The Ghosts of Colors (2006, 1MB, 29 sec)
Lewis LaCook is often brilliant & never less than interesting.
He says of this:
EVP is short for electronic voice phenomena; these are purportedly
“otherworldly” sounds audible only via magenetic tape.
They are often cited as evidence of the supernatural.
Some of the sounds heard in this video are culled from
paranormal research archives.
A new video from Lewis LaCook comes too infrequently.
He’s one of a kind in his and here too.
There’s a throwing of everything, including the
kitchen sink, going in his movies & it shouldn’t work
but it so does.
We’ll repost another of his pieces tomorrow; a little feast for you.
Just for the record here’s Lewis’s description of the piece:
Joey, or DJ Joey, as he is affectionately called, is a
young man in Lorain, Ohio, who spends most of his day
dancing on the corner of 28th Street and Elyria Avenue
to his boombox, waving and smiling at passing
traffic.
This video was constructed of footage found on
YouTube, all dealing with Lorain, Ohio. This is the
first video I
Popahna (2004, 20.7MB, 11:25 min.)
There’s Something About Barney (2004, 3.7MB, 3:35 min.)
More from Brian Kim Stefans.
This is ‘early’ work from 2004 & Barney quite clearly
has an experimental stamp to it -Stefans describes it as at least
in part an homage to Alvin Lucier’s great sound piece “I am Sitting in a Room”.
Popahna in my view is something altogether more
substantial – there’s so much of interest happening here, both
performance wise & in directorial terms. OK, it walks the occasional fine line
but in sum it’s haunting & utterly compelling.
Stefans contrives to give it an immensely powerful narrative forward
drive whilst still remaining nuanced, dreamlike & deeply odd.
Feels like a feature film that has been shrunk to 11 minutes
by a wicked fairy.
Great stuff.
Lawnmowing (2008, 3.9MB, 35 secs)
Mowing in February
Our Special Mowing in February Lawnmowers
are not the of the ordinary electric rotor,
gas-powered self-propelling,
or even hand pushed whirligig
human powered variety.
Our Mowing in February models
come with specially-equipped
permanently mounted plows
suitable for use by the most dedicated
lawnmowing enthusiasts
from September through May
in those clim’es so specially endowed
to understand the meaning
of a ‘Three Season Plow’
Martha Deed
Scraping (2008, 1.9MB, 58 secs)
Millie Niss & Martha Deed’s Sporkworld project is sui generis – entirely unbeholden to
fashion or cool & standing in a long & broad American tradition of such stubborn
(& sometimes even eccentric) beauty.
Their latest wheeze & a vastly effective one it is too, is the Sporkworld Microblog
which integrates many formerly slightly disparate areas of their activity – poetry, still
& moving imagery, filthy humour, a sense of life’s transience & tragedy & utter strangeness,
into one coherent, constantly unrolling whole.
Formally too, they are smarter than smart, as anyone with eyes will surely see –
they’ve taken the splendid Lumière form & integrated it beautifully.
It fits them like a glove.
Lawnmower in particular seems to have been crafted by a 21st century
suburban Breughel.
Armenia: Mandelstam (2007, 16.3MB, 3:24 min)
Track 4 (2007, 10.3MB, 1:46 min)
A couple of rather evocative & lyrical pieces from Paul Kelly
about whom I know very little.
On his site he’s says he’s reluctant to join the
online fray, publicising his work.
Know how he feels, but I’m glad he got in touch with us
& we’re pleased to show his stuff here- it deserves an audience.
Still Project 07 (2007, 5.7MB, 1:29 min)
Half of the splendid & indispensable MTAA, whose work we feature here
whenever possible – conceptualist pranksters with a rare (for the territory)
& self deprecating human warmth – Mark River makes interesting video stuff
(amongst other things) on his Tinjail site.
A lot of them are kind of multi-channel (go look) & don’t fit the dvblog format.
This one does & is excellent too..
Here’s his preamble to it:
‘The wild blue yonder, the decent, la jetee, fearless, street fight,
loud QUIET loud, a sound of thunder, enemy at the gate, so wrong they
Soul Zodiac (2007, 6.4MB, 2:12 min)
Interesting documentation of a piece recently shown at
Newlyn Art Gallery by Cornish based artist Nigel Ayers.
The zodiacal stuff leaves me a bit cold but the sound is utterly wonderful,
and the simple yet elegant & effective presentation is great too.
Volver trailer (2006, 30 MB, 1:38 min)
A long time ago I sat stony faced and unmoved through the much lauded
Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown & concluded,
quite wrongly, that Almodovar was not for me.
In 2006 about him by Bob Light in the UK Socialist Worker
prompted me to go & see his latest movie, Volver,
& I’m so glad I did – it’s simply magnificent.
Since then I’ve done a bit of catching up.
Goya’s Stories (2006, 26.4MB, 3:38 min)
Three Goya paintings – La Maja Desnuda (Nude Maja), El Rey Carlos
Cazador (King Carlos dressed as a hunter) and Autorretrato (Self-portrait) –
are brought to life by three present-day stand-ins. The beauty of the piece is
that none of the three people from the present day is an obvious
equivalent for the painting alongside which he or she is placed.
The least satisfactory of the three is the Maja. Goya’s nude is both
more blatantly sexual and less conventionally glamorous than the
equivalent we are given here. On the other hand the Carlos and
the Autorretrato – respectively a a wild-haired gaunt ceramicist
fingering a three-cornered pot, and an imposingly fat middle-aged
man half-naked at the seaside – do replicate the powerful combination
of individual character and human fallibility which comes across from
the Goya originals.
Edward Picot
Doron Golan has constructed contemporary stories from Goya
paintings, using people whose resemblance to Goya’s subjects is
striking.
One need not be familiar with the masterworks themselves to enjoy the
whimsical – at times, poignant – real life portraits constructed from
the paintings. Michael Szpakowski’s music intensifies the mood and detail of
Golan’s video. Like ekphrastic poetry, the video and music carry viewers into a
deeper exploration both of the paintings and the stories spun from
them.
Martha Deed
