Gordon Matta-Clark - City Slivers (1976)
Monday, December 24, 2007
Images of the deconstruction of abandoned buildings and industrial structures are closely associated with "anarchitect" Gordon Matta-Clark. Here, however, are the film works through which Matta-Clark furthered his lifelong excavation of urban dwellings. In this book, San Francisco Cinematheque presents a retrospective of the moving-image works through which Matta-Clark explored his aesthetic assumptions and philosophical inquiry. Featuring rarely published images and a quartet of imaginative essays, City Slivers and Fresh Kills establishes Matta-Clark's films as perhaps his most surprising, and certainly most viscerally arresting body of work, characterized by the same creative provocation, rough aesthetic beauty, and intellectual insight that idefined his signature architectural cuttings and slicings.
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at 1:26 PM
Julian Cooper - Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles (1972)
Long before Los Angeles's contribution to modern culture became widely recognized, British architectural historian Reyner Banham proclaimed it one of the world's great cities.
Banham's influential yet controversial book Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (1971) saw beauty in the city's sprawling layout and car-based urbanism.
Shortly after the book's publication, the BBC documented Banham's vision of Los Angeles for an episode of its series One Pair of Eyes.
The documentary, Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles (1972, 52 min.), takes the viewer on a tongue-in-cheek tour of the city's cultural landscape.
The trip includes stops at iconic landmarks such as Simon Rodia's Watts Towers and the Lovell "Health" House designed by Richard Neutra (a photograph of the latter is on view in the Getty Research Institute's current exhibition Julius Shulman, Modernity and the Metropolis), as well as mini-malls, drive-thrus, and strip clubs.
An entertaining and thoughtful examination of a metropolis in motion, the film documents a city situated at the divide between the modern era's clean lines and faith in progress—as captured in the work of architectural photographer Julius Shulman—and what has been described as Banham's "Pop Art" view, with its sparkle-front houses, Tiki huts, and jarring juxtapositions.
Reyner Banham (1922-1988) was a prolific architectural critic and writer best known for his 1960 theoretical treatise "Theory and Design in the First Machine Age", and his 1971 book "Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies" in which he categorized the Angelean experience into four ecological models (Surfurbia, Foothills, The Plains of Id, and Autopia) and explored the distinct architectural cultures of each ecology.
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at 12:59 PM
Jane Wilson & Louise Wilson - Star City / Proton, Unity, Energy, Blizzard (2000)
Saturday, December 22, 2007
Video shot in 303 Gallery, New York City, 2000: an installation by Jane and Louise Wilson that combines two of their moving image works, Star City and Proton, Unity, Energy, Blizzard. Star City is 8 minutes long. I don't know the length of the second work, but they are both integrated pretty much seamlessly into one ongoing loop. The installation's footage was originally shot on 16mm and transferred to DVD for exhibition. This record of the installation was shot on a DV camera.
From a review in Art in America:
Like Leni Riefenstahl, the British twins Jane and Louise Wilson create works that estheticize power, but to obviously different ends. Unlike Hitler's favorite filmmaker, their film installations are more funereal than triumphant.Share this via KaraGarga.
For their newest odes to eroded power and faded glory, a pair of videos called Star City and Proton, Unity, Energy, Blizzard, the Wilsons were granted access to high-security sites of the financially stricken and scaled-back Russian space program. The videos were shot, respectively, at Star City, the main training center for Russian cosmonauts just outside Moscow, and the Baikonur cosmodrome, the massive base of the space program located in modern-day Kazakhstan (though the program is still operated by Russia). These sites, once beacons of Soviet power, are now in such a state of decline that it is sometimes difficult to tell which facilities are still in use and which are abandoned. This sense of desolation is heightened by the near-total absence of people in their footage.
The looped videos were projected on two facing sets of double screens in the gallery's corners. The Wilsons used a number of subtle filming and editing techniques which are noticeable, yet not disruptive or distracting. Scenes shift from near to far, motion to still, but without a jumpy quality. Corresponding to the visual rhythm are the ambient sounds that gave the installation a musical quality-the clunking and whirring of machinery punctuated with silence. The editing juxtaposes things old and new, insignificant and iconic, and spaces vast and intimate: a launchpad's metal bay doors touched with rust swing open to reveal a vast desert horizon with a brilliant blue sky, an empty chair spins around in an enclosed testing chamber. As the camera pans across a room, the images sometimes seem to slide across one screen and onto the next.
