okay, not okay (2006, 2.53MB, 4:03 min)
year before last (2006, 1.98MB, 3:43 min)
I admire this work in its refusal to cosy.
I think it’s quite brave, in a medium where
startling visual effects are so easily realisable,
so little needing to be worked for, to make something
( & not just a work but a whole series)
that demands such careful listening
& hands out so few visual lollipops.
Lisa’s site.
my life is not a happening (2007, 17.3MB, 1:31 min)
I really like this genre of physical theatre/dance/happening/what-you-will
put through the video mangler (apparently jitter does its stuff here)
& the splendidly named Ben Pranger & his accomplices
carry it off rather nicely.
I gather this piece arose out of some workshops in 2007.
I love the excitement of that sort of voyage of discovery; there’s a kind
of frontier feel to it which is really captured here.
It’s also a philosopher’s stone job – out of apparently prosaic fragments
comes forth a small kind of magic.
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
Death was the West (2012, 221MB, 5:19 min)
A restrained, austere, smart and at the same time gripping piece from
Essex, UK, film-maker Peter Scott, still in his final months at art school.
I understand it to be a by product of a work in progress but it
has an integrity and presence entirely of its own.
I look forward to more.
‘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.
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.
sorry (2012, 6 MB, 24 sec palindrome loop)
We owe you an explanation…
what remains (2007, 19.7MB, 1:26 min.)
We need no excuse here to feature more of Alan Sondheim’s singular & remarkable oeuvre.
This one caused a bit of a debate on Netbehaviour in 2007 -some baulked, fearing it to be images
of rending, tearing of the body. Alan says not at all, it’s tantric/ecstatic.
The singer is Alan’s wife Azure Carter.
When he originally posted it, it came with this poem (a sonnet?):
what remains
because of the faces and powers among our second lives
and third and others in-between the others; because of
swollen faces thinned back to pages bones and shadowed flesh
that nothing stays what was simple and illusion
and then poetics rounds and fills the world
among lost pages and inscriptions freed
from every symbol and symbols freed and world;
the less are said the farther truth transcends
because of truths and songs and lights and place
where bodies turn; because of bodies churned and stretched
among beams of those lights and those songs; those truths
nothing stays back nothing; valleys fill with jostled things
and things churn symbols; the world
fills silence; skies get dark kiss; welkin