MORE MILK YVETTE

JOHANNA LINSLEY on INVASIVE ACTION: GIRL MONSTER @ THE DONAU FESTIVAL

2009-07-08T03:27:00.001-07:00

Describe this Girl Monster, then.

Spotted at the Donau Festival in Krems, a small city in Austria not far from Vienna. 25 April, 2009.

The Donau Festival presents music, performance and video, skewing towards the avant-garde aisle of available contemporary pop/art. Operating since 2005 under the direction of Tomas Zierhofer-Kin, the big headliners in April this year were bands like Sonic Youth, Antony and the Johnsons, and Spiritualized. Also on offer was interventionist fare – among others, Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop-Shopping, and an ongoing installation by Slum-TV, an organization of videographers from Kenya. 'Fake Reality' was the theme: 'a seven-day attempt to respond to the unreality of reality of our times by means of various artistic media and positions.'

On the fourth day, the Girl Monster appeared.

It started in 2006, when an audio-fanzine also called Girl Monster came out, 'bringing together contributions by 62 female and cross-gender artists from the fields of music, theory and art between the years of 1978 and 2006: the initial spark for a Girl Monster philosophy, aiming to encourage female artists to gain new freedom, be unique and wild, thus creating a platform for the further development of a culture.'

Organized by Melissa Logan and Alex Murray-Leslie, members of the Chicks on Speed collective, the lineup at the Donau Festival was queer and feminist and dangerous. Music from The Raincoats, M.E.N., Koko von Napoo, Yo! Majesty, Anat Ben-David with Regina Lind. Video compiled by artist A.L. Steiner, with work coming from Joshua Thorson, EMR (Math Bass and Dylan Mira), Patty Chang, Wynne Greenwood & Nicole Eisenman, K8 Hardy and Lesbians on Ecstacy, Mariah Garnett, Tara Mateik, Celeste Dupuy-Spencer. A dance called C.L.U.E. by robbinschild and A.L. Steiner, performance by Ann Liv Young with Isabel Lewis. Then at the end, a massive Girl Monster Orchestra. At least twenty-five people on stage, lots playing instruments, lots singing, some tapping out silent chords onto spike-heeled boots, a videographer dodging, stinging, recording – all conducted by producer/musician Gustav.

Is it a friendly Girl Monster?

Girl Monster has lots of friends, anyway. DIY is an understandable but insufficient description of the underlying principles operating here. The bands eschew big labels (Chicks on Speed have their own label) and a purposefully amateurish aesthetic links all of the artists, but collectivity and group effort reign supreme – nobody is doing it by herself. LTTR and Ridykeulous are other collectives with members represented in this bunch, and behind it all there are loads and loads of producers, beat-makers, designers, programmers, not to mention fans who document and promote and keep the whole thing going.

Friendly, though, is also an insufficient term. The Girl Monster has teeth, and it isn't always nice.

Fur, feathers or scales?

The Girl Monster looks great.

Anat Ben David in a dress fringed with lovely, synthetic, blonde wig-hair, and then later she had on terry-cloth towels and black electrical tape. robbinschilds rolling around in piles of monochrome t-shirts and skirts, dressing and undressing. JD Samson (also from Le Tigre) in splashy print shorts and, for part of the M.E.N. set, a headdress shaped like a suburban house with sloped roof. Jwl B and Shunda K from Yo! Majesty leapt out of their shirts altogether at the end.

Fashion is an element in the production constellation, floating alongside music, text, reproduced images. Taken largely from outside the mass-consumer field, clothes are as important as the mechanical and digital elements.

Where are the Girl Monster's parents?

Both self-generating and a grateful child, the Girl Monster comes from nowhere and finds itself everywhere. The idea is to make history, in two senses of the phrase. On the one hand, the artists are marking a break, attempting a new way to be queer and hot and not give a fuck. And on the other hand, they're asserting a genealogy. The Girl Monster Orchestra combined groups who'd played less than a dozen times together with the Raincoats – one of the most significant post-punk bands and a major reference for anyone interested in music and women. The Orchestra was interrupted by a performance lecture by A.L. Steiner on feminist art history. With the urgency of a team coach, Steiner insisted: 'Come on! You have to know this stuff!' Feminists know well that looking back is looking forward – radical reproduction means populating the past.

What does the Girl Monster eat?

A diet of kombucha, macrobiotic snack foods, weiner schnitzel-burgers and alcohol.

Is it a fictional Girl Monster?

Well, it has a volatile relationship with the actual. In other, less pretentious words: Chicks on Speed was very loudly a 'fake band' until they put out an album. This network of artists has forged careers in a progression from joke to game to lifestyle to institution. Though actually, it's less linear than that. Professionalism is an object of ambiguity for all of the acts under the Girl Monster umbrella. An extreme savvy about the subtleties of pop, sex, image and the commercial market rides alongside a projected disregard for standardization, restrictive codes and normative lifestyles.

