Jørgen Leth – 66 Scenes from America (1981, 9.9MB, 4:16)
Pretty self-explanatory: Andy eats a burger.
Scene from controversial Danish filmmaker
Jørgen Leth’s 1981 composite film, 66 Scenes from America.
Category Archives: humor
High Five Low Five/Tim and Puma Mimi
Tim and Puma Mimi: High Five Low Five (2012, 283MB, 4:22 min)
Slightly self-consciously kooky but, it must be said, splendidly
entertaining bit of both music and moving image, from -ahem –
Tim and Puma Mimi.
Curiously we were lobbied for this by a publicist type fellow.
We’re quite flattered here at DVblog that we’re thought of as having
any clout.
I should say we turned down the first couple of things he suggested
and he obviously then did his homework because this one we like, a lot.
3 from Brian Beletic
Basement Jaxx – Red Alert (1999, 10.5MB, 3:42)
Fatboy Slim – Don’t Let The Man Get You Down (2003, 9MB, 3:08)
Lady Sovereign – Love Me or Hate Me (2006, 12.2MB, 2:43)
Three videos from Brian Beletic.
His work spans the last decade,
these posted in chronological order.
Basement Jaxx’s video is conceptual: what if
music was illegal? Love the idea and execution.
The track itself takes me back to my younger,
raving days.
Fatboy Slim and Lady Sovereign also should be
proud of their Beletic vids. Both garner at least
a few chuckles and some definite appreciation for
the editing.
Exercise by Lucia Nimcova
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.
Richard Jochum’s group self portraits
Richard Jochum, Selfportrait as a Group #5 (2006, 14.5MB, 3:33)
Captured by Richard Jochum, proof that a photograph is much
more than we ever see: a collection, a collective process,
the self interconnected.
Joan Jonas – Waltz
Waltz (2003, 55.9MB, 7:04 min)
More ideas per second than many have in a lifetime & wonderful
& haunting & evocative & engaging & smart ones too.
She makes it look easy & natural. Think about it – bet it’s not.
A fantastic piece by veteran video artist/performer Joan Jonas found
on the invaluable Lumen Eclipse site.
'Paola e Bettino' – Lanza brothers film their parents watching the world cup..
By brothers Marco and Saverio Lanza.
Philippe Decouflé – Le P’tit Bal
Le P’tit Bal (1994, 35MB, 3:48 min)
Total joy !!
Video: Philippe Decouflé.
Song: Le P’tit Bal Perdu by André Bourvil.
Back By Popular Demand – The Lesbian Rangers
The Lesbian Rangers (2005, 18 MB, 1:41 min.)
Welcome to Reorientation 2005 (2005, 34.8 MB, 2:17 min.)
Victory at The Rock (2005, 72.4 MB, 4:45 min.)
Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan are Winnipeg-based collaborators whose
internationally acclaimed work addresses feminist, lesbian, and social concerns
with tremendous wit. “The Lesbian Rangers” were founded in 1997, to help people
learn about fascinating and fragile lesbian ecosystem. Rangers Dempsey and Millan
led the first expedition to Banff National Park, and continue to offer lesbian leadership today.
(thanks jillian)
1905 at 2 a.m. in the subway
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.
Will Goss – Sonnet by William Shakespeare
Sonnet by William Shakespeare (2011, 64 MB, 2:31 min)
“Here is a video I made a few months ago.
It’s a recitation of Shakespeare’s #135th sonnet.
In the background are Dexter Dalwood’s paintings,
which are collaged from other famous paintings.
The piece engages ideas of appropriation and identity.”
A beauty by Will Goss.
Errol Morris: Donald Trump on Citizen Kane
Donald Trump on Citizen Kane (2004, 40.2MB, 3:22 min.)
by Errol Morris.
‘The last thing one would imagine Donald Trump talking about is Citizen Kane,
what many believe to the greatest film ever made, but here he is talking about
in one of the aborted projects by Errol Morris — like he has lived it, like he is a
reincarnation of Charles Foster Kane. The beauty is not just in the Errol Morris
meditative style or even what Trump has to say about Citizen Kane but what we
want to see. Mainly, that Trump’s life mirrors that of Kane and that this real life
epic character sees his own tragedy.
