The film “Enclosure,” by the artist Rachel Rose, prompts viewers to consider how a scam can reconfigure the world.
’s Glass House, a landmark of modernist architecture. Rose’s cuts impose the beach on the idyll surrounding Johnson’s house in a manner recalling the way that unseasonable weather seems to collapse an uncanny reality into the familiar one. The juxtaposition of glass, the material that has come to define so much of the contemporary built environment, with the seaside revelers’ panic evokes the unique dread triggered by dwelling in structures that feel simultaneously flimsy and futuristic.
At the Gladstone Gallery, where “Enclosure” was recently on view, the thirty-minute film was projected onto a semitransparent screen of multiplex-like proportions that hung in the center of the room.
Historians have regarded the enclosure movement variously as the precursor to wondrous economic growth and as theft. E. P. Thompson, the author of “,” called it “class robbery, played according to the rules of property and law laid down by a Parliament of property owners and lawyers.” Before enclosure, most rural peasants were able to support themselves using the land, to which they had the right of access.