Michael Workman

A woman is riding the El. A man eyeballs her from a standing position in the doorway. She passes him a note, instructing him to follow her home. Upon entering her apartment, the anonymous male shoves her against the wall, stripping her as they move to the bedroom. She silently gets out condoms, lubricant. He emanates disdain throughout, inspecting one of her condoms as he takes off his pants. He is ready to penetrate her. After a few thrusts, he rolls her over and enters her from behind, yanking back her ponytail; when he finishes he throws the used condom at her. As the stranger pulls back on his jeans, the woman stares vacantly into the distance. A harsh moral emerges from this encounter-intercourse without intimacy is nothing more than consensual rape.

The woman is Chicago artist and provocateur Kristie Alshaibi (née Drew). The above scene is from her recently completed feature-length film "Other People's Mirrors." But it's not really her-or, rather, it's her porn-star alter ego Echo Transgression, the sexually perverse Jekyll that takes over for her on screen, over the web, and in public displays of non-affection.

Three years ago, while working on a feature-length video, this graduate of the School of the Art Institute's master's program placed an ad in a local paper seeking production assistance for a work-in-progress. Local filmmaker and Z Film Fest director Usama Alshaibi offered her space at Heaven Gallery that he was using to stage the first installment of his annual program. Kristie accepted his offer, and ended up shooting a party scene in the space. The two became friends and eventually married. Active collaborators on numerous film and video projects, the couple has since completed their first feature-length movies, "Other People's Mirrors" (Kristie) and "Soak "(Usama). A notable difference between the two directors is their intensely individual approach to filmmaking. Also a co-founder of the Undershorts Film Festival, Usama is only occasionally the subject of his own productions, whereas Kristie's is blatant self-portrait and self-reinvention, with an eye to a larger social critique.

In "Other People's Mirrors," Kristie mixes fictional and actual illicit experience to embellish upon a dozen pornographic scenarios. The film is a straight catalogue of sexual perversions pushed to their extremes, singling out such taboos as intercourse with the dead, copulation with machines, anonymous sex, participation in a gang bang, and autoerotic cannibalism. Throughout the film, in the character of Narcissus, New York cult director Nick Zedd (creator of such films as "Whoregasm" and "Elf Panties: The Movie") drops in to check on her progress.

In each scene, Echo evolves into a nihilist masochist famished by her own pitiless self-denigration for an ultimate, transcendental self-affirmation that never occurs, a postmodern Catherine Deneuve in "Belle de Jour." In aggressively pursuing the connection between art and life, Echo represents to Kristie what she calls "the beauty of art viscera." She credits German artist Hans Bellmer as an influence, especially his sculptures of rearticulated mannequins and, more distantly, British filmmaker and painter Peter Greenaway of "The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover" renown, although she obviously takes a turn from the Fluxist philosophy of life-as-art as well. By attempting to mock, ridicule and even at times to figuratively terrorize as a means of shocking her public, Kristie hopes to short-circuit the false familiarity of celebrity.

"There is no separation between Echo and me... She's the living example of the theory," Kristie insists. In real life, this filmmaker/escort/artist/pornographer has used Echo as a sexual persona to agitate for the acceptance of a radical artistic view of extremely violent and excessively sexual subject matter as legitimate. Indeed, Echo has received considerable attention--both from the media, appearing on MTV's show "Sex 2K," and from law enforcement, landing a night in jail for prostitution.

But are life and art truly commensurate? I'd argue that, especially if an art demands actual criminal practice, it exists at the risk of creating a very real threat to that art. If a filmmaker is in jail, for instance, no films are getting made. Explaining that Echo receives mission communiqués from an unknown source via an antenna in her spine, Kristie acknowledges the impossibility of taking on the persona of Echo in real life when she describes her persona as "schizo." Rather than going insane, both Alshaibis intend to ground their practice in a healthy skepticism of reality. Especially the "reality" of fame, which challenges the imagination in terms of sheer deception and falsehood.

Instead, Kristie is interested in making films free from the adoration of a population that looks to the stars for approval in their daily horoscopes. She pursues this by promoting and making films tailored to an eccentric freethinking audience. In theory, Echo is perhaps closest for Kristie to something like the personas of David Bowie, strutting onstage in the characters of Ziggy Stardust and Alladin Sane. But in practice, Kristie never invents from whole cloth, looking instead to Hollywood actors, politicians and others privy to the real-life, obsessive self-mythologizing of their own public image.

This basic self-deception is where the power Kristie refers to lies, in a mythology that reduces human beings to animal indignity. Various instances of the inability to separate the real life from fantasy ending in various degrees of trite self-victimization among celebrities come to mind: Winona Ryder's conviction for shoplifting, Robert Downey Jr.'s multiple addictions. Powerless ourselves to take action, we're obliging as audiences. Even blindly supportive at times. Part of the charisma surrounding such transgressive behavior is the fantasy that, because of the need to violate the laws that govern actual reality, they're somehow more than human.

Despite their efforts at articulating this distinction, some very difficult misperceptions have plagued the Alshaibis. Kristie's public musings on Al Qaeda, for instance, inadvertently drew a visit from the FBI. In August, the couple were preparing to head out for a day of dubbing videos as volunteers with the Chicago Underground Film Festival when there was a knock at their door. "They said they had to ask me a few questions, that they had a tip called in about something that was on my web site. I'd made a statement [in my weblog] that the next terrorist [to attack on U.S. soil] could be a white female." Though nothing came of the FBI visit, there were the same, all-too-common repercussions. Shortly after a Reader article was published about the experience, Kristie was approached by the owner of the gallery for whom she worked in the John Hancock building and asked to resign.

Despite such trials of public opinion, Kristie notes that she and Usama still enjoy widespread support for their work, and chalks up the difficult experience of losing her job as merely a hardship in the distinction between life in the art world and the art of making life: "They're two different things. Completely. But the 'causing a scene' aspects of the whole thing I'll set aside for a while."

For now, filmmaking and the Z Film Fest's mission of gouging the public eye are what the Alshaibis are focusing on, although both have separate side projects underway. For those with any doubts as to the equality of their creative relationship, Kristie points out the necessity of compromise. "[Usama] really has made a sacrifice personally to help me with my work. But I also allow myself to get wrapped up in his projects to the extent that I forget about my own for while. It's reciprocal."

This weekend, the pair will host the 3rd Annual Z Fest, showcasing film and videos from Australia, Canada, Germany and other international locales. On offering are such films as "Unearthed," a 16mm claymation film by Christina Spangler, "-440.0 Hz" by Michele Beck and Jorge Calvo, a three-minute experimental video in which the directors walk Manhattan streets with a spy camera hidden in their mouths and Portland-based artist Miranda July's "The Amateurist," "a video about surveillance, identity, watching and being watched." Designed to showcase "videos and films created for pleasure, pain, or propaganda," and "even the obscene," this year's Z Fest sets the bar high. If an October preview was any indication--a showcase replete with testicle-devouring lesbians, rapist priests, urinating nuns and a cavalcade of stomach-turning pathologies--patrons are likely to walk away profoundly altered.

The 3rd Annual Z Fest runs December 13 and 14 (same program both evenings) at Heaven Gallery, 1550 North Milwaukee Avenue, at 9pm; $5. More information is available at http://zfilmfestival.com

(2002-12-12)

Also by Michael Workman

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