Is the Girl Monster a girl?

More complicated than that. No, not more complicated – more complex.

Is it a political Girl Monster?

Is the revolution a party? (Possibly*)

* Girl Monster totally rocked in terms of super-exciting reconfigurations of identity. Queer, female, genderqueer, ethnically and racially progressive. And in terms of opposition, the message is anti-war, anti-globalization, anti-authoritarian.

The problems that come along with a self-organizing, totally flexible, anti-professional ethic are under-recognized, though. Neo-liberalism loves this model of production – low cost, labour-efficient, market-responsive and appealing to a culturally privileged demographic. A much longer essay could be devoted to the difficult intersections between the DIY ethic, the DIY aesthetic and the DIY industry.

But! It's maybe even more significant to question how contemporary corporate capitalism has appropriated certain deeply pleasurable activities that were long associated with the Left – creative processes, collaboration, self-direction. It's a task for progressive, even oppositional, politics to figure out how to get these activities back – how to make the movement feel good.

A WITHHOLDING CRITICISM: SUSAN HILLER'S CRITICAL PRACTICE OF WRITING AND TALKING

2009-05-28T05:13:00.000-07:00

Susan Hiller, The Provisional Texture of Reality: Selected Talks and Texts, 1977-2007, ed. Alexandra M.Kokoli (JRP Ringier, Zurich, & Les Presses du réel, Dijon, 2008). ISBN 978-3-905829-56-3.

There is a delicate balance throughout the thirty years of talks, catalogue essays, introductions and interviews that comprise The Provisional Texture of Reality. If Hiller demonstrates a verbal facility in regard both to her own work and broader structures and histories of art and thought, she is also acutely aware that if she could just talk or write about the issues involved then there wouldn't be any point making the art itself.

So the writings here give rein to that analytical verve, but always hold back, maintaining a space for the art work itself to function. Re-phrase that as the balance between logic, reason and coherence alongside something more mysterious and unfathomable, and an argument could be made for this being the key subject of Hiller's artistic output as a whole since the 1970's.

This critical-reserve concerns both her own art work and that of the artists about whom Hiller talks and writes. The first section of this book, then, is comprised of explorations-cum-tributes concerning Tarkovsky, O'Keefe, Helio Oiticica, Yves Klein, Henry Moore, Jackson Pollock and Kurt Schwitters. Hiller's tone varies. Her Pollock piece is the closest she comes to art history, seeking to unfold a web of underappreciated artists and influences she saw as leading up to Pollock. The piece on Tarkovsky moves quickest from its ostensible subject to a broader web of ideas and her own practice. But perhaps that is itself a tribute to the astonishing relevance Hiller finds in Solaris: its existence, like the other work she reflects upon, as a kind of viral cultural contagion.

Often - as was no doubt expected by those inviting her to speak at numerous themed conferences and symposia - Hiller is weaving out from each artist's work into a broader web of cultural connections as a way of connecting to her own work. There is a sense throughout Provisional Texture of attaining some clear ground where the self, the work, and the broader culture are all held in balance, and prioritising one is more choice-in-the-moment than imperative. The opening of "O'Keefe As I See Her" states a method applicable to many of the essays in this collection:

In a way, this is a collection of detours around the subject, circling in on it. It's like a drawing, where the negative space is as important as the marks, and where individual marks don't mean much on their own. In the process, I've found my lines of thought converging or overlapping to define a tentative shape that may represent a sighting or wish for something that will emerge more clearly in the future. (33)

Hiller's balance and reserve doesn't stop her making astute critical points. In the O'Keefe essay she raises many issues that have preoccupied academic art historians, but always founded on that initial statement of ambulatory method. Her critical response comes from her ongoing attempt to think (inter-) contextually. So here is O'Keefe in relation to her paintings, in relation to lots of other painters, to her depiction in Stieglitz photos, in relation to Hiller's own biography of engagement with O'Keefe, to Linda Nochlin's gender focussed criticism, and so on and so on.

Susan Hiller reflects on how much easier it is to talk about an art work when it's not in the room with you...

Essays on Oiticica and Klein focus on the difficulties of preserving anything like an accurate and authentic picture of their work. What we can access of Oiticica's work is "only a collapsed sign of the larger work he made available...relics of a dead past." Klein, by contrast, "took death into account when he made it explicit in his practice of deliberately creating works that were already 'only traces" (55). Hence " his relics do not seem to convey more to those who knew the artist personally than to those who didn't." (55)

Such concerns with the object and related processes of collecting, categorising, curatorship and the museological, relate to Hiller's background as an anthropologist. This emerges here as a biographical detail, an obvious influence on her intellectual approach, and a source of irritation to an artist often finding herself victim of, as she would see it, a lazy critical willingness to identify her works as exhibiting anthropological tendencies. If Hiller wanted to work within anthropological frameworks, her own impatient, somewhat irritated position seems to be, then she wouldn't have abandoned her original career plans.

