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An Outsider in Grand Theft Auto: Phil Solomon

Hava Aldouby

To cite this article: Hava Aldouby (2020) An Outsider in Grand�Theft�Auto: Phil Solomon, Art
Journal, 79:2, 76-79, DOI: 10.1080/00043249.2020.1765558

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00043249.2020.1765558

Published online: 17 Jun 2020.

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Hava Aldouby
An Outsider in
Grand Theft Auto:
Phil Solomon
black man
You are a target and marked as hyper-
visible; 13.6% of your population
is in fair to poor health. You are
responsible for grafting and suturing
a special skin for survival. If you so
choose, please proceed to [[the lab,
PAGE 85]]
or proceed directly to your birthright
within the [[supernatural realm, PAGE
86]].
This interview was made possible by the support
of Da’at Ha-Makom (I-CORE), at the Hebrew
University of Jerusalem.
Phil Solomon generously shared information,
materials, and reflections with the author, and
contributed significantly to the formation of the
present interview just a couple of months before
his tragic death. May this article be a tribute to his
memory.
1. Leo Goldsmith, “Chemical Sundowns, Phil
Solomon with Leo Goldsmith,” Brooklyn Rail,
November 2012, http://brooklynrail.org/2012
/11/film/chemical-sundownsphil-solomon-by
-leo-goldsmith.
2. For a discussion of these films’ chemically
based aesthetic, see Hava Aldouby, “The Physical
Anxiety of the Form Itself: A Haptic Reading of
Phil Solomon’s Experimental Films,” Projections:
The Journal for Movies and Mind 10, no. 1 (2016):
86–113.
3. Excerpts from American Falls can be found at
https://vimeo.com/69816031, https://vimeo
.com/160642452, and https://vimeo.
com/69814460; see also an exhibition
overview at https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=LiQRqUdFpVI
76
The essay and interview that follow ponder the move of Phil Solomon, a promi-
nent figure of American experimental cinema, into playing and creating with
Grand Theft Auto (GTA)—a video game of metropolitan gang warfare, fraught with
violence and critical irony.
Phil Solomon was born in New York in 1954, the grandson of
Russian Jewish immigrants. In the early 1970s he attended the
then-new film department, founded by the filmmaker Ken Jacobs,
at SUNY Binghamton and went on to earn a master’s degree from
the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston. Solomon’s
unique aesthetic, based on chemical manipulation of optically
printed found footage, matured during the late 1990s. In Walking
Distance (1999, 23 min.), a 16 mm film, he appropriated footage
from Houdini (dir. George Marshall, 1953) and Le Grand Bleu (dir. Luc
Besson, 1988), and in Night of the Meek (2002, 24 min.), dedicated to Anne Frank,
he chose fragments from 1930s German films, among them M (dir. Fritz Lang,
1931) and The Golem (dir. Paul Wegener, 1930), and from James Whale’s Frankenstein
(1931). The chemically molten emulsion, which Solomon once called the “roiling
chemical soup,” swallows the appropriated film images, which resurface only for
split seconds of recognition.1 Solomon masterfully manipulated the texture and
shading, as if painting onto the filmstrip.2
Solomon’s magnum opus, American Falls (2002–10, 56 min.) is a three-channel
video installation based on optically printed, chemically manipulated film materi-
als transferred to digital video.3 American Falls spans the entire history of American
cinema through an enormous quantity of appropriated footage and sound layers.
The epic work is suffused with irony and anxiety at what Solomon felt was the
corruption of the American ethos of democracy and social justice.
Solomon died on April 20, 2019, just a few months after this interview, likely
his last, was completed. The interview transcript (see pages 80–86) is based on my
extensive recordings from a ten-day research session in 2014 at the University of
Colorado, Boulder, where Solomon was a professor of film studies and a friend and
colleague of the late Stan Brakhage. Throughout several hours, at the department’s
film theater, I recorded Solomon’s words while we watched his entire oeuvre in
succession. He said he had never had a similar experience. The present interview
presents part of this free monologue, spoken over the projected films and lightly
encouraged by my questions. While the transcript draws on these recordings,
Solomon enriched and updated the texts, mainly via Skype in late 2018 and early
2019, in preparation for publication here. At the time, he was already facing the criti-
cal culmination of a years-long medical condition, and alert readers will discern the
Phil Solomon, still from American Falls,
