Beauty Plus Pity

Join us on e-flux Video & Film for an online screening of Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby’s Beauty Plus Pity (2009), streaming from Wednesday, July 21 through Tuesday, August 3, 2021.

Combining ditties, stories, cartoons, scavenged video footage, and the installation of taxidermied animals and other sculptural elements, Beauty Plus Pity investigates the perverse ethical, emotional, and existential relationships among adults, children, animals, and God. Syracuse-based Canadian artists Emily Vey Duke & Cooper Battersby suggest that generational legacies and natural cycles both comfort us with their promise of continuity and entrap us in destructive patterns. They are fascinated by how redemption can sprout from the present just as a tree sprouts from a seed. Reciting Philip Larkin’s poem about parental dysfunction, “This Be The Verse,” they urge us to “get out as early as you can” from our parents’ grasp “and don’t have any kids yourself.” Although children are not good, the narrator claims, they contain the potential for goodness.

Beauty Plus Pity is presented here as one of five films in Part Three | Interrelational Arrangements (Interdependency and Survival), the third of four programs in the online series Me, You, and Everyone We Know: Interrelationality, Alterity, Globalization programmed by Irmgard Emmelhainz for e-flux Video & Film. The series will run in four thematic parts from June 23 through August 18, 2021. Each part will include a two-week group screening, and a live discussion.

For more information, contact program [​at​] e-flux.com.