Bill Viola, still from The Reflecting Pool, 1979, 7’ 33”, colore, suono, 1979, video. |
Cronostasi and the Persistence of Vision |
GAM La mostra mette a confronto la storia delle immagini in movimento, intese come film e video d’artista, con l’immagine fissa della fotografia. È un incontro tra due diverse concezioni del tempo: da un lato l’eterno presente dell’immagine filmica, che può vivere solo nel suo ripetuto svolgersi, e dall’altro il tempo passato, fermato nella fotografia, sempre già concluso nell’istante stesso in cui affiora sulla carta fotografica. È un incontro tra due diverse dimensioni visive. Il cinema ha sempre mantenuto dalle sue origini di fine Ottocento un’aura diafana di proiezione magica. La fotografia ha invece portato con sé, sino all’avvento del digitale, un’implicita concretezza, significati di prova, evidenza e impronta di oggetti reali. In un arco cronologico, suddiviso in due tranches, che va dal 1961 e arriva fino al 2008, la mostra presenta opere fatte per immagini in movimento ma al cui interno l’uso della fotografia è centrale, come elemento strutturale o contenutistico. Da La Jetèe di Chris Marker, film sull’attraversamento del tempo, composto per sole fotografie, alla video installazione Retrospection di Claerbout, dove tutto il movimento di macchina si risolve all’interno della superficie di un’unica vecchia fotografia. Opere esposte Guy Debord, Critique de la Separation, 1961 17’ 23’’, bianco e nero, suono,1961, girato in film 35mm. Guy Debord's best known works are his theoretical books, Society of the Spectacle and Comments on the Society of the Spectacle. In addition to these he wrote a number of autobiographical books including Mémoires, Panégyrique, Cette Mauvaise Réputation..., and Considérations sur l'assassinat de Gérard Lebovici. He was also the author of numerous short pieces, sometimes anonymous, for the journals Potlatch, Les Lèvres Nues, Les Chats Sont Verts, and Internationale Situationniste. In broad terms, Debord's theories attempted to account for the spiritually debilitating modernisation of both the private and public spheres of everyday life by economic forces during the post-WW2 modernisation of Europe. He rejected as the twin faces of the same problem both capitalism of the West and the statism of the Eastern bloc. Alienation, Debord postulated, could be accounted for by the invasive forces of the 'spectacle' - "a social relation between people that is mediated by images". Debord's analysis developed the notions of "reification" and "fetishism of the commodity" pioneered by Karl Marx and Georg Lukács. This analysis probed the historical, economic and psychological roots of 'the media'. Central to this school of thought was the claim that alienation is more than an emotive description or an aspect of individual psychology: rather, it is a consequence of the mercantile form of social organization which has reached its climax in capitalism. Debord's first book, Mémoires, was bound with a sandpaper cover so that it would destroy other books placed next to it. Michael Snow, Wavelength, 1967-2007,15’, colore, suono, 1966-67, girato in film 16 mm, Michael Snow, born in Toronto in 1929, studied at Upper Canada College and the Ontario College of Art, is considered one of the mo is the subject of retrospectives in many countries. In his 2002 Village Voice review of Corpus Callosum, J. Hoberman writes: “Rigorously predicated on irreducible cinematic facts, Snow's structuralist epics —Wavelength and La Région Centrale— announced the imminent passing of the film era. Rich with new possibilities, Corpus Callosum heralds the advent of the next. Whatever it is, it cannot be too highly praised.”Corpus Calossum was screened at the Toronto, Berlin, Rotterdam, and the Los Angeles film festivals amongst others. In January 2003, Snow won the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, Douglas Edwards Independent Experimental Film/Video Award for Corpus Callosum. His numerous films have premiered in major film festivals all over the world. Five of his films have premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). In 2000, TIFF commissioned Snow with Atom Egoyan and David Cronenberg to make short films, Preludes, for the 25th Anniversary of the festival. Giulio Paolini, Unisono, 1974, 1’, bianco e nero, muto, 1974, video. Italian painter and sculptor, Giulio Paolini trained as a graphic designer and reacted against the picturesqueness of Art informel by concentrating on the basic components of painting: canvas, frame, paint of a single colour or even the abolition of paint in favour of a completely bare surface. Paolini soon turned to other media, in particular photography, as part of his continuing investigation of painting and of the status of the individual object. This sense that a work is not just itself, in the ‘here and now', but also the record of an earlier phase, led