James Benning: Twenty Cigarettes
Posted by | Jessica Bardsley | Posted on | April 16, 2012
April 19, 6:00 p.m. | James Benning in person!
- James Benning, Twenty Cigarettes (2011). Courtesy the artist.
Celebrated for his minimal, monumental landscape studies, James Benning turns to the intimacy of the portrait in his latest film, Twenty Cigarettes. Referencing Warhol’s screen tests, 1930’s Hollywood glamour, and the disappearing cigarette break, the film captures 20 of Benning’s friends (including filmmaker Sharon Lockhart, cultural theorist Dick Hebdige, and book editor Janet Jenkins) satiating their smoke cravings. Each shot’s length is determined by the time it takes each subject to smoke a cigarette, and over the course of the film a dynamic range of personalities emerges out of an array of physical characteristics, distinctive settings, and personal relationships to the camera. 2011, USA, HDCAM, 99 minutes + discussion.
JAMES BENNING’S (b. 1942, Milwaukee) filmic meditations on the social and political dimensions of American landscapes have played a vital role in history of experimental film. His films have screened internationally at festivals and other institutions, including the Vienna International Film Festival; London Film Festival; Sundance, Rotterdam; International Forum des Jungen Films, Berlin; Image Forum, Japan; Los Angeles Museum of Art; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Walker Art Center; Reina Sofia, Madrid; and the Whitney Museum of American Art. He is a recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. In addition to filmmaking, Benning is a professor at the California Institute of the Arts, and has taught at Northwestern University, Bard College, University of Wisconsin, University of Oklahoma, and the University of California–San Diego.
An Interview with Laure Prouvost by Robyn Farrell
Posted by | Jessica Bardsley | Posted on | April 16, 2012
March 1, 2012
Roybn Farrell in conversation with Laure Prouvost on the occasion of the screening “Don’t Look Up,” a program of brilliantly anarchic videos by Laure Prouvost.
Robyn Farrell: Your work is highly sensorial: color, sight, and sound all feature prominently, as well as the desire to touch and taste. How does the medium of film inform this aspect of your work?
Laure Prouvost: These words you are reading are smelly. They stink, they make the room smell.
The power of suggestion and imagination is something I love to play with and with film, I love this medium, as it triggers so many senses, and can provoke many senses as it requires a lot from the viewer. I love the idea that a film stinks or is soft like a cloud.
Ideally a film would smell of honey and metal and green motorbike.
Robyn Farrell: Discordant images, text and sound punctuate many of your films. Can you talk about the role of translation or mis-translation as a means to propel the direction of your work?
Laure Prouvost: Ideally these words would be translated into an image, then into a sound, then into movement, and back to words.
Translation is something that I have always worked with: translation of a video to a colour to a painting to a performance to another language. A mis-translation from language to language; this constantly evolving, changing, mis-understanding, mis-communication, mis-making a point and mis-leading you, not reaching an answer, but trying to propose a different interpretation and different views.
Losing control, it’s something I am constantly aware of: different interpretations of the work, the work changing constantly, for each person has a different reaction to it, its change with time, with places, with cultures. It’s all about in-between states.
Robyn Farrell: In Monolog (2009), you play with the director/audience relationship using your hand or text as an apparatus to control the viewer’s attention. Do you see yourself as a director? Or is this a mode to create self-consciousness in your art?
Laure Prouvost: Ideally these words would talk directly to you, and you would read the word “you” as “I”.
Yes I tend to be quite obviously directing my audience, pointing at things, asking the audience to listen, but here I play more with the ridiculousness of it, as it is purely images projected on a wall or a screen.
Robyn Farrell: Many of your videos do not follow a conventional narrative, but in works like Stong Sory 6 (2008) you act as storyteller. How do you negotiate these differing structures?
Laure Prouvost: Ideally these words would carry you somewhere else on a big adventure around the country side through cities and late at night watching the stars in a warm evening, then a car would pick you up to drive fast and things would endlessly happen, something else would always happen.
Robyn Farrell: You included Speak (1962) by John Latham in CATE’s program and exhibited all these things think link at Flat Time House, the late artist’s home and studio. How has Latham influenced your body of work?
Laure Prouvost: Ideally John Latham would be my conceptual grandfather.
Robyn Farrell: Aside from live action, how does your performance work differ from your video practice?
Laure Prouvost: Ideally these words would not be words but they would sing to you, and not be a video, but sung to you by an opera singer here now as you read this text on the computer.
Robyn Farrell: Tank.tv is a significant organization for artists working with the moving image. Could speak about your role as former director and the impetus for the museum?
Laure Prouvost: Ideally I would say a few words that could let you know how many great works are shown there and how it is a great place to introduce someone to work not ideally as installation or in a screening but for discovering work and being introduced to artist works.
The Internet is an interesting platform to discover things, to get a sense of someone’s work. It has a different purpose than seeing a projection or installation, and sometimes when a work is made just for that purpose it’s interesting.