This is to a degree somewhat disingenuous because Hiller, at least early on in her career, cultivates and depends upon the connection to anthropology as both a source of income and that through which the distinctiveness of her work can be articulated. Here Hiller reviews two exhibitions that, via content and context, weave a fraught amalgam of art and anthropology. In these essays - from 1979 and 1986 - Hiller is not accumulating a "collection of detours" that slowly circle in associatively on their subject. The ideas that lead to these exhibitions are colonial hangovers, and Hiller's aim is to highlight and skewer them with as much clarity as possible.

Thus her review of Sacred Circles: 2,000 Years of North American Art (Hayward Gallery, 7 Oct 1977- 16 Jan 1978) builds to where the show becomes - at least reading about it thirty years later - a kind of anti-credo for her work as a whole:

This exhibition, then, is really about using 'art' to cover up some historical truths; about using aesthetic judgements as a way of avoiding moral judgements; about expressing admiration for spiritual values while manifesting only materialistic ones; about admiring the 'work' while ignoring its meanings; about voiding symbols of their complexity by eliminating their context; and about valuing art objects more than societies.

To say that the purpose of the exhibition is 'that this art should at least be properly regarded for the sake of a better understanding among peoples', is, at the very least, an inadequate way to render justice to the peoples whose works are represented. (101)

Hiller's argument is all the more convincing for how - on the occasion of a review-essay for Studio International - she moves from condemnation towards demonstrating some practical alternatives. Several pages are given over to models of the kind of catalogue entry a non-colonial ethnography and curating would practice. Where an existing catalogue essay refers to "a wampum belt [that] served as a gift, also as a binding symbol of an agreement," Hiller appends to the beginning of the entry the note: "THE MAKING OF TREATIES WITH THE NATIVE AMERICANS WAS CONSIDERED PURELY GESTURAL BY THE WHITES." (96)

This efficacy throughout Hiller's counter-practice prevents many of the pieces in The Provisional Texture of Reality from being circumstance-bound musings. It also explains how Hiller negotiates the divide between artistic and academic, the creative and the theoretical - happily critiquing the later whilst holding to herself its authority.

Hiller herself explores all these issues in her still clear and powerful talk "Women, Language, and Truth", presented at a panel on 'Women's Practice in Art', organised by the Women's Free Art Alliance" in 1977. Hiller's central conviction is the impossibility of anybody or any-thing being fully represented by any available position. Noting how we are each "simultaneously the beneficiary of our cultural heritage and the victim of it" (115), Hiller goes on to observe that "It is always a question of following a thought, first incoherent, later more expressible, through its process of emergence out of and during the inconsistencies of experience, into language."

All this in the first two paragraphs. By the end of the talks two pages Hiller has offered, not a conclusion - "To sum up would be premature, obviously" - but three working proposals that clarify her non-positional and largely upper case free strategies:

1.all my ideas begin as part of the necessity for truth-telling in art practice;

2.not being entirely at home in the ordinary, dominant languages make this less than simple. At the same time, it gives me a wide range of options; and

3.the greatest self-betrayal for an artist is not indulging in anarchic or careless opposition to rational politics, but in fashioning acceptable SEMBLANCES of truth. (117)

Of course, over the time span and career of this book, there is the position of the Self to consider. Or, rather, such a career as Hiller's has to find its own way of not becoming a fixed position, whilst exploring a focussed range of themes, and meeting the professional and commercial pressures to make new work. Hiller herself articulates her anxieties over this in "An Incomplete Text on Commissions", a - perhaps tellingly - previously unpublished text from 2003. It also explains something of why From the Freud Museum has become so emblematic of Hiller's oeuvre.

Moments before giving an important lecture about her work, Susan Hiller performs an emergency resuscitation on her inner anthropologist...

Comprehensive as this collection is, it remains necessary to view it alongside Barabara Einzig's Thinking About Art: Conversations with Susan Hiller, which gives a sense of the different forms - and image-text relationships - Hiller's lectures have employed. Provisional Textures is poised between a Collected Writings and a snapshot of a writing and talking practice as a place for theorising, engagement and public address. Even though some texts - like Incomplete - gives a presence to Hiller's private writing, this is not a place for notes and other linguistic doodling - as collections of artists' writings often fetishise.

By the third section of this collection, however, I had begun to have a mental picture of Hiller, sifting through a wad of invitations to conferences on art and dreams, art and surrealism, art and anthropology, art and any paranormal phenomena you care to mention, trying to select those with enough of a space of difference to warrant the inevitable repetition. One that seems to warrant the effort is a conference on Body & Soul in Edinburgh in 2000. Hiller concludes her talk by noting, as the book began, her interest in "perspectives where figure-ground relationships can be allowed to shift" (249) and how "not editing-out and not forcing strange juxtapositions and unanswered questions to conform to theory is an aspect of my style, almost a signature."

