House at Flashpoint
Andrew Wodzianski, House III, 2008
Strikingly tall with a well-waxed moustache, Andrew Wodzianski looks like a villain from an old silent movie. It’s easy to picture him tying a damsel to a railroad track while laughing maniacally. But this D.C. resident’s cinematic inspiration actually lies in a later—though no less sinister—movie archetype: deep-voiced horror-flick maestro Vincent Price. And with House, his latest show at Flashpoint, Wodzianski takes an idea or 10 from Price’s turn as an eccentric millionaire in the original 1959 House On Haunted Hill.
Estimating that he’s watched the movie more than 30 times, Wodzianski admits, "I have to watch it on mute. The lead actress has one of the most horrific screams. It offends the senses." House channels this visceral reaction into 13 high-contrast paintings based on scenes in the movie—but don’t come to the show expecting to see stereotypically creepy figures or ghosts. Instead, the exhibition focuses on more suggestive items: pale paintings of tiny coffins and spooky candelabras as well as an actual life-sized coffin on an altarpiece display at the end of the gallery.
Yup, a life-sized coffin.
Wodzianski constructed the piece out of flimsy wood and even hid in it during the opening. He ended up spending three hours in the cramped, dark space, sweating it out in a funerary-looking wool suit. Though he went undetected by the throngs of people milling about, drinking wine, looking at paintings, and asking where they could find the artist, Wodzianski claims the incident turned out to be "good experience for my trip to hell."
The sensory deprivation led to a panic attack 20 minutes in, but he got through by listening to his girlfriend's iPod, breathing deeply, and managing somehow to pull his tie and jacket off—or, as he describes it, performing "the greatest Houdini trick ever." While Wodzianski was inside the coffin, visitors wrote tributes to him in a guestbook, including "I hope you left me your moustache wax in your will" and one friend’s taunt, "I never liked you anyway."
Wodzianski's stunts don't stop with the coffin; he's also been leading a scavenger hunt via his Twitter feed. By following the cryptic clues, five quick-witted fans will win tickets to this Friday's Halloween costume party at Flashpoint and paintings from his show. House On Haunted Hill director William Castle promoted his movie with cheesy tricks like sending a plastic skeleton swinging through a theater at a dramatic moment or having nurses on hand to ensure that no one was scared to death. It's a cinematic tradition Wodzianski has kept alive by mailing tiny coffins to art bloggers and handing out glow-in-the-dark skeleton soap tied in a tiny noose. "The whole show is a gimmick," he explains.
Turning his show into a game has brought a great deal of publicity, but it's also had the unsavory effect of distracting people from the exquisite paintings. "My entire career has been criticized for that. There's always a way to look at it as [me] being bombastic," says Wodzianski. "It's a tribute to a genre I love, but in the end, it's just popcorn. No one cares about the subtext of the art. They ask me what it was like to be in the coffin, what it's like to have this moustache."
Wodzianski’s love of a genre that avoids self-seriousness may be at the heart of his struggle to be, well, taken seriously. "I am reaping what I sow, by packaging it this way," he says. "If you research it further [there is depth], but for most people, it's a fleeting moment of eye candy. I can't have my cake and eat it too." Fortunately he can still have his popcorn.