Talking about wealth, he says ‘In real life, wealth does in fact isolate you from other
people…it is a protective mechanism’. That quote speaks volumes. The salesman is
poking holes into his much marketed life. Asked on what advice he would give
Charles Foster Kane, Trump says boldly: ‘Get yourself a different woman!’.
Abbie Hoffman and gefilte fish
Abbie Making Gefilte Fish (1973, 140MB, 21:04)
Footage of Abbie Hoffman making gefilte fish with Laura Cavestani
(who made the video) in his kitchen, 1973.
Like Abbie, I think art is in the everyday, and it sure is a fun
(and rather informative) twenty minutes if you’ve got it to spare.
Art for Abbie was education, constant revolution, evolution, and living for free.
Art and freedom were one in the same, inextricable from each other.
We miss you man.
Sondheim – Unmissable , Unmatchable
Native Dancer (2011, 92MB, 2:08 min)
Genbush (2006, 48MB, 6:03 min)
Two pieces from Alan Sondheim -one we originally posted in 2006
and one in 2011. The piece –Native Dancer –
is a particularly affecting example of recent motion capture/avatar work.
It properly forms part of a triptych but I think it is the outstanding of the
three and I’m going to exercise curatorial perogative & post it singly.
It enchants me -I don’t know exactly why, I think the reasons could be
quite banal -there’s something of the children’s TV sci-fi epic about it perhaps…
Don’t know, just love it.
And here’s what we originally said about the other piece, which I see no reason to change:
Humor is perhaps not a quality that springs immediately
to mind when discussing the work of Alan Sondheim.
Wrong! His work is saturated in it, often a species of
graveyard or gallows wit.
Here, though, he just lets loose, plays.
But the man is incapable of doing anything that doesn’t
resonate with layer upon layer of meaning too!
Lior Shvil – In Whatever Time
In Whatever Time (2010, 290MB, 15 min.)
“…Occupying a space somewhere between storytelling and spectacle, TV shows and
advertisements, the video and sculpture installations of such invented personas as
Cherry Bomb Fluffy White and Charley OnOff address the fragmented
representations of politics and gender, autobiography and history in contemporary
society. Embracing the roles of director, actor, narrator, editor, and set designer,
his experiments in epic theatrical production explore the comic territory of the jester
as he flirts with cultural stereotypes and satirizes political ideologies.”
Lior Shvil.
3 from Alan Sondheim
me (2008, 12MB, 1:06 min loop)
slbarrier (2008, 33.1 MB, 4:32 min.)
elo1 (2008, 46.3 MB, 5:26 min.)
Three from 2008. As always, utterly watchable and quite unparallelled.
PS I’m going to post beneath a text piece by Sondheim from around the
time the movies were made, not because it has any direct
relevance to them (though of course it has relevance)
but because it’s great & a further demonstration, if such were required,
of his range of technique and vision…
she can MOVE FRUIT FROM ONE KIND OF TREE TO ANOTHER
she can MAKE OTHERS FALL ASLEEP OR WAKE AT WILL
she can MAKE FIRE BLAZE FROM WEAPONS
she can FLY THROUGH AIR
she can SEE THROUGH WALLS
she can TRANSFORM A CAVE INTO A PALACE AND SEAL THE EXITS
she can REMOVE THE TUSKS AND TRUNK FROM AN ELEPHANT AND RESTORE THEM
she can MAKE A KING SPEECHLESS AND RESTORE HIS SPEECH
she can GENERATE DEMONS AND COMPLETE DEMONS
