Patrick Power – lights and darkness


Steamlight (2006, 16.2MB, 2:51)


Watauga (2007, 203.1MB, 26:23)

Two extraordinary pieces from Patrick Power.
Its as if the Qatsi trilogy found a way to use a videoblog as a testing ground.
This is much more than a test, though.
Some of the most important work I have seen in a while.
Beautifully touching randomized archives.
Pushing the limits of contemplative observation.
Taking time to visually visit other places.
There is so much beauty in reflections and the synchronicities of our minds.

Sample these two, then go visit the rest of his collection. Patrick makes the world watchable.

Edit: Sadly, Patrick Power passed away in 2007. This post was created to honor this man’s work, and now sadly, we must honor that work as his legacy.

More from Regina Célia Pinto

Paintings

Neste vídeo há uma grande delicadeza, uma fragilidade,
que não deve levar a pensar que essa peça de Regina Pinto
é de alguma forma ocasional ou menos artística.
Em vez disso, esse é o trabalho de um artista maduro,
sem nada a provar, e com a enorme liberdade que isso traz.
Um estudo de todo o corpo de seu trabalho evidencia
amplamente tudo isso e mostra quão profundamente
consistente e coerente ele se apresenta.
Poder-se-ia ainda acrescentar o quanto ele nos emociona,
o quanto é estranho e muito bonito.

There’s a delicacy, a fragility, about this piece
that shouldn’t lead one to think that Regina Célia Pinto’s
work is in any way casual or artless.
Rather, this is the work of a mature artist with
nothing to prove and the enormous freedom that brings.
A study of the whole body of her work
amply bears this out.
It shows just how consistent and deeply considered
it is and, one should add, how affecting, how strange
and how very beautiful.

Toby Tatum –The Golden Age

the golden age
The Golden Age (2011, 181MB, 5:34 min)

We’ve posted Toby Tatum’s work
before and it’s work with a definite charge to it and ambitious too.

I think this piece is more wholly successful than its predecessor but I’m still not totally convinced.
It’s something to do with the aim of conjuring a very precise & particular
dream-world which strikes me as an all-eggs-in-one-basket kind of approach,
in that the tiniest false note disrupts the sought for spell.
Therefore Tatum creates a very high bar indeed for himself and his performers.

If one compares similarly oneiric work by Cocteau, Lynch or Hadžihalilović,
however dense and rich the atmosphere gets, there is variation with humour
or banality preparing us for more poetry to come and somehow too, framing it,
setting it off.
That sounds more critical that I want to be for this is, in every respect, a
very nicely realised and haunting piece.

Next week, or the week after, we’ll post an interview with Tatum about his work.

Another from Ruth Catlow

as i looked up
travel images unseen (2011, 156MB, 6:01 min)

‘5 video clips taken on a simple video camera, through a window on a coach to the
plane from Istanbul and arriving in London by train. Selected by and stitched, unseen
by the creator who will never watch the video, ever.’

The gentlest conceptualism & quite, quite lovely too.
There’s something about knowing the premise that leaves one
very open – one could say innoculates one – to its formal consequences –
here a looseness which somehow gently stretches time, makes it grainier
but conversely sharpens our attention, perhaps to make up for the
maker’s own vow of abstention.
One more in the series to come.

Aī-Hz – My Miwoo

My Miwoo
My Miwoo [Tai Chi Weekend Control] (2007, 24.6MB, 50 secs)

Aī-Hz, real name Michael Renassia,
is a French visual performer living and working in Tokyo.
His site contains possibly my favourite biographical nugget ever:

‘He is using compositing software in a diverted way, and real-time mixing
instruments with the aim to create a noisy/pop universe…’

Now, who could possibly object to that?
This piece is rather lovely – the thing that totally makes it for me
is the epiphanic moment at the end when the music/animation stops &
the person appears ..there’s a haunting sense of time suspended..
So, for me, 10/10 for visuals.
I am pretty bored ,though, with the by-the-yard avant-dance music
that accompanies so much work of this kind..it’s not bad
or anything, just pedestrian…

Brian Kim Stefans – Difficult Beauty

vex1
Vex #1 (2006, 29.1MB, 2:08 min.)

vex5
Vex #5 (2006, 25.9MB, 1:09 min.)

ferrari dogs
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.

Abbie Hoffman and gefilte fish


Abbie Making Gefilte Fish (1973, 156.4MB, 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.

Ruth Catlow – As I Looked Up…

as i looked up
As I Looked Up (2011, 32MB, 2:23 min)
A co-director of the formidable Furtherfield, Ruth Catlow charms
and something more – something to do with the urgency and vulnerability
of performance and the importance of memory, of a sense of place – in this
fragile & lovely elaboration of an Ivor Cutler song.
Things its difficult to put your finger on but which go right to our core;
pointing to – literally singing – those things being in the ‘artist’ job description…

First of three. Two more pieces, just as delicate, just as necessary, to come.

James Joyce has a Posse

james joyce has a posse
James Joyce has a Posse (2011, 32MB, 4:49 min)

And mentioning Curt Cloninger, as we did on Friday last, it’s nice to report he has made
a new video which is both gorgeous and engimatic, with a musicality which stems
not only from the actual sounds but the video’s very construction, that repeated
wistful, strange, ‘Portrait of the Artist’, title motif…
Cloninger is someone (Eddie Whelan the other who springs to mind) who has thoroughly incorporated
data-moshing as an expressive tool into their vocabulary, defying reports of its early death.
Poetry.

PS And just in passing – I’m fascinated by movies like this one, for which it’s very difficult
to create an adequate poster image.
Data-moshing is a particularly dynamic form of moving image work
where the motion is like the Cheshire Cat’s grin.
It’s not just data-moshing – it happens elsewhere.
It’s like some movies are, in some sense, “further away” in the line of image kinship
with the still.

Gov. Scott Walker gets checked, Mic Checked!

scott walker mic checked
Gov. Scott Walker gets checked, Mic Checked! (2011, 81MB, 3:45 min)

If you don’t feel inspired & cheered up by this tremendous video please do the checking
your pulse thing…
Stand Up Chicago