Director: Heidi Neff
Running time: 3mins
Heidi Neff is a multimedia artist based in the United States. Her exhibitions use paintings, projections and videos to create immerse exhibitions, which examine the escalating political and social tensions sweeping America, and the world – to seemingly anxiety-inducing effect.
Crowd Control is the animated distillation of an exhibition displayed at New York’s Amos Eno Gallery in 2022. Exploring the institutions and methods used to maintain society’s established norms, visitors were ‘greeted’ by a glowering 6-foot charcoal drawing of five conservative Supreme Court justices, while projected drones observed everything from the ceiling. Central to it all, on one long wall of the gallery, Neff’s mixed media drawing series Riot Police follows the same police through eight different situations, leaving it to the audience to infer whether they may or may not be welcome in each.
This last part seems to be what makes up the 2024 short-film sent to Indy Film Library. The scenes feature recognisable images like a Pride event, or a gynaecologist’s practice, with police barging through each scene – a flaming Pride flag hanging above them, or standing symbolically between the doctor and a woman’s body. Meanwhile, a watercolour named Uvalde displays the arrest of a parent, attempting to intervene in a school shooting – the braying, crooked faces of the riot police between them and the shooter conjuring memories of Picasso’s Guernica.
At the same time, these are presented alongside more abstract constructions. These include a piece about crumbling empires – with iconography like abandoned statues of Julius Caesar and Lenin appearing alongside images evoking memories of 9/11 and the multiple wars America and its allies have become embroiled in since. There is also an abstract take on the pandemic, where corona-cells constructed out of assault rifles and penises reflect on epidemics of gun violence and sexual violence – which, like Covid-19, society is just expected to ‘live with’.
The relentless march of the riot cops between each scene disrupts what is occurring in many of them – but it pointedly also obstructs and obscures what we can see of them. Neff couples this with quickly cutting between each of the images – even when we are shown closer visuals, we are distanced from the unfolding action, and pacified, even as we feel the need to form an opinion or act on what we have seen.
This provokes a great exasperation, prompting us to think more about our own role as both consumers of media, and democratic actors. News media under capitalism is profit-motivated – to meet with those goals, it will both sensationalise what its ideological confines allow it to show, and obscure aspects which could compromise the ideological norms that that profitability depends upon. At the same time, we are told engaging with this process is essential to inform us, when we go to the polls to chose who gets to wield power over us, and how. Many of Neff’s images are things we should take a stance on – but obscuring them leaves us in an ambiguous limbo, where the safest option seems to be sitting on the fence and hoping for the best.
At the same time, the images warp and converge, occasionally stacking up to form the great, vertical feed that so many of us have come to rely upon for the kind of news coverage that has become impossible in the mainstream. But as we know all too well from social media’s great doom-feed, as all of the unfolding calamities unfold simultaneously, they end up competing for our attention. It is utterly overwhelming, and leaves us feeling just as powerless and uninformed as before. Confronted by a continuously evolving matrix of all the world’s evils, it is impossible to know where to begin, and again the result is a depressing, unfulfilling passive consumption.
It all feels too much to take in. That may well be the point. But it also comes with a downside when this film is removed from the context of Neff’s original exhibition. We have no respite, no opportunity to engage with each of these fantastically composed, visceral images on a more intimate level – to explore their composite meanings and complexities in more detail.
The film has introduced me to the artist, and my resulting searches have yielded ways for me to engage with each of the paintings, via her website. That is a good thing. But in doing so, it has also emphasised how the film as a lone piece of content is less engaging than as part of that bigger context. Each image is more impactful as a still, allowing our minds the time and space to wander through its many layers of meaning, and to think about the way it relates to the world around us. Then, placing it alongside the animation where riot cops and the fast cuts of the 24-hour media complex make it impossible to accurately read, makes a much more compelling point, too.
Neff’s work is filled to to the brim with text and sub-text. It is a rich tapestry of interwoven meaning and references – which speaks effectively to the nightmarish experience of 24-hour news consumption, as the intricate systems of the human world crumble simultaneously. It is also an effective way to introduce audiences to Neff’s work, which is both a blessing and a curse. I must confess I’d never encountered Neff’s paintings before – but now that I have, it seems that her usual medium (which I will be keeping an eye out for in the future) is much more compelling than this one.