she can END DROUGHT AND HEAL ILLNESS
she can SUBDUE LIONS AND TIGERS AND BRING THEM TO FAITH
she can REMOVE ARMS AND LEGS FROM SOLDIERS AND RESTORE THEM
she knows ALL LANGUAGES AND ALL DOCTRINES
she can EAT ENDLESSLY AND DRY UP WELL SPRINGS AND RESTORE THEM
she can CUT OFF HER HEAD AND FLY THROUGH THE AIR AND RESTORE IT
she can MOVE A BUFFALO AND HER CALF BACK TO THEIR HOME
she is SAFE FROM ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND BLOWS WITH CUDGEL AND ARROW
she can TURN AROUND ARROWS IN FULL FLIGHT
she can TURN INTO AN OLD WOMAN AND BACK AGAIN
she can SEE THINGS ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD
she knows ALL FUTURE AND ALL PAST EVENTS
she meditates FOR DAYS ON END WITHOUT SLEEP OR DRINK OR FOOD
she can HOLD SEVEN HUNDRED UMBRELLAS ABOVE HER WITHOUT TOUCHING THEM
she can RAISE THE DEAD AND RESTORE THEM TO DEATH
she can BE IN SEVERAL PLACES AT ONCE
she can TRAVEL INSTANTANEOUSLY FROM ONE PLACE TO ANOTHER
she can MAKE SMALL THINGS ENORMOUS AND ENORMOUS THINGS SMALL
she can MAKE DEVOTIONAL IMAGES CRUMBLE AND RESTORE THEM
she can CARRY A TEMPLE ON HER BACK
she can CLIMB ENDLESS STAIRS AND OTHERS CANNOT FOLLOW HER
she fits THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE INTO A TINY CORNER OF A CAVE OR HOUSE
she disappears AND APPEARS AT WILL
she conquers DEATH
she eats CORPSES URINE EXCREMENT SEMEN MENSTRUAL BLOOD
her slightest MOVEMENT TRANSFORMS WORLDS
her dance CREATES AND ANNIHILATES WORLD
she loosens BOUND ANIMALS AND RELEASES THEM
she can WALK ON WATER AND WALK THROUGH FLAMES
she can CAUSE THE EARTH TO QUAKE AND FLOWERS TO FALL LIKE RAIN
she can DISCOVER HIDDEN TREASURES
she can WALK THROUGH WALLS AND CLIFFS
she can SEAL CAVES AND CREATE GREAT HALLS WITHIN THEM
she can MAKE HERSELF INVISIBLE AND MAKE HERSELF VISIBLE AGAIN
she can CREATE OVERWHELMING TEMPESTS
she can SUBDUE SNAKES AND OTHER WILD ANIMALS
she can SING PERFECT SONGS OF HER OWN DEVISING
she can ALLEVIATE THE SUFFERINGS OF THE ELDERLY
she can ALLEVIATE THE SUFFERINGS OF THE POOR
she can SCORCH CLOTHES AND RESTORE THEM
she can READ MINDS CLOSE BY AND AT A DISTANCE
she can EAT ANY SORT OF IMPURITIES
she can LAUGH AN EIGHT FOLD LAUGHTER
she can DRAW STELES AND JEWELS FROM THE GROUND
she can ERECT VAST PALACES AT AN INSTANT
she extracts POISON FROM WATER AND WALKS THROUGH BLAZING FLAMES
she can CHOOSE THE DATE AND TIME OF HER DEATH
she can MAKE DRUMS AND MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS TO SOUND BY THEMSELVES
her steps MEASURE GREAT OR TINY DISTANCES AT HER WILL
her gaze CAN SHATTER AND RESTORE ANYTHING
she can TRANSFORM HERSELF INTO A SKELETON AND A RAINBOW BODY
her gaze CAN OPEN CAVES IN SOLID ROCK AND SEAL THEM AGAIN
she remembers HER PAST AND FUTURE BIRTHS
she can TARRY WITH CONSORTS WITH OR WITHOUT ELABORATION
she can SELF ILLUMINATE
she can WALK AIMLESSLY DAY AND NIGHT
she can SPREAD THE SCENT OF PERFUMES IN EVERY DIRECTION
she can SIT LIE OR WALK IN MID AIR
she can WEAR APRONS OF BONES
she is FLEET FOOTED
she changes THE COLOR OF HER BODY AT WILL
Baldessari sings LeWitt
Baldessari Sings LeWitt (excerpt) (1972, 10MB, 3:38 min)
In which John Baldessari sings Sol LeWitt’s
sentences on conceptual art.
From the indispensible Ubuweb.
Hexstatic
ninja tune (2006, 10.9MB, 5:06 min.)
distorted minds (2006, 6.9MB, 3:18 min.)
Brilliant, and in the case of the first piece, hilarious work from
Hexstatic out of London.
