Peter Rosen - Who Gets to Call It Art? (2006)
Sunday, April 13, 2008
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Stupid title aside, this is another recent little documentary which brings together a some rare footage and interviews about the art of the 1960s, the birth of "pop", and so forth. Not terribly profound, but fun.
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at 1:15 PM
Carine Asscher - Passageways: James Turrell (2006)
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This was produced for the museum of modern art, paris in 2006. It documents the infamously reclusive Earthworks artist James Turrell, and his majestic Rodin Crater project that he's been working on for about 25 years now. Since Turrell's work is not open to the public, and you're likely to get shot trespassing out in New Mexico where this sits, this is your only chance to see it. Highly recommended for those interested in late modern and contemporary art.
Box:
A pilot for many years, James Turrell is today the greatest American "Land Art" artist, and considers the sky as his studio. Upon spectacular and historical aerial images of Arizona's canyons, Turrell recalls his formal research on natural light and his friendship with the Hopi Indians. The film gives Turrell the opportunity to present his masterpiece, Rodin Crater, a true celestial light "observatory".
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at 1:10 PM
Various - Transmediale 06 - Video Selection (2006)
Thursday, April 10, 2008
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Festival for art and digital culture Berlin
Transmediale is a forum of communication for artists, media workers and a broad public interested in the arts. transmediale includes exhibitions, conferences, live performances, artist presentations and a variety of fringe events throughout Berlin. transmediale was founded in 1988 as a video art festival and has taken place annually, in Berlin, ever since.
First conceived in close relation to the Berlinale film festival, the festival changed its name from 'VideoFest' to 'transmediale' in 1997/98, thus reflecting the fact that its programmatic scope had broadened to encompass a wide range of multimedia-related art forms. Since then, digital technologies have become firmly integrated into our everyday lives. 'Digital culture' is no longer avant-garde terrain. transmediale has responded to this development by focusing its programmes not on the latest technical novelties and scientific speculations, but on the actual usage that people are making of such technologies.
Media technologies as cultural techniques
As a festival for art and digital culture, transmediale presents advanced artistic positions reflecting on the socio-cultural impact of new technologies. It seeks out artistic practices that not only respond to scientific or technical developments, but that try to shape the way in which we think about and experience these technologies.
transmediale understands media technologies as cultural techniques which need to be embraced in order to comprehend, critique, and shape our contemporary society.
1. On a Wedenesday Night in Tokyo by Jan Verbeek
2. Human Trial by John Butler
3. Luukkaankangas by Dariusz Krzeczek
4. Automovil by Rolando Vargas and Catherine Cely
5. Little Figures by Sarah Vanagt
6. Generator P730by Jakub Nepras
7. Being Luis Porcar by Manuel Saiz
8. I Love you Jet Li by Stacy Hardy and Jaco Bouwer
9. When I Wish Upon a Star by Mai Yamashita and Naoto Kobayashi
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at 3:19 PM
Dennis Oppenheim - Tooth and Nail: Film and Video, 1970-1974 (1970)
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Oppenheim's Aspen Series, presented here, is one of the landmarks of early video art, ranking with Nauman, Acconci, and Abramovic as the most important work of the early 1970s. This landmark collection was just recently released. I've included a snapshot of all the titles below, as well as the essay from the catalog. Please buy this dvd (link) and support the restoration and distribution of film video and film art! -mediaburn(kg member)
From Disc:
Dennis Oppenheim (born 1938) has received international attention for a conceptual oeuvre spanning performance, video, sculpture, installation, and land art. In the early 1970s, Dennis Oppenheim was in the vanguard of artists using film and video to investigate themes relating to body and performance. This portfolio features a selection of his works known as the Aspen Tapes, produced between 1970 and 1974, in which Oppenheim uses his own body as a site of experimentation on the personal. In these works the artist enters into an intimate and dynamic dialogue with his body as he explores the boundaries of personal risk, bodily transformation, and interpersonal communication. With the publication of this portfolio in collaboration with the artist's studio, this seminal series of quasi-anthropological performances is now available to the public for the first time on DVD.
Just as Oppenheim's work explores new and unusual forms of communication and address, Slought Foundation hopes that this portfolio contributes to an existing discourse about alternative possibilities for cultural production and reception. In Oppenheim’s Transfer Drawings and Identity Transfers, for instance, the artist deposits and retrieves information from his daughter Kristin and his son Erik. In so doing, Oppenheim presents the act of communicating with others as a physical and biological extension of the self. Likewise, we encourage you to experiment by viewing the works featured in this collection outside the confines of a gallery or museum, and in your own home, community, and places of work, alone or in dialogue with your children and parents, colleagues and friends, neighbors and strangers.
