Matt Stokes, Long After Tonight (Still), 2005 Super 16mm Film and Audio transferred to DVD, 6:45 minutes Image � Matt Stokes, Courtesy Workplace Gallery, UK
Artforum May 2007 "Reviews: Matt Stokes at ZieherSmith" by David Velasco
Matt Stokes�s six-minute forty-five-second Super-16 film Long after Tonight, 2005, may have won him the now-defunct Beck�s Futures Prize last year in Britain, but it doesn�t follow any of the current trends in American contemporary art. There�s no conceptual code to crack, no extreme or particularly innovative formal gestures, no wry political critique. And as if to evince the artist�s own sincere unselfconsciousness, there�s even a shirtless man with a braided ponytail, whirling to music like a dervish.
All reason enough, perhaps, to like the work, which was shown at Stokes�s recent New York solo debut. Long after Tonight was shot at a Gothic Revival church in Dundee, Scotland, where the artist staged an homage to and a re-creation of a famous weekly northern-soul night that ran for years in the adjoining social hall during the �70s. The film (presumably named after Jimmy Radcliffe�s soulful version of the Burt Bacharach song) is antididactic, an object lesson in the pure scopophilic joy of watching people dance.
Opening with a bleak exterior view of the church as duck, the scene shifts to the building�s baroque interior, lingering on an incense holder and sundry Christian iconography. The soundtrack comprises two obscure northern-soul instrumentals, both imparted by local "soulies": The first is a song called "The World Again," by Honey Townsend, while the second � a dramatic tone poem called "Sidra�s Theme," by Ronnie & Robyn � is the film�s musical cynosure. As the cathartic strings of the first song begin, the camera trains on a twirling skirt; a series of deftly orchestrated edits follow, cutting quickly from tracking shots of sweating bodies to close-ups of hard shoes and acrobatic splits on the church�s parquet floor. Long after Tonight frequently switches in and out of slow motion, syncopating the dancers� gestures to the music�s crashes and crescendos. The film closes simply and elegantly, with another exterior of the church at dawn accompanied by a harp�s crisp glissando.
On the other hand, Sacred Selections, 2005-, also showcased here, is a broader, endeavor comprising public recitals organized by Stokes, in which songs from musical subgenres � black metal, happy hardcore, and northern soul � are played on a pipe organ. Stokes�s practice of staging and translating fragments from musical subcultures (Real Arcadia, 2003-, a project not included here, documents and re-creates ephemera from defunct British rave organizers Out House Promotions) has often been called anthropological, situating it vaguely in the lineage of relational aesthetics. Considered as such, Stokes�s work perhaps bears greater resemblance to the more ludic happenings of Fluxus than to compatriot Jeremy Deller�s politically charged restaging The Battle of Orgreave, 2001. Still, Comparisons will inevitably be made to Deller�s Acid Brass, 1997 � a dead ringer for Sacred Selections � in which the artist hired a brass band to perform acid-house anthems.
The recent show included several glossy color stills from Long after Tonight, which largely highlighted the film�s more bathetic imagery: a statue of the Virgin Mary, a man shouting in ecstasy, a gracefully posed, sweaty torso. The miss Long after Tonight�s finer � often awkward � moments: a woman�s quiet smile as she concludes a spin or the dancers� occasional clumsiness in executing a move. In sharp contrast to the slick stills, Stokes also included individual portraits, taken during the warm-up to the film, of four of the dancers. Distinctly less noble-looking in the cruel, flattening glare of the flash, their appearance is refreshingly jarring, creating a sense of displacement that serves as a simple foil to the film�s nostalgic mien.