The second featuring Juice Aleem.
Now. Go practice.
Almost 7 Minutes of Unalloyed Bliss
What’s Opera Doc? (1957, 57.2MB, 6:52 min)
Remember the tingle down the spine when the first song kicks in in
the musical episode of Buffy?
Well, here’s the template from 1957.
Cartoons featuring talking and singing animals performing opera simply
do not get better than this.
Wishing you all a very happy holiday season…
How to Tell When a Relationship is Over (in Ninety Seconds)
How to Tell When a Relationship is Over (2003, 5.6MB, 1:30min.)
A micro-movie of under 90 seconds for
The Encounters Festival 2003.
Directed by Tony Roche.
Two from Lewis LaCook
modern life (2005, 3.6MB, 3:13 min)
grass spider (2005, 6.1MB, 2:55 min)
2005 work from Lewis LaCook.
He seems to have dropped out of sight.
A shame, he made startling and splendid work in a number of media.
Update: I looked – he’s here and .
Good.
Sam Easterton – Animal Vegetable Video
Ardvark (2001, 1.6MB, 15 sec.)
Scorpion (2001, 1.1MB, 10 sec.)
Tumbleweeds (2001, 1.2MB, 10 sec.)
Since 1988, Sam Easterton has been using tiny
‘helmet mounted’ cameras to create an archive of videos filmed
from the perspective of plants and animals.
By Mica
Guthrie Lonergan – Floor warp 2
Floor warp 2 (2008, 3.7MB, 20 sec. Loop)
By Guthrie Lonergan. More vids here.
Constant Dullaart – Garbage
Alan Sondheim – Kelvin Helmholtz Clouds
Kelvin Helmholtz Clouds (2008, 5.6MB, 24 secs)
It’s funny – even when Sondheim does picturesque there’s
something very defiantly personal about his take on it.
Here it’s the way that the sequence of images just occasionally
looks as if it hadn’t been thrown together at random but
most of the time it does.
And this does not matter -in fact it’s an asset -there’s a shamanic
urgency to everything Sondheim does which is wholly engaging.
Huzzah for Brittany Shoot!
Woah (2009, 6.1MB, 41 sec loop)
Bush Shoe (2009, 2.8MB, 27 secs)
Protest (2009, 14.1MB, 26 secs)
It’s the James-Bond-Martini scenario – tinder dry & leaving you
both shaken and stirred.
Three reasons to say “Huzzah for Brittany Shoot!“.
PS nobody in the UK actually says Huzzah, whatever you might have been told.
Will Goss – from Magenta’s Caress
Beanstalk [from Magenta’s Caress #3] (2010, 125 MB, 3:50 min)
This is great. It forcibly calls to mind the early work of the sainted Hal Hartley
and whilst it’s arguable that some of what’s on offer here is like a sort
of condensed supercharged bucket of HH’s stylistic tics I find none of that
irritating in the way I might have expected, rather it’s a definite plus, by some odd
counter-intuitive magic. It’s the very over-the-topness of it all that lends
it its huge charm.
More from Will Goss soon.
Bob Ross is alive. The Joy of Painting..
Bob Ross is alive (2008, 22MB, 2:50 min.)
The Joy of Painting (2008, 15MB, 5:45 min.)
Bob Ross came to prominence as the creator of ‘The Joy of Painting’,
a program on public television in the US. Here are a couple of great parodies
that poke fun at Bob and his calm and enduring nature.
Top is from Dutch filmmaker Miron Bilski (from the viral video award)
Bottom is from artists Max Kotelchuck and Peter Nowogrodzki.
Robb Bradely/Randy Newman – I’m Dreaming of a White President
I’m Dreaming of a White President (2012, 15MB, 3:16 min)
Great bit of film-making to match a genius song.
But…but…
Of course you want Obama to win just
to wrongfoot the racists et. al. but you
can’t help wishing he’d actually done something
to merit the mad hostility of the rich, the bigots
and the terminally gullible.
Mad King Thomas/Kevin Obsatz – Eat up, Little Pearl – trailer
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.
Jeremy Bailey – Transhuman Dance Recital #1
Transhuman Dance Recital #1 (2008, 56MB, 6:30 min.)
