Edward Picot – Job’s Comforters


Job’s Comforters (2013, 3MB, 7:00 min)

Those who associate Edward Picot solely with his marvellous Dr Hairy series,
wickedly funny and pointed satire in the kind of lo-fi/hand made tradition
that comes down from Postgate and Firmin might be quite taken
aback by this. You have to watch the whole thing. Until shortly before the
end you seem to be simply watching a poetic & minimal retelling of a bible
story, then the whole thing suddenly lurches several gears into the kind of
territory that one associates more with Tarr and Kasznahorkai at their most
bleak and disturbing (and somehow their most bracing and exhilarating too).
It’s a punch to the solar plexus of a piece and simply magnificent.
I don’t know where its bleakness comes from or takes us but what it does
en route burns into you.

Jim Punk & Antonio Mendoza – Dysleksic

dudeboat
dudeboat (2012, 2 MB, 11 secs)

misteriosoxxx
misteriosoxxx (2012, 4 MB, 41 secs)

Slightly traducing the spirit of the project where
the two artists mix, hack and otherwise mutate
and abut up to 9 videos simutaneously in the same web page
as a (very welcome) online adjunct to the current Drawing Surrealism
show at LACMA, we’re featuring a couple of the component parts.
(Because we love both these artists and we want to publicise
everything they do, which is never, ever, dull.)
To view it properly go (and keep on going back) to the
project page and to learn more go here.

David Olmos//José M. Sánchez-Verdú – Paisajes del placer y de la culpa

Paisajes del placer y de la culpa #1
Paisajes del placer y de la culpa #1 (2008, 119MB, 7:49 min)

Paisajes del placer y de la culpa #1
Paisajes del placer y de la culpa #2 (2008, 74MB, 4:52 min)

José M. Sánchez-Verdú is a Spanish composer who creates richly textured and
sensuous music in an uncompromisingly contemporary idiom.
His richness is no frippery but properly fought for and won.
Here is a short movie, in two parts, made by David Olmos, about whom I can find
no information whatsoever, which blends a fictional narrative with footage of
an orchestral performance of one of Sánchez-Verdú’s works
Paisajes del placer y de la culpa – Landscapes
of Pleasure and Guilt.
The film is undoubtedly skillfully made but I remain slightly agnostic
about its premise or even necessity; however no such doubts about some
of the most extraordinary music of recent years.
I grabbed the film from YouTube and as you can see the image quality isn’t great
although in some ways the graininess appeals and seems apposite to the subject.

Harrell Fletcher – Blot Out The Sun


Harrell Fletcher – Blot Out The Sun (2002, 46.7MB, 5:32)

Harrell Fletcher’s 2002 unconventional remake of Ulysses.
A garage in central Portland, Oregon is the setting for this
conceptual re-working of James Joyce’s Ulysses. The garage
owner, Jay, mechanics and neighborhood denizens serve as
narrators, reading lines from the novel that focus on death,
love, social inequality and the relationship between individuals
and the universe.

A five minute clip from the 22-minute piece featured in the
2004 Whitney Biennial

2 from Patrick Lichty

Explaining Conceptual Art to Bizarro
Explaining Conceptual Art to Bizarro (2012, 89MB, 1:36 min)

Danger Music #17
Danger Music #17 by Dick Higgins (2012, 19MB, 45 secs)

And to celebrate our resurrection (for which heartfelt thanks go to James Morris), two newish pieces from the redoubtable (I write so many of these things a nagging doubt enters my mind as to whether I’ve perhaps called Patrick redoubtable before, once, twice…more? But leave it – redoubtable he is) Patrick Lichty.

Both pieces take place in DC Universe Online, about which I know nothing so I won’t even begin to show myself up by attempting to expand, and both reference recent art history – one Beuys explaining pictures to a dead hare and the other Dick Higgins’s Danger Music.
Both are utterly splendid.

ASCII Rock – Yoshi Sodeoka

LedZepplinWholeLottaLove
Whole Lotta Love by Led Zeppelin (2003, 20 MB, 4:14 min.)

vh-unchained
Unchained by Van Halen (2003, 18 MB, 3:21 min.)

Ascii Rock by Yoshi Sodeoka is a brilliant example of the genre of ASCII art, which creates still images and videos entirely out of alphabetic and numeric characters (ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange, a common format for text files in computers and on the Internet that represents alphabetic and numeric characters as binary numbers)

Sebastian Sommer – Happily Drowning

indian_movie.jpg
Happily Drowning [clip] (2011, 126MB, 58 sec)

Here’s a clip from a short film by Sebastian Sommer, based on stories by the seemingly ubiquitousTao Lin.

It’s very nicely made – here is someone who takes to (and to some extent, reforges)
film grammar like a fish in water.
I’m not entirely convinced that the narrative is clear enough ( it all
looks so great and having not read the original I was intially prepared
to accept any lack of understanding was mine) – it was only a one sentence precis on
Sommer’s site that really clued me into what was happening.
Clearly, though, someone to be watched…
See the whole thing here