Spring 2015 Season
Posted by | George William Price | Posted on | January 28, 2015
John Gerrard, Pulp Press (Kistefos), 2013, Kistefos-Museet Sculpture
Park. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Jiri Havran
Happy 2015, it’s George, CATE’s program assistant here. Thanks for checking in with Conversations at the Edge blog. You’ll be glad you had as we have a fabulous lineup of international artists and scholars in our Spring 2015 season!
Highlights include German born new media artist and theorist Marisa Olson whose projects have taken on a variety of forms including pointed YouTube responses to iconic feminist videos; SAIC alum John Gerrard’s virtual emulations of outposts of human industry; and the program Projections, Portraits, and Picaresques, in which personal identity is articulated in relation to aesthetic and community, fiction and truth.
Mary Helena Clark, still from The Dragon is the Frame, 2014. Courtesy of the artist
If that wasn’t exciting enough we will be welcoming artist, and Chicago resident Robin Deacon to CATE, along with South Korean filmmaker Soon-Mi Yoon, and Academy Award nominated animator Daniel Sousa. Dennis Lim, director of programming at the Film Society of the Lincoln Center will present a recent restoration of Massimo Sarchielli’s seminal 1975 documentary Anna. You can browse through the entire season here.
I really believe this spring season may be one of our best yet! So I hope that you’ll be able to join us this season at the Gene Siskel Film Center. CATE commences in just a few short weeks—Thursday, February 19th.
Daniel Sousa, film still from Feral, 2012. Courtesy of the artist
Special Preview: Marvin J. Taylor interviewed for Video Data Bank
Posted by | George William Price | Posted on | November 21, 2014
Marvin J. Taylor, Director of Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University sat down with Conversations at the Edge’s program assistant George William Price to talk about his thoughts on the emotional archive, the ethics of custodianship, and the cultural scene of 1980’s Downtown New York City. This interview will be released as part of Video Data Bank’s On Art and Artists collection late Spring 2015.
Taylor introduced the November, 2014 program The X-Ray of Civilization: Films by Tom Rubnitz, David Wojnarowicz, and Tommy Turner. Surveying the cultural scene of 1980s New York, this program explored how the Culture Wars and the devastation of AIDS contributed to a city that crackled with tension and ached with sadness. Against this background, artists Tom Rubnitz, David Wojnarowicz, and Tommy Turner transformed mass media’s detritus into transgressive responses to the socio-political order.
Video Data Bank’s On Art and Artists is a unique collection of interviews and portraits of artists, musicians, performers, architects, theorists, and critics, spanning 1974 to the present. The OAA collection represents four decades of producing and acquiring interviews by the Video Data Bank, and features more than 300 available titles, of which at least half are interviews produced by the Video Data Bank and its co-founders Lyn Blumenthal and Kate Horsfield. In addition, the collection offers artist interviews produced by external producers and producing organizations—including Artists Television Network,Long Beach Museum of Art, and the University of Colorado—and experimental documentaries and portraits, many of them produced by other artists.
Tags: 2014 > Experimental > Marvin J. Taylor > On Arts and Artists > Queer > USA > Video Data Bank
On Mati Diop
Posted by | George William Price | Posted on | November 12, 2014
For the final installment of our SAIC student writing series, Natalia De Orellana examines the boundaries between documentary and fiction in Mati Diop’s A Thousand Suns. She suggests that Diop creates a world where imagination and reality intermingle.
Still from A Thousand Suns (Mati Diop, 2013). Courtesy of the artist.
Even as tougher immigration laws are proposed by European leaders–jeopardizing the long-gone fantasy of free movement–immigration has remained one of the principal worldwide issues shaping policy-making for the past half-century. Hidden among the facts and figures quoted by politicians are the complex stories and experiences of those who make this trek.
The issues around migration are just some of the themes embraced by the cinematographic narratives of Mati Diop (1982), daughter of the musician Wasis Diop and niece of Senegalese film director Djibril Diop Mambéty.