Further Information:
“In a sense, I am creating a system that allows the artist to become the material, to consider himself the sole vehicle of the art, the distributor, initiator and receiver simultaneously. Understanding the body as both subject and object permits one to think in terms of an entirely different surface. It creates a shift in direction from the creation of solid matter to the pursuit of internal or surface change. With this economy of output one can oscillate from the position of instigator to victim. Take the phenomenon of grabbing: instead of grabbing clay, you grab your stomach. For the first time, instead of imposing form manually, you are feeling what it is like to be made. You might have felt your hands picking up a piece of wood and stacking it, but you have never felt what the wood felt.” -- Dennis Oppenheim
"The idea that one developmental sequence has to be traceable through an entire oeuvre may be an outdated Modernist anxiety, from an age obsessed with the idea that History is the temporal embodiment of Reason. Oppenheim’s work, with its emphasis on discontinuities and ruptures, implies a different, more dialectical, relationship to the sense of evolution. In fact, a kind of Aufhebung, or overleaping of the self through incorporation of its other, underlies a lot of the shifts in Oppenheim’s sequences.
In this, the work seems to offer an analogue to the art history of a changing and volatile era—an era when the Hegelian idea of Spirit as the moving force of art became mobile, the Spirit moving restlessly from one lode to another for its fuel. It is arguable that Oppenheim’s shifts have not been strictly in response to this generalized shifting of the Spirit of things, but that, in part, they have been a guiding force of the series of shifts. -- Thomas McEvilley
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at 11:10 AM
Stan Douglas - Nu•tka• (1996)
Sunday, April 6, 2008
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Originally a continuous video projection installation Two-sided CAV laserdiscs; 4 laserdiscs. Alternately show n as single-channel color video projection and quadraphonic soundtrack;
Nu•tka• utilizes image bifurcation, this time to explore the history of colonialization on Vancouver Island, where English and Spanish fleets battled over trade routes in the 18th century. Films of the landscape—the only imagery shown—are superimposed on one screen so that the footage appears doubled. This formal effect is echoed by the soundtrack, which includes excerpts from the sea captains’ diaries, which become increasingly paranoid and irrational. At key moments in the narrative all visual and verbal elements meld together in exquisite clarity. -- Nancy Spector
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at 11:03 AM
Stan Douglas - Television Spots/Monodramas (1987-1991)
Saturday, April 5, 2008
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TELEVISION SPOTS (1987/88)
In 1989, his first series of short works for television, the twelve Television Spots, were broadcast in Saskatoon and Ottawa amid regular programming, as if they were commercials. Unidentified, the short scenes depicting open-ended, banal activities baffled viewers.
MONODRAMAS (1991)
Douglas’s «Monodramas,» ten 30- to 60-second videos from 1991, conceived as interventions into commercial television, interrupted the usual flow of advertising and entertainment when broadcast nightly in British Columbia for three weeks in 1992. These micronarratives mimic television’s editing techniques, but as kernels of a story they refuse to cohere. They are tales of dysfunction and dislocation, misanthropy and misunderstanding. When the videos were aired unannounced during commercial breaks, viewers called the station to inquire about what was being sold, their responses evincing how the media can refocus attention from content to consumption. -- Nancy Spector
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at 12:39 AM
Stan Douglas - Der Sandmann (1995)
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Originally an installation: Two-track 16mm black-and-white film projection and stereo soundtrack.
The film installation Der Sandmann investigates the intersection of history and memory as witnessed against the backdrop of post–Cold War Germany. Shot on 16mm film in the old Ufa studios near Potsdam, the piece fuses E.T.A. Hoffmann’s eponymous tale, Freud’s citation of it in “The Uncanny,” his study of repression and repetition, as well as the social impulses behind 19th-century German urban planning, which instituted the Schrebergärten, plots of leasable land on which the poor could grow their own food. Projected as two separate but intersecting videos showing the garden at different chronological points—in use during the 1960s and as a construction site some 20 years later—Der Sandmann contemplates temporality and the transformative effects of history. -- Nancy Spector
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at 12:34 AM
Ben Lewis - Gregor Schneider (2004)
Wednesday, April 2, 2008
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Ben Lewis continues his series of programmes looking at a new generation of contemporary international artists.
