Cuyler Ballenger: Inheritance

Cuyler Ballenger Inheritance Cecily E. Horton Gallery Lawndale Art & Performance Center Oct 10, 2020 - Jan 16, 2021

Cuyler Ballenger Inheritance Cecily E. Horton Gallery

Cuyler Ballenger’s Inheritance series is an allegory of the American opioid epidemic told in three parts. Combining documentary and experimental film techniques, Inheritance explores Ballenger’s familial lineage of addiction, merging the political with the familial.

Film Screening and Q&A with Cuyler Ballenger Friday, December 4, 2020 6:30 PM Join us in Lawndale’s Mary E. Bawden Sculpture Garden for a Film Screening and Q&A with Cuyler Ballenger. This public program will include a screening of Acceptance, the capstone of Ballenger’s Inheritance series.

Additional Credits Camera: John Carrithers, Rachel Ballenger Sound Design and Score: Mitchell Collins On-Camera: Alex Garber Acknowledgements from the Artist Thank you Mitchell Collins, John Carrithers, and Alex Garber for making these films with me.

Thank you to Stephanie Mitchell for seeing this work and believing in it. And to Roberto Tejada for helping me better understand my own work.

Thank you Julian Tran and Ryland Walker Knight for being incredible teachers and friends. I would like to thank my father, Jeff Ballenger, for laying it all out as plainly as he could. Thank you to Rachel, for making this life with me.

Cuyler Ballenger is filmmaker and video artist whose works incorporate elements of documentary filmmaking and contemporary visual practice. Ballenger employs fictionalized autobiography to explore themes of addiction, family, and labor. He earned his BA in Rhetoric and Film Studies from UC Berkeley, is an awardee of the 2019 Houston Arts Alliance Individual Artist Grant, and is currently based in Houston, TX, and Sonoma, CA. Roberto Tejada is the author of art histories that include National Camera: Photography and Mexico’s Image Environment (U Minnesota, 2009) and Celia Alvarez Muùoz (UCLA/CSRC; U Minnesota, 2009).

His writings appear frequently in journals and exhibition catalogs, among them Images of the Spirit: Photographs by Graciela Iturbide (Aperture, 1996); Now Dig This!

Art & Black Los Angeles 1960-1980 (UCLA Hammer Museum, 2011) and Groups and Spaces in Mexico, Contemporary Art of the 90s: Licenciado Verdad (Mexico City, Ediciones MP, 2017). He is the author of poetry collections that include Full Foreground (Arizona, 2012), Exposition Park (Wesleyan 2010), Mirrors for Gold (2006), and selected poems in Spanish translation Todo en el ahora (2015), He is the Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Distinguished Professor in Creative Writing and Art History at the University of Houston.

Cuyler Ballenger Inheritance Exhibition Checklist

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01. Inheritance 01: Denial, 2017

SD video (color), duration 09:00

03. Inheritance 05: Acceptance, 2020

4k video (color), duration 14:38

02. Inheritance 03: Bargaining, 2019

HD video (color), duration 10:51

02. Untitled Letter, 2004

Graphite on paper

8 1/2 x 11�

“I was two different people:” Cuyler Ballenger’s Inheritance An essay by Roberto Tejada

A handheld camera tracks artist Cuyler Ballenger as he swigs beer from a longneck, exhales in distress or impatience, and then jitters in the interval of a jump cut. He motions with bottle in hand to a distant slope of the downhill clearing, and then proceeds to cut a path over the flattened grasses, dry and sandy-hued below the surrounding California groves in sun-touched shades of green. The diminished quality of the image, occasional lens flare, and unsteady camerawork serve to suggest the kind of impromptu skylarking associated with home movies. Ballenger disappears behind a storage dome (a white plastic or fiberglass silo) then dashes back into the field of vision, committed to startling away a rafter of wild turkeys. First hobbling back to recuperate a lost shoe, he eventually ambles in return and takes his rightful place again in proximity of the camera. Throughout that duration, the sound perspective overwhelms and obscures the extended action of the scene.

A stammering voice, heartfelt in timbre, exceptional in its prolonged corroborations, but also unbearably familiar, meanders unshakably, from one recorded message to another.