Moving images, because it’s moving images one after the next, its not real stuff. It’s interpretation.
Yvonne Rainer: Lives of Performers
Posted by | Jessica Bardsley | Posted on | April 9, 2012
April 12, 6:00 p.m. | Yvonne Rainer in person!
- Yvonne Rainer, Lives of Performers (1972). Courtesy Zeitgeist Films.
Join us for an evening with filmmaker, choreographer, and poet Yvonne Rainer and a rare screening of her acclaimed first feature, Lives of Performers, shown from a pristine new print. Embodying Rainer’s aesthetic rigor and wit, the film combines fiction and documentary, script readings, dance snippets, still photos, and tableaux vivants to explore issues of power and gender that influence the emotional lives of her performers. 1972, USA, 16mm, 90 minutes + discussion.
Presented in collaboration with the Society for Contemporary Art at the Art Institute of Chicago, which features a lecture by Yvonne Rainier on April 11, 6:00 p.m., The Art Institute of Chicago, Fullerton Hall, 111 S. Michigan Ave.
YVONNE RAINER’S (b. 1934, San Francisco) work spans dance, choreography, performance, writing, and film. She has exhibited internationally at museums, film festivals, and other venues. Rainer trained as a dancer at the Martha Graham Dance School and the Merce Cunningham Dance Company and was a founding member of the Judson Dance Theater. Retrospectives of her films have been held at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York City. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including two Guggenheim Fellowships (1969, 1988), three Rockefeller Fellowships (1988, 1990, and 1996), a MacArthur Fellowship (1990–95), and a Wexner Prize (1995). In 2010 Yvonne Rainer: Dance and Film, the first major European survey of Rainer’s work, was presented at the Tramway in Glasgow, Scotland. A premiere collection of Yvonne Rainer’s poetry, Poems, was published by Badlands Unlimited (2011).
An Interview with Steve Anker by Jennifer Breckner
Posted by | Jessica Bardsley | Posted on | April 9, 2012
February 17, 2012
Jennifer Breckner in conversation with Steve Anker on the occasion of the screening “Radical Light,” a program of works that grows out of a decade-long research project into the history of experimental film and video in the Bay Area helmed by curators at the Pacific Film Archive and CalArts.
Jennifer Breckner: On the Radical Light website an interview with all three curators mentions that the exhibition came about after you realized how much material was stored in various archives. What are your thoughts on the foresight people had about collecting and archiving this ephemeral material early on? Did they understand at the time that they were creating history?
Steve Anker: Pacific Film Archive is a film and paper archive that came into existence in the early nineteen-seventies. Archiving has always been at the heart of what they do. In terms of the world of experimental film my sense is that while they have always had a broad commitment to archiving, there was less of a primary objective to build a significant archive devoted to the avant-garde in the early years. The Art in Cinema paper collection, discovered just before it was on the verge of being thrown out, was salvaged by the former PFA director Edith Kramer.
By the late nineteen-nineties, Kathy Geritz, Steve Seid, and I realized that many elder states people who had been significant players in the Bay Area were getting old and frail, and some had already passed away. The three of us felt that if we were going to preserve this tradition we must turn a significant amount of our attention to it. We became more and more aware that there was a remarkable tradition of experimental film and video in the Bay Area that included many genres, yet much of it was in a precarious condition. There was something about the Bay Area that made it a magnet, an attractive destination point, in many cases for people visiting from other places who then stayed, as well as people native to the area, all of who made significant contributions starting in the mid nineteenth-century and continuing to the present. We felt that we could really make a contribution with this project.
In talking with people and beginning to ferret out newspapers and documents collected from many decades, we realized how unbelievably active it had been starting in the mid-nineteen-forties. A central concept of the book is that the Bay Area has supported an ecosystem of alternative cinematic activity. Schools have been a key supporter and nurturer of talent, as well as screening and distibution institutions of all kinds and sizes. The three of us realized that we wanted to start archiving as much of this material as we could get our hands on for the PFA’s archives. Then, PFA started a more developed plan to expand its film holdings to include a large Bay Area experimental film collection. It also started a preservation project in which important Bay Area films could be saved from extinction, such as Robert Nelson’s The Great Blondino. There were challenges in doing this, especially with handmade personal filmmaking, as many films were made using crude, homegrown techniques. PFA realized that this represented a major tradition worth saving, not only for the sake of the Bay Area, but for American culture and the world of cinema.
Jennifer Breckner: How did you come about the decision to include so many writers, film, and video makers in this project?
Steve Anker: The idea of the book developed gradually and organically. At first the three of us talked about authoring it completely ourselves. However, there are so many people who represent different aspects of the experimental tradition, that we decided, why not call on them to share their passion and experience? Then in the early 2000s we started inviting experts to write on topics that they were close to, such as Craig Baldwin, who wrote about found footage, and Michael Wallin, one of the earliest openly gay Bay Area filmmakers, who wrote about early queer cinema. The content of what we were dealing with was so rich and complex in its multiplicity that we thought we could best embody that by asking a wide variety of artists, critics and scholars to speak to particular works or interests. For example, we asked critic J. Hoberman, to write on The End and The Great Blondino, and scholar Scott MacDonald, to write on Art in Cinema.