“If Jeff Koons had fallen for the Microsoft Help Paperclip rather than
vacuum cleaners or La Cicciolina, presumably the result would have
looked a lot like: ”The Jeremy Bailey Show”.
Says Jeremy Bailey: “From now on I dedicate myself to finding better
ways for humans to dance”
via Aram Bartholl – Magnotta SpeedShow
Magnotta SpeedShow (2012, 20.4, 3:07 min)
Magnotta SpeedShow – A vanity surf performance.
“One week after Magnotta got caught we present a vanity surf performance at the exact same Internetcafe in Berlin where Magnotta was arrested while vanity surfing! Be invited to join and vanity surf yourself!”
“Killing is bad, mailing bodyparts is worse, vanity surfing (while getting caught) is cool!”
“Internet cafes are not just vaguely unglamorous places for ethnic minorities and communications challenged, they do have a genuinely bad reputation.” [Olia Lialina – ‘Still There’] Where else a social network killer can be caught? Of course in the Internet cafe!”
[shot and edited(!) on a smart phone ]
Internetcafe Helin, Karl-Marx-Straße 156, Berlin
Tuesday 12th of June, 2012, 8-10 pm
by Constant Dullaart, CuratingYoutube, Olia Lialina & Aram Bartholl
Lior Shvil – The Kosher Butcher
The Kosher Butcher (2010, 84MB, 8:56 min.)
“.. Israeli provocateur Lior Shvil presented “The Kosher Butcher,” a darkly humorous commentary on Mideast politics in which he portrays a meatpacking Sweeney Todd.”
Shannon Noble – Finger Bolts
Finger Bolts (2005, 1.9MB, 1:13 min.)
Shannon Noble, an extremely technically accomplished
artist, made this elegant short video in 2005 from the simple, well-timed,
juxtaposition of moving images and sounds.
He’s still making stuff – he’s quite strangely
secretive about his work and quite often as soon
as it’s posted somewhere it disappears again.
A shame – he’s consistently great.
Pierre Huyghe
Pierre Huyghe #1 (NK, 2.69MB, 1:43 min)
Pierre Huyghe #2 (NK, 1.59MB, 3:03 min)
Pierre Huyghe #3 (NK, 2.33MB, 1:29 min)
Pierre Huyghe #4 (NK, 2.29MB, 1:30 min)
Four short videos by the often vexing, occasionally brilliant, Pierre Huyghe
from the website of the PBS Art in the 21st Century series.
Bonnie Prince Billy/Ben Berman –I See a Darkness
I See a Darkness (2012, 32MB, 2:40 min)
Bonnie Prince Billy/Will Oldham has a way of generating interesting things
around his core business of making extraordinary music.
In a similar way to that of Ornette Coleman, his album artwork always
contains many little explosions of visual pleasure and neither is it devoid of
food for thought.
This is also true of the videos he commissions to accompany his music.
We’ve posted some of these before , including a deliciously bizarre
one from Harmony Korine.
This is one of my favourites to date. Made by Ben Berman, it involves
Oldham lolloping around the streets of Glasgow in a way that in real
life would have me crossing the road toot sweet.
I’m an Oldham fan. If I had to put my finger on one of the things
that lifts him so far from the ordinary it would be a confidence in his
work so great (or maybe better, simply an integrity to it and to his art),
that he can encompass within it and place around it things of utter
ridiculousness without undermining it, indeed, whilst rendering it the more potent.
This is not to downplay the role of Berman in this. He is clearly a significant
talent and a fine co-conspirator for Oldham.
Pleix – No Animals Were Harmed
Birds (2006, 15.5MB, 3:04 min)
Netlag (2006, 15.8MB, 4:23 min)
Early 24 carat weirdness & ethereal beauty respectively from the
French Pleix group.
Psycho Bob – Bob’s Big Date
Bob’s Big Date (2008, 7 MB, 50 sec.)
“These are the adventures of a psychopath named Bob. Bob is not
a nice man; not even a little bit. This show is the video equivalent
of a Sunday comic strip.
Here Bob goes out on a date with Betty, perhaps the first woman
other than his mother to truly understand and appreciate him.”
From The AV Club.
