Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy - Fresh Acconci (1995)
Friday, March 7, 2008
Download this at KaraGarga.
Fresh Acconci
by Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy
1995, 45 min, color, sound
Artists McCarthy and Kelley re-stage classic 1970s performance pieces by Vito Acconci, with a decidedly ironic Southern California sensibility. States McCarthy: "[The piece] is a reference to art now, to a resurgence of the 1970s and an interest in youth in the art world. There are also references to Hollywood 8 movies and soft porn made in the Hollywood hills.... In Fresh Acconci, the New York art scene is sandwiched with Hollywood. Two kinds of esthetics overlap. The tape itself crosses lines of what is politically correct, exploitation and softening or obscuring the meaning."
Based on Videotapes by Vito Acconci: "Claim Excerpts" ('71) "Contacts" ('71) "Focal Points" ('71)"Pryings" ('71) "Theme Song" ('73).
Download this at KaraGarga.
at 8:30 PM
Pierre Huyghe, Anri Sala, David Claerbout, Joan Jonas & Paul McCarthy - Point of View. An Anthology of the Moving Image. Part II (2004)
Download this at KaraGarga. First part here.
Point Of View: An Anthology of the Moving Image is a DVD series that features eleven leading artists from different generations and cultural perspectives, who are among the most important artists working in film, video, and digital imagery today: Francis Alys , David Claerbout, Douglas Gordon, Gary Hill, Pierre Huyghe, Joan Jonas, Isaac Julien, William Kentridge, Paul McCarthy, Pipilotti Rist, Anri Sala.
Anri Sala, Time After Time, 2003, 5:22 min, color, sound
David Claerbout, Le Moment, 2003, 2:44 min, color, sound
Joan Jonas, Waltz, 2003, 7:03 min, color, sound
Pierre Huyghe, I JEDI, 2003, 5 min, color, sound
Paul McCarthy, WGG Test, 2003, 5:20 min, color, sound
Download this at KaraGarga. First part here.
at 8:21 PM
Ian MacTilstra - Stretched: Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy (2008)
Download this at KaraGarga.
"Stretched"; a documentary about Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy.
"It's actually weird to see the way he has received himself in this sort of this sliver and the way it functions is a bit like architecture, but also like an abstract painting. The way that it's kind of folded back is a big like Jasper Johns. Is it Jasper Johns? Yeah, I think it's Jasper Johns, yeah, it kind of looks like that, like a canvas being peeled away, where you can see the male body in this supermodernist reference, and to me this is pretty interesting, and he seems to be masturbating with ketchup, and I guess the colour part of the ... anyways."
-Vivienne Bessette, critic.
Download this at KaraGarga.
at 8:16 PM
Oliver Payne & Nick Relph - Mixtape (2002)
Thursday, March 6, 2008
Download this at KaraGarga.
We went to Kingston University because we thought of it as a place without a reputation--something interesting to fuck with. We thought that at least there'd be some cool kids there who'd been rejected from Central St. Martin's, but in fact it was a deeply conservative institution, suburban in the worst sense of the word. Nevertheless, it was something to react against, and although we hated art school, we'd thoroughly recommend it. We started working together soon after we arrived. Our first show was of every Polaroid we'd ever taken, about 1,700 in all. That consolidated our shared outlooks and beliefs. Then Oliver had an idea for a film (Driftwood), so we teamed up to work on that. We come from the same area, listen to the same music, so we don't need to spend much time explaining things to each other.
In Mixtape we wanted to exhaust people--hurt their eyes and make them feel a little sick--but make the experience enjoyable. We used certain images from earlier works, like the line dancers from House & Garage, to have fun with our aesthetic. Mixtape is a celebration of young people, but it also touches on the idea of what one critic called "youth under siege by youth culture." So Starbucks is "cool" because they'll employ you even if you have piercings, but they'll make you wear ludicrous hygienic blue bandages over them. Scooters are "cool" because they're aimed at "youngcles," twenty-somethings stuck in adolescence, but if you stick two kids on a scooter on a treadmill, they still ain't going nowhere. Our images are a "fuck you" to corporate intervention in youth culture, whether it's hardcore, punk rock, skateboarding, graffiti, whatever. We wanted to celebrate the other to that: the pure, raw cane sugar.
