Eat up, Little Pearl – trailer (2012, 42MB, 3:26min)
Absolutely wonderful promotional/performance video from US performance/dance
outfit Mad King Thomas (whom I know little about but would love to see),
the vid directed, apparently, by Kevin Obsatz who was behind the
video haikus we posted in July.
Video…&..er…troupe…all great, great.
Lucia Nimcova – Exercise (2007, 40.5MB, 6:03)
Outrageously funny video from 2007 by Slovakian artist
Lucia Nimcova.
I’m pretty sure not being able to understand
the language makes this that much more
endearing and amusing.
By brothers Marco and Saverio Lanza.
White Glove Tracking (2007, 45.5MB, 7:34)
At a televised special in March 1983, Michael Jackson
debuted what would later become known as his
signature Moonwalk. He wore a shiny jacket,
cuffed pants, and a sparkling little white glove
while gyrating around the stage. It’s nearly
impossible to deny the brilliance of Billy Jean,
and there it was – in some kind of larger than
life, glittery manifestation of the zeitgeist.
All very exciting, no?
But tracking Jacko’s glove – this collection of videos
known under the umbrella White Glove Tracking –
is an unparalleled feat, as are the resulting
remixes. 10,060 frames were tracked, the
data was collectively gathered, and all of the
source code was made available online.
Coding ensued. Here are the highlights so far.
2 a.m. in the subway (1905, 8 MB, 56 sec.)
A subway platform, a policeman and a conductor, a well-dressed man
with a cigar and two women dressed in long skirts and jackets.
One of the women causes a sensation by raising her skirt and
revealing her stocking. Artificial legs are displayed out the subway car window.
Hilarious. From – The Open Video Project.
British Beach Hut Miscellany(2006, 5.2MB, 1:36 min)
Made by Giles Perkins. Shot on Super 8 & digitally edited.
English pastoral loveliness with a conceptual/formalist twist,
which resolves to… English pastoral loveliness.
Lovely!
The Incorporation of Demands for Liberation(2011, 13MB, 3:24 min)
Brilliant!
Last piece from ANW, for the moment, although we
certainly hope to feature more in the future –
some of the most original and exciting work I’ve seen recently.
For some context see Monday’s post.
Flow Spot Test #6 (2011, 18MB, 3:34 min)
“Just downloading apps at my Blanc Laptop Cart when all
of a sudden BenJi, an old teammate from XpresSpa shows up.
He happens to be subcontracted now by the American Airlines
subsidiary AffinityAlliance as an evaluator of potential for their
Oneworld Alliance codeshare lounges (of which FlowSpot is the
newest member).”
Flow Spot Test #5 (2011, 57MB, 2:03 min)
“Just having my early afternoon session of Body-Work with
Nnah, my Body-Designer.”
Says ANW, of the FlowSpot Tests:
For a large-scale exhibition at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago
I created a color coordinated airport/hotel/mall/bank/spa/biennial lounge to
offer a site of relaxation and bodily engagement in an exhibition dominated
by isolated, sellable art objects.
All lounge products were purchased through online transactions (mostly
Target and Walmart), and were returned at the end of the exhibition.
My dystopic science fiction news video Global Countdown played on
a 55” flat panel monitor.
On opening night, visitors to FlowSpot could register for massages from
licensed massage therapists. While participants received massages they
could not see anything and listened to my directors commentary of the
Global Countdown video. The commentary consists of very basic visual
descriptions, with the goal being that the person receiving the massage
can visualize the video in their minds.
Throughout the duration of the exhibition, I used the lounge as a science
fiction video set to make “FlowSpot Tests.” In these videos I engaged
with the lounge both conceptually and materially in a color coordinated
outfit.
Contact me if you are interested in opening a FlowSpot in your airport,
hotel, mall, bank, spa, biennial, gallery, cultural center, or any other
space that you own/lease/use.
See also.
Anxiety About Relationships Between Friendship and Business (2011, 11MB, 2:41 min)
I’m so taken with Andrew Norman Wilson’s work I’m going to devote
the whole first week of this DVblog season to it.
He initially sent us a longish piece, Networking with Andrew Norman Wilson
made with Nicholas O’Brien of Bad At Sports.
It’s wonderful but pretty huge so you should definitely go and
look at the Vimeo version there.
On Monday, Weds and Friday of this week we’ll post smaller
pieces extracted from that (but without the commentary or
‘interview’ as it is styled elsewhere [-the text on the BAS page linked above]) ,
On Tuesday and Thursday we’ll post two of Wilson’s FlowSpot Tests
with some accompanying explanation from him.
