Hot Docs 2009: We Live in Public

We Live in Public (Ondi Timoner)
BY JONATHAN GOLDSBIE

Following up on her 2004 rock-doc DiG!, which charted the perpetual downward trajectory of The Brian Jonestown Massacre's Anton Newcombe, director Ondi Timoner finds herself an arguably even more insane creative-genius übermensch to profile: conceptual artist/web pioneer Josh Harris, whose life-long obsession with surveillance and voyeurism manifested in projects that delightfully and horrifically obliterate the boundaries separating performance art from social experiment. The most stunning section of the movie chronicles a Harris venture called "Quiet"; a self-contained underground society that lasted in New York City for fewer than two months at the turn of the millennium. Simultaneously a utopian socialist artist colony and a fascist police state—Andy Warhol's Factory meets the GDR, Quiet was a sex-and-art free-for-all occasionally interrupted by brutal, arbitrary interrogation sessions. Timoner sees Harris and his enterprises as prophetic microcosms of what the internet—and our consequently evolving notions of celebrity, privacy, freedom, and exhibitionism—would gradually become. Offering both nostalgia and contempt for the late-nineties Web bubble, We Live in Public is a frequently fascinating and sometimes exhilarating look at the intersections of commerce, art, and mania that over the past decade and a half have upheaved the concept of where I end and you begin. 4/5