But the talk also offers a chance to develop ideas around the body that are unarticulated elsewhere in this book. It suggests a motivation for these writings: let the flow of one's professional life as an artist, the opportunities that arise to talk and write, be a way of revitalising thinking and artistic practice itself. In her writing-talking about the body Hiller attempts a methodology that avoids becoming 'a position' - using one's knowledge and abilities, but always willing to start again, refusing certainties and obsessive originality, looking for clarity, the genuine engagement with the highly familiar:

The word 'body' seems very now, very contemporary. The word 'soul' sounds romantic and deeply unfashionable.

The word 'body' makes me very cross when used in connection with contemporary exhibitions, art of the body, the body in art, body art, etc., etc. In my opinion, body can be evoked but not represented. Pictures of bodies I don't think have much to do with 'body.'

Body is felt from the inside ... body is empathy. Body is communicated through touch and smell as much as sight. Body in art would be traces, stains, smears, sounds, not images. Body is blurry ... Handwriting is body. Voice is body.

IS THAT A UTOPIA IN YOUR VALISE?: HANS ULRICH OBRIST'S A BRIEF HISTORY OF CURATING

2009-05-22T00:02:00.000-07:00

Hans Ulrich Obrist, A Brief History of Curating, JRP Ringier and Les Presses du Réel, Zurich, 2008. ISBN 978-3-905829-55-6. Interviews with Anne d'Harnoncourt, Werner Hofmann, Jean Leering, Franz Meyer, Seth Siegelaub, Walter Zanini, Johannes Cladders, Lucy Lippard, Walter Hopps, Pontus Hultén and Harald Szeemann.

Hans Ulrich Obrist's interview project has the defeat of the book form in its sights. Spanning different generations of artists, curators, writers, architects, and scientists, its gathering together - such as Charta's 1,000 page volume in 2003- can seem unnecessarily monumental and static for a project that, by the time of publication, is already well into further real or projected volumes. Less than paper and a spine, it needs a canny database capable of endlessly arranging and rearranging its subjects according to particular themes, subjects, connections - with a LUCKY SEARCH function to enable the unexpected.

That said, I hope any self-respecting database, given the search field "curating, history of," would come up with something like the eleven cogent, perceptive interviews collected in A Brief History of Curating. If the Charta tome is a sprawling Documenta of a bookwork, and The Conversation Series a pleasing but sometimes too ephemeral show in a valise, A Brief History is about right. Although its subject area is more dispersed and fleeting, it fits alongside Amy Merchant's Challenging Art: Artforum 1962-74 as a model of oral history as an appropriate form for revealing the complexities (and vagaries) of how modern art, its practices and institutions came into being.

Gathering interviews conducted - and sometimes previously published - between 1996 and 2007, part of the pleasure of this book comes from its multiple functions. This is Obrist the curator thinking through his own practice in conversation with his elders. It is also a broader, more objective attempt to construct and document a history of exhibition making - working methods, practices, biographies, self-definitions - where it is lacking. It recognises and celebrates individuals, whilst using them as gateways to other curators, shows, geographies and ideas.

Curating emerges, then, as a profession of divergent, multi-located practices and practitioners, none of which would have used the word themselves. Thus, Harald Szeemann was originally involved in theatre, but turned to art because "it gives you the same rhythm as in theater, only you don't have to be on stage constantly." Lucy Lippard defines herself as a writer, but one for whom putting on shows articulates issues that seem important. Such biographical variety poses a striking alternative to the latest professionalised crop of Curating MA graduates.

Obrist looks at these diverse practices and asks: what is curating? Talking with Anne d'Harnoncourt he lists the ideas that have emerged from or informed the making of this book: John Cage says curating should be a "utility"; Walter Hopps quotes Duchamp's notion that " a curator shouldn't stand in the way"; Felix Feneon says the curator should be a pedestrian bridge [une passerelle]. D'Harnoncourts own definition is one of the books most lucid:

I see curators as enablers, if you will, as people who are crazy about art, and they want to share their being crazy about art with other people. But I think they also have to be very careful not to impose their own reactions too much, their own prejudices, on other people. And that's hard because on the one hand you can only be yourself; you can only see the work that you see with the eyes that you have. I think of curators as opening people's eyes to the pleasure of art, to the strength of art, to the subversiveness of art, whatever it is. (179)

Clear and lucid this might be, but it is also, importantly, vague and amorphous. Whilst interviews like these can be used to build a history of names, dates, exhibition titles and layouts, there is a vaguer history of intention and experience filtered through memory that is consistent with the fleeting nature of the exhibition. I found myself reading these interviews as examples of a curator's working language: a way of talking about their work that is poetic - in the sense of working through suggestion - as much as it is literal and descriptive. Is it, I wondered, in the poetic register of this working language that the legacy of curating has to be transmitted?

