Serra Frottage (2009, 13 MB, 3:17 min)
Whenever I’m travelling through, or near to London’s Liverpool Street station
I try and make time to pass by the wonderful Richard Serra sculpture,
Fulcrum, at the Broadgate end.
I really love it, one of the most successful pieces of public art I’ve
ever seen.
I mentioned this to a friend and he sent me a link to this piece,
one of a series of ‘minimal interventions’ by Jordan McKenzie
who clearly also um – –loves– – Serra’s work.
PIRATE (2006, 45 MB, 8:25 min)
By Annika Larsson.
Music by Tobias Bernstrup & Annika Larsson.
Found Art (Nolita) Unmonumental 484 (2011, 36 MB, 26 secs)
Found Art (Chelsea) Unmonumental 507 (2011, 32 MB, 23 secs)
Joy Garnett is not only a fascinating and accomplished painter but
she takes a neat photo too.
There’s a huge set of images on her Flickr pages entitled
Unmonumental – a recording and honouring of the melancholy beauty
of the neglected, ephemeral, the broken and the passing.
Recently she’s added videos to the collection and here’re two
of them.
They are utterly beguiling and we’re going to show the whole
lot over the next weeks and months.
We’ve got hold of a few movies spanning nearly 15 years from
Eleanor Suess who has staked out a very interesting position on the
borders of architecture and fine art (and specifically film/video art).
We’ll start with an early, and rather ravishing, handmade piece:
“Using a 16mm handmade film technique a DOLA/OS map of Perth
is transformed into a spatial surface. The territory of the drawing
is explored and navigated, the gridlines dominating the optical
soundtrack, marking the speed of the film as it passes in front
of the viewer
Everything Is Urgent (2008, 4 MB, 42 sec (Excerpt)
Ran Slavin
confronts the human figure in conjunction with the annoying barking of a dog. 4 figures, 2 young men and women, stand in front of an unknown audience, in front of a void and bark ferociously.
Driven away from systematic and social norms, the human barking figures attack us from within the digital domain, outward.
They present an uncompromising hybrid human, a cross between man and animal. Do they try to warn us, scare us like an omen or blame us? We see a human but hear an animal. Like a shout of desperation of a person who can no longer use his voice.
2008, 4:12 min. Single or 4 channel installation
Trav-erse short (2011, 96 MB, 1:58 min)
This is shaping up to be Furtherfield fortnight & whyever not?
Here’s some footage I took there last Friday night, at the very entertaining
launch of the Art is Open Source/REFF – Roma Europa Fake Factory publication
& exhibition, (GO, if you’re in London) of a splendid performance by
Garrett Lynch of his Trav-erse, where he uses custom Max/MSP created software to
grab audio from an analogue world band receiver, manipulate and remix it.
I was struck both by the simplicity of the idea and the effectiveness of
its execution – a neat concept but also an excellent ear at work.
The sound from my stills cam video was unusable (shame, it sounded great
there) so in the latter section I’ve dubbed on sound from
an earlier performance of the piece in Cardiff, Wales in 2008.
Duchamp’s Fountain (2011, 93MB, 1:59 min, silent)
Fascinating bit of footage from Kev Flanagan arising out
of a piece of work by Rob Myers (together with Curt Cloninger one
of the two smartest people I know) –here’s the original post
from his blog to give some context.
The whole thing sparked an interesting discussion on the Furtherfield
(see Monday’s post) originated Netbehaviour list this week.
Soziale Plastik (1969, 9 MB, 1:47 min)
Joseph Beuys accepts the challenge to expose himself to the anonymous spectator,
in speechless close-up on a video monitor: the artist as
Aroundabout: Second Person Present (2011, 117MB, 4 min, silent)
Extracted from a longer work made for Steven Ball’s
Aroundabout blog
“I also showed it as part of a presentation of material from
Aroundabout I did at City Methodologies at the Slade,
where it was displayed looped continuously on a flat
screen monitor face up on the floor, while I ‘performed’
the blog with Powerpoint!”
Some of these expanded cinema folk do relish a challenge!
Even truncated & divorced from its performative context it stands
as a splendid bit of structural/formalist film/vid poetry.
Samuel Beckett‘s only venture into the medium of cinema, Film was written
in 1963 and filmed in New York in the summer of 1964, directed by
Alan Schneider and featuring Buster Keaton. For the shooting Mr.
Beckett made his only trip to America. The film, which has no dialogue,
takes its basis Berkeley’s notion esse est percepti that is, to be is to be perceived.