2010, 3-channel HD video, color, sound, 56
min. (artwork © Phil Solomon; image provided
by the artist)
summer 2020
 Phil Solomon, still from Empire, 2008–12,
HD video, stereo sound, 48 min. (24 hours, GTA
time) (artwork © Phil Solomon; image provided
by the artist)
4. Phil Solomon, conversation with the author,
Boulder, Colorado, August 2014.
5. See Hava Aldouby, “Tightrope Walking on
the Threshold of Virtual Reality: Phil Solomon’s
Filmmaking in Grand Theft Auto,” in Borderlines:
Essays on Mapping and the Logic of Place, ed.
Ruthie Abeliovich and Edwin Seroussi (Berlin: De
Gruyter, 2019), 69–90.
6. Phil Solomon, artist’s statement, in Archaeology
in Reverse—Phil Solomon, ed. Hava Aldouby, exh.
cat. (Jerusalem: Mamuta Art and Media Center at
Hansen House, 2015), 9.
7. Soraya Murray, On Video Games: The Visual
Politics of Race, Gender, and Space (London: I.B.
Tauris, 2017), loc. 3414–15, Kindle.
8. Michael Nitsche, Video Game Spaces: Image,
Play, and Structure in 3D Worlds (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2008), 191.
CAA-AJ-SU20-INTERIOR-2020-05-08_gr1.indd 77
dark tones that pervade the interview. Solomon discloses invaluable details pertain-
ing to his work processes, his enormously rich assemblage of embedded sound and
found footage, and mainly his complex network of private and collective associations.
In his 16 mm film The Secret Garden (1988), inspired by Frances Hodgson-
Burnett’s 1911 children’s book of the same title and its cinematic adaptations, a
gradually intensifying flicker renders watching the film a painful experience.
Referencing this as “an expulsion, a visual expulsion” in an inescapable reference
to the archetypal biblical Expulsion, Solomon conflated the Secret Garden with the
lost Eden of childhood. “Here is the essential Romantic condition,” he said, “I want
entrance to the Garden, but I am consistently denied it. An eternal state of desire.”4
Solomon shifted from film-based work to gaming in 2005, pursuing the
Garden via the world of video games. He then produced a corpus of digital video
works, masterfully appropriating the opportunities afforded by the game engine. He
wandered in the game spaces, suspended between embodiment and weightlessness,
attempting to orient himself to feeling at home in the virtual expanses of the
game.5 “Without resorting to my usual bag of photochemical, cine-texture magic—
I was on my own again, nowhere to hide,” Solomon remarked on his shift, or
perhaps migration, into the game world.6 In the videos under scrutiny here, he
explored GTA San Andreas and GTA Liberty City, with a mixture of curiosity and anxiety.
Soraya Murray counts placelessness among the major anxieties that haunt cur-
rent game worlds.7 Solomon’s GTA videos construct the game world simultaneously
as place and nonplace: a promised land, yet not fully habitable. Throughout the
interview below, a conflict between accommodation and alienation is apparent.
On the one hand, Solomon describes having a strong physical sensation of the
space, yet his recurrent emphasis on the game world’s “lack of verisimilitude”
indicates the opposite. Visibly “not the real space,” he says, “the poetry lies in that
poignancy of its failure,” revealing its uncanny aspect to his anxious gaze.
In Michael Nitsche’s terms, “placeness” indicates a subjective sense of inhab-
iting the game space. Only “through the active work of the player . . . the masses
of polygons can transform into places.”8 Placeness is a functional requirement in
77 artjournal
5/20/20 4:32 PM
Phil Solomon, still from Rehearsals for
Retirement, 2007, top left, digital video, color,
sound, 12 min. (artwork © Phil Solomon; image
provided by the artist)
Phil Solomon, stills from Still Raining Still
Dreaming, 2009, digital video, color, sound, 12
min. (artwork © Phil Solomon; images provided
by the artist)
9. Murray, On Video Games, Kindle loc. 2774.
10. Ibid., Kindle loc. 3138–41.
11. For an excerpt from Rehearsals for Retirement,
see https://vimeo.com/160642452
12. Nitsche, Video Game Spaces, 200.
gaming, yet in Solomon’s work it assumes an aesthetic role. He made the game
space his own by investing it with traces of trauma, both collective and personal,
yet remaining an outsider throughout. Playing Grand Theft Auto unconventionally,
Solomon probed its inherent paradoxes, its cheat codes, and its glitches. The
interview dwells on the particularities of this intriguing process.
Murray emphasizes that Grant Theft Auto does not only “impart an impactful sense
of place, but the game play also demands that one learn the space well in order to
progress through missions.”9 Indeed, for Solomon, getting around in the game’s cities