These voicemails and others selected from a profusion left by Ballenger’s father between 2016-2018 modulate the image sequences comprising this nine-minute video-film, shot by Ballenger’s life partner and artistic collaborator, Rachel Ballenger, using a 1990s-era miniDV camera. The discontinuous narrative proceeds to confirm the tangible rift between visual and sonic elements mirrored thematically in this self-portrait of an artist as estranged son.

The sky turns a menacing shade of pink-grey, as though foreboding Northern California fires: “Hey, um, well, I’m going to go for a walk; the smoke is come back after being gone for a while, it’s been bad for the last few days so… [pause, intake of breath] anyway, before it gets bad, I’m going to do that so—um, I just, I’ll try you, um, tomorrow morning. I love you, bye.” Inheritance: Denial (SD Video, MiniDV, 9 min 00 sec. 2017) is the first of a series of short video films that engage the medium as the journal of experience, as the sketchbook of performances for the camera, and as the instrument that would document real and enacted encounters in light of eventual reconciliation. In communications that frame this series, Ballenger refers to a “long-standing rift” with his father after years of family abandonment, in turn stemming from a protracted history of substance-use and addiction. By shunning his father’s phone calls, “sometimes for years,” as though “attempting to deny his existence,” Ballenger inadvertently produced an audio archive of messages at once mundane, solicitous, and occasionally absurd.

The free-associative remarks, by way of detours, ellipses, and erratic reconstruction, betray the difficult emotions of past events, even as such excerpts tell the story of a life made tangible in the riddled processes of memory and re-acquaintance. These sources led Ballenger a point further to harness the recording media as the vehicle to more deeply explore the status of family relationship, “drawing lines and examining patterns,” and so mobilizing the psycho-ethnographic potential of the camera in order to establish a connection with his father through interviews and staged or re-staged sequences.

In one interview that serves as the basis for another film in the series, Inheritance: Bargaining (HD Video, VHS, 10 min 51 sec. 2018)—the titles all refer to the stages of grief specified by Elizabeth Kübler-Ross in her 1969 classic On Death and Dying (1969)— Ballenger’s father relates, in an extended narrative statement, the critical events that led to divorce and family estrangement. He tells of sustaining a painful work-related injury that required a surgical procedure in the months prior to his son’s birth. Through a clerical error in the healthcare system, he obtains two different patient ID-cards and begins mastering the proficiency needed to acquire ample amounts of medically-prescribed opioid pain relievers, struggling hopelessly to overcome the spiraling sequence of narcotic consumption wreaking personal havoc and family misfortune. In reference to the two identity documents that serve as narrative impetus, the voice-over—engineered vaguely in reverb—begins: “The two cards were everything. This whole story wouldn’t have happened if I didn’t have two cards. Literally, I was two different people….”

In a visual equivalence to the doubling that defines this logic of addiction—its simultaneously active and passive voice—the camera, held from a moving vehicle, follows the artist as he undertakes an act of physical endurance. The single shot captures him running across a bridge over Houston’s Braeswood Bayou and along the streets of the adjoining Braeswood neighborhood, stopping to regain his breath at points of fatigue so as to resume this performance for the camera, which finally abandons the exhausted runner as the vehicle turns a residential corner. The scene abruptly cuts to the final seconds of the film. The previously non-diegetic voice of Ballenger’s father now aligns with the figure depicted in the frame reclined on a home couch articulating the foregoing audio reverie the filmmaker has prompted as a kind of prelude to reparation.

Jeff Ballenger, the filmmaker’s father, demonstrates a continued willingness to serve as participant in this art-enabled, film-based therapeutic endeavor. The culmination of this process is the frankly accomplished third film in the series, Inheritance: Acceptance (4k Video, 14 min 38 sec. 2020). Uniting the cinematic grammar of horror (a menacing soundscape and uncanny high-angle tracking shots of a cloudless sky and sunlit forest) with the language of the film-portrait and personal essay, Acceptance registers the self-reflective consequences of writing resurrected from the past.