In 1972 Mambéty directed the film Touki Bouki which followed two youngsters in Dakar–Magaye Niang and Myriam Niang–who dreamed of leaving Senegal. The film has since become a classic of African cinema. Forty years later, Diop revisits this work and Magaye Niang with the film Mille Soleils (A Thousand Suns).
Still from A Thousand Suns (Mati Diop, 2013). Courtesy of the artist.
A Thousand Suns is a unique and compelling example of notions of presentness and inner conflict. Diop’s camera follows Niang, a denim-jacket-and-cowboy-boot-hero who had once the chance to ship away to Europe and yet whose feet remained anchored on the Senegalese coast: “At that moment,” Niang narrates, “I became very frightened, I wondered why I was leaving. What am I going to do in France?” Neither victim nor heroic figure, Niang is the present-day individual, the one that emblematizes the complex context where the West’s siren call is entangled with loss and fear. Indeed, Diop’s narratives are relevant for the attention she pays to conflict between passion and dreams and belonging and identity.
Diop’s films also transcend the definitional boundaries between documentary and fiction, creating a space between the imagination and the real, where “nothing is true and nothing is false.” The spectator finds herself in the in-between space of assurance and doubt, history and fantasy.
In intermingling the real and imaginary, Diop updates her uncle’s film and examines its legacy within the context of Senegal’s history. Questions from Touki Bouki are reformulated in A Thousand Suns: “Should I go?” becomes “Why didn’t I go?,” the “what will I do” is transformed into “what have I done?”
Natalia de Orellana is a second year graduate student in the dual degree program Arts Administration and Policy and Modern Art History, Theory and Criticism (2016). She holds an MA in Art History from The University of Edinburgh. Since 2010 she has collaborated in a number of curatorial projects in the United Kingdom for Tablo Arts, a non-profit London based organization. She is presently a curatorial fellow for the 2014–15 MFA Show at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Tags: 2014 > Artist's Film > Mati Diop > Natalia De Orellana > Non-Fiction > Senegal > Touki-Bouki > USA
Special Preview: John Smith interviewed for Video Data Bank
Posted by | Conversations at the Edge | Posted on | November 11, 2014
A special preview of John Smith’s interview for Video Data Bank’s (VDB) ever growing On Art and Artists Collection, due for release late Spring 2015. In this interview excerpt Smith discusses, with VDB’s director Abina Manning, his film Shepherd’s Delight a film largely concerned with how context determines the reading of information.
The Jarman Award winning artist presented his work at three different institutions during his time in Chicago. A collaboration between Conversations at the Edge, Video Data Bank, Northwestern University’s Department of Art Theory and Practice, Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, and the University of Chicago’s Film Studies Center. In his playful and thought-provoking short films and videos, Smith explores the language of cinema and reflects on the image’s role in politics, war, and the global economy.
Video Data Bank’s On Art and Artists is a unique collection of interviews and portraits of artists, musicians, performers, architects, theorists, and critics, spanning 1974 to the present. The OAA collection represents four decades of producing and acquiring interviews by the Video Data Bank, and features more than 300 available titles, of which at least half are interviews produced by the Video Data Bank and its co-founders Lyn Blumenthal and Kate Horsfield. In addition, the collection offers artist interviews produced by external producers and producing organizations—including Artists Television Network,Long Beach Museum of Art, and the University of Colorado—and experimental documentaries and portraits, many of them produced by other artists.
Tags: 2014 > Artist's Film > Europe > Experimental > Interviews > Monographic Shows > Political > Portrait > Retrospective > Video Data Bank
Nov 13 – Mati Diop: A Thousand Suns
Posted by | George William Price | Posted on | November 8, 2014
Thursday, November 13th | Mati Diop in person!
Still from A Thousand Suns (Mati Diop, 2013). Courtesy of the artist.