Paolini to an enquiry into the past. From the inception of Arte povera in the late 1960s Paolini was considered one of its leading exponents. Although he shared the conceptual emphasis of his colleagues, during the 1970s he turned increasingly to an investigation of the whole system of art as recorded in museums. The most famous paintings of the past, by such artists as Raphael, Poussin and de Chirico, are treated as a pretext for daring operations that involve either reassembling them piecemeal, breaking them up or even treating them as identical, as though they were ready-mades. Paolini's references to classicism and Neo-classicism, alongside his use of plaster casts of statuary or Corinthian columns, rephrased his ideas about the inter-relationship of past and present and between replication and originality. These works anticipated the revivalist trends that dominated art in the late 1970s and early 1980s, although he continued to adhere to a bare, unadorned means of expression. — Grove Art Online Chris Marker, La Jetée, 1962, 29’, bianco e nero, suono,1962, girato in film 35 mm. Chris Marker was born Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve, in Ulan Bator, Mongolia, 1921. In World War II he joined the Maquis (FTP). After the war he began to write and make films. He traveled to many socialist countries and documented what he saw in films and books. Les statues meurent aussi (1953) which he codirected with Alain Resnais was one of the first anticolonial films. Anatole Dauman produced the first films of Chris Marker and later produced two more of his films Sunday in Peking and Letter from Siberia. He became internationally known for the short film La Jetée (1962). It tells the story of a post-nuclear war experiment in time travel by using a series of filmed photographs developed as a photomontage of varying pace with limited narration and sound effects. This film was the inspiration for Mamoru Oshii's debut live action feature The Red Spectacles (1987) (later for Avalon) and also inspired Terry Gilliam's Twelve Monkeys (1995). It also inspired many of director Mira Nair's shots of the recent film, The Namesake. In 1982 Marker finished Sans Soleil, stretching the limits of what could be called a documentary. It is an essay, a montage, mixing pieces of documentary with fiction and philosophical comments, creating an atmosphere of dream and science fiction. The main themes are Japan, Africa, (the erasing of) memory and travel. A sequence in the middle of the film takes place in San Francisco, and heavily references Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo. Beginning with •ans Soleil he developed a deep interest in digital technology, which led to his film Level 5 (1996) and Immemory (1998, 2008), an interactive multimedia CD-ROM, produced for the Centre Pompidou (French language version) and from Exact Change (English version). Marker created a 19 minute multimedia piece in 2005 for The Museum of Modern Art in New York titled Owls at Noon Prelude: The Hollow Men which was influenced by T. S. Eliot's poem. Chris Marker lives in Paris and does not grant interviews. When asked for a picture of himself, he usually offers a photograph of a cat instead. His cat is named Guillaume-en-egypte. In the 2007 Criterion Collection release of La Jetée and Sans Soleil, Marker included a short essay entitled Working on a shoestring budget. He confessed to shooting all of Sans Soleil with a silent film camera and recording all the audio on a primitive audio cassette recorder. Marker also reminds the reader that only one short scene in La Jetée is of a moving image, only being able to borrow a movie camera for one afternoon while working on the film. John Baldessari, Ed Enderson reconstracts movie scenarios, 1973, 24’5”, bianco e nero, suono, video. John Baldessari’s cinema works primarily in the space of the spectator and opens up the filmmaking field to other language forms, to other story telling procedures. The film is no longer a narrative progression but rather a succession of near-still, suspended, photographic moments. Baldessari’s film aesthetic is built around his conceptual photographic work, an obsession with the non-link, with fragmentation and gaps. Images are both autonomous and integrated forms, time-image units referring to an ever-evolving film. It is up to the spectator to reconstruct and project a structure, to make up sequences from images. Title is without doubt one his most radical projects, a juxtaposition of extremely minimal images following each other without hierarchy nor direction. In this work Baldessari isolates and breaks up a classic film into its component parts. First the objects, the characters, the landscapes, then the frames associating two shapes, and finally the start of an action, of a dialogue. In this way he shows the precise making and manipulation of meaning, the tricks