On the occasion of McKenzie’s Whitney show, Shiv Kotecha writes revisits
Old Man/Sarcophagus (2013)
Dave McKenzie’s videos, performances and sculptures make concrete the drama of a mind as it calculates the severity of loss. They are apostrophic enactments, or they almost are. For
Old Man/Sarcophagus (2013), the artist returned to Berlin’s Neues Museum to see if he could reproduce an episode he had witnessed there before: an old man resting against an empty, 4,000-year-old Egyptian tomb (in essence, a human-shaped object for rest). Compressing the artist’s daylong visit into a three-minute montage, the video surveils several individuals who pause to admire the relic from a distance. (The man from McKenzie’s first encounter does not return, as you would expect.) The final minute of the video depicts the artist at home, with the camera hovering above a well-domesticated kitchen sink, itself a tomb-like container. McKenzie’s hands enter the frame, and he washes a day or