Buffalo Super Friends
WHO ARE THE BUFFALO SUPERFRIENDS?
It is night in the American Rustbelt. The segregated ghettos of
post-industrial collapse—the abandoned wealth of broken windowed art deco
skyscrapers, grimy imperialist statues still pointing with their swords and
torches towards a dream of American fascism, the broken urban semantics of
razed lots next to the neo-baroque cathedrals built to serve steel-worker
immigrants confident and nostalgic in their new wealth—cry out a message
that is not broadcast, of a fecund America in decline. Standing atop a dark tower, stark in
the moonlight, are four silhouettes: The Buffalo Super Friends. Oh failed city, they hear your cries of
longing!
The Buffalo Super Friends is an artistic encounter between two filmmakers, a musicologist, and a
sound artist. They take on the
project of collaborative art in a space of play—nostalgic of the
towel-caped adventures of childhood.
The Buffalo Super Friends goal is a wise return to a naive ambition:
creation as an expression of possibility, an embodied externalization... play.
It is art practice in costume—but not the identity costumes of Cindy
Sherman, but the transcendent costumes of childhood: caped-crusaders, seriously
approaching again this childhood question, ÒDo I have super powers?Ó Appropriately enough, this
collective was founded in the neo-Gotham of Buffalo, New York, surrounded by
the crime and burnt-out towers of wealth failed in bureaucracy and corruption. They share the solidarity of those that
live in a culture that is not broadcast or stereo-typed, but forgotten... they
share the freedom of those that are not being watched, but choose to watch
eachother and create. In Buffalo
you can still make the naive assertion of an industrial neo-realist self-realization
of being Super Friends.
NEXT PROJECT: 'THE SUPERHUMAN SELF-ACTUALIZATION PROJECT'