Lorna Mills, or the Uses of Ugliness

Part I

What strikes on first viewing of a loop by Lorna Mills is the apparent of ugliness of it all: ugliness in terms of subject or content and ugliness in terms of pictorial structure. Beauty, traditionally, prolongs its perception by swinging the eye on a grand tour of sorts; and ugly is that which distracts and confuses and makes the eye smart from its overexertion. The division once was common in handbooks for painters. Today it persists in arts education under loose talk of “balance” and the shopworn “rule of thirds.” Such are the claims to which Mills is the rejoinder: for hers is a kind of dynamics without beauty.

Her work Money2 (2012) can serve as an example. Made with Yoshi Sodeoka and described as an “idiotic sequel to Pink Floyd’s classic ‘Money,’” the 75-second video proceeds to collage a set of images from the Internet’s backwoods.¹ Against the default white ground a green parrot passes some green dollar bills from its hand to its mouth. Its figure is bounded by a jagged stairstep edge that runs more or less regularly around wing and head, then drops down vertiginously to the wad in its beak. And as the parrot rears back to look at the viewer, its stairstep edging alters also with each successive movement—never in a single direction, like an escalator, but with the irregularity of boiling water. The actual pattern can only be seen upon frame-by-frame inspection; still it must have its subliminal effects. The bird’s gesture is repeated and accelerated in line with the music on the soundtrack. Meanwhile two smaller figures approach from each side. From the right comes a man conveyed on a Segway. He fires off an automatic rifle as he goes. From the left comes another man on what looks to be a skateboard. Dressed only in a diaper and with a tube in his mouth, he moves himself forward by a series of pelvic thrusts. Both are likewise bounded by moving stairstep edges and they converge behind the parrot at some unseen point. Then the parrot drops below the frame line, leaving the screen a blank for exactly one frame. A woman twerking violently on the hood of a car takes its place. She arrives from dead center, at first a tiny speck and then at full bulk six frames later. A small poodle grows with her. On its hind legs it shimmies in perfect rhythm to the twerking, of which the typical cycle from raised ass to slammed ass is four or five frames. Other dogs soon join the dancers. Two Pomeranians materialize atop the car at the same moment a retriever drops down as if by parachute. The car with its three dancers—one human, two canine—recede into the vanishing point whence they first came; the poodle drops below the frame line; and the big retriever to the left, who nearly fills the screen from top to bottom, dances the merengue in a green dress with tulle. And all of this comprises the work’s first seven seconds. From them follow crashing cruise ships, an infant puffing smoke, a toddlers-in-tiaras type on whose head appears a plate of canned chicken, teeth that gnash and grind or manipulate costume jewelry, a sea of cats, chest-pumping Grim Reapers, men engulfed in flames or beaten down by cops in riot gear—and a host of other oddments in unlikely proximity. All receive the same contour and the same default background. In eye work alone the thing is plainly “ugly.” Incongruity of subjects is a further vexation.

We typically chalk up ugliness to lack of taste or ineptitude. The ugly has also its positive enjoyments and one can use it deliberately to achieve certain ends. For Mills it serves a twofold purpose, one aesthetical and one ethical. Its aesthetics are that of the Internet, the Web: the medium in which her work tends to circulate and from which her found materials are invariably drawn. Most come from Reddit or YouTube or Imgur; but whatever their provenance they are not made as art. These images are “poor,” to use a now standard distinction; they are to the sheen of 3D modeling what the Poverty Row cheapies once were to MGM. They are made quickly to be disseminated quickly. They are the Internet’s version of primary process and their sliding of meaning is our own slide down the page. Like most unconscious content they are rife with the prurient, the taboo, the freakish and nasty; and their rudeness is retained in the use to which Mills puts them. In that lies their ethics, for the images do come from elsewhere. They preexist the artist who, more often than not, can hardly fathom their purpose. To enter her canvas they must be excised from theirs. Hence they must be quoted, never paraphrased—and she does nothing whatever to soften their edges. She rather sharpens them to points round which a prior context bubbles in constant reminder of the transposition.²

