Dream Story
A mask as slight as a thong rests lightly ona pillow in place of a husband’s head. In Traumnovelle (1969), a made-for-Austrian TV drama based on Arthur Schnitzler’s 1926 novella Dream Story, the wife’s gesture silently declares recognition of marital infidelity by the woman’s husband. The mask is a key prop in advancing dramatic movement in Traumnovelle and is doubled in the two-person exhibition featuring paintings by Max Karnig and sculpture by Nicolas G. Miller at House of Seiko. Tunneling into multiple renditions of the fertile novella, the two Los Angeles-based artists converge their respective practices to amplify the effect of dual modes of psychological and embodied displacement. Time-travel and collective consciousness, a continuum between waking fantasy and nocturnal dream, is magnified in both artists’ work through idealized form and aesthetic control proposing reality as an elaborate fabrication subject to revision. Through recollection, replication, and subtle distortions of form, Karnig and Miller suggest history underlies and precludes any quest for self-determination. Schnitzler’s Dream Story generated five film iterations (among them): 1969 Traumnovelle to 1999 Eyes Wide Shut, and the low-rent 1989 version Ad un passo dall’aurora (Nightmare in Venice) wedged in-between. In the exhibition Dream Story, key aspects of these three films are employed to sync periods and stylistic nuances by era to the novella’s primary dramatic dichotomies, further multiplying the distance between dream and wakefulness critical to the story’s psychosexual machinations.
Through the mask, a spectator is granted permission to be unrecognizable to the self. Once cloaked, one is liberated from civilizing constraints and may elliptically witness the unknowable or disavowed within. In Nicolas G. Miller’s bronze sculpture Masks (Traumnovelle, Ad un passo dall’aurora, Eyes Wide Shut), a three-part sequence of masks from succes-sive cinematic responses to the novella spiralsdownward through the spectator’s gaze, inviting an intimate relationship to the object itself. Poised like a telescope central in the exhibition installation, the sculpture presents a first-person encounter with Dream Story’s shadowy themes. In Miller’s furtively dysphoric diagrammatical display, the mask as object and symbol morphs through time and cinematic location, spanning Austria’s demure eye-covering to the bestial Italian edition and capped by Hollywood’s ersatz costume-designed version from the turnof the 21st century. Miller accomplishes an inversion of the outward gaze by tripling the implied act of masking and viewing, building avisceral, perspectival dimension to perceiving by way of looking.
In four small, lapidary oil paintings on aluminum panels, Max Karnig distills climactic scenes from Traumnovelle, Nightmare in Venice, and Eyes Wide Shut in queered Northern Renaissance revivals that circle the gallery, one to a wall. In the novella Dream Story, the destabilizing threat of female lust spurs the male character’sunderworld adventuring, leading to his psychiccollapse. The cinematic female characters in the three films (decades-spanning, nonetheless) are archetypes rendered one-dimensional by male insecurity and willful lack of imagination. In two of the four paintings, Karnig centers the malegaze as a voyeur of unfettered female desire. Marianne replicates the cinematographer’s frame, duplicating the cropped visage of amoaning daughter in a paternal deathbed scene. Amid her father’s cooling body, she shockingly professes her secret love and sexual longingfor the late father’s doctor, our protagonist. In Denmark, the kaleidoscopic mélange of the protagonist’s orgiastic encounter in Traumnovelle is reimagined by Karnig as serial, soft-core imag-ery fanning out sequentially in a processional formation—sexual heat brought to order in a classical frieze
–Monica Majoli