Richard Serra & Nancy Holt - Boomerang (1974)
Wednesday, February 6, 2008
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Boomerang
00:10:27
1974
Originally broadcast over Amarillo, TX public television.
This is a tape which analyzes its own discourse and processes as it is being formulated. The language of Boomerang, and the relation between the description and what is being described, is not arbitrary. Language and image are being formed and revealed as they are organized.
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at 9:32 AM
Various - Sheffield Pavillion 2007 (2007)
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The Sheffield Pavilion is a project designed to take advantage of the harmonic convergence of super exhibitions which occurs when The Venice Biennale, Documenta XII, Skulptur Projekte Münster 07, and Art Basel coincide in June 2007. This nexus of projects falling together (an event which only occurs once every 10 years) offers a unique opportunity to symbiotically present the work of Sheffield-based artists and promote the contemporary art activity taking place in Sheffield in an international context.
The idea of a Sheffield Pavilion was inspired by the traditional format of the Venice Biennale, where different countries are represented by pavilions. The Sheffield Pavillon is a new variation on a small series of city or location-specific interpretations of the national pavilion construct; from the Manchester Pavilion’s art-free bar to the New Forest Pavilion’s more formal exhibition venue. These city/region specific pavilions perhaps aim to challenge the notion that art practice in non-metropolitan areas operates on a provincial or parochial level or conversely suggest that the international art world is simply another such parish.
However the Sheffield Pavilion is a new format for a city’s involvement in events such as the The Venice Biennale. A pavilion in book form is a structure curiously attentive to the roots of the word, in the Latin for butterfly, and in its subsequent usage to signify a tent or temporary structure used for leisure, entertainment or exhibition. The Sheffield pavilion is similarly airborne, nomadic, a moveable feast, an exhibition in book form or a paper based architecture for art.
The book will be launched at Venice at Bar Margaret Duchamp, Campo Santa Margherita, Dorsoduro, Venice, Italy from 8pm Friday 8th June (and will be available from the bar from 7-10 June) and will be distributed the following week in Kassel, concurrent with the Documenta XII festival.
The Sheffield pavilion is designed by the city’s renowned The Designer' Republic and the artists’ broader practice is represented on a DVD presented alongside it. The publication provides a curatorial resource but also exists as a work in itself. The book is not intended as an audit of artistic practice in Sheffield, but the first of (hopefully) many different ways of presenting aspects of the Sheffield art scene to a wider audience. The hope is that the project will act as a portal to contemporary art in Sheffield, representing artists’ work, practice and methodology as a vital and vibrant part of the city and making Sheffield–based artists more visible to an international network. The Sheffield Pavilion will continue the city’s international visibility after Echo/City – an exhibition of works about Sheffield - was selected to represent Britain in last year’s Venice Architecture Biennale.
The selected artists have presented new projects designed specifically for the book form. Tim Etchells has undertaken a creative exploration of the ‘track changes’ function in Microsoft Word, Penny McCarthy’s drawings include a facsimile of a letter from the NASA archive drafted should the crew of the first moon landing be lost in space, Matthew Harrison documents the production and progress of an unsolicited desk nameplate for Professor Colin Pillinger of the ill-fated UK Beagle 3 Mars probe, Farhad Ahrarnia presents a collage of extracts of articles and drawings by writer/journalist Maggie Lett for Tehran Journal in 1969, Neil Webb has produced a spectrographic and sound mapping of a microcosmic selection of Sheffield urban terrain, Maud Haya Baviera collects a series of illustrated short stories about a protagonist called Liberty, Katy Woods displaces and re-presents an intriguing collection of found images and text, Sarah Staton offers a photograph of a building in Sheffield whose collision of styles, age and function in one structure reflects the city as a whole, Meriel Herbert’s photographic images of bodily gestures respond to the physicality of the book and the intimate relationship between viewer/reader and writer/artist, and Host Artists Group presents a curated exploration of multiple artists’ responses to the notion of beauty.