Harald Szeemann discovers that the history of curating is far stranger than he expected...

If this is the case, then D'Harnoncourt is at the more literal end of this spectrum: transmitting the curators legacy as a way of seeing - shortly after this definition she quotes Gilbert and George's phrase "to be with art is all we ask." At the other end, again, is Harald Szeemann, whose coinages for his various organisations - Agency of spiritual guestwork, Museum of Obsessions - seek consciously to convey energy like some Beuys fat piece on a chair. Such phrases have a certain continuity - perhaps we can inhabit them, take them as our own, and see what happens. They also emerge here as deeply personal coinages, articulations of private formative structures and assumptions.

If each interview proposes a private language then what of the activity that language arises to describe? Perhaps what the interview form reveals best - particularly when, as here, most subjects are remembering things from 30-40 years prior - is the curator as a particular way of thinking, responding, making connections and arguments in space and through history, geography and the contemporary. Often this involves the establishing of certain spatial coordinates. So whilst Pontus Hulten produces a trilogy of horizontally conceived exhibitions (Paris-New York, Paris-Berlin, and Paris-Moscow), Werner Hofmann observes:

I then became aware of the period of Goethe as a quarry, as an inexhaustible conglomeration of periods of artistic experiments. I worked with these coordinates for a long time. (134)

And this (conceptual) spatiality develops further as a method for the making of exhibitions:

I bored into the tunnel from two ends. On the one hand from the material that was on offer, and on the other from the theory. So both deductively and inductively. Twelve chapters arose from this about everything that can happen with art, or what it can be misused for, and what results from it. (145-6)

Hofmann's clear intellectual enthusiasm and ambition is actually a fairly understated example of one dominant tendency of many of the interviews: to see exhibition making as an attempt at utopia. All exhibitions are utopias, says D'Harnoncourt, and Obrist's oft-mentioned notion of exhibition as 'lab' seems entwined with the provisional, temporary and problematic freedom of the utopia.

However, if this book is usefully thought of as a nineteenth century novel, the key theme would be the entwining of this utopian impulse with the politics and workings of public and private institutions. So, to generalise from different interviews, we see a curators own tension between large scale, ambitious, slow to realise projects, and the need for quick, responsive, flash projects, mapped onto the various architectural and administrative possibilities/pressures of self-run projects, temporary museums, biennales, large institutions, and the creation of museums from scratch.

This, of course, is a fraught process and, for young curators, the book is a tool kit of different methods for working through such tensions. See, particularly, Seth Siegelaub and, er, blue period Lucy Lippard: dematerializing the exhibition into a box or a book or an envelope (and who both, in some sense, eventually remove themselves from curating completely). Or Pontus Hultén, whose work is invested in creating a new kind of museum, perhaps closest to the multi-focus and activities of, say, Tate Modern today. Or Szeemann, again, dependent on the resources of large institutions for his huge projects, then withdrawing from such organisations and making a show in his own home of his father's barbering tools.

For the more practically minded, this story can also be told through its details: changes to the number of shows per year and the speed of turn around, the presence or not of administration, insurance and security. Most interviews lament the passing of a more relaxed time, when a Mondrian could be casually transported to the gallery by a curator in a Taxi. Then, too, there is the articulate and moving discussions of the role of a permanent collection, its dialogue with the seemingly more exciting world of temporary exhibitions. Hultén hauntingly points out that without the permanent collection ones work can disappear overnight, leaving no trace.

Obrist himself, meanwhile, is much more a participant in these dialogues than many of The Conversation Series, where he takes the role of enabling his subjects to express themselves fully within an unquestioned aura of their own brilliance. Here he is more particular, trying to place his own research in juxtaposition with his subjects, fleshing out the name or isolated fact, always with the oft-declared aim of making - in Eric Hobsbawm's phrase - "a protest against forgetting."

As, too, the history he chronicles ends with his own pervasive curatorial presence. The dexterous shifting from small to large, near and far, lasting and fleeting, that Obrist presents, is very much what he himself has made a rule of the game. On the evidence of these interviews, I'm not sure it's a dance that those before him were ever able to sustain for very long. Instead what this generation seem to offer the present - or what is amenable to transmission through the interview format - is more a call for a bold method of thinking and acting, practical and utopian both, constructing a history that enables a dexterity of both location and movement.

Another interviewer would maybe have had other more challenging questions: about ambition, power, and career, and how the developing of curating went along with the development of the market. But such oral histories as these are perhaps only possible as a conversation amongst colleagues. A critical perspective would require another method and purpose entirely. This book, instead, is the recognition and the party.

