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Though UBC MFA Tim Lee’s first solo exhibition includes three different works, I will focus here on only one, the video installation The Move, The Beastie Boys, 1998 (2000), which in many respects is emblematic of formal and thematic concerns addressed by the exhibition as a whole. Three video monitors on plinths depict three different close-up views of the artist’s face, clipped just above the neck, as he flatly recites the lyrics to the Beastie Boys song "The Move"—the first cut on their bestselling album Hello Nasty—with each "screen self" taking the vocal part of a different Beastie Boy. Lee’s flat, almost deliberately atonal inflection dampens the original song’s peppy exuberance, but in no way eliminates it. Rather, the installation’s overlapping monotones echo, in an oddly endearing way, the original’s crisp vocal play and lush production values. The installation’s ostensible musical utopianism resides in its implication that, at least for the duration of the song, Lee, or you, or I, or anyone at all can be Ad-Rock or Mike D., an imaginative dislocation from the shower, car stopped in heavy rush hour traffic, or university MFA hut to a Brooklyn studio, East Coast soundstage, or heavy rotation on MTV. Every man or woman an artist! B-boys to the early morn B-girls be rockin’ on and on!
In this sense, at least, Lee’s performance is not so much a copy of an original as it is a translation of a de facto "popular standard" from one context to another, much as a jazz player like Pharoah Sanders might radically translate a jazz standard like "Body and Soul" in the course of a live performance.
Lee likely picked "The Move" not so much out of respect for what the Beastie Boys mean to him personally, but as a result of the song’s dissemination through culture. In summer 1998 it was hard to turn on a radio and not hear "The Move." I recall driving late one night outside Seattle in a rental car and scanning the stations preprogrammed into the car radio, only to find "The Move" pumping out on each one.
The amateurism of Lee’s performance (by which I mean the verbal tics and hesitations that creep in despite how objectively the source material is presented) distinguishes his work from works of seamless appropriation, like Sturtevant’s restagings of Joseph Beuys’ lectures or Sherrie Levine’s copies of Walker Evans’ photographs. With these works, only the presence of a curatorial essay, wall label, or other kinds of directional signage distinguishes between the source work and its copy. Lee’s work, on the other hand, exaggerates its deviations from its ostensible source—3 identical Asian faces in place of 3 different Caucasian ones, video in place of audio, and so on. These exaggerations bring about the recognition that Lee’s project is not really about appropriation at all, but is rather connected to an older aesthetic bordered, on one hand, by Bruce Nauman’s staged studio performances and video works, and, on the other, by early Robert Morris works like 2.13, a performance masquerading as an art history lecture, whose point resides in the delay between a taped audio component and Morris’ out-of-synch performance of the actions the audiotape describes. The critical interest in Morris’ (and Lee’s) work resides in the degree of deviation between an audio component and its source (whether the Beastie Boys’ studio performance of "The Move" or the taped performance that Morris’ mimed actions deviate from).
My insistence on this reading is a result of Lee’s work’s overwhelming sense of determinedness, of complete formal and technical control. Lee’s work is knowing in the sense of flaunting the artist’s considerable art historical knowledge. One consequence of the work’s hyper-referentiality is that The Move seems to deliberately anticipate the contexts in which it will most likely be positioned by critics. But the complexity of Lee’s almost neurotic involvement with past art is sufficient on its own. What grates most about the work is the patina of cultural analysis cloaking it, as represented by, for instance, the artist’s claim in conversation that he found it interesting that, as an Asian male, his access to African-American culture had been mediated by three middle-class white kids from Brooklyn. In this respect, Lee’s title refers to the powerful feeling of social displacement underlying all contemporary artistic experience, a sense of not being-at-home in the world. But works that foreground this condition by telling us that everyone is always on the move often amount to special pleading for the artist’s own era. I think Lee’s work is more resonant when it drops its pretense of overt social analysis and focuses on its self-conscious and highly intellectualized relationship to past art. This process, to be sure, makes Lee’s involvement with the Beasties seem more calculating than charming. I respect this approach. But it will probably not play well with the crowd, who now demand that art with a "political" or socially conscious component somehow make its politics visible not as form, but as theme, or content. Lee’s chilly reply to this demand is bracing. So long playful, sensitive, and "politically aware." Hello, nasty.
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