The same scenes are often shot from different angles, with closely related but disjunctive images presented side by side or on opposing screens. For example, a large centrifugal training pod (used to simulate gforce) spins around like a carnival ride in a room with an elaborately tiled floor. For one view, a stable camera is trained on the whirling apparatus; in another, the camera is mounted on the machine itself as it follows its dizzying orbit. A particulaly eerie sequence involves an underwater lab-a replica of the Mir space station-used for antigravity training. Filmed from above and below the water's surface, the behemoth station sits immersed like a sunken ship, shrouded in water and silence.
The grandiosity and promise of Russia's space program are belied by scenes showing camels passing next to a rusted, disused launch pad, or space suits stacked on shelves like corpses in a catacomb. When filming these videos, the Wilsons couldn't have known that the Russian government would soon decide to crash the beleagered Mir into the ocean. The news, announced during their show's run last fall, added to the installation's somber quality. Their project shows just how far we still are from the cosmic dreams of Stanley Kubrick's 2001. -Stephanie Cash
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Richard Serra - Television Delivers People (1973)
Friday, December 21, 2007
at 8:35 PM
Jonas Dahlberg - Untitled (Verical Sliding) (2001)
The work was first installed in conjunction with shows at Index gallery in Stockholm and Milch in London, (2001). It has since then been presented at exhibitions at Marian Goodman Gallery in Paris (2005), Venice Biennale (2003); Pontevedra Biennale (2002) and Centre pour l'image contemporain Geneva (2003) among others.
The projection has the camera descending, elevator-style, past floor after floor, visiting a seemingly endless succession of passageways, each different yet all decorated with the same faintly patterned floral wallpaper. Light--maybe daylight, maybe artificial, it s impossible to tell--seeps from under closed doors, but there's no reason to think anyone's home--or rather, in their rooms, since these liminal spaces most closely resemble hotel corridors.
Appearances, of course, prove deceptive. Dahlberg's sets are architectural models, built to a circular plan, and filmed with a centrally positioned rotating camera--hence the seamless continuity of the installation's footage. What seem to be tracking shots are really ten-minute, 360-degree pans, describing loci that inevitably read as nodes in a labyrinth--a subtly scary one, since its vertical and horizontal extension implies the impossibility of finding an external vantage point. Taking the panopticon as its starring point, Dahlberg's investigation suggests a psychoanalytic appropriation of the panoptic model, revealing the surveying self as itself both self-surveying and vulnerable to surveillance. Might there be hiders in the house, unseen presences behind those half-closed doors and darkened entrances? The camera's full-circle pan becomes readable as a paranoid attempt to watch one's own back. This is territory Dahlberg has charted before, in Safe Zones I: to fetch a sweater, 1996, Spying out the apartm ents overlooking his, the artist found that a gun collector occupied one. Dahlberg calculated the "safe zones" in his own home, paths from room to room that were outside his neighbor's potential line of fire. Following these, he shot photographic evidence of his neighbor's hobby, but also videoed his own convoluted progress through the zones, a fugitive in his own house.
With the reflexive moment of philosophical thought, Cornelius Castoriadis writes, "Things are no longer simply juxtaposed: the nearest is the furthest, and the forks in the road...have become simultaneous, mutually intersecting. The entrance to the labyrinth is at one of its centers--or rather, we no longer know whether there is a center, what a center is." And Umberto Eco observes that multicursal labyrinths (like Dahlberg's) need no Minotaur, because in them one can make mistakes--the visitor's own errors play the monster's devouring role. Dahlberg's labyrinthine experiment, manipulating categories of interior and exterior, serves as an ambiguous model of the philosophizing psyche, its mood delicately poised between lyrical reverie and creeping paranoia.
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at 3:25 PM
Shane Carruth - Primer (2004)
Thursday, December 20, 2007
At night and on weekends, four men in a suburban garage have built a cottage industry of error-checking devices. But, they know that there is something more. There is some idea, some mechanism, some accidental side effect that is standing between them and a pure leap of innovation. And so, through trial and error they are building the device that is missing most. However, two of these men find the device and immediately realize that it is too valuable to market. The limit of their trust in each other is strained when they are faced with the question, If you always want what you can't have, what do you want when you can have anything?
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If you wan't some more background information about Primer, there's a review at Ain't It Cool.
at 4:18 PM
Pierre Huyghe - Le Château de Turing (2001)
Le Château de Turing
The film of the exhibition.
