lizzie (cleverly
underplayed by Michelle Williams) capture the paradox at the heart of Showing
Up. Making art is all about nurturing a flow of creativity, while
everything to do with maintaining a career in art – catalogues, exhibitions,
classes – implies deadlines, pressures and constraints.
One
phrase particularly resonates in this context: the compliment to Liz that she’s
“having a moment” in her path as an artist. But moments, by definition, can be
pretty fleeting, and artworld fashions move on swiftly. So, showing up for your
moment can be a tricky business.
Not
to mention: a treacherous business, as well. For, even more pointedly, having a
career involves managing a complicated set of social relations with gallery
owners, critics, teachers and technicians (André Benjamin has a low-key part as
the guy in charge of sculptural heating) – and, above all, rivals. For Lizzie,
all of this is painful – especially when her major rival, Jo (Hong Chau), is
also her landlord.
No
one shows better than Reichardt the casual, disheartening slights that
individuals – particularly women – suffer in daily, energy-draining situations
(this was a key aspect of her Certain Women [2016]). Add in divorced
parents (beautifully played by Maryann Plunkett and Judd Hirsch – the latter
also pops up in The Fabelmans [2022]) who remain at loggerheads, a mentally ill
brother (John Magaro as Sean), and a wounded pigeon … It’s no wonder that
Lizzie is in a perpetual state of emotional implosion, mixed with just a little
passive-aggression in order to survive.
Lizzie’s
little gestures and expressions of aggravation are the moments that the trailer
turns into LOL punchlines. But, like Lucrecia Martel, Reichardt chooses not to
play for overt laughs – even when the material offers the opportunity for such easy,
audience-pleasing indulgence.
The
pigeon turns out to be the through-line of the entire picture. In a
contemporary art scene that currently throws around the buzzword-phrase practices
of care with wild abandon, it’s salutary to see Reichardt bring the matter
down to the tending, feeding and warming of a little bird.
That
shift in the typical scale of a drama works at both the micro and macro levels
of Showing Up. You’re never sure when the bird business will exit
proceedings – just as many things tend to casually enter and exit in Reichardt’s
cinema. But the creature is still around when Lizzie has her fraught gallery launch
– and its fate brings a little, unspoken magic into the exacting, patient flow
of things.
Showing
Up was shot at the Oregon College of Art and Craft in Portland – Lizzie’s
sculptures are provided by Cynthia Lahti, and for the most part they manage to
ably fill that difficult-to-handle, object-oriented role of artworks within
fictional contexts: it’s too easy, often, for snooty viewers to dismiss the art
on show, even in something as great as Jacques Rivette’s La Belle noiseuse (1991).
But, by displacing the art-dealings away from New York, Paris, London or
Berlin, Reichardt deftly avoids the hipster-factor in such snap
taste-judgements.
The
somewhat humble, suburban setting also allows Reichardt to better continue her
exploration of and fascination with the meticulous process of working (she made
several observational shorts commissioned by the Centre Pompidou in preparation
for Showing Up) – for art is work, too.
MORE Reichardt: First Cow © Adrian Martin 23 December 2022 / 20 January 2023 |
