John Baldessari - John Baldessari: Films Transferred to Video 1972-1977 (1972)
Sunday, April 27, 2008
Download this at KaraGarga.
Baldessari’s cinema works on DVD.
Baldessari’s cinema works primarily in the Space of the spectator and opens up the filmmaking field to other language forms, to other story telling procedures. The film is no longer a narrative progression but rather a succession of near-still, suspended, photographic moments. Baldessari’s film aesthetic is built around his conceptual photographic work, an obsession with the non-link, with fragmentation and gaps. Images are both autonomous and integrated forms, time-image units referring to an ever-evolving film. It is up to the spectator to reconstruct and project a structure, to make up sequences from images.
"Title" is without doubt one his most radical Projects, a juxtaposition of extremely minimal images following each other without hierarchy nor direction. In this work Baldessari isolates and breaks up a classic film into its component parts. First the objects, the characters, the landscapes, then the frames associating two shapes, and finally the start of an action, of a dialogue.
In this way he shows the precise making and manipulation of meaning, the tricks of cinematic space-time.
In "Six Colorful Inside Jobs" he draws a parallel between a double process of life and creation. The video shows a room being painted in six different colors, each color of the spectrum corresponding to a day of the week. This work, which started as a performance/installation, integrates the artist as a comic figure faced with contemporary history—that of American painting—and shifts his function toward that of a house painter. Through this form of irony, Baldessari shows to what extent instruments and materials help him define the subtle limits between art and work, art and life.
"4 Short Films" is the product of the same ironic twist, a free and absurd association between time, matter, and objects. (Stéphanie Moisdon).
Download this at KaraGarga.
at 12:59 AM
Various - The PureData~Convention 2004 (2005)
Thursday, April 24, 2008
A potpourri of audio, video, audio-visual and documentary works of artists that participated at the 1st international pd~convention in Graz, autumn04.
Collection of works and documents of PureData artists.
Pure Data (or Pd) is a graphical programming language developed by Miller Puckette in the 1990s for the creation of interactive computer music and multimedia works. Though Puckette is the primary author of the software, Pd is an open source project and has a large developer base working on new extensions to the program.
Download this at KaraGarga.
at 11:32 AM
Åke Hodell & Per Wiklund - Lågsniff (1965)
Download this at KaraGarga.
Directed by: Åke Hodell and Per Wiklund
Photo: Per Wiklund
Performers: Åke Hodell, Torsten Ekbom, Bengt Emil Johnson,
Leif Nylén, Sissi Nilsson and Elisabeth Nylén.
Running time: 20 minutes.
This is one of the most essential DVD-releases of 2002, by the controversial Swedish text-sound poet Åke Hodell (1919-2000). "Lågsniff" is only screened once on Swedish television in 1965, and then creating such a stir that the film immediately was put into the dark vaults of SVT, where it has been hidden since.
Now the amazing visual recording of the event has been made available on DVD, 37 years after.
This experimental stageplay is a masterpiece in the use of live voices, (by fellow leading avantgardists of the time, Bengt-Emil Johnson, Leif Nylén a.o.) black and white cut ups and an innovative use of the camera.
Åke Hodell (April 30, 1919 - July 29, 2000, Stockholm, Sweden) was a Swedish fighter pilot, poet, author, text-sound composer, and artist. Son of author Björn Hodell and brother of actor Ulla Hodell.
Hodell was trained as a fighter pilot, but after a crash during practice July 17, 1941, he had to spend the next few years in hospital. This became a turning point and he became a dedicated antimilitarist. Lying in hospital he got to know author Gunnar Ekelöf and Hodell made his debut with Flyende Pilot in 1953. That same spring Hodell and Ekelöf travels to Rome. In his books, Hodell experiments with what he calls elektronismer, while he on stage and in radio in the early 60's works with text-sound composition. During this period he is also active at Pistolteatern in Stockholm. He also creates publisher Kerberos.
Download this at KaraGarga.
at 11:29 AM
Mores McWreath - The Bud, the Seed, the Egg (2008)
Sunday, April 20, 2008
Download this at KaraGarga.
"In this video I use the structure of YouTube and vaudeville to directly address ways of challenging the hegemony of capitalism through Roland Barthes concept of the Neutral. Barthes defines the Neutral as “that which baffles the paradigm,” it is an expression of “the right to silence.” The performer/character, played by myself, goes through a variety of performances that touch on a broad range of subjects from the state of artists in a capitalistic society to sex and power to the pronunciation of the word Iraq that immediately degenerates to gibberish. The video takes place exclusively in a neutral space that oscillates between an empty office, classroom, gallery, or retail space. The artifice of that neutrality becomes explicitly apparent as my performances become increasingly antic. Inspired in part by Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Happy Days, all of these vignettes come together to form a sometimes humorous, sometimes tragic expression of ambivalence and frustration. It is a portrait of an individual facing a world of decisions and finding only burden, not freedom, in capitalistic notions of abundance. The “neutral” is a place outside of the decision making process, a place of pure potential that I am trying to reach in this video." (Mores McWreath)
Installation shot:
Download this at KaraGarga.
at 11:12 PM
Andy Warhol - Outer and Inner Space (1965)
Download this at KaraGarga.