Known for dreamlike shorts that experiment with the boundaries between documentary and fiction, award-winning French filmmaker Mati Diop mined her own history for A Thousand Suns. The film explores the public and private legacies of the seminal Senegalese film Touki Bouki (1972), directed by her uncle Djibril Diop Mambéty. She focuses on Magaye Niang, a farmer living outside of Dakar, who, as a young man, played the film’s lead. As Niang reflects on the events of his past, Diop meditates on Senegal’s history, the role of its cinema, and her own place in it. Accompanied by Diop’s haunting 2009 short Atlantiques, which spins feverish tales of European opportunity and perilous sea crossings.
2009–13, Senegal/France, multiple formats, ca 65 min + discussion.
In French, Wolof, and Swahili with English subtitles.
Mati Diop (b. 1982, Paris, France) is an actress and filmmaker. She received an advanced degree from Le Fresnoy (National Studio of Contemporary Arts). Her films have been featured at festivals around the world, including Venice, Rotterdam, and the Marseille International Festival of Documentary Film in France. She has recently been the subject of retrospectives at the Viennale, the London Film Festival, and the Museum of Moving Image in New York City. As an actress, she has played leads in Claire Denis’ 35 Shots of Rum (2008), Antonio Campos’ Simon Killer (2012), and Benjamin Crotty’s Fort Buchanan (2013).
An Interview with Andrew Lampert
Posted by | George William Price | Posted on | November 7, 2014
Andrew Lampert sits down with SAIC graduate student Elizabeth Metcalfe to talk about his interest in archiving, current inspirations, and his unique approach to improvisation.
Andy Lampert
Lampert joined CATE on October 9th 2014 and turned his attention to the Gene Siskel Film Center in a site-specific performance created especially for the evening. The performance was accompanied by a series of Lampert’s shorts, including El Adios Largos (2013), an inspired reconstruction of Robert Altman’s 1973 feature The Long Goodbye from imperfect source material.
Elizabeth Metcalfe: How did you become interested in film archives and what role does the archive play in your artistic practice?
Andrew Lampert: When I was 18 I was hired by an organization called the New York Underground Film Festival of which I eventually became the Director of Programming. The festival itself happened at Anthology Film Archives, where I had previously been a patron. Through my role in the festival, I was hired to work at the archive as the Theater Manager, which I did for a number of years. And of course, at Anthology it’s very much focused on exhibition and preservation but it wasn’t until there was an evening in which they had a special private event to celebrate the tenth anniversary of a particular artist’s death and the preservation of one of their works. I attended this event and they were talking a lot about preservation and of course this was a word that I had heard thrown about quite a bit and I had never at that point asked myself, “Well, what IS preservation? What does it mean?” so I asked the person sitting next to me who was an archivist for a particular filmmaker and he said, “There’s a school for that! It’s the L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation at the George Eastman House Museum.” It was the first program in the United States specifically for film preservation. Generally speaking, film preservationists and archivists previous to this program were filmmakers and film geeks or de-facto librarians but not film preservation trained specialists. Then, I realized that Anthology, which has the most prominent collection of experimental, avant-garde films in the country, did not have an archivist and hadn’t had an archivist for a period of ten years because it wasn’t in the budget. So Anthology’s founder and director at that point, Jonas Mekas, was de-facto the archivist. Realizing that, I inquired about the school and I made a deal with Jonas that if I was accepted and went to the school, he would find the funding to bring me back as an archivist. So I went to school but my reason for going to the school was not a desire to preserve all films like Casablanca or Gone with the Wind for generations to come. I don’t care about preserving those films because I don’t have to. There are other corporate and commercial concerns safeguarding those films. But who’s looking out for the films that made a strong, aesthetic, cultural and emotional impact on MY life and the lives of many others? So I wanted to work with this particular collection. I went away, I trained, and Jonas brought me back as the archivist and for ten years I served as the archivist until my title was changed to Curator of Collections. My title changed because in those ten years, we managed to build up the archive so that now there are three employees: an archivist, a digital archivist, and myself.