of cinematic space-time. In Six Colorful Inside Jobs he draws a parallel between a double process of life and creation. The video shows a room being painted in six different colors, each color of the spectrum corresponding to a day of the week. This work, which started as a performance / installation, integrates the artist as a comic figure faced with contemporary history — that of American painting — and shifts his function toward that of a house painter. Through this form of irony, Baldessari shows to what extent instruments and materials help him define the subtle limits between art and work, art and life. 4 Short Films is the product of the same ironic twist, a free and absurd association between time, matter, and objects. — Stéphanie Moisdon, Hollis Frampton, (nostalgia), 1971, 36’, bianco e nero, suono, 16mm. Hollis Frampton's most significant work is arguably Zorns Lemma (1970), a film which drastically altered perceptions towards experimental film at the time. He was seen as a structural filmmaker, a style that focused on the nature of film itself. In an interview with Robert Gardner he stated a discomfort with that term because it was too broad and didn't accurately reflect the nature of his work. Zorns Lemma remains the most widely known of this films. It is formed in three different sections. The first is a reading (by Joyce Wieland) of the Bay State Primer, a puritan work for children to learn the alphabet. The sentences used had foreboding themes such as "In Adams fall, we sinned all." The second section is based on a text based work by Carl Andre, which started out with an alphabetical list of words for each letter in the alphabet. Each subsequent list is replaced with a letter until it is just letters. In Zorns Lemma, the concept is reversed. It starts off with a twenty four letter alphabet (I/J and U/V are considered one letter), each letter shown for one second of screentime and then looping. The second cycle replaces each letter with a word that starts with each letter. Gradually the word stills are replaced by an active film shot, such as washing hands or peeling a tangerine until there are only moving images. It is an amazing 45 minutes of film. The third section contains a seemingly single shot of a couple walking across a snowy meadow. The sound is of six women reading one word at a time from Theory of Light. One interpretation of Zorns Lemma was that it was a comment on life's stages, the morality of the Bay State Primer being childhood, the sets of numbers representing maturing and interaction with the world, and the third part representing old age and death. After Zorns Lemma, he made the Hapax Legomena films, a series of seven films of which (nostalgia) is the best known. Several of these films explored the relation between sound and cinema, an area often disregarded in American avant-garde film, by demonstrating a disjointed relationship between the two. Poetic Justice explores a "cinema of the mind", wherein the film takes place in the viewers' imagination(s) as they read title cards. An extremely rare artist book edition of Poetic Justice was printed by the Visual Studies Workshop. Bill Viola, The Reflecting Pool, 1979, 7’ 33”, colore, suono, 1979, video. Bill Viola's The Reflecting Pool created from 1977 to 1979 is largely concerned with water. The camera angle of this film never moves. The camera is positioned in the same place for the entirety of the piece. In the beginning of the film you see a square pool which has the color and feel of an impressionist painting. You hear the sound of outside, both airplanes and running water. From the woods you slowly see a man appear and he stands by the edge of the pool. The viewer is captivated with him standing there staring at the pool. Then there is a freeze frame of the man doing a cannon ball into the pool. There is movement of water as if something had dropped but the image is still lingering above the pool. A reflection of a person walking is able to be made out in the water. There is no person walking to be causing that reflection though. Then you see the frozen image over the water disappear. Now there are two reflections walking. Again there is no figure to cause such a reflection. There are ripples of water in the pool and then the single image reflection appears again. Then the person that was in the cannon ball freeze frame swims to the edge of the pool and get out, walking back into the woods. The Reflecting Pool seems to be a full circle. Starting from the woods and ending in the woods. Is this an analogy for life — starting at one point and ending at another with many strange things occurring in between? Sometimes there is no explanation for incidents, just like the reflections and you don't necessarily need to see the splash to believe that when you jump you eventually are going to land. The person getting out of the pool was a way of