It was very important for video to be as equally represented as film, since video art appeared early in its history through collectives such as Ant Farm and television programs such as those that aired on KQED, the local PBS station. We wanted to represent the whole world of alternative cinematic media as it was practiced by artists, written about, studied and curated. It became important for us to look back at the precedents that occurred in experimental media, such as Filo Farnsworth’s first transmission of a television signal in downtown San Francisco in 1927, as well as the even earlier nineteenth-century experiments of Eadweard Muybridge in which he made the first projections of motion pictures.
Jennifer Breckner: Prior to this project, how did the Bay Area’s film and video scene figure into histories of these media? How does the Bay Area compare or contrast to a city like New York or Chicago in terms that historiography?
Steve Anker: I think it’s a matter of dispersion. New York has the richest tradition in respect to the varieties and quantities of important alternative media art that has been created. Chicago has always had a strong tradition in experimental film dating back at least to the nineteen-sixties. In these large metropolitan areas the worlds of experimental film and video have been historically absorbed into or submerged within the larger art culture. However, because of its rebellious, iconoclastic, and often anarchistic character, experimental media has always stood out in the relatively small Bay Area. There’s something about the region that provokes a spirit of rebellion and defiance that stands out amidst the general culture.
The Bay Area has attracted people who have made work over the much of or most of their lifetime—Bruce Conner, James Broughton, George Kuchar, Gunvor Nelson, and Larry Jordan, for example. It is a place where a radical art practice stands out and can’t be ignored by larger institutions. There are an astonishing number of film festivals that have been virtually forced to acknowledge experimental forms of media for many decades. Why? Because it is such an undeniably strong and consistently cross-generational culture.
Jennifer Breckner: The catalog mentions often that the Bay Area was a fruitful place where artists working with experimental cinema were incredibly open to a diversity of approaches including nontraditional ones. Could you expand on the relationship between geography and this willingness to try any approach in terms of film and video making?
Steve Anker: San Francisco and the Bay Area have supported radical lifestyles and artistic experimentation beginning in the mid-nineteenth-century and continuing at least until the ‘nineteen-nineties dot-com era. It’s had a long tradition of attracting people with a deep hunger to find iconoclastic ways of expressing themselves. I still have students in Los Angeles, which itself is a hotbed of radical thought and freedom of expression, who want to visit San Francisco because they feel that that’s where real experimental filmmaking is most active. As far back as the early nineteen-fifties, Stan Brackhage was drawn San Francisco because of Sidney Peterson’s groundbreaking filmmaking workshops. He returned to the area a number of times in part because he found the Bay Area an exciting home for experimentation in cinema and poetry. Young people are drawn to the area’s experimental reputation; its sense of vitality is still intoxicating.
Jennifer Breckner: Expanding upon this idea of the Bay Area fostering a community where artists took great risks with media, I’m wondering if the inclination to be open to new approaches comes less from geographical location and more from the fact that film, and particularly video, did not have a long-standing history so the parameters of how to deal with it as an art form were not set in stone? I am thinking here about your discussion of Workshop 20, a filmmaking class for painters, or the many comments geared towards film and video’s amateur associations (home video, for example) or in Kathy Geritz’s interviews with artists about small-gauge film.
Steve Anker: I think that what you suggest is true of both film and later video; it was the relative newness of each combined with the freedom of the locale that led to so much experimentation in each, though the many great writers who emerged certainly were aware of the great traditions in poetry and prose. In my essay on Bay Area schools I mention Tony Labat, who talks about what it was like to be a video artist in the mid-nineteen-seventies, how exciting and liberating it was for him at that time since there was no ‘artistic baggage’ and how he felt as though he was in virgin territory. But it’s also true that in the Bay Area you felt you were in a secret hideaway where no one was looking over your shoulder. One was far away from the New York and European establishments and even Sothern California. The Bay Area is a unique physical and psychological environment where one can go to get away. Sidney Peterson, who was a wonderful writer, talks about this in terms of dealing with a place where visual and psychological perspectives are always changing. The Bay Area had one of the country’s earliest international populations, especially for a small region, which has contributed to an overall diversity of thought.
Jennifer Breckner: Lawrence Rinder, BAM/PFA director mentions on the website that this is a “landmark” and “ground-breaking exhibition” and the “first large-scale historical survey” of Bay Area avant-garde cinema. Indeed, it is a monumental undertaking. Why have their been no attempts prior to this to encapsulate the Bay Area’s contributions? Did you ever feel as if this project was too overwhelming? How does one begin to tackle a project of this size and scope?
