LOCATION: Brian Herman Campaign Headquaters, 554 Warren Street
VIEWABLE: 24 hours a day
PROJECT DESCRIPTION: "AGAINST ODD TOMORROWS
Several months ago, while on my second trip to Hudson to scout locations for "Plugged In", I was taking photographs along Warren Street. A man in his 60s approached and asked if I was a real estate developer. "No", I replied, I'm an artist looking for a place to display a project."
"What kind of project is it", he asked, maybe a little tipsy.
"I think I want to make a video about Hudson. Maybe re-create an event that happened here" (at the time, I was thinking of the history of trade and transportation along the river).
"I was in a movie once", he said. Odds Against Tomorrow. It was shot right here. I was in a scene with some other kids. I was 10 years old. Harry Belafonte was the star. You should see it".
I told him I would, immediately excited. As an installation artist who often addresses personal and institutional histories, coincidences like this are at the heart of my work. I knew this was the right direction to move in. I began to research the film, and learned that it was released in 1959, and probably shot in 1958. So, 2008 marks its 50th anniversary.
Odds Against Tomorrow is considered one of the last great works of film noir, and was directed by Robert Wise, who won Academy Awards for West Side Story and The Sound of Music, two very different movies. In the film, a jazz vibraphonist, Johnny Ingram (Belafonte) is in debt to a mobster for 7500 dollars. An old friend, an ex-cop, has a set-up for the perfect heist: a bank in Upstate New York, in small town Melton (Hudson). The third man on the job is a blatant racist, misogynist, and ex-con. He doesn't want to work with Ingram, but has no choice: he too is desperate for cash, but for different reasons. He has lost his sense of self worth, living with and sponging off his girlfriend, unable to find work.
It's really not a film about a bank heist. Belafonte wanted to push race into the foreground, and the tensions between the two leads are palpable. The end of the film is a brilliant commentary on the human condition. It demonstrates (in what could have been a grotesque way), that under the skin, we are all the same.
I've taken the bank heist sequence and made several small visual changes, like restoring the name of "Hudson" to the bank's clock and various signs. But the major change has been to present the heist in two ways: as it was shot, and then again in negative.
ABOUT THE ARTIST:
When Michael Oatman was in fourth grade he swiped a power cord from his school’s wood shop. During recess he plugged it into an outlet, dug a trench, and buried it. In the fall he dug a 30-foot-long culvert wired with electricity so that when winter came he could have a working laboratory. He filled the tiny space with thermometers and test tubes, and used a Super8 film projector to show movies of ants carrying food and birds building nests using the snow as his screen. “At the time I thought I was playing scientist,” Oatman says. “Now I realize that was my first installation as a multimedia artist.”
Today as a clinical assistant professor of architecture at Rensselaer, Oatman is still immersed in the worlds of science, art, and design. As an artist, he infuses his work with elements of science and architecture. A visitor need only look around his studio in downtown Troy to see that Oatman—a renowned collage and installation artist whose work has been exhibited at museums and galleries around the globe—draws inspiration from nearly everything he encounters. The space is filled with a wide range of obscure objects that seemingly have no business residing side by side. Upon further inspection it becomes apparent that the artist has meticulously organized the chaos of the space.
“When you look at any piece of Michael Oatman’s work, you quickly recognize that he is an artist of extraordinary talent, but that’s just for starters,” says Pulitzer Prize-winning author William Kennedy. “The range of his imagination dazzles. He is a relentless seeker after what is new, and ‘new’ to Michael means a wrenching transformation of any expectations you might have based on whatever you know of his previous work. He is a dogged realist in his detail, but a surrealist in his conceptions; and the fusion has given us a body of work that is bountifully diverse and original.”
by Amber Cleveland from Drawing Connections