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at 9:28 AM
Ernie Gehr - Signal-Germany on the Air (1985)
Sunday, February 3, 2008
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(1982-85); 16mm, color, sound, 37 minutes
"The artifice of the film image stands in stark contrast to the 'reality' of the scene-one is highly conscious of the frame outlines-of what's in and what's out. The color is almost always 'unreal' -some artifact of photographic depiction. The spaces and sounds between, behind, and above the image comes through, we fill out the scene. The mind permeates the space and we become highly aware of the processes used for this inspection. While watching you become aware of your own space, your own patterns of movement. Common ground and individual experience are the poles here, and the active mind shuttles between them in the duration. The recalcitrant world, once it is depicted and articulated, can be peeled back like an onion, revealing constituent layers. In Signal-Germany on the Air it is history that's in the air, behind the mask of every face, every facade, every street sign." -Daniel Eisenberg, "Some Notes on the Films of Ernie Gehr"
"A long sequence at the end of Signal was shot in the rain. This is almost comforting. The subdued colors of an overcast day seem more appropriate than the bright, saturated colors of the storefronts earlier in the film. It seems for a while as though the rain can wash away all traces of the past. But, when a bright orange flare-out signals both the end of a camera roll and the end of the film, the steady hiss of the rain reveals itself as the end of a conflagration." -Harvey Nosowitz in Film Quarterly
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at 12:01 PM
Ernie Gehr - Eureka (1974)
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This is a refilming of a remarkable movie depicting Market Street, San Francisco, around the turn of the century. The original film consisted of one long continuous take recorded from the front of a moving trolley from approximately Seventh Street all the way to the Embarcadero. I extended each frame six to eight times, full-frame, and increased the contrast and the light fluctuations.
To some degree, the original film has obviously been transformed, but I hope that this simple muted process allowed enough room for me to make the original work "available" without getting too much in the way. This was very important to me as I tend to see what I did, in part, as the work of an archaeologist, resurrecting an old film as well as the shadows and forces of another era.
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at 12:00 PM
Ernie Gehr - Shift (72/74)
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"For Gehr, SHIFT broke new ground, hence perhaps a pun in its title. The film is his first to employ extensive montage. The actors are all mechanical - a series of cars and trucks filmed from a height of several stories as they perform on a three-lane city street. Gehr isolates one or two vehicles at a time, inverting some shots, so that a car hangs from the asphalt like a bat from a rafter, using angles so severe the traffic often seems to be sliding off the earth, and employing a reverse motion so abrupt that the players frequently exit the scene as though yanked from a stage by the proverbial hook. A sparse score of traffic noises accompanies the spastic ballet mecanique. Not only the action but Gehr's deliberate camera movements are synced to the music of honking horns, screeching brakes, and grinding gears. The eight-minute film is structured as a series of obliquely comic blackout sketches: trucks run over their shadows; cars unexpectedly reverse direction or start up and go nowhere." - J. Hoberman, American Film, 1982
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at 11:58 AM
Ernie Gehr - Serene Velocity (1970)
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In representational films sometimes the image affirms its own presence as image, graphic entity, but most often it serves as vehicle to a photo-recorded event. Traditional and established avant garde film teaches film to be an image, a representing. But film is a real thing and as a real thing it is not imitation. It does not reflect on life, it embodies the life of the mind. It is not a vehicle for ideas or portrayals of emotion outside of its own existence as emoted idea. Film is a variable intensity of light, an internal balance of time, a movement within a given space.
-Ernie Gehr, January 1971
Serene Velocity is a literal "Shock Corridor" wherein Gehr creates a stunning head-on motion by systematically shifting focal lengths on a static zoom lens as it stares down the center of an empty, modernistic hallway–also plays off the contradictions generated by the frame’s heightened flatness and severe Renaissance perspective. Without ever having to move the camera, Gehr turns the fluorescent geometry of his institutional corridor into a sort of piston-powered mandala. If Giotto had made action films, they would have been these.
–J. Hoberman
EG Serene is available for the improvising of digital video in real-time. The software adopts and "open sources" the structure of the 1970 film as the basis for temporal reconstruction of your own selected digital videos in quicktime movie format. link.