On “The X-Ray of Civilization…”
Posted by | George William Price | Posted on | November 5, 2014
I first encountered the work of David Wojnarowicz a few years ago whilst interning for the New York City based arts organization Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI). I had been asked to research his expansive practice for an upcoming panel discussion David Wojnarowicz: Motion Rhythms and was instructed that I would need to visit Fales Library and Special Collections at New York University in order to do so. Here I was, an Englishman in New York, which at that time was an unfamiliar city, about to undertake an extended period of research on an unfamiliar artist with only a copy of his Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration for reference—a book that I studied closely whilst inside my shoebox of a room located in a grotty ground floor apartment in Crown Heights, Brooklyn.
Still from A Fire in My Belly (David Wojnarowicz, 1986-1987). Courtesy of Electronic Arts Intermix.
My first Monday in NYC I began the long, arduous, and immensely intimidating process of sifting through the seemingly infinite number of papers, objects, and everyday ephemera that make up the David Wojnarowicz Papers. Other the next three months I would divide my time between the EAI office and Fales Library. In the library I would place my personal items in a locker, surrender my identification to the librarian, and seat myself down at my assigned table, waiting for the first of many Wojnarowicz artifacts to be brought out to me.
Still from A Fire in My Belly (David Wojnarowicz, 1986-1987). Courtesy of Electronic Arts Intermix.
Tags: 2014 > Artist's Film > Experimental > Group Programs > Mexico > Political > SAIC Student Writing > U.S.
Nov 6 – The X-Ray of Civilization: Films by Tom Rubnitz, David Wojnarowicz, and Tommy Turner
Posted by | Conversations at the Edge | Posted on | November 2, 2014
Thursday, November 6th | Introduced by Marvin J. Taylor, Director of Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University and founder of the Downtown collection
Still from Psykho III The Musical (Tom Rubnitz, 1985). Courtesy of Video Data Bank.
The Culture Wars and devastation of the AIDS epidemic contributed to a cultural scene in 1980s New York that crackled with tension and ached with sadness. Against this background, artists Tom Rubnitz, David Wojnarowicz, and Tommy Turner transformed mass media’s detritus into transgressive responses to the socio-political order. From the sprawling suburbs in Where Evil Dwells (Turner/Wojnarowicz, 1985) to America’s status as a global military power in Listen to This (Rubnitz/Wojnarowicz, 1992) and A Fire in My Belly (Wojnarowicz, 1985) to Hollywood itself in Psykho III The Musical (Rubnitz, 1985), the three artists scrutinized and scathingly satirized mainstream American iconography.
1985–92, USA/Mexico, multiple formats, ca 85 min + discussion
Tom Rubnitz (1956, Chicago–1992, New York) was a video artist best associated with New York City’s East Village drag scene in the 1980s. Rubnitz crafted low-budget, candy-colored video fantasies featuring the likes of Ann Magnuson, the B-52s, the Lady Bunny, and the late John Sex. A genre artist par excellence, Rubnitz treated the sexy-druggy-wiggy-luscious-desserty qualities of the ’80s Downtown club scene with the loving care only a true hedonist could show.
David Wojnarowicz (1954, Red Bank, New Jersey–1992, New York) was a painter, photographer, writer, filmmaker, performance artist, and powerful presence in the New York City downtown art scene of the 1970s and ‘80s. Wojnarowicz’s work affirmed art’s vivifying power in a society he viewed as alienating and corrosive, especially for those who were not part of the mainstream.
Tommy Turner (1959, New York– ), began documenting New York City through moving image in the late 1970s. Turner contributed to magazines such as Richard Kern’s The Valium Addict and then went on to produce a magazine of his own titled Redrum. He has subsequently become associated with the underground movement Cinema of Transgression. Turner has exhibited his work at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City; Museum of Modern Art, New York City; Yerba Buena Center of the Arts, San Francisco; and The British Film Institute, London.
