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
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
Resexed Pistols (2006, 6.4MB, 2:06 min)
“another remix of the sex pistols piece you posted a while ago..
i had been working on it awhile ago then i went on vacation… and when
i saw the valdez piece, i felt someone had been searching my harddrive.
then i saw the piece (which is great) and realized that they’re quite
different, even though they tread in the same arena… i don’t know why so many
of us have been attracted to redoing the same clip (remember jimpunk did
another remix), but here is my mine.”
from Antonio Mendoza – Mr. Tamale.
Anarchy (Slight Delay) (2006, 17.8MB, 3:23 min.)
In which Aaron Valdez takes the Sex Pistols vid from
these very pages and..er..does stuff to it.
Explains Aaron:
‘This is the second entry in a study (or me messing around) with audio
and video delay. I did a Bob Dylan one way back. Nothing new but
interesting nonetheless. I made three tracks of video each offset by
6 frames then I cut out three frames alternating between those three
tracks. It
Mes Amis (2007, 37.8MB, 7:35 min)
Giles Perkins, from the excellent onsuper8.org
(whose own great work we’ve shown, last week & previously)
pointed this one out to us.
Gorgeous he said, and he was right.
Comes from here & there’s a discussion here.
They Got Bills to Pay (2007, 15.7MB, 2:29 min.)
The Streets of Philadelphia. Prostitution.
“It does sometimes confuse me as much how someone can be happy with such a life.
Sometimes I like to think that a happy person is able to be happy in any situation.
Other times I find it sad, thinking that they can’t possibly be really happy, that maybe
they don’t know real happiness. But I don’t like that answer. We can’t impose our own
sense of what makes us happy on someone else.
as far as being one of the worst areas, yes it is often hard and there is crime but I see
great beauty there and I hope to show that too.”
by David Kessler.
Shoveling (2007, 14.1MB, 1:00 min)
Snow Light, Snow Bright (2007, 15.2 MB, 52 secs)
Delicate; restrained, almost austere.
Which qualities the key, or better the bridge, to the richness,
the depth, of two perfectly judged Lumières
autoretrato; puesta de sol//self-portrait; sunset (2007, 5.16MB, 36 sec)
Hallado en una serie de vlogs (la navegación es un poco confusa,
y mi español rudimentario, así que espero haberlo pillado bien),
de la española residente en Chile Pepa García, este
vídeo es sencillamente perfecto: la mezcla justa entre
espontaneidad y cálculo; y hecho con arte,
conjurando una compleja atmósfera donde una especie
de deliciosa melancolía es la nota más predominante.
Simplemente genial.
Found on a series of vlogs (the navigation is a little confusing,
my Spanish is rudimentary, so I hope I’ve got the factual stuff right)
by Chile resident Spanish video maker Pepa Garcia, this piece is just perfect –
just the right mix of spontaneity and calculation, artfully made
and hence conjuring a rather complex atmosphere where a species
of delicious melancholy is the most predominant note.
Simply great.
Readings from ‘Health Proxy’ (2007, 32.7MB, 8:19 min.)
So..declaration of interest..Robert Roth is a friend of mine & I get mentioned in the book.
Nonetheless, if he was my worst enemy, I’d still say watch this, then .
Health Proxy is pretty much sui generis..the only comparisons I can think of being those fragmentary, diaristic things in the Japanese tradition:The Pillow Book or Essays in Idleness.
Of course Kenko & Sei Shonagon never wrote about baseball or AIDS,
nor were they animated by the massively warm oppositional & radical spirit we find here.
The video is a nice job too – not only is it elegantly made, but Langager and Smolarski
pass the documentary acid test of honouring their subject matter whilst still creating
something with a palpable sense of their authorship.