EXPANDED CINEMA: THE TALE OF TATE MODERN AND THE VIRGIN MEGASTORE

2009-05-20T13:10:00.001-07:00

One of the tensions at Expanded Cinema: Activating the Space of Reception (Tate Modern 17-19 April, 2009) was between the focus of the conference organisers and the broader interests of the sell-out Tate Modern audience.

If the first had at its core the historicization of certain film practices of the 1970's (often through conversations and presentations with those film makers themselves, including Malcolm Le Grice, William Raban, and Chris Welsby); then the frustration came from those for whom the conference title had promised a broader exploration of moving image culture, on our phones, laptops and throughout the urban environment.

As that list of names reveals, there were also more gender based grounds for disgruntlement with the conference organisers. The first issue was also, to a degree, a mis-aligning of expectations, testimony to how Tate Modern can attract a large, somewhat diverse audience to what is actually a narrowly focussed academic conference. But the tensions - manifested largely in frustrated questions and comments from the audience - raised unaddressed issues:

What happens to the self-definition of the experimental film maker when their techniques are proliferated and advanced throughout a larger culture that is unwilling to see what they do as particularly important or interesting?

Do conferences like this, at their worst, become guarded zones for the preservation of self-importance? If it is ethically and aesthetically important to claim a "specialness" for such work, then what is special and for who. How does it relate to all the stuff deemed not-special?

Just asking these questions was work for a different event.

The images in this post are a first step towards thinking about a film culture that can tackle and embrace these issues. Taken at the Union Square Virgin Megastore in Manhattan the top images show, on wide aspect ratio screens, scenes from the teen vampire movie Twilight, directed by Catherine Hardwicke. The lower screens are of Edie Sedgwick, newly available on DVD through the 13 Screen Tests CD project, where Warhol's subjects get soundtracks by Dean Wareham and Britta Phillips.

As the film-maker Julie Talen pointed out - showing me the photo's on her iphone a few days after the Tate Modern conference - the images not only pose a suggestive and inadvertent multichannel experience, but unconsciously mimic Warhol's Inner/Outer - where Sedgwick's film and video selves somewhat unnervingly encounter one another - not unlike, it occurred to me, the different constituencies at the Tate Modern conference!

One final question: how does our thinking about the future possibilities for film culture change when the images in the Virgin megastore are of Lou Reed not Edie Sedgwick?

TALK SHOP: SIMONE FORTI AND JEREMIAH DAY AT THE ICA

2009-05-13T06:00:00.000-07:00

Jeremiah Day & Simone Forti, ICA London, 7 May, 2009.

Writing about her "News Animations" the writer-dancer Simone Forti observes:

I can more easily access the raw store of fragmentary thoughts, feelings, and speculations out of which I build my understanding of the world. A News Animation performance involves improvising with movement and spoken language, taking off from the fluid, flickering, dream like image of the world brought to us by the news media. Moving and speaking at once, gives voice to the place between thoughts and muscular or visceral sensations, between verbal syntax and the body's syntax of sudden moves, hesitations, slumps and changes of facing. It reveals a process which is usually very private.

My father used to read a couple of news papers each day... When he died in 1985 I began to read the news myself. It wasn't coming easily to me. I did start to experience a sense of familiarity with the stories, with the personages, but most of all, as a dancer, I started to have kinesthetic impressions of pressures, currents, accumulations and pending collapses. I was noticing terminology like 'the dollar in free fall', and Lebanon being called a 'slippery slope.' Soon I was dancing the news, talking and dancing, being all parts of the news; tankers moving up the Persian Gulf, 'human waves' of Iranian youths crashing into the Iraqui forces invading from across the Shat al Arab estuary.

The movement included the kind of gestures one makes when explaining an describing, but here the gestures were taking on the whole body.

Jeremiah Day began his and Simone Forti's performance at the ICA by reading aloud some poetry from Amiri Baraka. There's a rhythm to the words, and to the body reading, a certain array of gestures, although initially Day's are quite neutral - like anyone might be stood reading aloud to group of people. Gradually, however, Day's movements - he paces from one side to the other of the ICA theatre space, turns on a slide projector - have a spatial expanse and focus that we might recognize as dance. Soon, as the piece unfolds, Day sits, squats, stands, walks, talks: a dance-language of words and movements, both linked and autonomous.

I found it an exhilarating experience. For a second piece, Day was joined by Forti, and the two engaged in a surreal, playful, storytelling conversation about economics, in which again verbal language and movement shared an equal role. Or what was the precise word-movement relationship? Day and Forti counter an avant-orthodoxy where words and gestures must not be illustrative, being unafraid to ground their word-movement relationship in literalism: hands waving in the air when talking of water, arms outstretched to be a bird in flight. This enables the complex rhythms and elaborations that do unfold to be read not as virtuosic but as a pleasure-in-relationship or - as Fred Dewey would suggest in his following talk - a demonstration of democracy in process.