Steve Anker: Although PFA and Cinematheque would frequently pay homage to different Bay Area eras and key artists, we never attempted a historical overview of this magnitude. One of the great things about Radical Light was that the more research we did the more expansive it became; the more we researched, the more we discovered interesting personalities or works that we hadn’t heard about before. We did really well in continuing to investigate the far reaches of this world and covering major players—writers, curators, teachers, and makers—and the depth and range of the project became more and more expansive. We also came to realize that no single project, even of this scale, could really be exhaustive since there will always likely be more to uncover, and many of the major artists and areas of activity could only be touched upon.
We often felt overwhelmed. That’s one reason that why it took ten years to complete. People began saying that the book would never be finished because it was too big but we believed it was always going to happen, in part because of the support of Mary C. Frances, Humanities Publisher + Music and Cinema Studies Editor of the University of California press. She has published a number of books on experimental film and supported the book very early on, stayed committed, and encouraged us to take as long as we needed to see it properly through.
Jennifer Breckner: It seems that the expansive range of Radical Light fits in with other types of exhibitions that you curated in the past, which are large in scale and all encompassing in nature. For example you curated Big As Life: An American History of 8mm Films, an exhibition for the Museum of Modern Art, which featured **seventy-six programs** as well as Austrian Avant-Garde Cinema: 1955-1993, which traveled to ten cities throughout the U.S. What attracts you to these large-scale endeavors? What is your curatorial approach to something so vast?
Steve Anker: My personality tends towards the expansive. I don’t focus narrowly but burrow and tend to be excited by the unraveling of new possibilities that are revealed within artistic movements and communities. I gravitate towards the incredible range of people, voices and perspectives that form communities of artists. The way that I helped run S.F. Cinematheque, and prior to that in my programming in Boston during the late 1970’s, was to be as embracing and supportive as possible in terms of the breadth of accomplishment within experimental media. It’s about social networking not in contemporary but in more historical terms such as the ways that people interact with each when physically sharing music, dance, theater, and cinema. Cinema, including its most current electronic uses, is the newest of the arts and is still radical when compared with the more traditional ones. And, I am most interested in finding the outer margins of cinematic expression. This is what has always been exciting to me, beginning with my education at Binghamton University with Ken Jacobs, Larry Gottheim and other great teachers, and this has kept me inspired over the years.
Jennifer Breckner: In terms of the screening for SAIC, how did you choose the lineup of films? How did the program differ for the other two Chicago venues?
Steve Anker: The Radical Light series in the Bay Area included about thirty programs of many different types of themes. The program at Gene Siskel Film Center was designed to showcase 16mm and 35mm films that have been preserved and in some cases significantly restored, and we now have excellent viewing copies that weren’t previously available. In addition, we wanted to present as much variety as one ninety-minute program could do in terms of some of the central themes of the project. We wanted to look at the landscape, both physically in terms of the light and sense of sensuality of the place, as well the landscape of the mind, which deals with the freewheeling and defiantly rebellious nature. One of the other Chicago programs focused on narrative and storytelling and how that has been played with over the decades. Another program featured films that for their times used found footage in radical ways. Although Bay Area filmmakers were not the first to re-use found footage to make their own films —this history goes back to Soviet filmmaker Esther Shub or the American Joseph Cornell in the nineteen-thirties. However, Bruce Conner can be thought of as the father of the prevalent kind of contemporary found footage film, and his way of suturing together material from preexisting films to accompany music is clearly the precursor to, although at a much higher level, of music videos.
Jennifer Breckner: In the catalog you mentioned that public and private funding for experimental cinema has evaporated and that programming institutions have become more conservative. How has this affected artists working in the Bay Area? Do you see artists finding other solutions to making and showing their work?
Steve Anker: I think that this was the case in the nineteen-eighties when I began programming at S.F. Cinematheque. However, it’s less true now than during those years. It began in earnest in the nineteen-nineties but the last ten years has seen the emergence of a many younger curators and critics championing experimental film and video, and a wealth of new work is being made. There are now more international film festivals in North America and Europe that include sidebars or even entire series featuring experimental cinema. For example, last year the New York Film Festival’s “Views From the Avant-Garde” has expanded to four days from its original single weekend. In addition, Toronto, Berlin, Vienna and Rotterdam all have major experimental film components that show a wide range from established masters like Ken Jacobs to young makers who have just began gaining exposure. More and more museums are now showing experimental film and video in circumstances that are on a par with painting, sculpture and installation. Grants and patron support in these areas, however, remains scant. The depletion of financial support both with foundation as well as governmental agencies that started in the Reagan years has gotten worse. Experimental cinema was always an underground activity made by people with no money who used whatever materials they had at hand. One of the hallmarks of experimental cinema has always been this feisty spirited do-it-yourself approach. Artists who work with film know that it will not make money (with the recent exceptions of a few high profile gallery artists) and so the medium continues to attract people who accept, although sometimes grudgingly, their marginal role within the larger art culture. To be an experimental filmmaker means that one must be prepared to live with marginalization. And again, the Bay Area remains a magnet for those people who are passionate about their medium and will continue working whether or not they gain larger social success.
