Artists Who Dissect 'Starsky & Hutch'

That's where the couple's histories collide. They started dating in Paris, where they had both gone to brush up on the latest French theories on film and popular culture. They also gorged on international contemporary art. "A lot of the experimental works we saw, it was clear we could do that, too," remembers Kevin.

It turns out they were right, even if others only came to recognize it fairly recently.

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Ever since moving to New York in 1996 -- after earning master's degrees from the cutting-edge program in electronic arts at Rensselaer Polytechnic in Upstate New York -- the McCoys have been doing fine as academics. Jennifer's a full professor of fine art at Brooklyn College; Kevin's on his way to tenure at NYU. But their careers as artists took off in 2001, when they exhibited a piece called "Every Shot, Every Episode."

Describe the project and it sounds like a dry exercise in academic deconstruction: The pair took a huge pile of footage from a single television show, then pulled it apart into its components. Almost a season's worth of close-ups got burned onto one CD, while the establishing shots, zooms and pans were gathered onto others. Still other CDs collected all the shots of city streets, for instance, and other kinds of settings or props or characters. The artwork includes a little player and a screen mounted in a briefcase, "Man From U.N.C.L.E."-style, and you're invited to pop in any of the discs and watch as the disjointed imagery unfolds.

The genius and fun of the project lies in the show the McCoys chose.

Their carefully honed analytic skills were brought to bear on the '70s trash of "Starsky & Hutch."

Dip into the project's 277 discs -- as curators at the Metropolitan Museum of Art did a little while back, when they proudly put their McCoy on display -- and you get to survey "Every Disguise," or "Every Comic Criminal" or "Every Sexy Outfit." A TV show that was painfully formulaic in the watching becomes a pleasure in this work of art, which is an almost comic celebration of its formulas, an appealing crazy quilt of trivialities.

Rather than crying out against how television constructs the modern self, or begging us to break free of its formulas, the McCoys invite us to revel in the medium's absurdity. The "essential joke" of the piece, according to Jennifer, is its failure. It "critiques and laughs at the idea that those categories are sufficient to human experience."

Despite the success of "Every Shot," the McCoys soon began to move in another direction altogether.

Almost on a whim, and in the space of a week, they got a film crew and an actor friend to re-create a short chase scene from the horror classic "Evil Dead II," which they shot and re-shot. Their pile of footage was then edited so it could be looped and scrambled, sped up and slowed down and reversed, ad infinitum, by a computer program of their own devising. Thanks to the McCoys, the poor slob will be fleeing forever, without escaping or getting caught but without ever precisely repeating his flight.

To a generation that grew up learning Indiana Jones by heart, with the best bits on slow-motion repeat, there's hardly any need for narrative or plot or closure. "Horror Chase" shows how a good chase is good enough all by itself, especially if it lasts forever and always changes.

Since the chase, the McCoys have moved on again, away from the disembodied imagery of film and television, toward a more material, almost sculptural approach. They made a bunch of crude tabletop dioramas, made of model train parts and shot by crowds of tiny video cameras, that mimicked scenes from different movie genres -- from horror films, from French art films, from 1930s musicals. A computer was programmed to cut, live, among all the cameras' different views, generating an ever-changing tissue of filmic cliches that got projected on a screen.

An absurdly disjointed world becomes seamless once it's turned into a filmic narrative.

And that's the world we live in all the time, the McCoys' most recent art suggests. This isn't just about the structures underpinning film and TV. Our lives are built around the same Hollywood scaffolding: We think about the world and about ourselves and about our place within the world, according to the models that we've learned from TV and at the movies. Last spring in New York, for instance, the McCoys showed an installation called "Dream Sequence." One circular diorama, mounted so it can turn, reconstructs what goes on at night in Kevin's head: Tiny model railroad sets show scenes of terrorist attacks, medieval knights and sexy girls in class. As the setup slowly spins, the disconnected scenes pass before a video camera and are projected on the wall. Over the course of a revolution, we get to see the stream of unconsciousness that passes through the sleeping artist's head, as modern camouflage gives way to shining armor that gives way to miniskirts and desks.

Another similar turntable, also covered in six-inch model film sets, puts us into the head of his wife: Her rather more domestic dream is all about a peaceful fishing pond that morphs into a flood, which in turn gives way to a deluxe pool party. It's shown as half of a split screen it shares with Kevin's dream.

According to "Dream Sequence," we are all, down to our most basic male and femaleness, as much a tissue of hand-me-down cliches as any "Starsky & Hutch" plot.

"The humor here," the McCoys once said, "is that the personal revelations could almost be anyone's."