Duncan Speakman – Is Life Boring? (2005, 5.3MB, 1:17 min.)
From Duncan Speakman (yes, his real name) and the now abandoned 29fragiledays.
Duncan moved onto the less populated Delicate Museum, but I enjoy his older work much more (maybe because there is simply more of it?).
No contrived voice-overs (at least not at first), I’m also given enough time to meditate on the video.
Sometimes short is too short.
This is one of the best pieces from his previous incarnation.
Time After Time (2003, 45.5MB, 5:39 min)
I was initially rather mystified by the vogue in UK galleries for
the work of Albanian artist Anri Sala but after a while the penny
dropped.
The courage to embrace the poetry of detail, of stillness,
apparent lack of incident & furthermore to trust
one’s viewers to accompany one to that place…
Elegant, sad, lugubrious & also, I think, much more crafted
than first meets the eye.
Great.
Festival of Money (2012, 111MB, 8:06 min)
Amusing & depressing both, because it is so spot on, a lovely bit of
satire from Marc Garrett and Ruth Catlow of Furtherfield fame.
Most artists, of course, are from the 99%…this is a timely reminder of
where our interests lie and don’t lie…
Quilts Never Sleep (short version) (2007, 20.9MB, 3:07 min)
Two very different but attractive & telling pieces from Dan Canyon.
The first was part of a show of – you guessed it – quilts in London in 2006,
about which read more here.
The second could’ve been made for dvblog, well, at least for me, as I’m a fool
for all things turntablist, & features the splendidly monickered Mickey Morphingaz.
Marie Menken – Glimpse of the Garden (1957, 36.2MB, 5:04)
Marie Menken, avant-garde filmmaker of the 1940s, 50s,
and 60s – in addition to being the inspiration for
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and a Warhol
superstar – made inspirational work from a time we seem
to overlook too much today. The garden here belongs
to one of her husband’s former male lovers, and while
Menken was often criticized for being quaint in her displays,
her style is an obviously feminine one that hides much
deeper meaning in ordinary but stunning visuals.
Whole Lotta Love by Led Zeppelin (2003, 20 MB, 4:14 min.)
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)
Urbandale (2000, 43MB, 7:30 min.)
“Urbandale”, an ASCII/ANSI movie by Cory Arcangel.
“Filmed at Urbandale Plaza in the eastern suburbs of Buffalo N.Y.,
“urbandale” is a study of America’s suburban sprawl stripped to its barest
essentials and void of unnecessary contemporary cultural influence. This
film captures the sly, bland smile strip plazas cast at modern culture.
The film, rendered in text, focuses on the repetitive motion of food
stuffs being cooked in the lobby of a discount department store.”
“Urbandale” is a 2000 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc
for its Turbulence project.
Recreation, Re-Creation (2006, 9.6 MB, 4:27 min.)
“This video juxtaposes original 16 mm footage acquired from my Grandfather
with interview footage taken of my Mother and Grandparents. All but the
past-tenses of their speaking are left intact, while the film footage has been
aggressively manipulated.
The project seeks to question the language of constructing one’s identity through
negotiation with familial history, where the past has been constructed and reconstructed
in order to corroborate certain facades of culture which are wished to be left intact.”
Bitsy Knox from 312.
Mike Kelley (2007, 7.3 MB, 15 sec.)
‘Mike Kelley’ are high definition video projections of individual trees
with branches moving in a twirling pattern. Projected to fill the height
of the gallery’s walls, the images interact with the architecture of the gallery,
creating tension between the imaginary landscape and the physical space.
The Singing Sculpture (1992, 830k, 41 sec.)
“Singing Sculpture documents one of Gilbert & George’s most famous “living sculpture” pieces.
Covered in multicolored bronze paint, the artists sing and interchange parts of the English
music hall standard “Underneath the Arches.” Through their stylized performance,
Gilbert & George deliberately blur the lines between life and art, reality and contrivance.
This ambiguity does not rely on a transformation from living to sculptural form. On the contrary,
they have merged the two in order to obliterate, rather than emphasize, the distinctions between life and art.” – Walker Art Center
from Video Data Bank
