A Los Angeles art gallery will play host early next year to an exhibit in the form of a videotape rental store with nothing but thousands of VHS copies of the Tom Cruise film “Jerry Maguire.”
The exhibit, created by Everything is Terrible!, an absurdist comedy/performance art collective, will run during the last two weeks of January at iam8bit Gallery and will make use of the approximately 14,000 copies of the Tom Cruise film that the group’s members have collected over the past seven years.
“Seeing thousands of Jerrys finally reunited will forever destroy the viewers’ previous perception of culture, waste and existence as a whole,” the collective said in a statement. “The Jerrys are a beautiful thing.”
The collective has used the film in their videos, installations and live performances before. In 2014, members built a throne from discarded VHS copies of “Jerry Maguire.” Their fans from around the world collect and send the tapes to a P.O. box in Los Angeles.
“There’s this kid in Spokane that’s given us 1,300 and something,” said Nic Maier, one of the collective’s founders.
The video rental store exhibit will not end the collective’s obsession with the Cameron Crowe-directed film, which also features Renée Zellweger and Cuba Gooding Jr. In fact, Mr. Maier said, the event is merely a precursor to a planned Jerry Maguire pyramid that the collective hopes to build “in the desert between Los Angeles and Las Vegas.”
Designs for the pyramid are scheduled to be unveiled next month, as the collective kicks fundraising efforts for the project into higher gear.
Describing what the collective does more generally, Dimitri Simakis, another of its founders, likened the group’s output to “garbage soup” made out of “media vomit.”
“We take this media that’s in mass consumption that people have vague memories of from Bible school or third grade,” he said. “We put it through our blender, we edit it and spit it back out at you.”
Everything is Terrible! began in Los Angeles in December 2007. The core group includes five to seven artists and performers; there is a larger group of about 15 members spread across the country.
The members make what its founders call “performance art for the internet age” — some of it analog, some of it digital — and Mr. Simakis curates an annual multimedia festival, which is called, appropriately, Everything is Festival, and usually takes place in the fall.
The collective’s obsession with Jerry Maguire, which was released on VHS in 1997, the same year that DVD players began to arrive in American homes, is a product of the ubiquity of the VHS version of the film, as well as its status as a somewhat useless object.
The film “sort of called to us,” Mr. Maier said. “We kept seeing it over and over again.” (Wikipedia claims that itis the best-selling, non-Walt Disney VHS film ever. But according to a 1998 press release from Blockbuster, the film “Titanic” broke records in video home sales, surpassing several Disney filns as well as “Jerry Maguire.” )
Mr. Simakis said “Jerry Maguire” had been reduced in many people’s minds to a series of catchphrases from the film, cultural detritus that mirrors the real-life VHS leftovers that his collective has decided to give new life.
“I don’t know anyone who could tell you the plot of that movie,” he said. “The average person just says, ‘Show me the money,’ ‘You had me at hello,’ ‘The human head weighs eight pounds.’”