Handsworth Songs
Posted by | Jessica Bardsley | Posted on | April 2, 2012
John Akomfrah/Black Audio Film Collective, Handsworth Songs (1986). Courtesy the artists and LUX, London.
THE BLACK AUDIO FILM COLLECTIVE (1982–98, UK) included John Akomfrah, Reece Auguiste, Edward George, Lina Gopaul, Avril Johnson, David Lawson, and Trevor Mathison. The group produced films, videos, slide-tape pieces, installations, posters, exhibitions, and performances, including Handsworth Songs (1986), which garnered seven international awards, Testiamint, which premiered at the Semaine de la Critique at Cannes International Film Festival in 1988. These and subsequent works such as Twilight City (1989) and The Last Angel of History (1995) staked a claim for a new kind of moving image work that was resolutely experimental and confidently internationalist. Throughout their career, the BAFC worked within and between the media of art, film, and television, participating in British survey exhibitions such as From Two Worlds (Whitechapel Gallery, 1986), The British Art Show (Hayward Gallery, 1990) as well as international exhibitions such as Documenta X (1997) and Documenta XI (2002). BAFC is the subject of the recent retrospective and catalog, titled Ghost of Songs: The Art of the Black Audio Film Collective (2007, Liverpool University Press).
An Interview with Basma Alsharif and Tirtza Even by Susan Mamoun
Posted by | Jessica Bardsley | Posted on | March 30, 2012
- Basma Alsharif, The Story of Milk and Honey (2011)
Feburary 9, 2012
Susan Mamoun in conversation with Basma Alsharif and Tirtza Even on the occasion of the screening “We Began by Measuring Distance,” a program of works reflecting on home and distance by women from or connected to Palestine, curated by Tirtza Even.
Susan: Where were you born and where are your parents from?
Basma: In Kuwait. Both of my parents are Palestinian. My mother is from Gaza and my father from Tulkarem in the West Bank. They met in Alexandria Egypt where they were both in Medical School at the university there.
Susan: And you went to school here in Illinois; have you shown work here at the Gene Siskel Film Center or in Chicago before?
Basma: Yes, I went to UIC. I’ve shown at a Palestine film festival here and, while in grad school, I showed at the Chicago Filmmakers. I’ve actually had limited experience showing in Chicago.
Susan: How do you connect yourself to Palestine? What is the connection there for you?
Basma: Another Palestinian artist and I have talked about this a lot. It’s that you don’t really have to make the connection, it’s already there, even if we’re making work that’s not directly related to Palestine or the cause. Even if the work is not necessarily political, it inevitably contextualizes our work, which can often be problematic but also is a kind of interesting challenge. I’m hesitant to call my own work political, but I know that it is.
Susan: And why would you say you’re hesitant to call it political?
Basma: Because I approach the subject matter aesthetically and structurally, so the political content is described by its form. I never feel like I can accurately describe the political content, but I can describe the structural and aesthetic very easily. I try really hard not to state things or inform, or to be factual or historical. It’s more about asking questions and seeing how things read–and how we relate to these things–whether or not we do or don’t come from political backgrounds.
Susan: So for tonight’s program, since your films are being shown with other Palestinian filmmakers, how does your work fit in with the rest of the works?
Basma: I personally know a couple of the others in the program. When Tirtza and I initially met in the fall, a lot of our discussion was how the framework for such a program would function as a vantage point for these works. I emailed Jumana [Jumana Emil Abboud] and asked her what she thought about being labeled as a female and a Palestinian. And she said that she didn’t think of gender playing a large role in her work. I think that’s what makes this program interesting because gender is not a significant factor in the way we define our work, at least as far as I know, and this grouping of works/artists together reveals things that are perhaps neither political nor gender-related and what originally brought the works together for the program becomes an afterthought.
Basma to Tirtza: I think the programming for tonight’s show is interesting because all of the films shown tonight deal with big ideas–female, Palestine–and you’re Israeli. It just shows that all of these categories are nothing but categories, you group them and then push that group aside and you have something completely different being revealed, which is really great. It speaks a lot about the region not being black and white, which is how it is often treated.
Tirtza to Basma: The fact that I’m Israeli, did that make you participating mean one thing or another?
Basma: It definitely made me curious. I feel like it’s something that can’t be ignored and this is something that I deal with constantly, always being politicized: having to decide whether I am Palestinian or American and where I stand on certain issues when this is not necessarily something I am even interested in with my work or personally.
Tirtza: I feel the same way. I’m invested in this history and all the problems because I’m from there. But I don’t wear that hat. But does that none-the-less mean that it is more risky or provocative for you to be a part of the screening tonight?
