Basinski / Elaine / Justice

September 9–30, 2000

Fountain
William Basinski, James Elaine, Roger Justice

"In the silence I cry out for you," begins Roger Justice's dark, tender, poetic diary entries which, recited in a smoldering monotone by William Basinski, serve as the text for and spiritual center of Fountain.

The three projected images in Fountain, continuously changing, continuously the same, are taken from footage Elaine shot of a fountain in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and they are at once mesmerizing abstractions and foci of powerful metaphors: electric blue water swirls and ripples, bright white streaks of water cascade, now lush, now stark and cold, making present the self's hidden source, its violence and circularity, its light-charged endlessness.

Basinski's open-ended ambient music not only underscores the images' trance-like rhythms, their sense of being live icons of absorbing, contemplative attention, but also introduces subtle, electronic dissonances, a quality of disequalibrium and unease-Fountain is not a work designed to produce cheap contentment or New Age peacefulness.

Most importantly, Fountain's images and music allow one to enter deeply into the treacherously intimate interior of Roger Justice's text. Painter, filmmaker, criminal, addict, ecstatic, Justice is a poete maudite in the tradition of Rimbaud, Genet, and Burroughs, and the undated passages from his diary form what Spanish mystic and homoerotic poet St. John of the Cross called a "dark night of the soul." Justice laments that his heart is dying, that he is among the select few God has chosen not to love, and yet his savage despair, his sense of damnation, fuels a love poem to lost lovers, to the city, to heroin, to the always dying world in which his "I" and "eyes" merge with seas of sand, ice, and flesh.

"There are no defenses," Justice writes, "it's all over," and yet he goes on. After watching Fountain, one has the sense that it neither begins or ends, that it has somehow always existed at the source of one's fragile and ordinarily well-defended inner life.