One of Andy Warhol's most important works of art, one of the very first works of video art, an absolute masterpiece. Sound awful in this version. Hoberman gets a few facts wrong below, but it's a great short review. -mb
FILM; A Pioneering Dialogue Between Actress and Image
By J. HOBERMAN
ANDY WARHOL has so become his own trademark -- and is so much a one-name synonym for the culture of celebrity -- that it can be a shock to realize just how brilliantly original he was as a visual artist. A case in point: The double-screen video-based film installation ''Outer and Inner Space'' at the Whitney Museum (through Nov. 30), which places his glamorous, doomed superstar Edie Sedgwick in a dialogue with her own video-taped image.
First shown in 1966 and largely forgotten for some 30 years thereafter, ''Outer and Inner Space'' is a historical anomaly -- a masterpiece of video art made before the term even existed. The piece meditates on the distinction between film and tape while introducing the issues of real-time recording and simultaneous feedback that would inform much video art from the 1970's on. For the Whitney adjunct curator, Callie Angell, '' 'Outer and Inner Space'' ''creates this classic background for video art that it didn't know it had.''
Mid-summer 1965, a few months before the father of video art Nam June Paik got his first Sony PortaPak, a prototype Norelco slant-track video recorder was delivered to the Warhol Factory. (Its arrival, Ms. Angell points out, is an event in the hectic first chapter of Warhol's ''documentary'' novel ''A.'') The Norelco video recorder was expensive, unwieldy and short-lived. There are no extant machines. Warhol, then producing a 16-millimeter feature every other week, played with the video equipment for a month. A documentary of the Factory scene produced by Bruce Torbet that summer shows a surprisingly hands-on artist -- Warhol himself wielding the white tubular-shaped Norelco camera as he supervises the lighting of the 22-year-old Sedgwick, perched demurely on a stool.
These tapes, as played back on a large monitor, were the basis for a two-reel, 66-minute movie with Sedgwick positioned before, responding to and illuminated by her video image. (Thanks to this lighting, unconventional then, the film seems less black and white than gorgeously black and silver.) Shot in profile and close-up, the video Sedgwick is uncharacteristically earnest, staring off camera with an almost mystical concentration as she talks on and on about . . . something. A typically laconic Factory description explains that her ''duo dialogue'' concerns ''space, mysticism and herself.'' Although the tape is manipulated to produce intermittant video distortions and bar rolls, the most subtle effect has the video Edie slightly larger than life. Space is flattened, perspective destroyed. In a further temporal complication, Warhol arranged for the two 16-millmeter reels to be projected simultaneously side by side.
Suggesting both the silkscreened multiples of Marilyn Monroe or Jacqueline Kennedy, as well as Warhol's vast series of 16-millimeter screen tests, ''Outer and Inner Space'' is one of his great portraits. Her lips glossed and eyes shining, a pair of enormous dangling earrings casting a grid of shadows across her graceful neck, the film Sedgwick was never more appealing than here. Poised and elegant, she acts as though it's tea time on Mars. Sedgwick never stops talking, unless it's to draw on her cigarette or pull a face, presumably in response to something she hears her video self say. The four layers of Sedgwick discourse become a murmuring burble in which only isolated phrases (''We had better times than anybody else,'' ''I don't believe it'') float to the surface of audibility.
''Outer and Inner Space'' had its world premiere at the Filmmaker's Cinematheque in Manhattan. (An advertisment in the Jan. 27, 1966 issue of The Village Voice drolly promises new work by Andy Warhol and the teen-age underground filmmaker Barbara Rubin as ''double screen experiments by double screen experimentalists.'') Later, it was incorporated into Warhol's growing multi-media show, the ''Exploding Plastic Inevitable,'' which featured not only the rock band the Velvet Underground but also the continuous projection of Warhol movies on the walls and ceiling of the St. Marks Place discotheque known as the Dom.
Although Warhol would only once again work in video, Ms. Angell believes that ''Outer and Inner Space'' had a decisive influence on his development. She points out that nearly every film he made afterward was shown in some sort of double screen: ''After a certain point, Warhol thought he could combine any of his films in any way he wanted.'' It was during the spring of 1966 that the artist began shooting ''The Chelsea Girls,'' the double-screen movie that would be his greatest critical (and commercial) success. Still, there are few Warhol movies as concerned as ''Outer and Inner Space'' with their own process.