Dr Hairy – Mentoring
Mentoring (2012, 255MB, 16:01 min)
Final one in the present series of Edward Picot’s Dr Hairy videos.
Great stuff, which we’ve enjoyed a great deal.
We eagerly anticipate series #2, perhaps we could suggest The Return of Dr Hairy,
Dr Hairy’s Repeat Prescription or The Beard is Back.
Glad to see he’ll be putting in an artworld appearance at
the new Furtherfield Gallery in Finsbury Park, London.
Not to be missed if you’re in the area during the run of the show (not only
because Dr H is great but also because Furtherfield haven’t put together
a remotely dull show yet).
Lior Shvil – Rough Cut
Rough Cut (2007, 54MB, 4 min.)
Born in 1971 in Tel Aviv, Lior Shvil currently lives in New York and recently attended Columbia University’s School of the Arts MFA program.
Shvil works primarily in video, installation and sculpture. His works are multi-layered, both poetic and critical; they tap into collective memory (cultural, mythical, historical), and are inspired by television, cinema and story telling.
Shvil received his B.A. from the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem. He has had a solo shows at the Herzliya Museum of Art and the Heder Gallery in Israel. His work has been featured in group exhibitions at the Haifa Museum of Art in Israel, Milliken Gallery in Stockholm, The 7th International Istanbul Biennial, and NGBK Gallery in Berlin. Shvil won the Samuel Givon Prize for Young Artists, awarded by the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, as well as the Israel-America Fund for Culture, Israel. – See more at: givon art gallery.
Subversion at Cornerhouse
Larissa Sansour: A Space Exodus ( Clip) (2009, 7MB, 1:15 min)
Tarzan and Arab: Colourful Journey (Trailer) (2010, 11MB, 1:38 min)
Here are two clips from videos featured in the excellent Subversion show,
featuring artists from the Arabic speaking world, currently on (to 5th June) at
Manchester’s “Cornerhouse”.
It is carefully, elegantly and thoughtfully curated by Omar Kholeif, who writes:
“Like many of the artists I was looking at, I felt that collectively
curators and writers associated with the politically unstable Arab world were
being asked to step up and perform to an identity that the world wanted us to play.
With Subversion my aim was to do just the opposite. I worked with artists who
referenced this very language but who wanted to dissent, poke fun, critique
and re-define themselves as artists of the imagination, and not of any specific
social or political condition.”
It has to be said that this bending of the stick is eminently successful – none
of the works included has any taint of tokenism, they are rich with a poetry,
humour and humanity that cuts entirely across any notional cultural divide.
Where they do focus upon political subject matter (and one should not form the
impression that this is a show with, in any sense whatsoever, its political teeth pulled)
what delights is the richness and the playfulness with which this is done.
Larrisa Sansour’s “A Space Exodus” is both gentle and devastating.
Gentle, the Sansour persona (and we’ll have another piece of hers next week)
presented in the work, with the rather stylish space suit, the wistful smile and wave
towards the far away earth, having planted the Palestinian flag on the moon:
–“That’s one small step for Palestinians, one giant leap for mankind”.
Devastating when one sets this gentleness by the side of what we know of the Apartheid
wall, the illegal settlements, punishment demolition of Palestinian homes &c.
(Anyone who doubts the piece’s political impact should take a look at the vile racism
of some of the comments on the YouTube posting of this clip
– “Send all the Palestinians to the moon” &c.)
The other piece featured here is from the Gazan twins Ahmed and Mohamed Abu Nasser,
known professionally as “Tarzan and Arab”.
Although (in a disarming interview in which they come across a bit like a smiley
and un-terminally-corroded-by-snotty-cynicism younger version of the Chapmans)
they assert the piece is in some sense about internecine Palestinian conflict,
to me it reads more like a balletic paean of love to the cinema, to the
moving image (including perhaps the video game too – what do you think?).
Until last year Tarzan and Arab had never been to a cinema and have largely
been unable to attend screenings of their own works abroad.
In fact their first works, also shown at Cornerhouse, were old style film posters
for non-existent movies, all given titles from the names of Israeli military
operations: Defensive Shield, Cast Lead &c.(as, indeed, their film has too).
