ILLUMINATED INSTALLATIONS

Marco Brambilla, the Milan-born, Canadian-reared video artist who has a retrospective opening May 21 at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, has always thought big. At 14 he titled his first film, on super-8, Third Planet. "It was about the earth," he explains. His first Hollywood movie, the $59 million Demolition Man, starring Sylvester Stallone and Wesley Snipes and released in 1993, was the highest-budgeted film ever given to a first-time director up until then. He switched to video art in 1997, taking the form to new heights of technical intricacy and visual splendor. While his subject matter can seem kitschy —revolving restaurants (Cyclorama, 1999), porn films (Sync, 2005), Christmas shopping at the mall (Cathedral, 2008)—his artistic intentions are more complicated. "I want to be relevant," he says, "so a lot of my work is about how to subvert pop culture. But it's moving so fast that it's almostimpossible to out-run it." His newest pieces are both critiques and masterpieces of visual overload—"video collages" constructed from found film footage spliced into dense, multi-layered tableaux of endlessly looped motion. Civilization (Megaplex), a beyondrococo tour of heaven and hell, is permanently installed in the elevators at downtown Manhattan's Standard Hotel. Evolution (Megaplex) purports to be "the history of humankind" in 3-D, using sampled images from hundreds of Hollywood epics, from The Ten Commandments to Prince of Persia. Brambilla's work is in the collections of the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among others. (His videos are produced in small, limited editions, and he is represented by the Christopher Grimes Gallery, in Santa Monica.) Brambilla is probably mostfamous for the darkly erotic one-minute video he created last year for Kanye West's song "Power." "The lyrics are really nihilistic, very neurotic—about this celebrity with a death wish, essentially, who's addicted to being in the center of the universe, but at the same time is very uncomfortable with that," he says. "That concept attracted me." He has since passed on opportunities to make videos for Katy Perry and Justin Bieber, afraid of crossing the line from art to commerce one time too many. He has said yes, however, to an offer from his native land: "I'm working on an art car for Ferrari. This new, four-wheeldrive sports car is going to become a projection surface for a video of the speed of light—like what would the speed of light look like as depicted on the surface of the most expensive Ferrari?"

BOB COLACELLO

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