Ken Okiishi

The Sixth Year is an art world drama series in five episodes, which re-interprets the format of the TV series. Set in the New York art world, it stages the backstage and theatricalizes the social interactions and power games, the aspirations, passions, and everyday realities of the field. The screenplay is based on interviews with artists, curators, gallerists, collectors, and art advisors, whose opinions, anecdotes, and gossip it abstracts and extrapolates into a fictional narrative.

Ken Okiishi’s most recent moving-image work is an engrossing take on the studio portrait. In tasking his real-life fitness coach with restaging social media photographs in reverse order—an embodiment of the social feed, half archive, half look book—the artist plays with notions of identity at the center of contemporary visual culture.

"Chapter One. He adored New York City," begins Woody Allen's 1979 Manhattan. "To him it was a metaphor for the decay of contemporary culture. The same lack of individual integrity to cause so many people to take the easy way out . . ." Allen's line may be an allusion to suicide, but one less radical departure for New York creatives has been, traditionally, to move away. With seemingly exponential increase over the past decade, asylum seekers have turned not to Brooklyn but to Berlin, inaugurating in their wake a love-hate fantasy wherein the German capital is cast as a utopian center of artistic production, and New York as a place to sell, not to make––a sexy but commercial hell. The success of Ken Okiishi's film work (Goodbye to) Manhattan, 2010, is its dismantling of that bipolar fantasy, of which its protagonists are ostensibly a part.

In what appears to be a college dorm room, Okiishi delivers a freewheeling presentation on the martyrdoms of James Dean and especially of River Phoenix, tortured film stars who became queer icons in their untimely deaths. Readings are interspersed with half-reenacted scenes from My Own Private Idaho (1991), Gus Van Sant’s classic of New Queer Cinema; and from The Matrix (1999), the blockbuster fantasy starring Keanu Reeves -- object of gay desire in Van Sant’s film, now in the role of action star and messianic hero.