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at 11:54 AM
Ryan Trecartin - I-BE AREA (2007)
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NY Times article on I-BE AREA
Video Art Thinks Big: That’s Showbiz
By HOLLAND COTTER
Published: January 6, 2008
WE’RE in a house of many tight, messy rooms. In the suburbs? Cyberspace? Hard to say. Anyway, it’s night. A door bangs open. A girl, who is also a boy, dashes in, talking, talking. Other people are already there, in gaudy attire, dire wigs and makeup like paint on de Koonings.
Everyone moves in a jerky, speeded-up, look-at-me way and speaks superfast to one another, to the camera, into a cellphone. Phrases whiz by about cloning, family, same-sex adoption, the art world, the end of the world, identity, blogging, the future. Suddenly indoors turns into outdoors, night into day, and we’re at a picnic, in dappled sunshine, with a baby. Then this all reverses, and we’re indoors again. A goth band is pounding away in the kitchen. The house is under siege. Hysteria. Everyone runs through the walls.
This is a highly impressionistic account of Ryan Trecartin’s sensationally anarchic video “I-Be Area,” which made its debut in the Elizabeth Dee Gallery in Manhattan last fall. The piece caused a stir, in part because most people had never seen anything quite like it before, certainly not in an art gallery.
Art video still has a funny reputation, left over from the 1960s, of being a serious medium, made for function rather than pleasure, as opposed to film. Yet “I-Be Area” was pleasure all the way. It was nonstop visual razzle-dazzle. It drew on every cheap-thrill trick in the digital graphics playbook.
More radically, it was the length of a feature film. More radically still, it told a story, one with dozens of characters and multiple subplots, which is what entertainment, not art, is supposed to do, if you assume there’s a hard and fast difference between the two.
Mr. Trecartin, apparently, does not assume this. He is not alone. The American artist and performer Kalup Linzy, for example, has invented a serial soap opera around a dysfunctional African-American family. Sadie Benning uses hand-drawn animation to tell bittersweet tales of urban gay life. Nathalie Djurberg, born in Sweden and living in Berlin, sculptures clay figures and sets them in sadistic encounters. These artists, using video that is cheaper and more accessible than ever thanks to digital technology, are creating a new kind of 21st-century art that is narrative in form and potentially epic in scale.
At present it is shaped by a combination of pop fantasy, ingrained cybersmarts, neo-tribalism and an angst-free take on contemporary life that marks an attention-deficient Internet culture.
The relationship of this work to an art world structured on galleries, museums and fairs is, potentially at least, one of detachment. You can experience “I-Be Area” on a laptop wherever and whenever you want. That may be a reason why few of these new video artists feel the need to live in New York City. They have chosen a medium that is not only flexible and affordable but has a history of embracing experimentation.
Video 40 years ago offered restless, penurious, disenfranchised and performance-based artists (many women worked in early video) an alternative to the blue-chip clubbiness of Pop painting and Minimalist sculpture. Video was associated with television and newsreels, not art. It was available and fairly easy to learn. Because it had no aesthetic history, it came with no fixed expectations. Using it allowed artists like Vito Acconci, Joan Jonas, Nam Jun Paik to open a fresh chapter in art history.
Video, it is important to note, was not a static medium. Painting and sculpture could, in their ways, tell stories, but video could make stories move through time and keep moving indefinitely. Because it was relatively cheap, you could fool around with it, improvise and edit like crazy. Experimentation naturally led to self-indulgence. There was a lot of terrible, boring video in the ’70s. But there was at least as much boring, terrible painting. Some of that painting still hogs space in our museums while videos sit on a shelf.
With time video gained credibility, meaning it found a market. Production values rose: better tape, richer color, smoother projection. Technical differences between video and more expensive and durable film media began to blur. After the ’70s, in the interest of commerce, videos grew shorter, more polished and more self-contained, more like objects. But narrative, which required watching a video from start to finish, was a problem. With hundreds of galleries springing up in the ’80s art boom, who had time to spend an hour in a dark room on a Saturday afternoon?