Gregor Schneider won the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 2001 by exhibiting his whole house in the German pavilion. But this was no ordinary suburban home - since the age of 16, Schneider has been transforming his father's three-story detached property into a house of horrors: a grim series of acoustically-isolated rooms insulated with lead, fake partitions, dank dark basements and, in his own words, "love nests" and "wanking corners".
Convinced that this kind of art can only be explained by a terrible childhood trauma, Ben tries to persuade Schneider to talk about his past, but the artist perceives his work within a rather more theoretical-conceptual framework...
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at 2:35 PM
Various - First Person (2002)
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Turning to themselves as the first person at hand, the Mexican and American artists presented here employ their own bodies as a medium to describe their relationship to their cultural surroundings. As homogenized entertainment and media spreads its social paradigms globally, these artists are reacting to the pressure to conform to these dominant cultural stereotypes.
These works are not autobiographical. Instead the self, as a visual or verbal construct, is used as a tool to highlight pedestrian situations in order to frame their reconsideration. These artists exploit the camera¹ s gaze by addressing it directly, which turns private actions into public performances. This direct address to the camera lets the viewer know that he or she is supposed to watch, yet does not mitigate the intimacy of the act; the end result is a feeling of invited voyeurism.
The camera is integrated as a primary tool in the construction of these video-performances. Instead of creating a performance in front of an audience and videotaping it for documentation, the artist treats the recording of the performance as the primary means of experiencing the piece, rather than as its documentation: the camera is the audience. Instead of trying to make the camera invisible, the artists conceptualize their piece in order to reveal its own construction. Through thematic parody and reenactment, and structural duration and repetition, they foreground their intention to perform in front of the camera and not a live audience. In performing for the camera, as audience, they collapse the boundaries separating video art and traditional performance.
Artist:
Arturo Castelán
Ximena Cuevas
Sharon Hayes
Justin Lincoln
Rodney McMillian
Amaranta Sánchez
Julia Steinmetz
Haruko Tanaka
Anne Walsh
Natalie Zimmerman
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at 12:15 PM
Various - Destricted (2006)
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Destricted is the first short film collection of its kind, bringing together sex and art.
Explicit in content they reveal the diverse attitudes by which we represent ourselves sexually. Formed in 2004, Destricted is a platform for all forms of uncensored artistic expression; manipulating and embracing the expression of sex through art.
The Destricted brand is the first in a continuing series. The seven films presented explore the fine line where art and pornography intersect. The films highlight controversial issues about the representation of sexuality in art; opening up for debate the question of whether art can be disguised as pornography or whether pornography can be disguised as art or something else altogether. The result is a collection of sexy, stimulating, challenging, provocative, strange and sometimes humorous scenarios that leave it up to the viewer / voyuer to decide.
Balkan Erotic Epic
Marina Abramović, 2005, 13 min
Performance art legend Marina Abramović delves into Balkan folklore to create an instructional series of mis en scènes that explore the crude, magical and mysterious rites of ethnic fertility and virility.
Hoist
Matthew Barney, 2004, 14 min 36 sec
American fabulist Matthew Barney stages the erotics of sexual encounter as it takes place between ‘green man’ and the lubricated drive shaft of a customised deforestation vehicle destined for the Carnival de Bahia.
Sync
Marco Brambilla, 2005, 2 min
American artist and filmmaker Marco Brambilla ransacks porn-film archives to produce a witty, fast-moving montage of money shots.
Impaled
Larry Clark, 2005, 38 min
Larry Clark, cult anthropologist of American adolescence, directs a sensitive yet frank investigation into how, for the generation growing up in the 1980s, pornography has shaped the way they think about sex and sexual fantasy. The result is a riveting documentary about desire and sexual initiation.
We Fuck Alone
Gaspar Noé, 2006, 23 min
Gaspar Noé, maker of Irreversible, the controversial art-house movie whose brutal depiction of rape that left audiences physically sick, now promises to turn you on with a cinematically erotic journey into masturbatory fantasy.
House Call
Richard Prince, 12 min
American iconographer Richard Prince appropriates a segment video that captures the generic gold standard of 1970s porn – big tits, big cock and cumshot – re-shooting it in the manner of the cowboys, girlfriends and outlaws that first made him famous.
Death Valley
Sam Taylor-Wood, 2004, 7 min 58 sec, music by Matmos and Andrew Hale
British art star Sam Taylor-Wood directs a porn star in a droll elegy to masturbation and the great American outdoors.
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at 11:22 AM