answering whether or not he was in that pool. This film made you think about the process of human thought. How everything doesn't need to physically be shown to know they are there. — Jessica Boch, 2006 Gilbert & George, In the bush, 1970, 1’, bianco e nero, suono, 1970, in Gerry Schum, Identifications, video. Gilbert & George started to do performances because they did not see any point in the functioning of traditional sculpture. The collaborators' initial notoriety came in 1968 when they presented themselves as "living sculptures." By adopting the identity of "living sculptures"’ in both their art and their daily lives, they are not only creators, but also the art itself. In The Singing Sculpture, they are dressed in suits and painted gold as they moved in sync to a Flanagan and Allen song. From the beginning, they wanted to communicate beyond the narrow confines of the art world, adopting the slogan "Art for All." But by the public performance in a museum or a gallery they were aware of the fact that the pubic attendance was limited. Therefore they started to make videos so that they could reach a larger public. In the video In the Bush they wander through the park in their impeccable suits surrounded by the noise of the trees and the whistling birds. They present themselves in the middle of their world so we can imagine to some extend their thoughts and feelings. Luigi Ontani, Pucktriscobolo, 1985, 3’, colore, muto,1985, video. From the beginning, Luigi Ontani expressed this ceaseless roaming between other identities, places, and times through photographs which help him to project himself outside his own identity while maintaining his own features, which are never imitated, yet are effectively transferred. Never, not even during the 1970s, did Ontani use photography as a pure act of documentation in its infinite metamorphosis, but rather as a surface on which he can stratify illusion upon illusion, playing with colour in an anticonformistic way, using watercolour images, overlapping prints with captivating polychrome varnish. A practice through which he redefined photographic representation, taking it to extreme consequences until he transcended the means itself and abandoned it, flooding even ceramics and paintings, glass and watercolours, paper-pulp and wood with his figure and embarking on videos and films with the same spirit. Ontani collapses his production into his own persona. In fact, he has described his work as "the adventure I live as a person of art," and the most obvious device binding his diverse oeuvre (objects of many kinds, hand-colored photographs, performances) is his endless repetition of the image of his own face — that and an interest in history and myth, for Ontani the sources of stories and characters into or onto which he can insert or superimpose himself. Who knew, in 1970, how strong such themes would later become in art, flowering in the '80s and still developing in the '90s (one thinks, for example, of the photographs of Yasumasa Morimura). |
Chris Marker, La Jetée, 1962, 29’, bianco e nero, suono,1962, girato in film 35 mm.
Chris Marker, La Jetée, 1962, 29’, bianco e nero, suono,1962, girato in film 35 mm.
Chris Marker, La Jetée, 1962, 29’, bianco e nero, suono,1962, girato in film 35 mm.
Chris Marker, La Jetée, 1962, 29’, bianco e nero, suono,1962, girato in film 35 mm.
Guy Debord, Critique de la Separation, 1961, 17’ 23’’, bianco e nero, suono,1961, girato in film 35mm.
Luigi Ontani, Pucktriscobolo, 1985, 3’, colore, muto,1985, video.
Gilbert & George, In the bush, 1970, 1’, bianco e nero, suono, 1970, in Gerry Schum, Identifications, video.
Michael Snow, Wavelength, 1967-2007,15’, colore, suono, 1966-67, girato in film 16 mm.
John Baldessari, Ed Enderson reconstracts movie scenarios, 1973, 24’5”, bianco e nero, suono, video.
Bill Viola, still from The Reflecting Pool, 1979, 7’ 33”, colore, suono, 1979, video. |
John Baldessari, Ed Enderson reconstructs movie scenarios, 1973, 24’5”, bianco e nero, suono, video. |
Jem Cohen, Still from This is a Story of New York, 22', black and white, audio,1987, shot on 35mm film. |
Cronostasi. Bending the Perception of Time |
Robin Rhode,Still, Promenade, 2008, 5', black and white, music by Arenor Anuku, video animation.
Jimmie Durham, Still, A Kinetic Sculpture in two dimensions, 2006, 37", colour, audio, 2006, video.
T.J. Wilcox, still, Garland 5, 6' 49", black and white, silent, 2005, 16mm film.
T.J. Wilcox, still, Garland 5, 6' 49", black and white, silent, 2005, 16mm film.
Cyprien Gaillard, Still Real Remnants of Fictive Wars V, 2004, 7', colour, silent, 2004, video.
Robin Rhode,Still, Promenade, 2008, 5', black and white, music by Arenor Anuku, video animation.
Robin Rhode,Still, Promenade, 2008, 5', black and white, music by Arenor Anuku, video animation.
Simon Starling, Still, Autoxylocyclopyrobos, 2006, colour, silent, carousel of 36 colour slides.
