Saturdays Only (2008, 50MB, 1:18 min)
We’re quite keen here at DVblog on Giles Perkins & his quirky &
beautiful Super8 work.
He also maintains the excellent all-things-Super8 site onsuper8.org.
You might remember his beach huts piece
or his Burnley Panopticon mini-documentary.
Here he turns his poetic but clear eye to “Britain’s oddest train
– the once a week Stockport to Stalybridge.”
A great way to kick off our new season…
Kiki and Bubu and the Good Plan (2008, 74MB, 7:24 min)
Kiki and Bubu and the Shift (2008, 39MB, 4:11 min)
Well, almost.
Marred only by some fashionable end-of-the-working-class-in-the-West
(who collects your trash, checks out your groceries, teaches your kids?)
nonsense, this is on the whole the finest piece of glove puppet based
agit-prop I’ve ever seen & very funny to boot.
In particular the best of these pieces,Kiki and Bubu and the Good Plan,
is an absolutely clear & devastating reply to the marketeers…
See ’em all…
Utterly ravishing Lumière from the never predictable,
always interesting, Rupert Howe.
On that summery note, we’re going to take a rest in the sunshine.
We love doing DVblog, but the daily deadline definitely takes
its toll after a bit.
We’ll be getting ready to hit the ground running again around 16th Sept.
& we’ll still keeping our eyes peeled for the new, for the weird &
(best of all!) for the wonderful.
Have a great summer!
Brittany, Doron, Michael.
Pop Mantra Video Documentation #4 (2008, 51.7MB, 5:17 min)
Pop Mantra Video Documentation #7 (2008, 50.5MB, 5:41 min)
I like & admire Curt Cloninger for his steadfastness of belief in both his religion
& his artistic work.
He’s also one of the best writers about new media around at the moment.
In both theory & practice he’s curious, inventive, knowledgable, quirky and passionate.
Unlike many in this sphere he’s also not afraid to think aloud in public, to take risks.
Even, (quelle horreur!), to risk appearing uncool.
Recently he’s been making work away from the web, some of it performative
& very interestingly so.
Here (& I stress what you see here is the documentation, not the piece
itself -a fine, but important, distinction) he repeatedly sings & plays a
single phrase from a popular song, in this instance Radiohead’s Karma Police, for several hours.
For me there are number of interesting resonances – minimalism, shamanism,
the kinds of ‘test’ that occur in many religious belief systems, a losing, dissolving
of the self (In additon to the eponymous “mantra” ,there’s an echo too, I think, of Sufism);
but also there is the straightforward investigation*** of the mechanics of playing,
of performing (& there’s a fractal quality to the rather symmetric & crystalline
structure of popular song that makes this kind of extracting both possible & immediately
approachable -it’s a world familiar enough to welcome us in.)
The two extracts are from different ends of this marathon
( & selecting & typing that word just conjured another association –
the of the twenties & thirties).
I find this work fascinating.
Fascinating & affecting too.
*** It’s almost always a laughable misuse of the word to say ‘investigation’
in an art-speak context. Here it seems correct & natural.
Ludwig Poos Schwabe (2007, 36MB, 1:20 min)
1st Ping-Pong Lesson With Lucha Lib (2008, 31.2MB, 4:18 min)
Even 18 years after the wall came down there’s still a quite palpable
residue of the great absurdist tradition that flourished under Stalinism in work
being made in the former Eastern bloc.
(Of course it goes back further, to
Touch My Body (Oliver Laric version) (2008, 40.9MB, 4:18 min)
No Mariah (Caspar Stracke version) (2008, 52MB, 4:03 min)
OK, pay attention! This is complicated.
Ms Carey (or her corporate minders) release a video, which if she did have
a significant part to play in it shows such a staggering lack of self esteem
that a kind of dark despair begins to envelop me.
Artist Oliver Laric remixes it, removing all the backgrounds and replacing it with
green, for ease of a certain species of remixing.
There follows what is actually an interesting and nuanced exchange of views.
Then Caspar Stracke posts the second of our videos & MTAA make a
very funny joke.
Dust/Spring Evening (2005-7, 26.2MB, 1:57 min)
Dignity (2004, 40.4MB, 7:02 min)
Rain : Focus winter in the north (2004-9, 9.5MB, 1:12 min)
We showed a couple of rather restrained, pastoral pieces by Paul Kelly
in February of this year.
So, here’re three rather restrained, somewhat more urban pieces.
I admire the determinedly austere approach, to make much – or rather
to make us make much- of what is given to the camera (quite a lot, it has
to be said, in Dignity which is a touching portrait of man & dog), although
one does have visions of a kind of Yoda figure meditating in depth before every possible
editing decision to take the four years Focus apparently took to make.
I look forward to more.
Undisclosed Beauty (2008, 8.7MB, 3:13 min)
We’ve shown Anders Weberg’s work here on a number of occasions.
He’s clearly a serious artist & has made some very potent work,
I find myself a bit at a loss with this latest piece – it doesn’t work for me.
My assumption is that it’s me who is not looking right, but I find the
aestheticising of what looks like some quite violent and disturbing
imagery both trite and somewhat suspect.
(And the music over-eggs it for me too…)
The piece recently won a prize in Ljubljana so I could well be in a minority.
Of course it’s the mark of a rich & challenging body of work that the artist is ahead
of the commentators so I look forward perhaps to reconsidering in weeks, months or years…
patafilm #609 (2008, 18.2MB, 4:27 min)
No excuse offered or needed to show work by the Danish
magician, Sam Renseiw. (When I called him the ‘genius Dane’
here a little while ago, he wrote me, modestly demurring,
but he is, Dear Reader, he is. Both.)
He says “…still imbricated in the subtle magic of simple things
and situations…”, which is unusually accurate for an artist
self assessment.
Beautiful work.
