Emile Zile
Linda Wallace
Emile Zile, Larry Emdur’s Suit
Emile Zile is a Melbourne-based artist who reuses media the stuff of television, print and the internet—in a range of works for VJ, performance and installation (www.bubotic.net). A graduate of Media Arts at RMIT, most recently he took part in the Composition show at Degraves Street subway in Melbourne. For this he made a series of “wartime psychosexual” slogans in red vinyl lettering with red neon. They were “mutated advertising jargon for alert commuters; text blobs of compressed meaning: GRASS IS GREENER SUICIDE BOMBER; LICK MY ZIP SAVE MY BEIGE; ENTERTAIN ME WHILE I CHEW.”
His video work Larry Emdur’s Suit is a classic. Finding himself a contestant on The Price is Right, Zile successfully guessed the price of the Nursery package and moved up to share the stage with host Larry Emdur. This is where Zile ‘performs’ himself in a bizarre series of hand gestures and contorted postures to which Emdur responds by mirroring. Zile effectively bends the materiality of television to his will, making Emdur follow his dance. It is hilarious and very, very strange.
His most recent work is Holy Cow, a reworking with original internet audio and video clips of people watching the WTC destruction from their office windows. Zile says, “I hope to excavate deeper levels of meaning in the material than the immediately audiovisual, by re-animating that material in another context, often in live performance-manipulation of the multiple perspectives of one event and magnifying the intersections of personal, social and televised history. I am obsessed by the individual frame that separates a home video from an international news item.”
RealTime issue #57 Oct-Nov 2003 pg. 14
