Jenny Perlin: “The Bunker Films”
This Video Viewing Room features three of the Jenny Perlin’s recent films—DOUBLEWIDE (2020), Your Friend Milton (Bunker F-1206) (2020), and Ed of Subterra (2019). The films were available to view from April 2020 through September 2021. What remains on this page is an introductory text written by the artist, along with stills from and descriptions of the films.
This presentation is organized by Alison Burstein, Curator, Media and Engagement, and Matthew Lyons, Curator.
I started traveling to meet people living underground in former missile silos and munitions bunkers in the American Midwest after the 2016 U.S. elections. It seemed a necessary way to try revisit and reclaim some of my own upbringing. I knew there was more to the place than the way the media portrayed it. And I wanted to travel alone, to go “home” and experience the otherness I always felt growing up in southwestern Ohio.
Twenty years of living in Brooklyn had gotten a little boring. I wasn’t used to being agreed with so often and knew my left-leaning friends who had stayed in the Midwest were working harder than ever to maintain and support the causes they held dear. For whatever perverse reason, I missed the sense of alienation that had once tormented me as a young person. The adrenaline of the unknown.
There are three Bunker Films so far. Two of the films are portraits of people; one is a portrait of a company doing brisk business crafting new underground shelters for wealthy clientele. A fourth film, about a country-wide chain of several collective shelters, is in the editing phase.
People ask me why I make these trips alone and how I can deal with spending days and nights underground talking with strange men who like to declaim their philosophies for hours on end. In short, I suppose that talking to others allows for a kind of dissolution that I find both satisfying and strange. As the conversation continues, it’s not that I agree with their perspective, but that their person-ness is present before me, and in the context in which they are speaking, it is simply logical that what they are saying comes out of them. Only later, usually as I’m transcribing the interview, does it hit me where I’ve been. But by then, the empathy is there too, all mixed in.
— Jenny Perlin, April 2020
DOUBLEWIDE, 2020, HD, color, sound, 18 minutes
Doublewide is a look at a Texas-based company that sells, constructs, and installs custom-made, secure steel subterranean hideouts for wealthy clients. A trip to one of their newly completed massive underground bunkers in Michigan reveals a fortified underground world for the wealthy to retreat from global crises.
Your Friend Milton (Bunker F-1206), 2020, HD, color, sound, 17:30 minutes
It is a hot day in South Dakota at the end of June, 2018. Milton Torres has just left his ex-wife and 12 year old daughter in Chicago and is spending his first full day in his new home, a 1940s munitions bunker. He is the only full-time inhabitant of VivosX, a compund of 575 bunkers on a vast tract of rural ranchland. 99-year subleases are available to people who dream of safety during apocalyptic times. This film is a portrait of Milton as he begins his new life, alone, in the country.
Ed of Subterra, 2019, HD, color, sound, 20:25 minutes
Ed of Subterra is a portrait of Edward Peden, founder and sole inhabitant of Subterra Castle, a 14,000 square foot former missile silo in Eskridge, Kansas. Ed has lived at Subterra for over two decades, making a space 20 feet underground into a home and sanctuary. Three years ago Ed had a stroke and he will probably have to sell Subterra and move aboveground. His wife Dianna, with whom he built the space, moved back to Topeka a few years ago, but Ed chose to stay behind in his castle.
Jenny Perlin makes films, videos, installations, and drawings. Her projects draw on interdisciplinary research interests in history, cultural studies, literature and linguistics. Her films incorporate innovative techniques to investigate history as it relates to the present. Perlin shoots 16mm film and digital video and combines live-action, staged, and documentary images with hand-drawn, text-based animation.
Her films have been shown as single-channel works and multi-channel installations at numerous venues including the Guggenheim Museum, Mass MoCA, MoMA, Guangzhou Triennial, IFC Center, Berlin and Rotterdam film festivals, the Drawing Center, and The Kitchen.
Perlin received her BA from Brown University in Literature and Society (Modern Culture and Media), her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Film, and completed postgraduate studies at the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York.
To learn about Perlin’s 2007 exhibition at The Kitchen, Transcript, visit The Kitchen’s Archive Site, and to learn more about her work, visit the artist’s website.
Image: 1) Still from DOUBLEWIDE, 2020, HD, color, sound, 18 minutes. Courtesy of the artist. 2) Still from Your Friend Milton (Bunker F-1206), 2020, HD, color, sound, 17:30 minutes. Courtesy of the artist. 3) Still from Jenny Perlin, Ed of Subterra, 2019, HD, color, sound, 20:25 minutes. Courtesy of the artist.