Much of the pleasure came from how Day and Forti moved both within the particularities of their own bodies and the space itself. The performance had been shifted from the gallery to the theatre space at the last moment, and whilst text appeared fixed, both Forti and Day were making use of the particular space in which they found themselves, leaning against its walls, climbing its steps and odd nooks. The architecture, too, became part of how ideas and relationships could be manifested, tested, explored, and played with. Both words and images functioned as primary text, commentary, and ornamentation.

For a final piece Forti came on with a copy of the days newspaper and improvised, the newspaper entwined with body, text and her own reading aloud of the words on its pages. Pages were held out, resting on air currents, slowly drifting to the floor, or crumpled and held up against her face. It almost seemed a poetics for the whole project that Day and Forti had presented us with: an art process that finds a way to shape, refine, develop everyday gestures to where they acquire a further layer of import, but without removing them from their source.

Before the final piece, Fred Dewey - who has published Forti's writings as part of his Beyond Baroque publishing project - responded to Day and Forti's project, seeing it as a model of a particular kind of democratic culture. He talked about Forti's particular relationship to poetry, in which written texts would be edited by the body. This created a new kind of text-poetry-transcription, but also, said Dewey, seemed a demonstration of poetry as an act of moving, thinking, and writing in public space, a physical research in time and space. West quoted Carlyle:

unreality is death to all parliaments and all things

and also Milton:

to speak all tongues

to do all miracles

Day and Forti were performing to launch Jeremiah Day/ Simone Forti , a publication chronicling a collaborative exhibition and performance series at the Project Arts Centre in Dublin in 2008. Day had become fascinated by the story of the Blasket islanders, who emigrated to Springfield, near Boston. The Blasket islanders had been the sources of one of the finest repositories of oral lore, collected by George Thompson, but in Springfield, Day's research informed him, the storytelling culture had vanished completely.

The resulting publication combines Day's black and white photographs of a city - whose physical and economic decline appears to match the vanishing of its stories - with images of Day and Forti's collaborative performances. There are also several transcriptions of Forti's News Animations which, whilst thoughtful, rhythmic texts in their own right, were best read after the performance, newly animated by their proximity to a body, no longer privately consumed texts on a page but, even in an act of solitary reading, inseparable from a performance/demonstration/conversation in a public space.

Later in her essay "About the News Animations" Simone Forti observes:

I teach improvisation with movement and language in workshops around the world. I often begin with an essay I call Movement Memory Snapshots. We sit in a wide circle and each offers a particular memory which comes to mind because of an aspect of movement. I use the term 'offers', so as not to be directly asking for either language or movement. Some plunge in with their whole body or describe with their hands. With some, their movement, as they speak, is subtle: a shift of gaze, a sudden working of their toes without their being aware of it. But there is always some movement related to the activity of that telling.

We talk about the movements we saw each other do: a mix of abstracted shapes of our original experience, signs like pointing, mimicking, shifting weight at the end of a thought and many other kinds of body moves. Movement and language improvisations can be done solo, or by two or more people working together, sometimes conversationally, sometimes in juxtaposition. Once people get the hand of relaxing into this flow between verbal and kinesthetic, the question becomes: What to explore. What to research. What to express.

"About the News Animations" originally appeared in Oh, Tongue (Beyond Baroque, 2004). Jeremiah Day/ Simone Forti, published by Project Press, Dublin, 2009, developed from the exhibition Simone Forti/ Jeremiah Day 'News Animations'/ 'No Words For You, Springfield', Project Art Centre, Mar 27- May 3, 2008. ISBN 1-872493-24-6

HYUN JIN CHO & DAVID JOHNSON on PERFORMING LOCALITIES: RECENT GUATEMALAN PERFORMANCE ART ON VIDEO

2009-05-11T02:48:00.001-07:00

Performing Localities: Recent Guatemalan Performance Art on Video , INIVA, London, 5th and 6th May 2009.

Remember after the first evening I wanted to ask Rosina Cazali (Guatemalan critic and curator) about what it means to have these works be shown here in London? Whom is this work directed at originally?

You mean its "sight of reception"?

Yes, I suppose. In yesterday's Q & A, a couple of people raised similar questions, didn't they?

Yes, I remember. So, what did you get out of the panel's answer?

When Rosina says that 75 percent of this work has only been seen outside of Guatemala, that says something about who is seeing this work and for whom it's designed. Then the avenues for dissemination... she went on to say that there are no viable places to show these works in Guatemala. I don't remember specifically why.

Perhaps there are no venues or that people aren't quite ready for this type of work. But in essence, the people in Guatemala are not seeing this work, or this type of work that's been shown here the last two evenings.

I also sensed that Rosina wanted to tell us not to feel too bad about our being ignorant of their history, not having their political situation 100 percent correct, because this work is art. I remember that she repeated the point about the desire of taking this artwork into a different status, not only within a specific Guatemalan situation, but in more of a global art context.