Jem Cohen, Still from This is a Story of New York, 22', black and white, audio,1987, shot on 35mm film.
Jem Cohen, Still from This is a Story of New York, 22', black and white, audio,1987, shot on 35mm film.
Jem Cohen, Still from This is a Story of New York, 22', black and white, audio,1987, shot on 35mm film.
Harun Farocki, Still, Images of the World and the Inscription of War, 1988, 75', colour, audio, 16mm.
Harun Farocki, Still, Images of the World and the Inscription of War, 1988, 75', colour, audio, 16mm. |
GAM This second, and last, part of the exhibition re-proposes investigations on the relationship between filmic time and photographic time, focusing on the historical period following the one presented in the first part. The works on show have been produced between the mid eighties and 2008. Exhibiting artists belong to two different generations and come from different educational backgrounds. Nevertheless, they have all experimented, in a more or less exclusive manner, forms of time-based art, coming upon photographic culture and temporal suspension during their investigations. The exhibition path starts off from the relationship between documentary films and photography with two works by Jem Cohen and T.J. Wilcox, while Harun Farocki's film picks up on Debord and Baldessari's analysis on the social and political aspects of photography. Works by Simon Starling, Jimmie Durham and Cyprien Gaillard introduce the subject of entropy and of the Western teleological time matrix in the relationship between still image and filmic flow. David Claerbout embarks on a voyeuristic relationship with film and photography that echoes Barthes' punctum, while Robin Rhode's work, at the end of the path, leads every possible still image analysis back to the harmony of animation, a combination of music and dance. Jem Alan Cohen (born 1962, Kabul, Afghanistan) is a New York City-based filmmaker known for his observational portraits of urban landscapes, blending of media formats (16mm, Super 8, video) and collaborations with music artists. He was born in Afghanistan where his father was working for the U.S. Agency for Information and Development. He graduated from Wesleyan University in 1984. Cohen's longer works include his feature film, CHAIN, (Berlin Film Festival premiere, 2004), and the experimental documentary, Instrument, (Rotterdam Film Fest premiere, 1999) a portrait of the D.C.-punk band Fugazi that was ten years in the making. Another film that covers a ten year arc, Benjamin Smoke, is about the life of the frontman of the Atlanta, Georgia band Smoke. Other works of note are Lost Book Found, his Walter Benjamin-inspired portrait of New York City, Buried in Light, a series of connected Central and Eastern European city portraits, and his short film about the late Elliott Smith, Lucky Three. In 2002, Cohen made Chain X Three, a precursor to the CHAIN feature film, which was exhibited as a three-channel installation. His concert film of the Dutch band The Ex, Building a Broken Mousetrap, premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in 2006. Cited inspirations (to which his films have been dedicated) include filmmakers Jean Vigo, Chris Marker, and John Cassavetes. Viewers of a certain age respond immediately to the sound of the 16mm projector that T.J. Wilcox uses to show his films. The powerful auditory input triggers memories of 1950s and 1960s paneled rec rooms, shag rugs, and the family vacations and birthday parties that were the main subjects of these reels. Younger viewers may process this as nostalgia-and that is exactly the complex recollection that the artist counts on. Wilcox's own practice, in fact, employs this collage effect. He first shoots in 8mm, then pieces together the work frame by frame, adding found footage and new clips; the film is then copied onto video for editing, and finally transferred to 16mm for projection. — Alicia G. Longwell Between vandalism and minimal aesthetics, romanticism and Land Art, the work of Cyprien Gaillard (born 1980 in Paris, lives and works in Paris) questions man's traces in nature in an iconoclastic way. Whether he commissions a traditional landscape painter to paint colourful views of housing projects in Swiss suburbs, surrounded by their luxurious natural environment (Swiss Ruins, 2005), or introduces the image of a distinct tower-block into a Dutch landscape etching from the 17th Century, hence transforming the naturalist visions of Rembrandt, Anthony Waterloo and Jan Hackaert into building lots (Belief in the Age of Disbelief, 2005), Cyprien Gaillard represents contemporary architecture as a modern ruin on the verge of being taken over by nature, just like French ruiniste painter Hubert Robert did with the Louvre in the 18th Century, thus perfectly illustrating Denis Diderot's quote: "One must ruin a palace to make it an object of interest." Like Robert Smithson, Cyprien Gaillard's work deals with