Art Review

She's been called "a one-woman video machine," "the poster child of the VJ (as in DJ) movement," and "the leader of a new generation of video performers," but when Bec Stupak was first getting into video at Princeton High School, she was, as she puts it, "the neon green sheep of the family" and her parents weren't quite sure how she was going to turn out. She admits being worried about what Alex (her stepfather) and Barbara Waugh, and her father, Steve Stupak, would think about her work, most recently Radical Earth Magic Power, her companion piece to Jack Smith's 1961 film, the drag classic Flaming Creatures. Both the original and her remake were projected on opposite walls of the gallery at Deitch Projects in New York while her story boards outlining the action were projected on a surface in the middle. The effect viewed in an Arabian Nights setting complete with a divan for the audience to lounge on was "amazing," according to Roberta Smith's New York Times review, which found Stupak's flaming creatures "much more fluid, androgynous and … flaming" than the original and suggested that, "in this regard, she may have surpassed her inspiration."

Bec says her parents responded by continuing to be "wonderfully supportive." "They always encouraged me to follow my heart, even when I wanted to quit my corporate day job and become a fulltime video artist." And: "I think they liked meeting all my queenie friends at the opening."

The cast was made up of a performance group called the Radical Fairies, the Hula-Hooping Groovehoops and underground celebrities ranging from Agathe Snow to Gary Indiana. She also had some directorial help from improv director, Octavio Campos. For all her previous successes (such as being included in the Whitney Biennial, having an exhibit at the Tate in Liverpool, winning an award for Best Underground Music Video, doing a video remix for the Rolling Stones, and a DVD 'zine shown at the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center), Radical Earth Magic Power was both her most personal and most ambitous work, "really the first thing that I directed with a major cast." What she wanted, she says, was to make a version of Flaming Creatures based only on what she'd heard about the original. "When I was in high school," she recalls, "so much of what influenced me were things that I only heard about, but never experienced directly, so I was really interested in exploring that." To research the film, she conducted interviews with people who had seen it only once or twice as well with people who knew it by heart. The creative challenge implicit in such an approach is considerable. Imagine a painter responding to Picasso at the same remove rather than absorbing the influence first-hand. For that matter, imagine Jack Smith evoking the B-movie world of Maria Montez without ever having seen those films.

As a VJ, Bec had to tailor her work to the party or "rave" environment, mixing videos (all hers, none from external sources) the way a DJ mixes music. Her gallery work liberated her from the party aesthetic, where, she says, "you could bend it and tweak it a little, but if it went too far off the beaten path, it would no longer be accepted as being legitimately part of the scene. At a certain point, the art no longer wants to take a back seat to the partying; it wants to be acknowledged as being important."

Bec Stupak can be seen with the seven other artists picked from among 400 applicants to be part of the Artstar documentary/reality series which began on the fine arts channel, Gallery HD, available nationwide on DISH network (channel 9472). The first episode aired on June 1. The final three can be seen at 9 p.m. Thursdays through July 20. Repeats will follow.

Art reviews are usually accompanied by an image from the artist's work. In this case, it makes more sense to include an image of the artist. For one thing, Bec Stupak's work needs to be seen in motion. A frozen image is the opposite of what she's about. If you see her with her fellow artists in the Artstar series, you'll also see that she's adept at improvising on her own image, expressing her style. whether it's in the way she arranges (or disarranges) her hair, ties fronds and feathers into it, or pastes butterfly sequins above each eye, she's expressing points of style that you can be pretty sure will be featured in her work: for example, the picture accompanying this review (best seen at www.towntopics.com where the colors can be appreciated). Set the imagery painted on her face in motion and you're in a Bec Stupak video. Notice the way she's posing her hands: you'll see moves like this employed by her alter ego, friend, and muse, Carla Machado, who is the exotically bangled, bejeweled, and painted performer weaving and undulating and lip-synching to Yoko Ono's "Walking on Thin Ice." The first few times I saw this exhilarating little (just under six minutes long) film Bec made with Eli Sudbrack at the Assume Vivid Astro Focus collective, I thought she herself was the performer. While admitting that she and Carla are often mistaken for one another, she assures me that she's not in any of her videos. But she really is, the same way that an auteur informs his or her movies. The performer on film is a projection of the video artist's aesthetic, the medium for her spirit. Yoko Ono has seen the video and "loves" it and you can see why. It's not just that this is a brilliant throwback to the days when music videos were exploding all over MTV. If Bec had been on the scene in that era, she'd have easily been one of the most sought-after directors because unlike many of the story-oriented interpretations of the music, hers gets right down to it, catching every beat, every nuance, using a mixture of editing and her own lovely, exuberant imagery like a visual percussionist to underscore every fractured "cry" in Yoko's recurring chorus of cries. The result is both edgy and joyous, outrageous and romantic, launching the "Blow through the limits" message like a fireworks display. No wonder one of her favorite quotes about her work is from a Japanese blog responding to Radical Earth Magic Power: "In the movies, there were many make-uped crazyeeee people. there no taboo include gay, nude, messed-up!! i felt people gave me message 'release yourself get free!!!!'"

Talking about her evolution as an artist, Bec begins with her father Steve Stupak, who encouraged her art early on (like a paternal antecedent to gallery entrepreneur Jeffrey Deitch), commissioning projects, getting her to make things in clay, create giant paper sculptures, and to draw still lifes. In fact, the "Walking on Thin Ice" video begins and ends as a still life of a formation of fruit that opens out and explodes in your face and then folds back in on itself when the journey is over.

As for Princeton High School, from which Bec graduated in 1994, she found that the projects she was "passionate about" rarely coincided with the sort of assignments the school had in mind ("I would always sneak art books into my textbooks in class"). Nevertheless, her creativity was encouraged by instructors like Joan Goodman, Bob Loughran, and, most particularly, art teacher Dave Mackey, "who recognized the way each of the creative misfit kids needed to be helped along. I can't even say how many times I sought refuge in his classroom, or received encouragement from him to be as outrageous as I wanted to be. He had subscriptions to art magazines that I was obsessed with looking at, and through them I learned about Basquiat, Philip Guston, all kinds of artists. I was able to work in whatever art medium I wanted to."

Another key figure at PHS was Ray Nutkiss, the video teacher: "That video program saved my life and gave me a look into a world that would have been off limits, because the equipment was so hard to come by." She also mentions the importance of the photo lab and even more, the fact that PHS was an early user of the internet, for which she credits Peter Thompson: "Back in '91 the school had a dial-up hub that you could call into, and they had a closed-circuit internet system. Since I later went on to earn my living in internet use and design, I feel like that was so essential to everything I've done since."

People around town in the early 1990s might have seen Bec Stupak and her friends making videos. What made Princeton "a really good place to grow up in" were "all the tons of little nooks and crannies to walk around and hang out in, little paths all through the campus, alternate routes to places, interesting places to shoot. I used to dress up all my friends in crazy outfits and take them on campus to shoot in the parking garages and out by the stadium. We shot stuff all over the town, always stealing little moments here and there, hoping the campus security wouldn't find us.

"It was both the best of times and the worst of times in many ways, but I think high school is that way for anybody."

Art

Princeton's Art Star Bec Stupak, The 'Neon Green Sheep' of The Family

Stuart Mitchner