What ''Outer and Inner Space'' shares with much video art is its sense of immediacy. As in many of the early Warhol films, an onscreen performer can be seen interracting with people offscreen. At one point, Sedgwick visibly responds to a direction, presumably from Warhol, to sneeze in tandem with her video image. The most powerful ''off-screen'' presence is, however, the taped image, which Sedgwick can hear but not see.
Becoming in a sense her own audience, the ''live'' Sedgwick often seems startled, distracted, even sometimes distressed by the effect of having her own voice whispering in her ear. (''It makes me so nervous to listen to it,'' she exclaims at one point.) As its title suggests, ''Outer and Inner Space'' visualizes a fragmented attention, a schizoid disjunction between public and private selves. Never less than animated, Sedgwick appears to approach hysteria -- perhaps annotating her video monologue, perhaps freaked out by it.
The four faces of Edie, ''Outer and Inner Space'' is ultimately the poignant spectacle of watching a beautiful wraith reacting to her own past. (Scarcely six years later, Sedgwick was dead of a drug overdose.) In a way, the piece makes literal the celebrity's dilemma: the superstar is trapped between her own disembodied image and the implacable, voracious eye of Warhol's camera.
J. Hoberman is the senior film critic for The Village Voice.
Download this at KaraGarga.
at 11:06 PM
Danny Plotnick - Warts & All: The Films of Danny Plotnick (2008)
Download this at KaraGarga.
Warts & All: The Films of Danny Plotnick
Danny Plotnick roared into the underground film world in the 1980s. Fueled by his love of punk and alternative culture and infected with d.i.y. spirit, he started making films that captured a
similarly snarly attitude. His films were pegged as bawdy, bad-mouthed and beautiful, straddling the line between high-brow and low-brow art. It’s no surprise that his work has screened from the MOMA in NYC to mortuaries in Baltimore to the Independent Film Channel. With little opportunity to screen this type of work in the 80s, Plotnick took to the road, projector and films in trunk, screening in bars, warehouses and cafes. Plotnick trail blazed a path for the underground film world that exploded in the early 90s, a scene that would ultimately champion his work.
Working in the pre-digital age, Plotnick was a fierce advocate for super 8 filmmaking. He took this 1960s home movie medium with limited capabilities and made work that stands tall regardless of format. The special features on this dvd are an important document for students of film, providing a rare glimpse into the world of sound super 8 filmmaking.
The films on this disc include Swingers’ Serenade, a titillating tale of suburban sexual malaise; I, Socky, a rogue sock monkey hits the town on a big day out; Steel Belted Romeos, a turbo-charged tale of California road rage; Skate Witches, a glimpse into the world of a 1980s female skateboard gang; Flip About Flip, a tribute to comic genius Flip Wilson.
Download this at KaraGarga.
at 11:03 PM
Anri Sala - Now I See (2004)
Download this at KaraGarga.
Upon entering the installation of Anri Sala’s Now I see (2004), his first 35-mm film, the viewer is enveloped in total darkness. The effect is, at first, purposefully disorienting; then a flicker of light flashes upon a 10 x 12 foot screen. A second or two later, the face of a young man emerges from the pitch-black along with the pulse of an electric guitar.
What follows seems to adhere to fairly standard conventions of rock video, with its guitar antics and male posturing, until a dog-shaped balloon falls on to the stage and disrupts the scene.
Despite the film’s opening pretense, Sala is anything but a conventional filmmaker. Trained as a painter in his native Albania before studying film in France, Sala, now based in Berlin, merges an interest in color, particularly black and white, with structuralist explorations of language and sound. - Susan Snodgrass (chicago)
Download this at KaraGarga.
at 5:10 PM
Joan Jonas - Glass puzzle (1973)
Download this at KaraGarga.
This complex and enigmatic work, which is performed by Jonas and Lois Lane, explores female gestures, poses, the body and narcissism. Mirroring each other with synchronized movements as they perform as alter-egos, Jonas and Lane reference archetypal female gestures and poses from popular and traditional cultures. Throughout the performance, space is dislocated and altered as a formal device — segmented by a swinging bar, superimposed in layers, transformed by subtle changes in light and shadow, or flattened by the video screen. With its evocative personal theater and idiosyncratic vocabulary of gestures, ritual and symbolism, Glass Puzzle is a quintessential Jonas work.
Camera: Babette Mangolte. Music: The Liquidators. With: Lois Lane, Joan Jonas.
Download this at KaraGarga.
at 12:06 PM
