Paul Thomas - Portraits of the New Subconscious @ Cine, Sat. May 24th

Paul Thomas, Athens’ very own Andy Warhol (or is it Andy Kaufman? Andy Griffith?) put on an art show at Cine that was half installation piece, half music. The portraits themselves, film loops of intense close-up faces which are then multi-exposed and slowed down, are the best thing the artist has ever done. Unsettling in their beauty, unsettling in their detail, unsettling in their lighting, unsettling in their horror, these are a long way past their most obvious historical antecedent, Warhol’s screen tests back in the sixties.

The musical accompaniment featured Thomas (maybe Andy Gibb?) and friend Christopher Ray constructing a droning atmosphere out of samples and synthesizers, which were then sped up or slowed down to match the action taking place in the center screen, which featured film trailers from the 60’s and 70’s for exploitation B-movies with titles like “Bad Girls Go To Hell” or “Deadly Weapons,” provided by Michael Oliveri. With the portraits projected on either side of the main screen, the faces seemed to change expressions in response to whatever was taking place in the movies.

So it turns out the ‘new subconscious’ is pretty similar to the old one. Sex & Violence, Tits & Death, Freud would be proud (or maybe Andy Dick?). The film trailers have more breasts than a farm of Purdue chickens, more knives than a troop of boy scouts, more violence against women than Super Bowl Sunday, more sex than a thirteen-year-old’s imagination, more rapes than Milledge Avenue during rush week, and more deaths than a Florida nursing home at Christmastime.

At the very least, it was funnier than Juno.

There were two ways to experience the show, in a 15-minute burst, or to sit through the whole 2 hours. For the people who chose the first option, they left a little more amused, a little more disturbed, and a little more entertained. For the people who stayed for the whole show, the experience gradually began to shift from entertaining to excruciating. Even Thomas (Andy Richter?) went outside halfway through the show and didn’t come back until it was over. The sheer absurdity of boob after boob, of mutilation after mutilation, eventually gave way to a kind of numbness, a blank nihilism that can’t be countered. By the end of the show, you felt like you needed a shower.


In spite of the void it portrays, or perhaps because of the void it portrays, one could argue that ‘Portraits of the New Subconscious’ does reflect what it means to be an American in early 2008--certainly more than the Don Chambers show taking place over at Tasty World the same night. After all, we are the first people to live through a war that is taking place, with the exception of the soldiers and their friends and families, primarily in our subconscious. After an hour of watching, I wanted to look away. And I couldn’t help feeling a little guilty thinking about the people who are surrounded by this every day, but who aren't able to get up and walk out of the theatre after fifteen minutes, let alone two hours.

Maybe it would sit a whole lot better if the show traded in its definite article and called itself ‘Portraits of a New Subconscious.’ Because while nobody can deny the show’s truth, it remains only a partial truth. There is a lot more to our subconscious, as well as our conscious, than blankness, boobs, and battering. Any art that suggests otherwise is only telling you half of the story.

Paul Thomas’ show Saturday night displayed his genius in full, but his most brilliant gesture of the night may have been when he got up and went outside.