After listening a lot to the Terry Riley song, we constructed a series of images and sequences that connected with these ideas and had a place within the music. Absurd or funny, poignant or romantic, we wrote them all down and assembled the best of them around the track. It's about fifty-fifty sound and vision. We tried to be aware of the music while we were editing. The strobe lights and the hunting scenes, for instance, begin just as the track goes mental. It would have been a drag to edit everything right on the beat. It's like a Krautrock record, a Neu! or Can track, in which a single phrase is repeated until it begins to generate new rhythms. The economy of the cuts in Mixtape is critical. The editing is crass at points, but we were mindful of a disjunction between sound and vision as well as a connection. Mixtape was shot on film, so it looks different from our previous work. We wanted it to look like a cross between an insurance ad and Schindler's List: heavy and ugly and stupid. But at times it also h as a brash, colorful Carry On appearance to it. We didn't want to make another shaky handheld film. The more we see films shot through plastic bags, the more we want to make refined, "straight" classics.
There's a lot of dancing in Mixtape, for the simple reason that we love to see dancing on film. Dance is a primal celebration of life. In House & Garage we made the point that two kids playing bedroom DJs--what's called having a little rinse-out--are participating in the same tradition as a suburban divorcee going line dancing. Watching a good skateboarding video is like watching ballet--we're interested in that kind of grace in movement and in different uses of space, whether it's dancing with a partner at a community center or making backside boardslides on a park bench.
There's an explicit reference See explicit link. to Huysmans's Against Nature in Mixtape that surprisingly few people picked up on: a young flaneur looking amazing outside a chip shop with his jewel-encrusted tortoise on a leash. Most of the other images are less academic. The old guy with the hammer is an homage to reggae legend Lee Perry, who crawled across Kingston, Jamaica, on his hands and knees trying to chase Satan from the earth by banging the ground with a hammer. We just transported his character to Chiswick. As for the kids riding scooters on a rolling treadmill, there's a shop in London called Lillywhites that had an offer: If you bought a treadmill, they'd throw in a free scooter. They had it displayed in the window, a treadmill with a scooter sitting on top of it. It looked so amazingly stupid--we sat outside the shop just crying with laughter.
Even if you hate it, you have to admit that Mixtape is full to the fucking brim.
Short-listed for this year's Beck's Futures award, British filmmaking duo Oliver Payne and Nick Relph put their prize money straight to work. The result is Mixtape, 2002, twenty minutes of "wild, trance-inducing loops" designed to infect viewers with humor and headaches alike. Structured around Terry Riley's mesmerizing Motown cutup "You're No Good," the film weaves a set of tangentially related vignettes into footage of a teenage hardcore band's spasmodic writhing. As the title suggests, it is an idiosyncratic compilation of perfect moments or, as Relph offers with a chuckle, "a really good party film."
Payne and Relph made their US debut last year at Gavin Brown's enterprise, screening their three major works to date: Driftwood, 1999, House & Garage, 2000, and Jungle, 2001. The first is a portrait of London as a chaos of cultural contradictions, a series of ongoing battles between skateboarders and architects, Stop the City demonstrators and Mayfair suits, ghosts of the old Soho and parasites of the new. Jungle shifts the focus to the Great British countryside, pulling apart its anachronistic ideals. House & Garage is a gentler affair, a hodgepodge of found footage and suburban tall tales that is at once wistfully melancholic and in rapturous love with life.