Basma: No, not at all. I’ve recently started collaborating with an Israeli artist. She’s enough conflicted with her own identity that it is interesting to be in conversation with her. Collaborating with her has already posed problems on my side. There are many who’ve implied that I will lose friends and colleagues if I continue with this project. It’s a sensitive issue but for me the only way to make sense of any of it is to attempt to understand these things relatively and personally. I don’t see art as a place for revolution necessarily, I see it as a place that creates dialogue and allows for experimentation. I totally respect why others would have an issue with this kind of collaboration and understand it completely but the challenge of figuring out how to do this is far more interesting to me because it could potentially totally fail.
Susan: How does “home” and “distance from home” inform your work?
Basma: Home has always been a measure of displacement for me, which is now something I recognize in the places I live in and visit. It’s something that I’m constantly looking at: one’s relationship to surroundings and how one’s identity, opinions, morals, etc. are formed as a result of this down to how one navigates a city. Are you tied to the nation you’re from and if you’re not- what does that mean? These things are becoming more and more important today I think. My generation has seen major shifts as a result of globalization, I think this has shifted how we relate to the idea of home as an ideological relationship as well as a physical one. More and more people are moving around and living in different places now. For me, living in more than one place at a time is a very significant experience because it ends up being about the opposite of freedom and forces me to be more aware of my relationship to place and the people in these places.
Tirtza: All the works tonight deal with displacement in various ways. In Mona’s [Mona Hatoum] work, she shows how she was displaced from certain social norms.
Tirtza to Basma [concerning the different reactions to the work between the East and the West]: So when you show your work in the East, you can almost remove the more narrow or overt frame and look at it in relation to other, more open, contexts?
Basma: I’ve experienced really different perceptions of my work depending on where it is shown and in what context, sometimes the work comes off as obvious or even kitschy while in different circumstances it is seen as subtle and poetic. I was working on The Story of Milk and Honey in Lebanon and when I showed it to some friends there, they thought it was too bold–not in a good way. I like the fact that depending on where you are from or where you are seeing this, which languages you speak, the work takes on different meanings.
Susan: How does history inform your work? Do certain facts or events start your projects off and then you go from there?
Basma: It’s never a single idea; it’s a combination of many ideas and how they come together. So it could be a combination of a particular historical event, a song, a set of words, etc., and then a question of how to alter the way these things are read or understood.
I work by building a kind of archive and I don’t know why or what I’m using as far as images, sounds, text–I’m constantly compiling without any clear intent. And then it’s about how all of these things come together in the end. So, it’s about history being a kind of material, and how it relates to a color or sound or afterimage.
Susan: There is a male voice-over in your piece [We Began By Measuring Distance]. Why did you decide to use a male voice-over?
Basma: I like using voice as a kind of material as I do with anything else–like sound or image. Even the content that I deal with is used as a physical material. The voice-over is chosen because of the quality of the voice, which becomes another layer of information.
Tirtza to Basma: But I think the male voice gives an authority that makes the tension more acute in your work.
Basma: Right, that’s true. But he is speaking in an Egyptian dialect. I hired him based on the quality of his voice and because I knew that he wasn’t educated, so speaking classical Arabic was going to be difficult for him and would affect the pace that he would read the script at: with a degree of uncertainty. He also has a really rich, deep, male voice that I found incredibly soothing to listen to. I knew that if you understood Arabic you would have access to how the voice over as information and that if you didn’t understand Arabic the voice would serve as a kind of pleasant background sound that paces the speed of the subtitles and alternately have an aesthetic experience of the sound whereas those who understood the voiceover would have an aesthetic experience of the subtitles, and that the line distinguishing these two experiences would also be blurred.
Susan: Is your work geared towards a certain audience?
Basma: Both pieces reference the Middle East but I try to remove it from a specific place, so it can’t be located in just the East or just the West. Depending on your knowledge, you’ll understand it differently. If you understand Arabic, you’ll understand something different than someone who understands English alone. It’s all about what kind of information you know in order to unpack all the different layers.
Basma [regarding the Arab Spring]: I feel that with everything happening in the region, my work is becoming dated. My work talks about the region in an isolated way, but everything that’s happening in Egypt and Syria shifts everything out of perspective because it makes the situation in Palestine and Israel seem less relevant somehow, even though it remains just as extremely relevant.
Tirtza: Part of the problem is that all the other news is overwhelming, but it doesn’t diminish the gravity of the conflict in Palestine. The polarity isn’t so simple anymore, now it’s not just Israel and Palestine.
Susan: Is there anything you want to discuss after the screening tonight during the Q&A?
Basma: My work is about asking questions and seeing how people perceive information in different ways. So I am interested to see how this audience will see mine as well as the other works in this program.
Tirtza: [In regard to Chicago viewers watching the screenings] It might be very foreign to them, it’s not a burning issue here. They will have a distance that might generate different insights.
Brent Green: Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then
Posted by | Jessica Bardsley | Posted on | March 19, 2012
March 29, 6:00 p.m. & March 31, 12:30 p.m. | Brent Green in person!
