In her review of artist Brock Enright’s 2007 multi-media exhibition Good Times Will Never Be the Same, New York Times critic Roberta Smith summed up her somewhat bemused pan with a general statement of disapproval for the image under which Enright has molded himself, as a kind of bad boy trafficking in the surreal aesthetics of fear. “Mr. Enright’s art has more energy and ideas than clarity or purposefulness,” Smith wrote. “It is also trailed by debts — to Paul McCarthy, Mike Kelly, The Blair Witch Project and Stanley Kubrick for starters — that need to be sorted through. In the process he might examine his faith in mess for mess’s sake.” This faith of Enright’s propels Jody Lee Lipes’ documentary on the creation of that art show, Brock Enright: Good Times Will Never Be The Same, which premiered at SXSW and won a special jury prize for cinematography at the Sarasota Film Festival (full disclosure: I was on the jury that gave the film a special award for cinematography). Enright’s faith that if he makes it, he’ll be able to sell it –– regardless of what “it” is –– creates an expectation of an resolution which, ultimately, Lipes backs away from playing into. He’s more interested in how his subject’s endless faith in mess, and the increasingly unacceptable methods which feed into it, is both seductive and destructive in his personal relationships.

Lipes stays behind the camera of this gorgeously shot film (his attention to lighting and framing is particularly remarkable for what is essentially a verite piece), but with a video/image savvy bullshit artist like Brock, it would be naive to think that the filming itself has no affect on the proceedings. The action starts when, commissioned to produce a show for the Perry Rubenstein Gallery and, completely unsure, of what he’s doing, Brock and his girlfriend Kirsten drive across country from their apartment in Brooklyn to her parents’ cabin in the woods in Northern California. Brock films Kirsten along the way, in various bizarre, ridiculous and borderline degrading situations. When they get to their destination, a stage of sorts is built in the woods, and Kirsten adopts a new costume/persona as a squeaky-voiced giant mouse. A young representative of the gallery eventually shows up to check on Brock’s progress; to the viewer, it may not be clear that he’s made any, a suspicion that’s confirmed when Brock, who first came to notoriety for staging kidnappings, falls back on a variation/regurgitation of old tricks.

From what we see of it, we get the sense that his art — whatever it might be; my best guess is that it involves building an elaborate set for surreally violent videos, which he sells as documentations of performances, and also commodifies each prop –– is at best pretentious, and at worse, a scam, a joke. Good times for him, maybe, but even his gallery’s owner admits that he can’t quite describe the work’s allure. When Perry Rubenstein asks Enright to “idiot proof” this work to make it more saleable, the artist agrees, and with a vigorous nod promises, “You’re gonna cream your pants.” If Sacha Baron Cohen was to take as his next persona a frat boy-ish shock-art star, you an easily imagine him mocking up a similar exchange. If anything, Brock’s work seems to be designed to chase its own tail, to force the viewer to ask familiar answer-less questions like, “What is art, anyway?” Is it about selling a statement, or is it about provoking the anger and frustration that necessary results in discourse/argument — that is, selling the consumer the compulsion to make a statement against the artist? More colloquially: is he punking us?
Throughout, Brock and Kirsten fight over thier relationship, his work, how his work is destroying their relationship, and vice versa. Kirsten is worried about money, of which Brock has none, and has little guarantee of making any after the gallery is paid back for thier investment in his current project. Brock is an expert at playing the victim. “I don’t feel free. I feel watched, judged … you’re afraid of who I am in front of your parents,” he accuses her, after rehearsing a nonsensically violent scene from the piece. He becomes obsessed with the idea that he’s “imposing” on her family, a loaded statement which she correctly interprets to actually mean that he’s saying her family is repressing him. She correctly, it seems, accuses him of making excuses. As an artist, Brock is totally unsympathetic. As a boyfriend, a discreet personality struggling to mate his creative impulses with some version of normal domesticity, he’s weirdly relatable. Their arguments — needy, desperate, mutually selfish back-and-forths which solve nothing and in which nothing is resolved — are an object lesson in the fundamental incompatibility of love and careerism, of genuine togetherness and the maintenance of a super ego.

The film ends not with the reception of the work by critics — the actual opening of the show is unseen — but with Kristen and Brock’s recepton of their newborn baby. Nothing has been resolved, there’s no sense that making it out of the Good Times experience alive has solved any of the couple’s problems. It’s with no small amount of horror that we recall Smith’s critique, and realize that Enright lives his life the same way he makes art: he approaches procreation just as he approaches creation, with more energy and ideas than clarity or purposefulness. But with the film’s ostensible reason for existing left out of the final equation, Lipes’ conclusion forces the viewer to interrogate the film’s construction.  In presenting so much artistically-conscious footage that makes its subject look like a talentless con artist, enriching this with the auto-critique evidence from Brock’s personal life but then choosing to ultimately dodge answering the question that the film seems to make central (ie: will Brock’s otherwise unjustifiable creative practice at least turn enough of a profit to assuage Kirsten’s concerns, thus allowing their relationship to last?), is Lipes ultimately letting his subject off too easy? Or is this the more accurate mirror of life itself, a cumulation of experience that leads up not to one final judgement, but to some kind of temporary equilibrium, with further iterations of familiar tortures unquestionably on the horizon? Either reads seem equally available. After letting it digest for a good long while, I still find Brock Enright’s conclusion unsatisfying and infuriating, its matter unquestionably compelling. I only wonder if Lipes, like Enright, is avoiding saying anything in the name of provoking a response.