Payne failed his undergraduate program in Intermedia ("a bullshit word") at Kingston University in 2000; Relph was booted out the same year. Launched onto the London circuit with a helping hand from curator Matthew Higgs, who showcased their work in "Protest & Survive" at Whitechapel Gallery (2000), fig-1's "50 Projects in 50 Weeks" series (2000), and "Sound and Vision" at the Institute of Contemporary Art (2001), as well as in these pages (First Take, January 2001), they have tended to polarize the critics, receiving a flurry of damning reviews from a cynical British press. Acutely aware of the upstart myth that surrounds them, the pair is keen to transcend preconceptions about their attitude and intent. "I think it's a shame when we are portrayed as simply 'bad boys,'" shrugs Payne. "How very boring. We make films with heart."
Download this at KaraGarga.
at 7:41 PM
Vito Acconci - Three Adaptation Studies (1970)
Wednesday, March 5, 2008
Download this at KaraGarga.
9min, b/w, silent, super 8mm.
In these early film exercises, Acconci exhibits an almost childlike vulnerability that is at once comic and oddly affecting. In Blindfold Catching, a blindfolded Acconci reacts, flinching and lunging, as rubber balls are repeatedly thrown at him from off-screen. In Soap & Eyes, he tries to keep his eyes open after dousing his face with soapsuds, resulting in a tragicomic clown face. In Hand and Mouth, he repeatedly forces his fist into his mouth until he gags.
at 1:01 AM
Marcus Coates - Dawn Chorus (2006)
Tuesday, March 4, 2008
Download this at KaraGarga(29mb).
Dawn Chorus is the latest in a series of films by British artist Marcus Coates, in which he attempts to make the human voice mimic birdsong. In this multi-screen video installation 19 singers reproduce a recording of a group of wild British birds singing at dawn.
Dawn Chorus is an ambitious exhibition comprising films of 17 singers that uncannily recreate birdsong in their ‘natural habitats'. The individuals sing from various situations such as an underground car-park, an osteopathic clinic and a shed. Filmed in Bristol, the project is as much a portrait of British society and idiosyncrasy as it is of our natural world.
Picture This has worked with Marcus Coates and birdsong expert and wildlife sound recordist Geoff Sample over a three year period to support all aspects of the project, from scientific research and field work, to sourcing and filming singers and presenting the beautiful, natural phenomenon of the dawn chorus as a contemporary art exhibition. The project is supported by the Wellcome Trust.
During rigorous fieldwork 14 microphones were placed around woodland to record the dawn song of birds over a two week period in Northumberland. This study used a multi-microphone recording technique to capture numerous individual birds' songs simultaneously during the dawn chorus. From this multi-track recording each song was slowed down up to 16 times, then each human participant was filmed mimicking this slowed down song. Finally the resulting video footage was then speeded up, returning the bird mimicry into its ‘real' register. The speeding up of the film not only magically translates the human voice into bird song, but also emphasises unconscious gestures that appear uncannily similar to the physical behaviour of specific birds; a grandfather becomes a pheasant, teachers in a staffroom transform into chiffchaffs, robins and blue tits and an office worker metamorphoses into a wren. Together the films create an immersive soundscape for visitors to the exhibition.
'This is Yellowhammer," says Marcus Coates excitedly, pointing at a video of a man with a paunch reading a newspaper over breakfast. Suddenly, the man's eyes dash from side to side. His chest twitches up and down, and he bursts into an orgy of twittering and tweeting. "He sat there singing for an hour and 10 minutes," says Coates. "Watch: his mannerisms are so bird-like."
Yellowhammer is one of a cast of characters Coates has created for an extremely odd video installation, to be shown at Baltic in Gateshead next month. Dawn Chorus, which recreates the sound of birdsong using human voices, is an ambitious project, with scientific as well as artistic goals - medical research charity the Wellcome Trust sponsored him, and the birdsong has been archived for researchers.
