Archive Project 11: Edgar Arceneaux

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Charles LaBelle's Essay

I shot the original footage for this video installation in May 2001 during a cross-country road trip from L.A. to New York. It was shot inside the Eisenhower Memorial Tunnel just west of Denver on Interstate 70. The tunnel is over two miles long and the product of America’s post-World War II economic and suburban expansion. Specifically, it is part of the Eisenhower administration’s creation of a system of superhighways across the continent. This system, which effectively replaced the more rambling one that Kerouac traversed, remains the backbone of American ground transportation today. I had never been to Colorado nor driven through the Eisenhower Tunnel, but when I saw it on the map—two red triangles indicating the tunnel’s openings—I knew it was exactly the place I’d been looking for, and that I had to go. In many ways my work has always been an excuse to go someplace unknown, to put myself in the position of being estranged. In shooting the footage I made more than a dozen passes back and forth through the tunnel, both at dusk and then again the following dawn. I spent the night in Silverthorne, at the base of the mountain, in a recently opened motel that smelled of new carpeting and glue.

Horror of Light grew out of a larger, yearlong project called 2001: A Space Odyssey. This project involved shooting video footage of the road (with a small surveillance camera through the windshield of my Ford F-150 pickup) every time and everywhere I drove during the course of the year. Additionally, a second tiny camera mounted on the steering wheel continually videotaped me as I drove. The amount of video footage I recorded is substantial: two 2-hour tapes each day, sometimes more. Eventually, specific moments in that footage began to interest me, and I started to think of ways to distill them into their own discrete works. Horror of Light is the second of these, part of a series of Road Works that may eventually include up to six separate installations. The first piece, Sunset at Dawn, is a double video projection of Sunset Boulevard shot at sunrise that was shown in September 2001.

During the making of 2001, each time I drove through a tunnel I was fascinated with the image and the eerie psychological pull of it: the way this pull echoed the physical passage of the body, encapsulated and hurtling through the narrow space. I was also drawn to the way this passage could represent a kind of transformation—the idea (or hope) that when you emerge out the far end, you are not the same person who entered. This is different from the belief that something better awaits down the road—the proverbial “light at the end of the tunnel”—which is a lie. I suspect that at the heart of our desire for change is a yearning for permanence. We move forward seeking stillness. We rush to halt time. In Horror of Light, I purposely stop short of emerging from the tunnel. (It’s a blinding moment, and when your eyes adjust you see the snowcapped Rocky Mountains all around you.) Here, I am more interested in the interstitial passage, the would-be transformation, the state of continual change. All of these recent works question my drive to locate myself in time and space. They are an acknowledgment and a reconciliation of a subjective fluidity, a lack of determinism and a veiled impulse for self-obliteration.

The video is a circular image that is projected onto a concave disk that rests on the floor. The distortion of the image was achieved by strictly lo-fi means. The original footage was shot with three surveillance cameras simultaneously. I placed a cardboard toilet-paper roll over each and covered the lenses with a variety of things: vaseline, spit, condoms, water-bottle caps, potato chip bags. Further degradation of the image was achieved by re-recording the footage, slowing it as I did so, pausing and advancing frame by frame with the VCR remote. The audio track combines three elements: the ambient sound of driving through the tunnel; “Blackout” by Scorn, a Birmingham, U.K.-based project by Mick Harris; and an untitled track from Japanese noise musician Keiji Haino’s CD “Saying I love you, I continue to curse myself.”

Charles LaBelle
October 2001