I find this work in general very exciting because it does a lot
of interesting, nuanced and often rather funny (and I’m in favour of funny –
there are very few great works of art which contain no funny at all)
and intially apparently contradictory things.
Let me give you my take on it.
The Webinars are all composed entirely of footage sourced from Pond5
“the worlds stock media marketplace” . The FlowSpot Tests are performative
pieces involving bizarre consumer items sourced from e-bay and wallmart and
deployed in a 21st Century updating of silent movie Lloyd-Keaton-Chaplin
deadpan involving, too, a certain degree of slapstick
and displaying a deliciously calibrated sense of the ridiculous.
The Webinars (a least when one takes account of their titles and certainly viewed
in the light of the commentary from “networking”) are a kind of consumerist
reductio-ad-absurdam.
The intent is celarly in some sense satirical but the pieces take risks in
that they don’t stop and end in critique – there is an understanding of
how toxically compelling some of this imagery is and to some extent they
toy with celebrating this.
Wilson is clearly a natural movie maker. He doesn’t restrain himself from
visual flourishes and jokes which are by no means integral to any
satirical case but make the pieces more fun to watch.
(The distortion effects applied to objects in the periphery of the
action in FlowSpot Test #5 are a case in point.)
Additionally, and most impressively, there is a muddying of the
waters in Networking… (and by implication the
Webinars and FlowSpot Tests) whereby
cogent and apparently straightforward philosophising is allowed
to cross pollinate/contaminate with the satire and vice versa,
leaving the viewer with -ahem- work to do.
This work is not glib; it takes risks – in order to maintain its
high level potency it risks misunderstanding.
A look at Wilson’s CV shows a spell spent working for a
labour union and I read the impulse behind these pieces
as radically anti-commodification and corporate mind rot.
Agit-prop, thankfully, it’s not, but “something rich and strange”
– radical art for interesting times to come.
Nice to see this when so many younger artists seem to be
tempted by a career orientated and somewhat cynical celebration
of that same deadend emptiness.
Band-Aid (2007, 54.4MB, 21:53 min)
Temple To Aeolos (2003, 1.52MB, 43 sec)
Well executed & not a little disturbing work from Charlie Roberts,
a man whose CV features the interesting combination of
performance video & ..er.. inflatable sculpture.
Bit of both here, both a compelling watch…
Baldessari Sings LeWitt (excerpt) (1972, 30.5MB, 3:38 min)
In which John Baldessari sings Sol LeWitt’s
sentences on conceptual art.
From the indispensible Ubuweb.
Ice Cream Lift (2003, 6.3MB, 2:07 min)
“In 1996, I started working on a project idea to change the
aesthetics of exericise. I became a “fitness guru” and made my
own 55-minute workout video where all 12 workouts used food as
exercise equipment. The music in the video is from bands that I knew
in CA, or bands that I listened to while working in my studio.”
Kristen Baumlier from Buns of Butter.
15 Years (2011, 60 MB, 3:08 min)
Reverse aging transformation of a 15 year self-portrait sequence
of Dan Hanna, forming the basis for the movie “StartStop” (2009).
Edited in HD. Used is 32 channel split screen asynchrony to create the illusion of flow.
By Steven Hoskins.
We haven’t had anything from Shannon Noble for a long time.
He’s quite elusive. His blog springs up, then disappears, then appears
again under a different name. Currently most of his stuff just seems to
be sitting, unlinked, in a folder on his site.
His work is always interesting (in the strong sense that one can
always learn from it) and hardly ever showy. Maybe his lack of need to show off
or jump up and down saying look at me, even when he’d be justified in so doing
is tied in with his apparent reluctance to promote his work.
Don’t get me wrong -I approve of the former -it makes the viewer do some work and there
are rewards to be had here for doing that work.
Here’s the first of two pieces, a bit like Robert Croma’s piece earlier this week,
not at all in mood or content but simply in being by someone who clearly knows
exactly what they are doing.
The use of sound is both deeply eccentric and wonderful.
More next week.
Combine Harvester (2010, 68MB, 2:23 min)
A eclogue of sorts from Edward Picot; somewhat noisy, somewhat dusty
but evocative of the real British countryside and a little bit thrilling too.
Pink Tall Bike (2010, 50 MB, 2:16 min)
One of those does-what-it-says-on-the-can movies.
Made by Mike Stoddard & Ryan Lynch who say:
”This is our latest creation made from free bikes and parts,
comprised of three womens’ frames, bed frame iron (front fork),
and an old ATV shock.