Coates will go to extreme lengths to get what he wants. For Dawn Chorus, he spent a week camping with a wildlife sound recordist, Geoff Sample. The pair lived in a motorhome in Northumberland, getting up at 3am to activate a 24-track digital recorder. They collected 576 hours of birdsong in all - robins, whitethroats, wrens, blackbirds, songthrushes, yellowhammers, greenfinches. Coates says he became obsessed with Sample's ability to tell birds apart - not just by species, but individually. "He'll say, 'Oh, that's that robin doing a bit of blackcap.' He knows birds by the way they start or finish a phrase. We had two robins - I can't tell them apart, but Geoff can."
On their final morning, they placed microphones around a patch of woodland, hoping to capture the song of 14 individual birds at dawn. Then, back in his Bristol studio, Coates slowed the recordings down by up to 16 times, making the birdsong sound like a conversation between the Clangers. He recruited a choir to sing, whine and groan along to these strange sounds while being filmed at dawn in their own "natural habitat" - in the bath, in a taxi, in the kitchen. When the film is speeded up, the "birdsong" comes to life, the subjects twittering away like real birds. Blue Tit is a woman lying in bed, fluttering her eyes and whistling through a puckered mouth. Linnet is an osteopath, nodding and blinking furiously and puffing up his chest in his consulting room.
Most of the subjects are amateur singers from Bristol, hand-picked at choir rehearsals. Chaffinch is Pearl Conway, 62, a nurse at the burns unit in Bristol's Frenchay Hospital and a member of a ladies' barbershop choir, the Avon Belles; she is pictured cheeping away in a hospital waiting room. "Some of the notes were tricky," she says, "but I gave it my best shot. It did go on: it lasted about an hour."
"It was quite meditative," says Blackbird, aka Piers Partridge (yes, that's his real name), a musician from Bristol who was filmed in his garden shed. "I found myself going deeper and deeper into the quality of the sound." Partridge found that he could predict where the "Clanger" sounds were going. "The blackbird had one or two favourite riffs, so I'd think, 'OK, here he goes.' I imagined myself as a blackbird on a spring morning, very early in a high place, having that freedom not to think but just to let the sound come out. With that came some interesting movements - I was cocking my head to look around. I felt really spaced out. When it finished I was miles away."
Coates, 38, is getting something of a reputation as a one-off. His work has been described as quintessentially British, focused on the boundary between the human and the animal. For his best-known piece, Journey to the Lower World (2005), he dressed as a stag and performed a shamanic ritual for the residents of a condemned tower block in Liverpool. Next month he will dress as a badger for a similar ritual at the Hayward Gallery in London. His 40-minute film A Guide to the British Non-Passerines (2001) has him mimicking 97 bird species, and for a photographic project, Goshawk, he strapped himself 20ft up a tree in an attempt to become a rare bird of prey.
Coates' projects seem half-jokey, half-serious; he talks with intense passion about each of them, but is quick to point out their ridiculous elements. This seems to be part of the experiment: it's as much about discomfort and the surreal as about animal metamorphosis. His ideas evoke a child-like desire to "become" an animal or a bird and, strange as they are, they are oddly moving.
He trained as a painter at the Royal Academy of Art, and says he has been fascinated by British birds and wildlife since childhood. "I grew up in Harpenden, in suburbia, so wildlife was always this exotic thing because it was so limited. There was a tiny wood next to our house and my brother and I would see these birds and go home and draw them. We'd always think we'd seen a honey buzzard and it would turn out to be a crow. I thought for a long time being an artist was about making art, but in fact it's about representing what you are passionate about."
Coates' installation should sound like the original dawn chorus: the screens playing the music will be placed in exactly the same positions as the microphones in the wood where the birdsong was recorded. Coates says he hopes to apply the method again: he recently went to Japan to experiment with Japanese birds and singers. But the Baltic exhibition, he feels, is quintessentially British, because of our attachment to wildlife. "It's outside the human lifestyle because we get up too late," he says. "I wanted to create something you could experience again and again."
