During the 1970s, while in graduate school at CalArts, Ericka Beckman met several other artists who would become prominent figures of her generation—Mike Kelley, Matt Mullican, James Welling, and James Casebere among them. These interlocutors had a lasting impact on her artistic production, which consists primarily of film and video. For one thing, Beckman’s concern with the ways in which sociocultural norms develop and are maintained often coincided closely with Kelley’s. For another, she has been historicized alongside Mullican and Welling, for example in the exhibition “The Pictures Generation” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2009. What is more, all of the aforementioned artists appear in Beckman’s works, as evidenced by her first comprehensive retrospective, recently on view at Kunsthalle Bern.

Most of Beckman’s films are populated by actors whose movements are synchronized. The same coordination applies to the mise-en-scène, the accompanying music and sound effects, the complex stage sets, and her manual manipulation of the filmic medium through superimpositions and stop-motion. Like early pop-music videos or video games, these works both demand and reward viewers’ absorption in an orchestrated flow of audio-visual information. In Beckman’s Super 8 trilogy (We Imitate; We Break Up, 1978; The Broken Rule, 1979; and Out of Hand, 1980–81) as well as in You the Better, 1983, social development and aptitude are allegorized via games and steeped in competition, with both rules and playing fields. The entire second half of the twenty-minute-long The Broken Rule, for example, depicts Kelley engaged in an increasingly convoluted series of recreational activities, starting with red rover and warping into mock track and field. By accidentally breaking the rules, he repeatedly loses for his team and intermittently responds by aggressively yanking up his athletic socks. The film parodies not only his failure but also the very motivation to play. This parodic tone is heightened by a breathy, ironic line in the sound track sung by Beckman: “If everybody, if everybody, if everybody does it . . . ,” calling up the rather naive idea of complete conformity to a given social practice, which comes tumbling down as soon as one considers the actual diversity of behavior. Similarly, You the Better addresses the process of learning social rules but places greater emphasis on the contemporary imperative to excel, both through its depiction of a group of men passing around a ball in an attempt to earn points and through its sound track, which repeatedly insists on the game’s high stakes.

With the exception of Tension Building, 2013––a video composed from stop-motion footage Beckman shot while moving through the stands of a university football stadium, combined with short clips of game play on the field––all of the films in the exhibition seethe with a saturated palette of primary or secondary colors. By combining the actors’ exaggerated gesturing with pitched-up, repetitive musical sound tracks, Beckman gives her works the psychotic energy and seeming nonsensicality of a fever dream. And they were brilliantly installed in an environment whose theatrical lighting—a combination of color-filtered windows and fluorescents—equaled the vibrancy of the films’ palettes. Some galleries were also populated by props from the films and sometimes held with related drawings or photographs. At its best, the exhibition display functioned in concert with the works, as in a programmed lighting system that alternately illuminated each of the three large-format photographs in the series “Boundary Figures,” 1989, re-creating the films’ sense of drama and atmosphere. Altogether, this exhibition attested to the remarkable consistency, longevity, and playfulness with which Beckman has followed an indispensable analytic framework tuned to the rules and appearances of social behavior, resulting in a mesmerizing body of work.

––John Beeson