Ericka Beckman
[6][7][8] Her film and video works adopt game and fairytale tropes as structuring device, employing hand-made sets that suggest playing fields together with protagonists (or "players"), whose rule-based actions are choreographed to the rhythms of musical scores and incantations.
While these might be sources of childhood fun, Beckman is not playing around: her dark, techno-futuristic films and installations use these tropes to question role-play, gender and identity, as well as issues surrounding late-capitalist systems of power and control.
[30][3] After graduating, Beckman moved to New York along with fellow alumni such as Jack Goldstein, David Salle, Matt Mullican and James Welling, where they individually pursued artmaking that addressed an image-saturated culture and became identified, collectively, as part of the Pictures Generation.
[35][30][36] Beckman superimposes images, uses plays on words to create double meanings, and juxtaposes a bright, pop-art aesthetic with psychologically dark underlying themes in a manner that ARTnews described as "cheery but biting.
[1][9][37] Interactivity is regarded as a key quality in her oeuvre with considerations of audience engagement being central to her strategic use of games as a structuring device and sound, her editing style and the layout of her exhibitions.
[42][43][1] It featured a rotating cast of performers—Beckman and artists including James Casebere, Mike Kelley and Matt Mullican—and combined childhood dream recollections, cognitive development ideas and narrative structures related to games and folklore.
In a 1981 Artforum review, J. Hoberman described Beckman as "one of the most accomplished of younger American filmmakers [located] at the 'perceptual' edge of Poststructural Punk," and likened her work to primitive cartoons whose "enigmatic allegories are filled with nervous activity and comic violence, sexual imagery and syncopated energy, perceptual game-playing and ingenious homemade optical effects.
[36][10][1] The 35-minute film—which combined elements of basketball, dodgeball and roulette in an absurdist gambling game—was met with catcalling by viewers, who were likely in attendance for the Jean Luc Godard premiere with which Beckman's was co-billed.
[36][18] You the Better was viewed more favorably in art circles and received subsequent attention for its early engagement with concepts such as interactivity, digital avatars, virtual reality, cybernetics, video gaming and themes involving financial success and capitalism.
[12][31][55] The film's focus on attending rules, violations and rewards foregrounds the normally subtle workings of ideology and socialization in the story and functions as a critique of popular narrative structure, which often obscures these influences.
[27][8] Filmed in an abandoned water purification plant in Hungary, the piece shows people hard at work, flipping switches and turning cranks to keep a large machine in motion.
[27][8][2] The film uses interactive techniques known to invoke a mimetic response in viewers—rhythmic sound, stop-motion editing, camera movement and variations of focal length and exposure—creating an effect that Amy Taubin wrote, transformed its coliseum settings "into a giant thrashing machine.
Reach Capacity (2020, M – Museum Leuven) examined contemporary real estate market abuses and the history of the Monopoly board game, invented in 1904 by feminist and socialist Lizzie Magie.
[26] Retrospectives of her work have been held at Tate Modern,[3] Kunsthalle Bern, Le Magasin – Centre National d'Art Contemporain, and MIT List Visual Arts Center.
