Beloff claims her works acts as a medium between the living and the dead. And “The Infernal Dream of Mutt and Jeff” is no exception. It looks to introduce us, the living, to old film equipment, the dead.
Beloff boasts three key concepts: re-aligning old cinema machinery and footage, contemplating whether human creations can live and work outside of its creator and as an addition Capitalism’s commodification of the human body.
All very nice clear-cut themes, but all done before.
The exhibit includes a ladder, chalkboard and desk. It’s essentially another exploration of a bunch of redundant objects cluttering a white-walled room. The skill is in the grouping not the making. A black and white cartoon plays, periodically interrupted by a shrill bell. A cleverly re-hashed film is projected onto the main wall providing an explanation of the objects beneath.
The piece is simple and sterile, giving no sense of a busy film set. The constant hum of the machines induces silence, but far from contemplative it ‘s almost boring. There is hardly any substance and Beloff makes a large leap from piece to themes. This film and the title are the works most redeeming features.
The second room, an afterthought, seeks to justify the work by quoting great arts of the industrial revolution. We see Duchamp revisited and Surrealism hinted at. But Beloff brings nothing new and does it nowhere near as well as the Léger’s and the Oppenhiem’s of the turn of the century.
The £4 pamphlet is more meaty than her work itself!
The concept of relying on technology is no longer new it’s factual and Beloff’s basic re-examination of Marx’s Commodity Fetish is tedious, tenuous and 100-years too late.