For the same reason, one would expect narrative video to be even less welcome now. Now there are more galleries than ever. And no environment could be more video-averse than art fairs, with cramped booths entirely geared to drive-by shopping. Yet here is Mr. Trecartin, asking us to sit for an hour and 48 minutes for a high-concept, intensely detailed, attention-demanding experience. And we gladly comply.
We do so, first of all, because “I-Be Area” is so giddy, so different. But it’s also just plain strange, which is part of the larger appeal of today’s video art. It represents a possible way out of something, out of the renewed tyranny of the precious object, out from under a boutique art market that has amassed grotesque wealth and power while making art itself seem small and utterly dispensable.
Mr. Trecartin, born in Texas in 1981, produces work of its moment in others ways too; it is the natural product of a generation that grew up on television and grew into the Internet. At the same time a segment of this generation wants to get away from cellphones, the Web and instant, nonstop information. So Mr. Trecartin and, even more decisively, some of his peers are using very basic digital tools to create a highly personal narrative art, almost a kind of folk art.
It is an art that adheres to the market-sanctioned genius model. Mr. Trecartin directs his videos, writes the script, designs the costumes and takes several leading roles. But he also describes his art as a collective project very much shaped by a circle of family and longtime friends. One of these friends, Lizzie Fitch, he lists as a collaborator; she is almost as prominent in the videos as Mr. Trecartin himself.
Finally, as is true with several other artists working in narrative video, Mr. Trecartin’s work is part of a second or possibly third wave in queer identity politics. The big change lies in emphasis. For queer artists of Mr. Trecartin’s generation, cross-dressing, cross-identifying and cross-thinking are part of a state of being, not statements of political position. Like the work of John Waters and Jack Smith, his art is about just saying no to life as we think we have seen it and saying yes to zanier, virtual-utopian possibilities.
The New York artist Kalup Linzy, born in 1977, has also cooked up a populous and intensely imagined narrative in video, one based in part on the soap operas and sitcoms he watched as a child. In a multi-episode serial with the umbrella title “All My Churen,” he takes the daytime drama format, with its turgid emoting and big secrets, to present the life of a fictional African-American family called the Braswells in the rural South.
As a group the family members touch on a prickly range of black stereotypes. They are all played, with awesome panache, by Mr. Linzy.
Culturally speaking this is a reference-intensive work, though the very notion of high art versus low art is long gone. Cindy Sherman, “The Jeffersons,” Manet, Richard Pryor, Zora Neal Hurston and the drag diva Vaginal Davis are all at the same V.I.P. party. Queerness is assumed, not even worth a comment. Each video episode is an auteur product: Mr. Linzy writes, directs, acts, designs and overdubs the supporting characters with his own voice. But it’s a product developed within a tight community of artist friends.
A big difference between his work and Mr. Trecartin’s is in the degree of digital engagement. Mr. Trecartin goes wild with editing bells and whistles; Mr. Linzy does not. The plainness and occasional clunkiness of his video technique is one reason the Braswell serial ends up touching in a way that Mr. Trecartin’s buzzed-up narratives rarely are. For all their raunchy hilarity Mr. Linzy’s characters are more than cartoons; “All My Churen” is a family-values story that has a lot to do with life.
The same is true of some outstanding recent narrative video that substitutes animated characters for live actors. In these works cultural references to a childhood universe of cartoons and puppets, originally intended to amuse and instruct, now are used to explore adult trauma.
Sadie Benning, born in Wisconsin in 1973, started making short narrative videos with a PixelVision camera as a teenager. She has since refined a distinctive style of hand-drawn cartooning, engagingly applied in her 30-minute video “Play Pause” (2006) to an updated Pilgrim’s Progress. The video tracks several solitary figures, men and women, through an unnamed city. They walk the streets to a grim pop beat — Ms. Benning was a founding member of the feminist New Wave band Le Tigre — and troubling sights catch their eyes: newspaper headlines, corporate advertising, security cameras.
At midpoint in the video the animated walkers converge on a small bar, and the mood lightens up. It’s a gay bar filled with lovers and friends. A communal retreat, it’s a mini-Eden, or could be in a different world. The video’s final scene is in an airport, a place of goodbyes. Figures sit in isolation. The police patrol. We’re back to the mood we started with.