There is a great deal more to this show, which covers diverse geographical slices
of the Arabic speaking world and where therefore the interaction between life
and art has a different tempo and character to the works by the Palestinian
artists discussed here.
And it’s all great – I don’t have space here to properly do the whole thing justice.
In particular, though, I do want to mention Akram Zaatari’s two luminously beautiful
films set in the milieu of gay life in Beirut – though again to outline them thus,
in one line, in terms of “topic”, is to oversimplify – we must distinguish between
ostensible topics and the dense, lyric and dazzling poetry which they engender.
Also Khaled Hafez’s wonderful short “On Presidents and Superheroes”
(yet another political context, that of a staggeringly prescient augury of a victorious
but still contested Egyptian revolution) but I simply am going to just mention it as I
hope to write something a little bit more extended about it when I post a clip here (soon!).
Harrell Fletcher – Blot Out The Sun
Harrell Fletcher – Blot Out The Sun (2002, 46.7MB, 5:32)
Harrell Fletcher’s 2002 unconventional remake of Ulysses.
A garage in central Portland, Oregon is the setting for this
conceptual re-working of James Joyce’s Ulysses. The garage
owner, Jay, mechanics and neighborhood denizens serve as
narrators, reading lines from the novel that focus on death,
love, social inequality and the relationship between individuals
and the universe.
A five minute clip from the 22-minute piece featured in the
2004 Whitney Biennial
Eating Disorder- Arzu Ozkal Telhan
‘My practice can be grouped under the interpretation of body and its
relationship to its environment. I make attempts to emancipate the body
from social and cultural norms and try to suggest ways to distance one from
the limits imposed on the society by totalitarian establishments.’
by Arzu Ozkal Telhan.
2 from Patrick Lichty
Explaining Conceptual Art to Bizarro (2012, 89MB, 1:36 min)
Danger Music #17 by Dick Higgins (2012, 19MB, 45 secs)
And to celebrate our resurrection (for which heartfelt thanks go to James Morris), two newish pieces from the redoubtable (I write so many of these things a nagging doubt enters my mind as to whether I’ve perhaps called Patrick redoubtable before, once, twice…more? But leave it – redoubtable he is) Patrick Lichty.
Both pieces take place in DC Universe Online, about which I know nothing so I won’t even begin to show myself up by attempting to expand, and both reference recent art history – one Beuys explaining pictures to a dead hare and the other Dick Higgins’s Danger Music.
Both are utterly splendid.
Joan Healy: Deranged, but in a Good Way
Sithair (2007, 6.4MB, 1:49 min)
Cyber Skin (2007, 38.8MB, 3:05 min)
Meat Market (2007, 39.6MB, 7:14 min)
I was lucky enough to see young Irish artist Joan Healy
present her work at a 2008 DATA event in Dublin.
It was strange.
First off, consciously or not, she has this innocent
butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-my-mouth demeanour and then she
shows this.. er..stuff
Documented here, in ascending order of weirdness, there’s a performance piece
where she transforms her hair into a musical instrument,
a piece where she satirises the current bio-art fashion by
getting into a box, exposing some of her back (the installation
claims this is especially grown cyber-skin)
& then attempting to draw to screen the patterns the punters trace
out on her.
Last is ..well.. (vegans avert your eyes), electronically assisted dancing meat
– you know.. chops.. steaks.. & the like..
After she gave her talk I said to her I thought her work was ‘utterly deranged’
She smiled sweetly and said she would take it as a compliment.
It was.
Dr Hairy in Child Safety
Child Safety (2011, 189MB, 16:19 min)
Latest adventures of Edward Picot’s splendid Dr Hairy.
Ruth Catlow & Marc Garrett –Festival of Money
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…
Sondheim, Foofwa – <em>Blanking</em>
Blanking (2011, 30MB, 1:07 min)
for Carol Novack
‘I was working on this, shot with Foofwa d’Imobilite at Eyebeam,
when I heard the news that Carol Novack had died. for many of us,
this was unexpected and awful, as if the year couldn’t end
without just one more tragedy.