What characterizes the Turing machine is first of all its universality: the borders between the cognitive modes of man, animal and machine are abolished. Among all the possible Turing machines, the one Pierre Huyghe presents contains three methods of data processing: human, alive and artificial. Here, the spectator is himself a calculating being, leading his investigation under the retroactive control of the Hal computer - which, in addition, directs computing processes that culminate in generating and exposing visual art works.
Much of Huyghe's work examines the structural properties of film and its problematic relationship to reality. His two-channel video The Third Memory (1999), first exhibited in a museum context at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and The Renaissance Society in Chicago, takes as its starting point Sidney Lumet's 1975 film Dog Day Afternoon, starring Al Pacino in the role of the bank robber John Wojtowicz. Huyghe's video reconstructs the set of Lumet's film, but he allows Wojtowicz himself, now a few dozen years older and out of jail, to tell the story of the robbery. Huyghe juxtaposes images from the reconstruction with footage from Dog Day Afternoon, demonstrating that Wojtowicz's memory has been irrevocably altered by the film about his life.
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at 12:13 PM
Jonas Dahlberg - Invisible Cities (2004/2005)
Wednesday, December 19, 2007
The artist chose this title as a linkage with the book by Italo Calvino and, just like the author, he is keen to construct his work like an architecture, like a "space which the reader can enter and explore, in which he can even get lost, but possibly also find the way out too." Here it is the spectator's eye and the way it sees which inform the space, because there are no inhabitants present, and the city is given over in all its architectural obviousness.
It is worth emphasizing that Jonas Dahlberg studied architecture, and that he finds in the art world the means to pursue his lines of thinking. In this sense, Invisible Cities deals with forgotten cities, cities "between", forgotten by politicians, newspapers and architects themselves. The way the artist's eye sees aims at underscoring what is alike in all these spaces, and spectators have the impression of moving about in a single place, whereas the artist traveled six months from city to city. As he himself hails from one such city, he casts a critical eye thereupon, but an eye imbued with a certain affection. Through its content and its spatial positioning, the Invisible Cities project thus wavers between politics and poetics.
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at 12:43 PM
Mircea Cantor - Deeparture (2005)
Cantor’s Deeparture (2005) is as severely economical in its setup as it is intense in its poetic potential. It involves two unwitting players, a wolf and a deer, in perhaps the most unlikely and artificial environment in which they can find themselves—a white-cube gallery. The artist shot the animals in 16mm film with a seemingly unforgiving eye, structuring a series of taut close-ups from various angles into a seamlessly looping video. Confounding expectations, the “natural” predator-prey relationship does not play itself out here. Instead, both animals keep their distance from each other and appear in turn tense, confused, exhausted, and dejected, even oblivious. As viewers are gradually roped into emotional engagement with the ultimately unreadable animals, they’re led to wonder if these nonhuman players serve as a blank screen upon which human emotions and psychological attachments are projected.
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at 12:39 PM
Mike Kelley - Extracurricular Activity & Superman Recites (1999 - 2000)
Monday, December 17, 2007
Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #1 (Domestic Scene) 2000, 29:44 min, b&w, sound
Kelley has constructed a half-hour drama inspired by a photo found in a high school yearbook. The original, a still from a school play, depicts two young men in a shabby apartment. From this image Kelley has re-staged a 'Domestic Scene': the protagonists' unnerving, at times histrionic, relationship.
Superman Recites Selections from 'The Bell Jar' and Other Works by Sylvia Plath 1999, 7:19 min, color, sound
Mike Kelley writes: "In Superman Recites Selections from 'The Bell Jar' and Other Works by Sylvia Plath an actor portrays Superman and does exactly what the title describes. In a dark no-place evocative of Superman's own psychic 'Fortress of Solitude' the alienated Man of Steel recites those sections of Plath's writings that utilize the image of the bell jar. Superman directs these lines to Kandor, the bell jar city that represents his own traumatic past, for he is the only surviving member of a planet that has been destroyed. Kandor now sits, frozen in time, a perpetual reminder of his inability to escape that past, and his alienated relationship to his present world. For us, Kandor is an image of a time that never was -- the utopian city of the future that never came to be.
This videotape was originally produced as an element for the installation work Kandor-Con 2000, which was presented as part of the exhibition Zeitwenden at the Kunstmuseum Bonn in 2000. The title mimics the term comic-con, which is a comic book collector's convention, and the piece is meant to be reminiscent of the kinds of displays found at such events.
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at 8:10 PM