Then there’s one last image, of a couple — they might be women or men — making love on the wings of an ascending plane as silver birds float like angels through a night sky.
If Ms. Benning pulls some of the utopianism latent in Mr. Trecartin’s art to the surface, another young storyteller, the Swedish artist Nathalie Djurberg, almost gleefully buries it in video animations that depict a dog-eat-dog world. Ms. Djurberg, born in 1978, has gone back in time to find her chosen medium, old-fashioned stop-action animation using hand-molded plasticene figures.
With this labor-intensive technology, she has created a series of picaresque short narratives that have a fanciful, fairy-tale look but devolve into scenes of cruelty and degradation: a child sexually abuses a cat; a woman whips a slavish young girl; a man slices himself to bits. Flesh rips, blood flows and characters weep big clay tears, not because they’re sorry for the vile deeds they’ve done but because they’ve had to stop.
Another video by Ms. Djurberg, made on commission for Performa 07 and introduced to New York last fall, was her most ambitious yet, in every way a tour de force. Nearly an hour long, it depicts a fight to the death between a racially mixed gang of children and a pack of ravenous dogs over a meal of garbage. The scene goes on and on; dogs and kids are killed left and right, only to be resurrected in a hospital emergency room where they are tortured by doctors and nurses. Ms. Djurberg, along with two musicians — the composer Hans Berg and her brother, Pascal Strauss — accompanies it with a live score, using toys, kitchen utensils, squeezed balloons and crushed cornflakes.
This deservedly well-received piece brings to mind certain older videos by Bruce Nauman and Paul McCarthy and bears a close relationship, psychic if not stylistic, to Kara Walker’s slave-narrative puppet animations. There are also plenty of comparisons to be made to work of Ms. Djurberg’s peers. I’m thinking of the ghoulish puppet animations by Bert Green and the chilling stop-action re-enactment of a robbery and murder, using animated G.I. Joe dolls, by Hank Willis Thomas and Kambui Olijimi. Then there’s Mr. Olijimi’s video of the life and death of a young prostitute, told within the time it takes for Nina Simone to sing “House of the Rising Sun,” and the hallucinatory five-minute version of Roman Polanski’s “Repulsion” by the talented Keren Cytter.
The Beijing artist Cao Fei gave us one of the best single videos to come out of China in the past few years in her “COSPlayer,” about a day in the life of a feral population of adolescents who dress as Japanese anime heroes and live on the fringe of a mushrooming city. And there’s the wonderful, Kafkaesque “Lost City” by Gigi Scaria, an artist from New Delhi, which I recently saw at the Newark Museum.
It’s about a young man whose memory deserts him day by day. We first watch him labeling photographs of family members and acquaintances so he can remember them. Next he makes elaborate maps of his daily route to work. Finally he posts directional signs on trees and walls along the route. At the end of the video we see him stranded in the street. Someone has taken the signs down, and he can’t find his way home.
Mr. Scaria, who was born in 1973, works in a traditional, linear, scene-by-scene style. Other video storytellers, like Ms. Cytter, stretch or truncate time and place. Still others, like Mr. Trecartin, are at some outer, experimental edge of video, narrative and time alike, pushing all three further out with every new piece.
In a time of speeded-up production and marketing, they are making art that runs by a different clock. They are also making art that does things that objects can’t do. And they are, potentially and some cases actually, reaching audiences by a new route. When you have YouTube at your disposal, who needs Chelsea?
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at 11:53 AM
Ryan Trecartin - A Family Finds Entertainment (2004)
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From the New York Underground Film Festival website:
"Entertainment is easy… Fuck! I’m so ugly!"
Ladies and Gentlemen, prepare to meet the experimental people and ready yourself for "IDM up the rear end! But be careful listening… it’s very influential."
Directed/Edited/Starring experimental person Ryan Trecartin, AFFE is a fucked up digital bedtime story that indulges a drag-queen-dress-up-twist on the classic coming out melodrama. In this world, populated by about 50 of Trecartin’s outrageously costumed friends, every moment and sound is electronically manipulated or processed, and performances seem to be fueled by an Alice-in-Wonderland type drug that accelerates (and often reverses) every character’s movement. It’s like the internet, but it is SO HONEST.