Foofwa and I had talked about our
work together, earlier, about issues of pain, wounding, death;
I think this piece, made at the time, is all I could do, I speak
through image and sound, these words already lost, resting in
peace
thank you Foofwa and Jamie and Jackson at Eyebeam’
Alan Sondheim
Morrisa Maltz – an interesting intersection of art & commerce
Saved By The Bell/Mofones (2011, 33MB, 54 secs)
The title of this post being words that seldom pass my lips but which in this case
are entirely to the point.
The splendidly creative video artist Morrisa Maltz whose work we’ve been delighted
to feature here several times made these..um..arty-i-phone holders, which are, it has
to be said, rather good and to cut a long story short their commercial potential was
spotted and now she is a C….E….O & Urban Outfitters are selling her stuff.
I hope she spends all of any money she makes on giving herself time to make more of the
very smart and fetching art videos she’s so good at.
Anyway this is a promotional vid for the moFones, lovingly carved from “Saved by the Bell”.
She even does marketing classily.
Yu-Chen Wang – Struggle for Existence
Struggle for Existence (2004, 18MB, 1:58 min.)
“By linking Darwin’s “The truth of universal struggle for existence” with a Taiwanese children’s game, The video represents two individuals’ slaughter in the virtual battle field and reflects on the ideology of boundary dividing, self-defending patriotism and bellicosity.”
by – Yu-Chen Wang.
Eric Lerner – Mr. Deja Vu
Eric Lerner – Mr. Deja Vu (2006, 27.2MB, 3:48)
From Eric Lerner‘s collection of Mr.CityMen.
Freud was a Fraud – Charlene Rule
freudwasafraud (2006, 20MB, 2:32 min)
‘There’s nothing like spending a little quality time with the
latest top ten questions about your potential state of mind.’
podcast from Charlene Rule aka scratch video.
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer 1975
Jack Goldstein – Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (1975, 16.2MB, 2:10)
An endlessly cyclical Hollywood, summed up in two minutes,
over thirty years ago. Still relevant and all too real.
by Jack Goldstein.
Brian Kim Stefans – Difficult Beauty
Vex #1 (2006, 29.1MB, 2:08 min.)
Vex #5 (2006, 25.9MB, 1:09 min.)
Ferrari Dogs (2006, 25.9MB, 1:09 min.)
You know sometimes how when you first look at a work
you can’t process it immediately, it seems jumbled – wrong –
& you’re tempted to dismiss it.
Then you live with it awhile & suddenly it leaps into focus &
you realise you’re in the presence of something much richer
& more rewarding than the things which did immediately fall into place?
Do you know that feeling?
Well, that’s how I felt as I prepared this post.
The work, by the artist & poet Brian Kim Stefans, snuck up
on me & then hit me over the head.
Furthermore, there’s still a puzzling quality to it all, for me:
the Ferrari Dogs piece seems like work of a different category
to the vex pieces somehow ( as does Manchurian Rainman on
the site. Check it. Now – what is that all about?)
Anyway – I’ll take mystery over glibness anyday – I look forward to more.
aircondition – Oliver Laric
Edward Picot – Appraisal parts #3 & #4
Appraisal Part #3 (2011, 159MB, 9:47 min)
Appraisal Part #4 (2011, 143MB, 9:40 min)
Latest two in Edward Picot’s wonderful Dr Hairy series.
Andrew Norman Wilson #4
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).”
Andrew Norman Wilson #2
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.
Andrew Norman Wilson – Webinars & FlowSpot Tests
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.
Joan Brossa – Fi
Joan Brossa, the Catalan poet, artist, performer and polymath,
who died in 1998, deserves to be more widely
known in the rest of the world.
I’ve often thought his work, in particular the visual
poems, prefigured much of the art of the early days
of the net (but mostly better: terser, wittier, riskier –
I think Brossa would have loved the net).
This elegant & delightful performance ( ‘Fi’ is Catalan
for ‘End’, in this context The End) was recorded
in Barcelona eight months before his death.
It requires a little patience; the reward being that
it can be viewed many more than one time, so it
seems like an appropriate thing to leave you with
over the summer.
Remember we’re always delighted to look at new work,
so if you’re making moving image yourself,
or you happen across great stuff don’t hesitate
to send us links.
We’re back on Monday, September the 26th – in
the meantime we wish you all a happy and relaxing summer.