Beth B’s Under Lock and Key

In the doorway of the gallery is a large black box. Its brutal bulk is intensely intimidating.

It should be.

The box is actually four isolation cells. Inside each cell is a metal slab, a drain hole and a single, bare bulb. Through a speaker hidden in the cell’s ceiling, excerpts are played from convict-author Jack Henry Abbot’s book In the Belly of the Beast.

Behind the cell block, at the back of the gallery, are two large, rear-projection screens. On the right, an actor plays serial killer Ted Bundy, using material culled from interviews before Bundy’s execution. On the left, people who have been assaulted read letters that they have written to their attackers.

The alternating images are periodically joined together in blurred abstractions of trees. They form slow streaks across the screen. It’s as if they were a visualization of a scream.

This is the cold, dark heart of Under Lock and Key, Beth B’s multimedia installation at the Wexner Center for the Arts. The exhibit is harsh, didactic and unrelenting. It’s also a direct confrontation with evil.

The exhibit has a raw, visceral effect: it’s crudely dramatic and extremely uncomfortable.

But Beth B’s work is never comfortable. She is the punk poet of the primal scream.

She is best known as a filmmaker, gaining her initial notoriety at the end of the ‘70s with the Super-8 movies G-Man, The Offenders, and Black Box. The films are a crazy quilt of rambling narratives, primitive techniques and taboo violations – an odd mishmash of Franz Kafka, Amnesty International reports on torture and post-Oedipal loathing.

The punk “no-wave” movement was in full gear at that time and the films were tremendously popular, playing all over New York’s lower East Side. The Offenders was presented as a regular serial at Max’s Kansas City – the musical mecca of punkdom. Despite the films’ venomous anti-aesthetic approach, they found their way into such venues as the Contemporary Art Museum of Chicago.

And the films kept coming. There are her features – Vortex, Salvation! and the soon-to-be-released Two Small Bodies. Not to mention her music videos, with such catchy titles as Dominatrix Sleeps Tonight.

But Beth B is a painter and printmaker (and the daughter of painter Ida Applebroog), as well as a filmmaker. Under Lock and Key unites her diverse media in a single, focused context.

The early films provide crucial references to her current exhibit. Black Box is about a man who is kidnapped, stripped, hung upside down and eventually placed within a torture chamber based upon devises used by the Chilean secret police. Another film, Letters to Dad, is a series of tight close-ups of performers delivering a dead-pan reading of letters written to Jim Jones by his followers, just before he ordered them to commit mass suicide.

Under Lock and Key carries a tremendous amount of psychic baggage – the soul-destroying weight of a faltering culture. It presents the various kinds of force and violence that are used on the battle fronts of class, racial and sexual warfare. Ironically, it forces itself upon the viewer.

And it succeeds in its intentions: it opens the door to the prison-like psyche of society’s victims.