Download this at KaraGarga(29mb).
at 4:47 PM
Dylan Thomas - Under Milk Wood (1963)
Monday, March 3, 2008
Download this at KaraGarga.
To begin at the beginning. It is generally believed Thomas conceived the idea for such a play already early during his life, perhaps as far back as 1935 at the age of 21, when he had written of "the stories of the reverend madmen in the Black Book of Llareggub" in a surrealist story called The Orchards. It took him quite some time however to arrive at a suitable and final structure, and also World War II intervened, at the end of which Thomas had gone to live in New Quay. Here he had written Quite Early One Morning, a sketch of life in a seaside town, which is likely to have been a foretaste of Under Milk Wood: he spoke of a sun-lit town with the sea "lying still and green as grass after a night of tar-black howling and rolling."
Throughout the years Dylan Thomas eventually discarded a number of these 'first structures' until he found a freer form for his play when he began to work on it in Laugharne in 1949, four years before his death, writing of his plan to complete "a piece, a play, an impression for voices, an entertainment out of the darkness, of the town I live in, and to write it simply and warmly and comically with lots of movement and varieties of moods, so that, at many levels, you come to know the town as an inhabitant of it." This work was Under Milk Wood - an orchestration of voices, sights and sounds that conjure up the dreams and waking hours of an imagined Welsh seaside village within the cycle of one day.
Subtitled A Play for Voices, Dylan Thomas' magnum opus carries the double legacy of the author's extensive work for radio - a medium for which he had an almost intuitive grasp - and his skill and ability as a poet. A polyphonic evocation of a day in the life of an imaginary small Welsh seaside town, Thomas' play - "a green leaved sermon on the innocence of men" - visits in turn the inhabitants of Llareggub (read it backwards!) while they sleep, when they wake and go about their daily activities, as the night falls. Balancing a rhythmic, densely poetic language with a nuanced ear for the musical cadences of speech, the play's gentle, affectionate charm and humour resonate to create a deeply textured portrait of a community responding almost mythically to the awakening of spring.
The play also reveals a more serious aspect of Thomas' creation - it was composed in part as a response to the terrible inheritance of World War II - in which the affirmative, redemptive cast of the play carries a moral dimension, an imaginative, lyrical empathy for the regenerative innocence of the average human being and their capacity for grace. Llareggub becomes a space in which eccentricity is tolerated, sin is forgiven and love is nurtured - or at least dreamt about and possible. Thomas has a compassion for the small dramas of the everyday and a belief that what is commonplace unites us, all underscored by the transformative power of the language he bestows on each inhabitant. His characters - Captain Cat, Myfanwy Price, Organ Morgan, Willy Nilly Postman, Polly Garter, Dai Bread, and others - are generously animated and affectionate.
Under Milk Wood saw a first solo performance by Dylan Thomas in the Fogg Museum at Harvard on May 3, 1953, and a stage performance in New York on October 25 of that year, just before his death on November 9, 1953, but is believed by many to be unfinished, although it seems perfect as it is. It was published after his death in 1954. In 1963 the BBC recorded it for radio with narration by another famous Welshman, Richard Burton, who claimed "the entire thing is about religion, the idea of death and sex". These important themes are central to the lives of the colourful characters whom Thomas describes with a great deal of fondness. He introduces the people of Llareggub through their dreams and creates some idea of what will be important to them when they are awake. For Dai Bread it is harems; Polly Garter loves babies; and Nogood Boyo dreams of "nothing".
The town as a whole has its own personality which is divided along Freudian lines, into a conscious world of daily activity narrated by the First Voice, and a subconscious world of intimate thoughts and feelings revealed by the Second Voice. There are powerful, often sexual, forces operating beneath the calm exterior of a town which has "fallen head over bells in love". The Second Voice exposes the secret fantasies of Gossamer Beynon who feels Sinbad Sailor's "goatbeard tickle her in the middle of the world", and also Mr Pugh who imagines concocting "a fricassee of deadly nightshade" to poison his wife. Each relationship is governed by peculiar rules but each of the characters remains deeply involved in his or her own idea of love.