- Brent Green, Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then (2010). Courtesy the artist.
Brent Green’s folk-punk films interweave drawing, puppets, hand-built sets, and stop-motion animation to spin tales of transformation and loss. For two appearances Green presents his acclaimed animated feature Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then (2010). Based on the true story of a Kentucky hardware clerk who attempted to transform his house into an eccentric healing machine to save his dying wife from cancer, the film was shot in a full-scale model of the house Green built in his rural outdoor studio in Pennsylvania. Mirroring the architecture of the house itself, Gravity is a crazy-quilt of fantastic imagery, fabulist narration, and themes of love, obsession, and spirituality. 2010, USA, Blu-Ray, 75 minutes + discussion.
Tickets for the Thursday, March 29 screening are limited so be sure to get them early. Visit the Gene Siskel Film Center’s website for box office and ticket information.
Presented in collaboration with SAIC’s Visiting Artists Program, which features a FREE lecture with live musical accompaniment by Brent Green on March 28, 6:00 p.m., The Art Institute of Chicago, Rubloff Auditorium, 230 S. Columbus Dr. In addition to screening his feature, Green will also discuss his practice in a FREE hybrid lecture-performance Wednesday, March 28. For more information, visit SAIC’s Visiting Artists Program website.
BRENT GREEN (b. 1978, Baltimore) is a visual artist, filmmaker, and storyteller. Green’s films have screened at MoMA, The Getty, Walker Art Center, Rotterdam Film Festival, and the Sundance Film Festival. His sculptures and film sets have appeared in solo exhibitions at the ASU Art Museum, Site Santa Fe, and the Berkeley Art Museum, among others. His latest EMPAC commissioned work, Too Many Men Strange Fates Are Given, a multimedia sculpture featuring a new hand-drawn animation, premiered at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival.
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Sara Ludy: A Space In-Between
Posted by | Jessica Bardsley | Posted on | March 9, 2012
March 15, 6:00 p.m. | Sara Ludy in person
- Sara Ludy, Transom (2011). Courtesy the artist.
The work of SAIC alumna Sara Ludy (BFA 2003) spans a wide variety of formats including photography, video, animated gifs, live performance, and large-scale installations. She explores the representation of domestic interiors, suburban architecture, and landscape design in virtual and real environments. This evening Ludy presents a selection of work, including videos from her ongoing Space Portraits (2010) series; clips from her Projection Monitor (2010–ongoing) project; and exhibition footage from Wallpapers (2011–ongoing). 2010–12, USA, Various formats, ca 75 minutes + discussion.
SARA LUDY (b. 1980, Santa Ana, CA) holds a BFA in New Media from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is a member of the online art collective Computers Club and the band TREMBLEXY. Her work has been widely exhibited in the United States and Internationally at São Paulo Cinemateca Brasileira, 319 Scholes, Berkeley Art Museum, Luminary Center for the Arts, Hex Gallery, Armory Show, Artisphere, Ghost Gallery, Fe Arts Gallery, bubblebyte.org, Fabrien Fryns Fine Art, Heaven Gallery, and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.
MORE:
Sara Ludy’s website
Sara Ludy’s blog
Computer’s Club
Tomonari Nishikawa & Small-Gauge Japan
Posted by | Jessica Bardsley | Posted on | March 2, 2012
March 8, 6pm | Tomonari Nishikawa in person
- Tomonari Nishikawa, Tokyo-Ebisu (2010). Courtesy the artist.
Working in formats ranging from Super 8 to 35mm still photographic film, Tomonari Nishikawa constructs his films through precise single-frame shooting, elaborate masking, superimposition, and in-camera editing. He transforms the elements of urban life into multilayered abstractions of light, movement, and space. This evening Nishikawa will present a selection of his own works alongside a survey of films by other contemporary Japanese filmmakers working in small-gauge formats. 2005–11, Multiple directors, Japan/USA/Thailand, Various formats, ca 80 minutes + discussion.
PROGRAM:
Sketch Film #1 (2005, USA, Super 8mm, 18fps, silent, 3 min)
Sketch Film #2 (2005, USA, Super 8mm, 18fps, silent, 3 min)
Market Street (2005, USA, 16mm, silent, 5 min)
Sketch Film #3 (2006, USA/Japan, Super 8mm, 18fps, silent, 3 min)
Sketch Film #4 (2007, USA, Super 8 mm, 18fps, silent, 3 min)
Sketch Film #5 (2007, USA, Super 8mm, 18fps, silent, 3 min)
Lumphini 2552 (2009, Thailand, 35mm, 1.33:1, sound, 3 min)
16 – 18 – 4 (2008, Japan, 35mm, 1.33:1, silent, 2.5 min)
Clear Blue Sky (2006, USA, Quicktime file, sound, 4 min)
Tokyo – Ebisu (2010, Japan, 16mm, sound, 5 min)
Shibuya – Tokyo (2010, Japan, 16mm, sound, 10 min)
Shake ‘n Bake (work-in-progress, USA, 16mm, sound, 3 min)
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Tags: 2012 > Artist's Film > Asia > Diary > Experimental > Group Programs > Non-Fiction > USA
Laure Prouvost: Don’t Look Up
Posted by | Jessica Bardsley | Posted on | February 24, 2012
March 1, 6:00 p.m. | Introduction and post-screening discussion with Laure Prouvost via Skype!