In the context of Mill’s oeuvre Money2 is feature length. Most of her work since 2010 has been in the form of animated GIFs that are over and done with in less than one second. Prominent among academic clichés is the comparison of GIFs to early or pre-1910 cinema. Their silence, their brevity, their vulgar beginnings all seem to suggest some distant kinship. But, for the most part, the GIF’s vernacular is not cinema’s. In Mills’ case especially it is far closer to painting. Her frame is a canvas, not a window, and for all its activity it never captures anything like filmic duration. There are no isolable shots and one does not feel as if time were passing over the image. Definitions of cinema based on movement alone or on the index alone fail to realize that “cinema” is, above all, a set of expectations for the management of time-consciousness. Sixty seconds is long enough to make history. Sixty frames is only the present. Not the everlasting present of the mystics—the not-passing Now more often called eternity—but the mere or specious present, the present of which we are immediately sensible and which Mills likes to furnish with her procession of uglies.

In this she is only exploiting her medium as any good formalist is wont to do. Her signature stairstep contour is only a heightened version of what most JPEGs look like when magnified even slightly. For any image captured or generated digitally must ultimately resolve into the grid that underwrites it: and the radical disunion of two adjacent pixels would be doubtless suggestive to one in search of new forms. Such disunion carries over from the micro to the macro, from the grain of an image to its arrangement with others. Those who grew up with Web 1.0 likely have memories of traffic cones, bonfires, unicorns floating awkwardly against starry night backgrounds and too-expressive fonts; memories, in short, of “My Personal Web Page.” All was composed of what Olia Lialina calls free collections of elements and “even those sites that that never contained a web graphics collection were, in themselves, collections”; for everything in them “could easily be extracted.”³ Such ugliness today is almost impossible for the layperson to achieve. Few would even want to. Anything uploaded to a social media platform is immediately slotted into a streamlined interface. The elements are disaggregated, but comfortably so. They are proportionally sized and uniformly separate. They do not occupy the ugly middle ground of superposition without gradation of emphasis.

But ugliness persists in the diversity of content so posted. Little unites the items of a timeline or newsfeed save their concurrence on timeline or newsfeed. The chance encounter of an umbrella and a sewing machine is no longer avant-garde but prosaic, banal. And each Lorna Mills loop is simply a reminder that almost nothing we consume is in any sense coherent. The phrase “image dump” is apt insofar as to dump is to discard a used or contemptible object; and a dump is that heap on which it has been tossed. Moreover, a dump accepts all comers. All content is equal in its capacity to be dumped. That this word also signifies the process and product of excretion only points up the fact that we all of us dump, and can hardly help doing so. Hence the name of Mills’ website, LornaMillsImageDump; for she does not tend her garden so much as tidy her dump.⁴ Some piles stink more than others and she typically sources from all the worst offenders. She then returns an ugly form to a content that deserves it.

At the same time, she shapes it. She submits it to a structure as exacting as it is boorish. Exacting: the nine different flowers that border Linguine Prima Vera (2013) bloom in perfect unison for ten frames, contract entirely at frame eleven, bloom again for three frames and then restart when the fourteen-frame GIF repeats. The effect is of a hiccup of petals near the end of each cycle, which yet lead the eye insistently to frame center. Boorish: what the eye finds is an image of coitus as a man jackhammers away at his unseen partner. Seen from behind, his enormous scrotum bounces twice per cycle, or about four times every second. The orchid beneath him blooms up to his perineum until, at its greatest extension, the tip of a petal forms a straight line with his buttocks. A blooming carnation does the same from above. The resulting connotation is less growth than overgrowth; and the idyll is further tainted by a literal “taint.”