The X-Ray of Civilization Program Notes
Special Preview: Carlos Motta interviewed for Video Data Bank
Posted by | Conversations at the Edge | Posted on | October 31, 2014
We are excited to present a short excerpt of Carlos Motta’s interview for Video Data Bank‘s On Art and Artists Collection, conducted by SAIC’s Art History Chair David Getsy. In this compelling interview Motta discusses his rich practice, major influences, and Queer and Trans theory in relation to contemporary artistic practices. The full interview is scheduled for release late Spring 2015.
Motta presented a short series of films entitled The Nefandus Triology at Conversations at the Edge on October 2nd. Motta’s practice draws upon various political histories in an attempt to articulate counter narratives that recognize suppressed histories, communities, and identities.
Video Data Bank’s On Art and Artists is a unique collection of interviews and portraits of artists, musicians, performers, architects, theorists, and critics, spanning 1974 to the present. The OAA collection represents four decades of producing and acquiring interviews by the Video Data Bank, and features more than 300 available titles, of which at least half are interviews produced by the Video Data Bank and its co-founders Lyn Blumenthal and Kate Horsfield. In addition, the collection offers artist interviews produced by external producers and producing organizations—including Artists Television Network,Long Beach Museum of Art, and the University of Colorado—and experimental documentaries and portraits, many of them produced by other artists.
On Anda Korsts…
Posted by | George William Price | Posted on | October 29, 2014
SAIC printmedia graduate student Amanda Sukenic takes the time to describe Anda Korsts as a feminist visionary who, along with many others, shaped the alternative media landscape of the USA on both a local and national level. Please join us this Thursday October 30th for a special survey of Korsts’s prolific career presented in collaboration with Media Burn Independent Video Archive.
Anda Korsts Polaroid. Courtesy of Media Burn Archive.
Before I had the oppourtunity to take the Chicago Media Arts course being taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the name of Anda Korsts was entirely unfamiliar to me. When it came time to pick an artist to focus on for our final projects, I carefully researched all options, and finally decided on Korsts. I was intrigued by not just her incredibly visionary stance on the importance of video as a tool for the masses, nor simply for her own prolific and multi disciplined practice, but as an archivist and the founder of Videopolis.
As a young DIY archivist myself, Korsts was someone who worked hard to uphold the work, the people and the ideas she thought were valuable and important to not simply her own life and work, but society as a whole. Korsts also worked to archive and preserve them in the hopes that others would also come to see their great value. As I researched Korsts more, I became increasingly aware that my interest in her was more than just as a cold subject for a paper, it was a wresting with ones own Dorian Gray style portrait in a sense—Korsts’s personal life tragedies, and the mystery of the later parts of her existence, haunt me each day it seems.
I am ecstatic to finally have a chance to see more of the amazing work from this extraordinary individual, as there is still so much of her work that remains unseen. This is why I am so very excited that Anda Korsts’s Video Metropolis will be the subject of this Thursday’s Conversations at the Edge.
Amanda Sukenick, is a fat, bipolar, learning disabled tranny with a huge toy collection… She is a monster. Graduating as an undergraduate from SAIC in 2007, she is currently back at SAIC, working towards an MFA in Printmedia. Primarily now a video artist, Amanda started making Youtube videos in 2009 doing Dragonball Toy reviews, and now focuses on DIY video archive building, music, Antinatalism, and the production of Vloggerdome, a public access Philosophy/Variety show created by Youtubers from around the world.
Tags: 2014 > Chicago > Early Video Art > Experimental Documentary > Midwest > Non-Fiction > Political > Retrospective > SAIC Student Writing > U.S.
About
Conversations at the Edge is a weekly series of screenings, performances, and talks by groundbreaking media artists.
CATE is organized by SAIC's Department of Film, Video, New Media, and Animation in collaboration with the Gene Siskel Film Center and SAIC's Video Data Bank.
Programs take place at the Gene Siskel Film Center (164 N. State / Chicago, IL / 312.846.2600), unless otherwise noted.