- Laure Prouvost, Monolog (2009). Courtesy the artist and MOT International.
The brilliantly anarchic videos of Laure Prouvost run wild with the rules of narrative and language. Prouvost’s fast-paced works often feature surreal tales jarringly interrupted by self-conscious text, unsettling imagery, or the artist herself undermining and adding new meaning to the original story. This evening Prouvost, who is also the founder and former director of tank.tv, will present her own videos alongside a selection of contemporary and historical works by other artists, including John Latham and Owen Land. 1968–2012, Multiple directors, France/Italy/UK/USA, Various formats, ca 90 minutes + discussion.
Due to unforeseen circumstances, artist Laure Prouvost will be joining us live via Skype for audience discussion rather than in person. We apologize for any inconvenience (but hope you can still join us!).
PROGRAM*
It, Heat, Hit (Laure Prouvost, 2010, color, sound, video, 6 min)
Monolog (Laure Prouvost, 2009, color, sound, video, 12 min)
The Artist (Laure Prouvost, 2010, color, sound, video, 10 min)
Burrow Me (Laure Prouvost, 2009, color, sound, video, 13 min)
Wide Angle Saxon (Owen Land, 1975, 16mm, color, sound, 22 min)
Speak (John Latham, 1962, color, sound, 16mm, 10 min)
Associations (John Smith, 1975, color, sound, 16mm, 7 min)
+ PERFORMANCE AND MORE!
*Subject to change
LAURE PROUVOST (b. 1978, Croix-Lille, France) graduated from Central Saint Martins College of Arts in 2002, and in 2009 she completed the LUX Artist Associate Programme. Her work, which includes painting, video, sound, and site-specific work, has been exhibited widely in exhibitions and screenings, most recently at the 2011 Frieze Art Fair; Tate Britain; Sculpture Center, New York; Whitechapel Art Gallery, London; BFI, London; EAST International, Norwich; MOT Gallery, London; Guangzhou Triennial; and St Gervais Centre, Geneva. From 2003-2009, she was the director of tank.tv, an online platform for artists’ work in moving images. Prouvost is also the recipient of numerous awards and prizes, including the 2009 EAST International Award 2009, the 2010 and 2011 Short Film Principle Prize from the Oberhausen Film Festival, the 2011 Film London Artists’ Moving Image Network award (FLAMIN) in 2011, and most recently, the 2011 Max Mara Art Prize For Women.
OWEN LAND, formerly known as George Landow, was one of the most original and celebrated American filmmakers of the 1960s and 1970s. The works he made during this period fused an intellectual sense of reason with the irreverent wit that distances them from the supposedly ‘boring’ world of avant-garde cinema. His early materialist works anticipated Structural Film, the definition of which provoked his rejection of film theory and convention. (Mark Webber)
JOHN LATHAM was born in Rhodesia in 1921. He studied at Chelsea School of Art and taught at St Martins School of Art, London. He founded the Artists Placement Group (APG) in 1968. Latham’s filmmaking began as a means of recording the evolution of his bookworks Unedited Material From Star 1960, but developed to embrace collaborative works with the Event Structure Research Group, abstract animation in the 1960s, and works made for television in the 1990s.
JOHN SMITH was born in London in 1952 and studied film at the Royal College of Art. Since 1972 he has made over 40 film, video and installations works. His films have been shown in cinemas, art galleries and on television throughout the world and awarded major prizes at film festivals in Leipzig, Oberhausen, Hamburg, Cork, Geneva, Palermo, Graz, Uppsala, Bangkok, Ann Arbor and Chicago. One-person presentations of his work include exhibitions at Ikon Gallery (Birmingham), Pearl Gallery (London), Open Eye Gallery (Liverpool), Kunstmuseum Magdeburg (Germany) and retrospectives at the Venice Biennale and Oberhausen, Cork, Tampere, Uppsala, Regensburg and Winterthur international film festivals. John Smith is Professor of Fine Art at the University of East London. “The films of John Smith conduct a serious investigation into the combination of sound and image, but with a sense of humour that reaches out beyond the traditional avant-garde audience. His films move between narrative and absurdity, constantly undermining the traditional relationship between the visual and the aural. By blurring the perceived boundaries of experimental film, fiction, and documentary, Smith never delivers what he has led the spectator to expect.” (Mark Webber, Leeds International Film Festival, 2000)
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Colin Perry on Laure Prouvost in Frieze
Tags: 2012 > Curators & Programmers > Europe > Experimental > Live Cinema > Performance
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.