came close to navigating his own neighborhood. But he eschewed the game’s pre-
scribed forms of engagement, which Murray references as “opportunistic and exploit-
ative.”10 Solomon meandered in the spaces, following an associative stream of
consciousness, where certain locales evoked melancholic or anxious imaginings.
A case in point is the video trilogy In Memoriam (Mark LaPore 1952–2005), dedi-
cated to Mark LaPore, Solomon’s close friend and fellow filmmaker who took his
own life on September 11, 2005. In the videos of this trilogy, personal loss and
universal trauma are tapped through the choice of particular game locations and
settings. For example, recurrent scenes in Rehearsals for Retirement (2007)11 feature
airplanes crossing the skies. These were spawned by the artist as stand-ins for the
traumatically charged date of LaPore’s suicide. In Still Raining, Still Dreaming (2009), he
pans slowly within a tiny wardrobe, where a rack of men’s coats invoked, for him,
an image of hanging. Often, he dwells on sites that conflate game representations
of iconic landmarks, such as the Golden Gate Bridge or the Griffith Observatory in
Los Angeles, with their iconic representations in the movies. In Nitsche’s terms,
such evocative locations are invested with “a new placeness.”12
78 summer 2020
Phil Solomon, still from Last Days in a
Lonely Place, 2007, digital video, black and
white, sound, 22 min. (artwork © Phil Solomon;
image provided by the artist)
black woman
You are a target and marked as hyper-
visible; 13.6% of your population
is in fair to poor health. You are
responsible for grafting and suturing
a special skin for survival. If you so
choose, please proceed to [[the lab,
PAGE 85]]
or proceed directly to your birthright
within the [[supernatural realm, PAGE
86]].
13. For an excerpt from Still Raining, Still Dreaming,
see https://vimeo.com/76477740.
14. Motionless observation recurs in Still Raining
and in Last Days in a Lonely Place and prevails in
Empire (2013), Solomon’s single-take session of
GTA: Liberty City and homage to Andy Warhol’s
eponymous film (1964).
15. Aldouby, “Physical Anxiety of the Form Itself.”
See also Aldouby, “Tightrope Walking.”
16. On “givenness,” see Murray, On Video Games,
Kindle loc. 2644–45.
Solomon often adopted the position of an outsider, silently observing as the
game played out its strange, precoded incidences. Fascinated, he would haunt mar-
ginal and uncanny places like the abandoned soda factory in Still Raining, a melan-
choly space that he associated, again, with LaPore’s suicide. In another compelling
scene in Still Raining, a shadow crawls over buildings and storefronts in a vacant
Chinatown street in Liberty City, accentuating the rapid shift from daylight to
dusk.13 Solomon made immense efforts to empty the place, and then, seated on a
motorcycle, he watched as twilight took over the deserted streets.14
One of Solomon’s tactics was using weather cheats to induce images of
unending fog and rain so as to attain “film grain.” I have argued elsewhere that
texture renders Solomon’s images suggestively tangible, fostering intense somato-
sensory engagement.15 The evocative graininess of the fog and mist endows the
game world with a “skin.” “I do think artists are . . . familiar with never quite
feeling at home in the world or even in [their] own skin,” he asserts in the inter-
view that follows; “hence we create new worlds and new skins in the privacy of
the creative act.” By growing a skin of grain, albeit virtually, his game spaces
become surrogate dwellings, substituting for the yearned-for Garden.
Yet placeness in Solomon’s Grand Theft Auto videos is a fleeting effect, always
challenged by an underlying note of irony and anxiety. Motion is expressly detached
from an embodied viewpoint, invoking a migratory subject roaming the game
world unmoored, faceless, and disembodied. At the same time, the disembodied
point of view affords the relief that accompanies free movement, unencumbered by
the weight and consciousness of an alienated body. Lack and compensation, anxiety
and relief are thus subtly interwoven in Solomon’s gaming aesthetic, negotiating
placeness and migratory anxiety via the givenness of the game world.16
Hava Aldouby, PhD, is senior lecturer at the Open University of Israel, Department of Literature,
Language and the Arts, and artistic director of the Open University Gallery. Her research focuses on
experimental cinema, video, and new media art. Her publications include Shifting Interfaces: An Anthology of
Presence, Agency, and Empathy in Early 21st Century Media Art (Leuven University Press, 2020), and Federico
Fellini: Painting in Film, Painting on Film (University of Toronto Press, 2013).
79 artjournal