Jeremy D. Slater – Manic Chinatown Bicycle (2007, 15.6MB, 2:01)
Jeremy D. Slater – Kanjiscroll (2007, 11.1MB, 0:41)
Two travel videos – albeit different sorts of it –
from Jeremy Slater, who primarily works in sound.
But I like his video work – minimal, often observational
in one way or another – so here are two samples.
A Christmas Medley From Barnsley Town Centre (2011, 87MB, 1:29 min)
Normally we don’t post our own work here but I couldn’t resist this.
Also – it was a gift; no editing, just the take. (OK. I turned down the brightness
& jacked up the contrast a little.)
Barnsley is actually the friendliest of places, with a grumpy, wry, cheerfulness born of
generations of working-class solidarity, especially in the pits, though it’s now
ravaged by the cuts and closures of the past years.
From me & Doron, Happy Holidays and looking forward to a better world next year.
We’re taking a small holiday break & we’ll be back with something rather splendid
from Morrisa Maltz on January 2nd.
overland (2010, 131MB, 2:58 min)
And sadly, the last in our little season of movies by Ruth Catlow. This is another
train movie, no conceptual underpinnings to speak of this time, just a beautiful,
bleached out pastels, lo-fi ( mobile?) account of the Serbian section of a journey by train to Istanbul
last year when she was refusing ‘to fly for art’, something more people should do more often if
the results here are anything to go by.
More from Ruth, of course, as she produces it…
travel images unseen (2011, 156MB, 6:01 min)
‘5 video clips taken on a simple video camera, through a window on a coach to the
plane from Istanbul and arriving in London by train. Selected by and stitched, unseen
by the creator who will never watch the video, ever.’
The gentlest conceptualism & quite, quite lovely too.
There’s something about knowing the premise that leaves one
very open – one could say innoculates one – to its formal consequences –
here a looseness which somehow gently stretches time, makes it grainier
but conversely sharpens our attention, perhaps to make up for the
maker’s own vow of abstention.
One more in the series to come.
South Yorks (2011, 27MB, 2:40 min)
Possibly only amusing (or even intelligible) to those hailing
from the area, I’m going to post it because I do & it makes
me laugh a lot.
Bit of background on Kid Acne here.
Landscape (2011, 114MB, 3:12 min)
Ravishing piece of work from my friend and colleague Ruth Catlow
who is also co-director of the indispensible Furtherfield.org
We’ve been talking a lot amongst ourselves and with our students about
continuities across art history and about hybrid techniques which
meld both the ancient and the newest.
Filmed in the New Forest, this piece (apart from its great beauty)
is an exemplar of this approach and pathbreaking in its way.
(More so than much which, dull-eyed, shouts and waves the latest thing
from the rooftops.)
The oldest kind of mark making, delicately but robustly realised,
captured on a tiny portable video camera in a semi-performative
way and then networked…
Beautiful and nourishing both.
Travelling (2004, 185 MB, 11:33 min)
Carefully made & delicious to watch travelogue
(although I think it conflates a number of different trips,
so in one sense it’s about travel itself as much as place)
from French artist Christophe Gendre.
More soon.
Time Travel (2010, 10 MB, 1:10 min)
A Right of Passage (2010, 14 MB, 1:04 min)
We’ve not hidden our enthusiasm here for the work,
always interesting ,often stunning, of Sam Renseiw.
Sam’s been a particularly deft & prolific exponent of the
Lumière form re-invented/discovered/conceptualised
by Andreas Haugstrup Pedersen and Brittany Shoot (of this manor).
Here the whole thing goes a stage further with a great
collaboration between Renseiw and British filmmaker/sound artist
Philip Sanderson, archived on a site called Lumière et Son
which title, for me at least, occasions both a groan and a kind of grudging admiration.
The work is great – Renseiw’s originals, with new found-sound additions
from Sanderson; playful, witty and perhaps even a a little profound,
in a Zen kind of way.
I hadn’t really clocked it properly until I saw a couple of these pieces
at a screening in London the other day.
Here’s one from that programme (the original of which
we posted here a while ago) plus another that especially
tickled me.
Splendid stuff & here’s to many more!
Anarchy In The UK (2007, 45.4MB, 4:44 min)
Anarchy In The UK has been a bit of a theme of late here on dvblog.
Now, from the indispensable Rupert Howe comes this breathtaking version.
Not only is it extremely funny, with an off the meter chutzpah quotient,
(witness the animal terror in the eyes of the guys on the tube towards the end)
but like a lot of Rupert’s work it’s a kind of contemporary London travelogue
(of the best sort: hard edged, eyes wide open truthful & hence beautiful) too.
A Rough Mix (excerpt) (2007, 140MB, 8 min.)
Excerpt from a single channel and a looping installation DVD by Rick Silva.
Oh this is smart & rich & lovely work!
You think perhaps the remix idea has colonised all of our thoughts
& our work to the level of clich�.
(So maybe all that remains is to classicize it – to do it better & better,
which is certainly something Silva, in various guises, has recently done..)
One day, someone describes
might, if of a cynical turn of mind, think – ‘Ho-Hum!’
Then you actually look at it & there’s something alchemic going on.
From a fairly base metaphor, Rick Silva conjures a work of elegance,
substance & great beauty – a beauty not only visual but moral.
Look at it! – it’s a paean to the planet but many other things too:
the scratching becomes dance, it’s a dance film!
The music is so carefully cut (but in such an apparently offhand way,
the way one imagines the mythical 19th century gentleman
would cut): it’s a music video!
It’s a travelogue (but its editing would not have made sense
before the net).
Each basic level constantly & fruitfully gives rise to other emergent
meanings which in turn reseed new ways of thinking about the piece
– the mark of a serious & substantial work of art.
PS Interesting to compare this with Cary Peppermint’s recent
Series of Practical Performances in the Wilderness
– another work that is in a sense engaged around loosely ecological
themes, very much the zeitgeist, (but reasonably so!)
& whose artistic qualities are not confined, limited, by that engagement…
PPS Now I think about it – there’s all the wonderful stuff by Stallbaum & Poole too.
That fits in somewhere too…
PPPS Personally I like this much more than Silva’s recap – for me, in that, there was a sense in which the formal structure based on a kind of repetition over a long period eventually closes
us off ( although one can of course see how that work might have been
a very necessary staging post to this)
– here there’s a fantastic sense of opening-out
Exhilarating!