the notion of entropy, a movement of transformation irreversibly aiming towards chaos. In the short-lived Land Art works of the series Real Remnants of Fictive Wars, he activates industrial fire extinguishers in carefully chosen landscapes (amongst which Smithson's iconic Spiral Jetty), releasing a thick white powder that creates a vaporous cloud as well as a veiled threat. Exploring the same notion of entropy in a romantic way, the video Desniansky Raion (2007, 29') constantly alternates between order and chaos, from a pitched battle between two hooligan gangs on a parking lot to a grandiose show of lasers and fireworks on the facade of a housing block before it is torn down, to end with a dangerously low altitude flight over a multitude of stark towers rising into a snowy and melancholic landscape. Jimmie Durham was born in 1940 in Washington, Arkansas and became active in theatre, performance and literature related to the US civil rights movement in the 1960s. His first solo exhibition was in Austin, Texas in 1965. Durham moved to Geneva, Switzerland in 1968. He studied at L'École des Beaux-Arts, Geneva until being drawn back to the US in 1973 through his involvement with the American Indian Movement (AIM). From 1973 until 1980 Durham worked as a political organizer with AIM where he became a member of the movement’s Central Council. He also served as director of the International Indian Treaty Council and representative to the United Nations. When AIM fragmented at the end of the 1970s Durham, who was then living in New York City, returned his attention to art, using detritus and other found objects to create sculptures that radically challenged conventional representations of North American Indians. He exhibited and published essays frequently and from 1981 to 1983 he was the director of the Foundation for the Community of Artists in New York. In 1983 West End Press published Columbus Day, a book of his poems and in 1988 his poetry was also included in Harper’s Anthology of 20th Century Native American Poetry. In 1987 Durham moved to Cuernavaca, Mexico, where he was based until moving to Europe in 1994. During his time in Mexico, Durham exhibited widely, including at the Whitney Biennial, documenta IX, ICA London, Exit Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp and the Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels. He also published a number of essays in books and periodicals, including Art Forum, Art Journal and Third Text. In 1993 a collection of his essays, A Certain Lack of Coherence, was published by Kala Press. Since moving to Europe, Durham’s work has focused primarily on the relationship between architecture, monumentality and national narratives. His anti-architectural sculptures, performances and videos seek to liberate architecture’s privileged material, stone, from its metaphorical associations with monumentality, stability and permanence. His exhibitions in Europe have included venues such as the Hamburg Kunstverein, FRAC in Reims, Wittgenstein Haus in Vienna, Kunstverein Munich, and the Venice Biennale, among many others. In 2005 Durham co-curated The American West, an attack on cowboy and Indian mythology, at Compton Verney, UK. In 1995 Phaidon published Jimmie Durham, a comprehensive survey of his art, with contributions by Laura Mulvey, Dirk Snauwaert, and Mark Alice Durant. Simon Starling (born 1967 in Epsom, Surrey) is an English conceptual artist and was the winner of the 2005 Turner Prize. He studied photography at Trent Polytechnic Nottingham and then attended Glasgow School of Art. The idea of efficiency is a theme that informs much of his work, including Tabernas Desert Run (2004), featuring a bicycle fuelled by hydrogen and oxygen that he rode 66 kilometres across Spain's Tabernas Desert. The only waste product was water, which he then used to paint a watercolour of a cactus that he had seen on his trip. Tabernas Desert Run was one of his Turner Prize show exhibits, but the piece which attracted most media attention was titled Shedboatshed, and consisted of a wooden shed, which he had at one time dismantled, converted into a boat (in which he had sailed down the River Rhine) and then turned back into the original shed in Basel, Switzerland. The Times quoted Charles Thomson, leader of the anti-conceptual art Stuckists: "The Turner should be renamed the B&Q diy prize." Subsequently two other newspapers took up this idea, buying a shed from B&Q, and turning it into a boat. As of 2005, Starling lives and works in Berlin and Glasgow. Harun Farocki was born in Nový Jicin (Neutitschein) in 1944, in German-annexed Czechoslovakia, From 1966-68 attended the Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin (DFFB). Farockis has made close to 90 films, including three feature films, essay films and documentaries. In 1976 in Basel, he and Hanns Zischler staged Heiner Müller's plays The Battle and Tractor. Since 1966 