"I believe that somewhere there is something worth dying for, and I think it’s AMAZING!"
Meet Skippy, a depressed suicidal "teen" who locks himself in a bathroom with face-paint, a Polaroid camera and a knife. Desperately in search of an identity—any identity—Skippy has settled on suicide as a solution. But after a failed attempt, he receives a message in a seashell telling him "Skippy, don’t do it!" and immediately leaves home to embrace a newfound queer life. It’s a revelation, a celebration, "Ye-ah!"
"You’re so revolutionary!"
Meet Shin, a self-absorbed but charming hipster princess who leads a gang of her brethren in pursuit of the "random" lifestyle.
"We are so unpredictable!"
And other bizarrely fabricated (We made these kids on PhotoShop) hyper conscious hipsters including a ‘boys’ club where the men are so manly their dicks always hurt, and a cat named Murder on the Dance Floor.
In this world, the only dark side is to party alone.
An interview with Trecartin about it can be found here.
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at 11:50 AM
William Klein - Contacts Vol. 3: Conceptual Photography (2005)
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A collection of films that uncover the artistic processes of the greatest contemporary photographers from an original perspective. Using images (contact prints, proofs, prints, or slides) with commentary by the artists themselves, the viewer is thrust into the secret universe of creativity and into the heart and method of the evolution of a photographic body of work.
John Baldessari
Bernd & Hilla Becher
Chistian Boltanski
Alain Fleischer
John Hilliard
Roni Horn
Martin Parr
Georges Rousse
Thomas Struth
Wolfgang Tillmans
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at 11:47 AM
Sophie Calle & Greg Shepard - No Sex Last Night aka Double Blind (1992)
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For over 20 years Sophie Calle’s work has taken the form of photographic installations and chronicles, whose structure and form reflect a narrative approach - both within themselves individually and, taken together, in terms of Calle’s own career. Born in Paris in 1953, Calle’s early work dates from a world trip in the 1970s that lasted seven years. During a stay in California in 1978 she took her first photographs – graves marked Father and Mother – with no professional intent, she simply had come upon something that ‘her father might like’. On her return to Paris she began tailing unknowns in the street as part of a conscious ‘drifting through the city’, recording the results in notebooks containing photographs and texts.
By the 1980s the emphasis had moved to her own feelings resulting in the construction of a set of rules and rituals intended to resolve certain personal difficulties. This was followed in the late ‘80s and ‘90s by a concentration on the concept of sight and more recently issues to do with the disappearance of people and things.
Double-Blind
by Sophie Calle and Gregory Shephard
1992, 75:58 min, color, sound
In her premiere video project, French conceptual artist Sophie Calle joins with Gregory Shephard to create a voyeuristic tour de force. Armed with camcorders, Calle and her collaborator/partner Shephard head West in his Cadillac convertible to produce and document a real-life narrative of their journey and their relationship. With America as the backdrop for this unconventional coast-to-coast road movie, Calle and Shephard each narrates and records a personal diary, presenting strikingly different versions of the narrative/relationship. Aiming their dueling camcorders, the protagonists chronicle the elusive landscapes of human relations, wrestling to reconcile self, sexuality, and desire. The viewer is challenged to reconsider the subjective and cultural roles imposed by gender, sexuality, power, and tradition. Throughout, Calle seeks to redefine through personal investigation the terms and parameters of subject/object, public/private, truth, fiction, and role-playing. The quasi-documentary style evokes the films of Chris Marker, to whom Double-Blind is dedicated.
Written, directed and camera by Sophie Calle and Greg Shephard. Editor: Michael Penhallow. Music: Pascal Comelade, Tom Waits, Roy Orbison, Dwight Yokum, Taj Mahal, Jackson Brown, Cowboy Junkies, La Caanastera, Greg and Michael, W.M.Mozart. Production: Bohen Foundation. Post-production: San Francisco Artspace.
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at 11:43 AM