Filmed on the Woonsocket River Bikeway in Rhode Island. ‘
…not much to add except to say it’s very diverting &
WANT ONE!
The Wicker Man (2010, 12 MB, 1:09 min)
The Wicker Man Live (2010, 7 MB, 3:31 min)
Rupert Howe is always doing interesting things.
He’s also an early adopter of the sort of tech that in-my-old-age I
would cautiously leave a few months to see how it turns
out, so many of the interesting things he does mystify me
somewhat at first.
SO.. here he seems to have got given (?) lots of extras
(in what universe does this occur?) to remake a section of
cult British horror film The Wicker Man on Hampstead Heath.
The results are jaw dropping in two ways.
Jaw droppingly charmingly-funny.
And jaw droppingly odd.
Most of his work is essentially some combination of these
two axes. ( Plus serious skills)
As an added bonus there a kind of Making-Of-The-Wicker-Man-Remake
which apparently was originally streamed live from his mobile.
I didn’t even know you could do that.
If anything the ‘making-of’ piece surpasses the substantive one on the
Howe strangeness scale. Even his friends & colleagues seem touched too
by a species of benign insanity.
Long may he flourish.
Jor El (1978-2006, 38MB, 3:29 min.)
Marlon Brando, the CG character, rather spookily reappears as
Jor-El in Superman Returns.
From Rhythm & Hues studios.
Utterly bonkers* & totally splendid video documentation of a performance
by Annie Abrahams, Colette Tron et Emmanuelle Delafraye.
Annie Abrahams performs the movements whilst the others
read texts on the subject of fear, garnered, I believe, from the internet.
* in a good way; committed, unafraid, vulnerable, generous.
15 Minutes – clip (1997, 8.2 MB, 5:09 min.)
Early clip made for the web.
Over the course of several weeks, guerrilla-style film and video crews followed
artists 24 hours a day, and along with actual news coverage, tell the tale
of taking the media and the art world hostage in an effort to manufacture
’15 Minutes’ of fame.
From Marque Cornblatt.
Bowl/Glass (2009, 2 MB, 1:01 min)
Bowl/Flower/Vase (2009, 3 MB, 57 secs)
Little River (2009, 2 MB, 1:00 min)
Recommended to us by the sublime Sam Renseiw who,
when he speaks, we listen.
Nonetheless I had some difficulties in coming to grips with this.
Sam tells me it relates to some current You Tube thing whereby people
throw ping-pong balls into various receptacles with a high degree of accuracy.
Clearly I should stay in more.
So…in this case the balls are substituted by a species of cookie, apparently
known in Denmark as ‘chamberlains’.
(I asked Sam exactly what a chamberlain was.
He says:
“Chamberlains is an odd translation of ‘kammerjunker’ that
can both be a chamberlain and danish cookie/biscuit.
It is usually consumed in summer with “koldsk
A Small Spork Lumiere (2009, 3MB, 9 sec silent loop)
Fireworks (2009, 2MB, 43 sec silent loop)
Two from the ever reliable, delightful, and in its quiet & unassuming
(but frequently deadly – it’s the Columbo of art blogs) way, mould-breaking
Sporkworld Microblog, which if you don’t follow religiously, you should.
Ironically, given the setting, A Small Spork Lumiere could constitute a kind
of ostensive definition of dryness.
Beautiful Katamari Royal Rainbow (2008, 17MB 5:08 min)
Mad as a box of badgers but also very smart & winning, Joan Healy is a one-off.
We’ve featured her before, here’re some new vids of her work.
Even more here…
Transformation (2009, 15.5MB, 1:18 min)
Representation of Memory (2006, 75.4MB, 2:22 min)
Clearly there is something in the water in Athens, Georgia giving us,
as it has, John Michael Boling & Javier Morales, John Crowe,
Dan Osborne, Brantley Jones and now Ash Sechler.
Hmm – The School of Athens, Georgia.
There’s no common style but there is a certain sensibility which,
curiously, pervades the quiet meditative stuff as well as the more
out-there and bizarre – it’s a species of wryness combined with an
eye for the casually arresting, odd and beautiful.
It’s exemplified here in both these rather good pieces, though I particularly
like Representation of Memory.
Dennis Knopf – Bootyclipse (2007, 18.8MB, 5:38)
Found footage mashups aren’t really anything new, but
Dennis Knopf made this one from YouTube booty dancing
clips, and it makes me laugh every time I watch it.
Kelly Mark – Crosswalk (2001, 1.2MB, 0:38)
Basketball court sprints at a busy intersection. Man unknown.
From Kelly Mark.