he has been involved with numerous publications: 1974-1984: editor and author of the magazine Filmkritik (München). Since 1966 he has collaborated with other filmmakers (as script writer, actor and producer). Since 1990 he has presented numerous exhibitions and installations in galleries and museums. Since 2004 he has been a visiting professor at the Akademie für Bildende Künste, Vienna, Austria. Antwerp-based artist David Claerbout’s video and digital photography projects intervene in our sense of linear time by slowing down, speeding up or even stopping time in filmic narratives. Claerbout’s video installations mine our slippery relationship to duration. Presenting mysterious and compellingly incomplete storylines — such as a female figure emerging from a home, turning towards the camera and waving goodbye to the viewer in slow motion in Long Goodbye — in ways that separate narrative time from viewing time, Claerbout’s actors and dialogue quickly become the backdrop for the real subject of his work: the shifts in light and movements in environment that mark the passing of both hours and eons. Robin Rhode is a South African artist, born 1976 in Cape Town, South Africa, now based in Berlin, Germany. In 1998, he obtained a diploma in Fine Art from Technikon Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, followed by a postgraduate program at theSouth African School of Film, Television and Dramatic Art in Johannesburg. Working predominantly with everyday material like charcoal, chalk and paint, Rhode started out creating performances that are based on his own drawings of objects that he interacts with. He expanded and refined this practice into creating photography sequences and digital animations. These works are characterized by an interdisciplinary approach that brings aspects of performance, happening, drawing, film and photography together. Rhode often returns to his native South Africa, creating work in the streets of Johannesburg and continuously registering the traces of poverty and social inequality. An outstanding characteristic of his works is his addressing of social concerns in a playful and productive manner, incorporating these issues into his practice without simplifying or judging them. Reminiscent of practices of street culture, Rhode usually works in public spaces, using walls, public basketball fields or just the street as his “canvas." His preferred materials are easily accessible ones like charcoal and paint. As a result, his works stand out through their simplicity and their formal clarity, emphasizing the idea over lavishness of production. Rhode transforms simple shapes into elements of narratives, interacting with only imagined presences. This narrative practice goes back to an initiation ritual at South African high schools — that Rhode himself experienced - where new students are forced to draw and interact with their drawing. Rhode’s reference to this event takes this social gesture further into a playful mode of "addressing cultural phenomena." Rhode’s stories often include a moment of conflict and possible failure. The black and white 26-panel photographic work Juggla for instance depicts a circus-like clown. Prodding at this form of popular entertainment, the faceless character is at the mercy of the wealthy, juggling or holding nothing. With Juggla, Rhode references Minstrel Carnivals from the Caribbean and South Africa where troupes, made up of members from a particular neighborhood of the city, are assembled and each is expected to parade and perform for its local community in exchange for food and drink. Rhode also pays homage to the fervent utopian ideals of the Bauhaus, implicating Oscar Schlemmer’s seminal Triadic Ballet from the twenties, a performance experiment created in the Bauhaus studios in the absence of a theatre space, balancing “emotional impulses” with an agenda of political agitation. His drawings of objects like a bicycle, a motorbike, a car, or of abstract shapes and patterns are employed as physical elements in a story, often alluding to the act of creation itself as in Promenade (2008). Works on show include Jem Cohen, This is a Story of New York, 22', black and white, audio,1987, shot on 35mm film; T.J. Wilcox, Garland 5, 6' 49", black and white, silent, 2005, 16mm film; Cyprien Gaillard, Real Remnants of Fictive Wars V, 2004, 7', colour, silent, 2004, video; Jimmie Durham, A Kinetic Sculpture in two dimensions, 2006, 37", colour, audio, 2006, video; Simon Starling, Autoxylocyclopyrobos, 2006, colour, silent, carousel of 36 colour slides; Harun Farocki, Images of the World and the Inscription of War, 1988, 75', colour, audio, 16mm; David Claerbout, Untitled/Retrospection, 2000, endless loop, black and white, audio, video; and Robin Rhode, Promenade, 2008, 5', black and white, music by Arenor Anuku, video animation. |
T.J. Wilcox, still, Garland 5, 6' 49", black and white, silent, 2005, 16mm film. |