In Thomas' world these sensuous relationships can not be separated from the dark shadow of death. The promiscuous Polly Garter sings all day of her lost love Little Willy Wee, the only husband Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard can tolerate is a dead one and blind Captain Cat is haunted by the memory of Rosie Probert, "the one love of his sea-life". Many of the characters are troubled throughout by their frustrated and sometimes explicit desires.
Under Milk Wood is a sensitive, often comic, examination of Welsh life in which the people are viewed as being particularly blessed. They are the "chosen people of His kind fire in Llareggub's land" and the town retains its own magic and holy significance despite its faults.
Download this at KaraGarga.
at 12:44 PM
Anri Sala - Selected Works (2001-2003)
Download this at KaraGarga.
Compilation featuring six works by Anri Sala.
Promises, 2001, color film, sound.
Arena, 2001, color film, sound.
Naturalmystic(tomahawk #2), 2002, color film, sound.
Ghostgames, 2002, color film, sound.
Dammi i colori, 2003, color film, sound.
Time After Time, 2003, color film, sound.
Download this at KaraGarga.
at 11:34 AM
Carolee Schneemann - Meat Joy (1964)
Sunday, March 2, 2008
Download this at KaraGarga(dvdr at 314mb/rip at 74mb)
DescriptionMeat Joy
Carolee Schneemann
1964, 6 min, color, sound, 16 mm film
link
Writes Schneemann: Meat Joy is an erotic rite -- excessive, indulgent, a celebration of flesh as material: raw fish, chicken, sausages, wet paint, transparent plastic, ropes, brushes, paper scrap. Its propulsion is towards the ecstatic -- shifting and turning among tenderness, wildness, precision, abandon; qualities that could at any moment be sensual, comic, joyous, repellent. Physical equivalences are enacted as a psychic imagistic stream, in which the layered elements mesh and gain intensity by the energy complement of the audience. The original performances became notorious and introduced a vision of the "sacred erotic." This video was converted from original film footage of three 1964 performances of Meat Joy at its first staged performance at the Festival de la Libre Expression, Paris, Dennison Hall, London, and Judson Church, New York City.
Meat Joy: First performed May 29, 1964, Festival de la Libre Expression, Paris. Filmed by Pierre Dominik Gaisseau. Editor: Bob Giorgio. 
Download this at KaraGarga(dvdr at 314mb/rip at 74mb)
at 3:55 PM
Mike Kelley - Test Room Containing Multiple Stimuli Known to Elicit Curiosity and Manipulatory Responses (1999)
Download this at KaraGarga.
1999, 59:54 min, color, silent
Test Room Containing Multiple Stimuli Known to Elicit Curiosity and Manipulatory Responses 1999, 51:18, color, silent
A Dance Incorporating Movements Derived from Experiments by Harry F. Harlow and choreographed in the manner of Martha Graham 1999, 8:32 min, b&w, silent
Test Room Containing Multiple Stimuli Known to Elicit Curiosity and Manipulatory Responses documents Kelley's installation of the same name, in which visitors were invited to enter a caged area and interact with sculptural objects and "parental surrogate objects." Kelley creates a theatrical space, in which the ambiguity of the elements provides a backdrop for psychological projection.
With: Sonia Kazorov, Kristen Hernstein, Dion Derizzo, David Bicha, Anita Pace, Carl Burkley. Choreography: Anita Pace. Production Supervisor: Patti Podesta. Camera: Robert Elhardt, Greg Kucera (Dance), Lighting Assistant: Derth Adams. Editor: Greg Kucera. Crew: Catherine Sullivan, Cameron Jamie, Abram Boosinger, Joycelyn Shipley (Dance).
Download this at KaraGarga.
at 3:50 PM
