Enormous Changes at the Last Minute: The Videos of Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby

Cinemascope issue 22

By Jason McBride

Exhibit A: Weirdly Wonderful

The Globe and Mail, Spring 2006

By Sarah Milroy

To describe Cooper Battersby and Emily Vey Duke's new video as ironic doesn't do it justice. Irony implies brittleness, cleverness and world weariness, but if these two artists have anything going for them, it's a sense of wonder at the endearing weirdness of life and all the vulnerable, furry little creatures immersed in it (mostly us). Their 16-minute tape, titled Songs of Praise for the Heart Beyond Cure -- showing currently in the group show Fantasia at Jessica Bradley Art + Projects -- consists of a sequence of vignettes that share a kind of bleak humour, but the force of these artists' imaginations makes the whole anything but depressing.

This is odd, given the subject matter at hand: environmental degradation, teenage bullying, rape, murder and crack addiction. Yet, the couple perform their haunting a cappella harmonies in lilting, innocent tones that have the stout-hearted feeling of hymns or old seaside shanty songs (Vey Duke comes from Halifax, Battersby from the Okanagan Valley in British Columbia). One particularly infectious tune decries the idiocy of mankind, put to shame by the gleefulness and industry of common song birds. Wizards in tall, pointy hats deliver strange, cockeyed truths about the changing relationship between man and nature, foretelling apocalypse.

In one of the video's most stunning passages, Vey Duke assumes the voice of the Very Small Magic Baby, revealing the bizarre details of her birth in a fiendish, adorable whisper: "I was made in a cellar, out of bits of plant matter, soil, the tissues of a lot of animals and special magical words," she whispers. "I grew in an enamel pot with a breathable covering over the top, which was made out of long human hair. I may be only the size of a jellybean, but I am unnaturally smart."

She then reveals her attachment to the Very Tiny Science Baby, who was incubated in the uterus of a Minzhu pig and lives in a science lab, a fellow old spirit with whom she communicates via telepathy. It's a delightfully odd take on the relationship between science and magic -- two systems of thoughts through which we aim, in vain of course, to explain away the mystery of the world.

In another passage, Vey Duke impersonates the voice of Petra, a cartoon schoolgirl who confides the tale of her persecution (and that of her friends), and her plans to start a revenge club for outsiders.

It's a pitch perfect snapshot of the struggle for identity in a youth culture mad for conformity. Vey Duke, who also performs this voice, says it is the most directly autobiographical piece she has ever made.

More than anything, Songs of Praise for the Heart Beyond Cure has the deliciously lazy feeling of daydreaming, and there's a reason for this. The work came out of a season of unusual sloth, when the couple spent the summer in Vey Duke's father's house at Beach Meadows, on Nova Scotia's remote South Shore. Following a period of frenetic professional activity in Halifax and an MFA at University of Illinois, this interlude of total isolation provided the space for these unique ruminations and flights of fancy, and for the making of the video's instantly unforgettable lyrics and melodies. Music, they say, is a big part of their relationship to each other. "We sing to each other all the time," Vey Duke says, describing her singular alliance with Battersby, her partner of 12 years. "But we never listen to other people's music. It's not really so much that we are singing songs. It's more a way of speaking to each other back and forth, when we are alone, in a sing-songy way. It's not the kind of thing that we would want any one else to hear."

Essay to accompany the exhibition “Curious about Existence”

Mercer Union, Fall 2005

By Jennifer Hsu

In obeisance to a governing principle of nature, we should feel no shame for what is disorderly and chaotic in us. For as the First Law of Thermodynamics tells us, “energy can neither be created or destroyed, it can only be transformed.” Driven by an impulse to rebuke the crippling nature of arguably needless moral anguish, Duke and Battersby make a philosophical case for absolution in “Curious About Existence”.

We are dirty and yet we belong here, “on this earth with green and green and red.” In the legacy of a profound revolution in morality spearheaded by Nietzsche, this video is deeply entrenched in a classically heretical ideological seat; the system of reality which it offends is the age old Western paradigm that order is good. Rationality is the best, as it is built on a system of orderly propositions, inferences and conclusions. Irrationality is the worst, as the laws of inference are broken and disorder abounds. The impulse to die, or to rage, or to envy is shameful since the capitulation of ordered rational behavior must precede it. In response to this system, Nietzsche broke dangerous ground: our depravity at its most colorful may in fact be vital to our nature.

Episodic in nature, “Curious About Existence” reacts ultimately against an uninspired but prevailing acceptance of moral terms. It begins with a song, a worship song to the looming nastiness of our organic existence. A celebration of disorder and entropy, the opening song seems borne of a curiosity about the possibilities of joy and freedom.

A lecture ensues. In a familiar pedagogy of computer generated illustrations, the professor teaches an introductory lesson on the First Law of Thermodynamics. What begins as a matter of fact postulation of the scientific law becomes a broader application of the law to human relationships and all the scientific phenomena they spawn. The First Law of Thermodynamics is wonderful because everything, including every dark impulse, is coded as a manifestation of energy and thus fits together in an infinitely complicated system of transforming energy.

As students pick up and leave their lecture hall, the viewer departs the venerable halls of higher learning and hears the quiet and distinctly unhuman sounds of natural water and birds. A squirrel and beaver converse about how everybody feels bad a lot of the time, which is compounded by the stupid things they do as a result. These stupid things are more eloquently characterized by Wagner’s wife in excerpts from her letters to Nietzsche. “Treat your impulses as a comedy that wants to entertain you, not a doctrine to be followed”, she writes. Again, here, as in the second episode, there is nothing to forgive except the over indulgence of impulses.

In closing, we are bereft of further exploration of our unnecessary motivation to feel ashamed. Instead, Duke and Battersby close their existential meanderings with a poetic song of reassurance that indeed, you belong here. Unapologetic, “Curious About Existence” may offer absolution of our crimes of filth and love.