Ballenger’s father is heard reading a letter out loud in the film’s present tense, while a close-frame sequence shows his hands holding the lined sheet of paper scrawled in pencil; a communication he had sent his son fifteen years earlier. From the unspecified forest of memory surfaces a feverish poetry of despair: Alley ways door ways windows of light Gray Souls lost. Soaking the shadows that cross them paths at all Cost Searching out answers into the night Can I be free Ask the wrong question win the reward Will it be me…. —who wrote this? The voice of the artist intervenes:

“You.” “No way.”

“You sent that to me.”

“Just like this?”

“Just like that.”

The film unfolds a complex design of high-definition images and engineered sound: hands driving a shovel to excavate a shallow cavity in the earth; a cow’s distorted bleating; images of a forearm and cubital vein; the elder Ballenger’s verbal testimony and corroboration of heroin use; images that depict a clew of slithering earthworms….“The first time I put a narcotic in my body…” A split screen periodically serves to unite the face and figure of father and son. And, as though to mirror this formal and thematic composite, there follows a rhythmic choreography of father-son arm-wrestling; father’s hands gently holding electric clippers as he thoroughly crops his son’s hair; closely framed images of buckles and freefloating belts; all concluding with superimposed frames that signal a proper burial. The departing image—a blur of buried belts and emerging earthworms—unsettles the visual field and likelihood of a tidy redemption story.

From both evolutionary and psychoanalytic standpoints, physical traits and compulsive symptoms are only the visible end result of hidden processes that link an individual to immediate forebears and remote ancestors by way of inheritance. In Denial, Bargaining, and Acceptance, Ballenger transposes the stages of grief onto an audiovisual archive edited so as to suggest the related structures of descent, resemblance, and susceptibility to substance. With techniques drawn from stagecraft he acknowledges the powerful role fantasy can play in making discernable histories of pain encapsulated in emotive and chemical attachments. To the degree that make-believe can make happen, so do simulated amends precede actual reckoning.

Photographer and filmmaker Agnès Varda once avowed that cinema reminded her “at every instant that it films motion for nothing, since every image becomes a memory, and all memories congeal and set.”1 In the cinema process itself, in the slippage between sequences that affix and tempos that fixate (“I was two different people”), Ballenger develops a film language commensurate with the experimental nature of interpersonal understanding.

These films serve as a reminder that continuities—generational, conceptual, or syntactic— are never other than a cover story for discontinuity. •••

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Agnès Varda, “On Photography and Cinema,” in The Cinematic, ed. David Campany (London: Whitechapel; Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2007) p 62.

Mission Lawndale is a multidisciplinary contemporary art center that engages Houston communities with exhibitions and programs that explore the aesthetic, critical, and social issues of our time.

About Lawndale believes in the role of art and artists to inspire and inform the world around us. By serving as an intimate gathering place to experience art and ideas, Lawndale seeks to foster connections between communities in Houston and beyond. Lawndale presents a diverse range of artistic practices and perspectives through exhibitions and programs, including lectures, symposia, film screenings, readings, and musical performances.

Through exhibition opportunities, the Artist Studio Program, institutional collaborations, and the engagement of an advisory board comprised of artists, curators, and scholars, Lawndale seeks within its mission to support all artistic and cultural communities of Houston.

Supporters Lawndale’s exhibitions and programs are produced with generous support from The Anchorage Foundation of Texas; The Brown Foundation, Inc.; The Brown Foundation, Inc.; David R. Graham; The John R. Eckel, Jr. Foundation; The Joan Hohlt and Roger Wich Foundation; Houston Endowment; Kathrine G. McGovern/The John P. McGovern Foundation; The National Endowment for the Arts; The Alice Kleberg Reynolds Foundation; the Texas Commission on the Arts; The City of Houston; and The Wortham Foundation, Inc. Additional support provided by Benjamin Berg/Berg Hospitality, Illuminations Lighting Design, Lindsey Schechter/Houston Dairymaids, Saint Arnold Brewing Company, and Topo Chico.

Additional support provided by Benjamin Berg/Berg Hospitality, Illuminations Lighting Design, Lindsey Schechter/ Houston Dairymaids, Saint Arnold Brewing Company, and Topo Chico.

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