Concern at the level of every frame ultimately separates the work from our idea of cinema. If anything, the most telling comparison is not the Lumières but the metrical films of Peter Kubelka. “I can give you a visual signal which lasts half time, double time, fourth, third, as I choose,” he told an audience with great satisfaction. And if nature was yet more awesome than any product of human hands, “I can do it faster, make thunder and lightning 24 times a second”—or blossoms and thrusts, as the case may be.⁵

Part II

What surprised most in Mills’ choice for Midnight Moment, the digital art showcase that occurs in Times Square every night around midnight, was its relative beauty. The loop, called Mountain Light/Time(2015), eschewed the harsh white backgrounds of earlier work. Rather, as the clock struck 11:57, a blazing yellow filled the many screens that encircle the square. The strairstep contours remained, but they bounded neither fires nor freaks nor even the animals of which the artist is fond. Near the upper left of the frame was a small russet triangle that grew in six seconds to a mountain in sunlight. The rate and shape of its expansion were dictated by the source, a time-lapse of the rising sun as it peels back an evening’s curtain of shadow. The motion was nervous—scintillating, really—but uniform in direction; and the sense of calm was enhanced by the gentle sinking of the mountain so that its peak also moved one-fifth down the frame. The artist timed it deliberately to mimic “a deep breath.”⁶ And if it managed to synchronize viewers to its rhythm, inspiring thereby some eupeptic feeling, it met at least one of the criteria for beauty.

But it would be premature to speak of a turn in Mills’ work. None of the videos in her Ethereal Imperial (2017) suite can be said to solicit contemplation in the old sense. The tawny mass that stretches across No. 1 might be a desert skyline when seen as a still: an impression only strengthened by the blue expanse above it. In motion we can see it for what it truly is, a blanket with a gash at its center and underneath which a person is struggling. A tiny airplane appears roughly half a minute later and proceeds to rain missiles down on the blanket. They seem aimed at its hole, which they never quite reach; for the airplane snaps back to its original position, turns and fires again at the end of every second. No. 8 features a blanket as well. It hoods an unseen agent—a deleted hand perhaps—that punches twice down and twice up against a stream of water. No. 5 is unusual in that one subject dominates: its view of trees in winter is not cut out, but cut into, forming blue sawtooth snowflakes from the picture’s negative space.

Other entries exploit the greater length of video to unfold a collage in time, while yet retaining short cycles for each given element. No. 2 begins with the head of a man, dead center, sliding from left to right into a pile of white powder. Whether the pile is actually cocaine or flour is unimportant as its function is to rhyme with the moving clouds behind it. Presently, this thin band of cloud is crossed by a band of smoke curving round an absent figure, which context soon shows us to be a revving car. As smoke begets smoke and one plume conceals another the only constant in the image is the man’s sliding head. Shrunken cars proliferate along the left border, one above another, all spinning their wheels or performing little tricks. The image reaches full saturation by one minute fifty. The vertical pileup weighs so heavily on the left that one is relieved to see it vanish twenty seconds later. The head continues its slide along the abscissa with an immense cloud of burnt fuel for its shroud. Then the loop resets.

Unlike most of Mills’ work, the colors here do not clash; they are all in blues and greys. There is unity of shape between the clouds, the smoke, the ambiguous white powder. There is even a certain unity of theme, if human stupidity can be taken as such. All the elements submit to a rigor that calls to mind shibboleths like “secret geometry.” And yet her work resists beauty. Indeed she cites the beautiful only to pervert it. Her rhythms are not gentle, but sexual, always with the same one-two thrust and with the same abrupt stoppages that defer climax endlessly. The many units still impinge and abut with crinkle-cut contours, debarring integration; while their sudden appearance at the periphery contravenes canons of pictorial emphasis. Edmund Burke defined beauty as like a series of globes, such that a hand stroking one passed on smoothly to the next. If the ugly is yet too disparaging a phrase we might well essay Burke’s alternative, that which passes not smoothly but is checked at every turn. Extreme contrast of quality, staccato presentation, a sense of infinity are all comprised in its profile. A person willing to endure it would thrill at the broken, irregular, hurried and changeful. The feeling it inspires is one of tension and strain, not melting or repose. And if it isn’t, like the ugly, mere privation of beauty, that is also to say it can have our respect. Burke called it the sublime—which is as good a name as any. Some even say the English discovered it in mountains.