What do you think 'different status' meant? A different status in terms of content or reception?

I understood it as being about reception. I remember her saying "an event like this is an example" and what we are doing here is good, positive. She used the word 'we'. I'm guessing she was referring to an art establishment based in the 'western world'. I also remember her positive use of the word 'discourse' several times…

If we were to view the work we saw on the level of an elegy or meditation, does the work stand on its own? In terms of the quality of the work...

I personally stopped worrying about its quality, or if it was an artist film, all of these criteria that I normally think about. Maybe this seemed inappropriate to me.

Then are you admitting that you're not receiving the work in a way that Rosina wants you to?

Well, yes. That's my very first honest reaction. It's also true what Julian Stallabrass [Guest Critic and Art Theorist/Curator] said, "The only history we know about Guatemala is the worst part of its history. There are issues with categorizing artists by their nationality for international art exhibitions?" I agree. That's not ideal either. Perhaps on this second night Rosina felt strongly about representing aspects of contemporary art in a Guatemalan context without the heavy political references... nothing wrong with that.

Of course, it's not all bad in Guatemala. Undoubtedly he's right in saying that. But what I couldn't process was this disconnect between that idea and the work itself, the content within the work itself. This content doesn't really address what's outside of Guatemala's tragic past and current difficulties, so I 'm confused. Certainly, we would be interested in a Guatemalan artist's portrayal as an even balance, the good and bad, the joyful and the horrible. But that's not what was presented. The work we saw on the first day, it was so direct and visceral: A woman [the artist Sandro Monterroso] making tortillas from the corn that she eats from the cob, chews, and spits back out; a man [the artist Angel Poyon] shouting into a hole in the ground the names of missing Guatemalans; a woman [the artist Regina Jose Galindo] carving the name in Spanish for the word 'bitch' on her leg with a knife; and the same artist in another piece shackling her neck, arm legs with heavy chains then proceeding with her daily activities for 4 to 5 days. There was more. Then a discussion afterwards that began to place this work within a historical/contextual locality. So what else was there to say?

It's too bad that there weren't any artists at the event to receive our questions. Is it important for him or her to be a Guatemalan artist? Or do they prefer to be a global artist? How do they want us to receive their work? Especially in relation to the actual events/situations that are referenced.

Jessica Lagunas, "120 Minutos de silencio" "120 minutes of silence," New York, 2008. Single-channel digital video. 12o minutes. Color, silent. Short clip available online.

How do you begin to make comments on this work How do you call it by name? I don't have right to do it. Do the artists themselves have the right to call it art? It's quite complicated. But then the second evening, the work was much less visceral with a certain layer of remove. There's still references to drug trade, illegal immigration, and missing war victims, but most of its was not first person performance. The commentary afterwards was much cooler and was more interested in talking about how the work fit into a global artist network. And the idea that these artists want to be understood as an individual artist rather than merely a Guatemalan artist. The two nights couldn't have been more different.

It's true. The first night was about Guatemala, what they've endured, the works that come from this condition and environment. You and I didn't or couldn't have a discussion. The next day we're confronted with having to talk about these works as art. The committee wants to frame it in relation to a market distribution system. (It's not their words but that's what I thought they were talking about.) To discuss it in this way seemed to ignore what we experienced in this work and perhaps to forget the specifics of the events that actually happened.

To say that these crimes also occurred in other Central or South American countries, or speaking about this injustice in more general way, as if the specifics didn't matter... We were being asked to shift register, or to read this in a certain way, and I wasn't able to do this. In the end aren't we just replacing one framework with another- Guatemalan artist for Latin American artist or Global artist? Perhaps this is for the sake of the artist's individual integrity, but that didn't help eliminate any of my discomfort with the discussion.

But because of the different nature of the second evening, we were allowed to be active, and to have a dialogue. Even though the dialogue was going in a disturbingly cool and distant direction to our perception of the situation and whether we agreed or not, we were able to react and engage. This seems positive. We were developing our thoughts in terms of a Guatemalan artist's place in this world even if at a superficial level.

Perhaps this reflects the aims of the second night's discussion panel?

So then, what's an appropriate response to this work? Is there a one?

Well to start, the realisation that we're in such a small insular bubble is obviously important.

But can 'Art' really engage with this kind of situation with any substance? Make it into image, decontextualise the situation, make it more abstract and aesthetic, easier to digest. It's building awareness, but anything beyond that?

Can this works exist as art without its political content? Can the artist be successful without the political content?

You mean to be recognized, from outside? Certainly in Guatemala there must be non-political artwork, still lifes or portraits or something, but maybe those would be of no interest to us.

Then the corollary, does this work maintain itself without the political content? Is it quality/successful art? Without its political content? I know quality is a slippery word. But you and I recognise that it exists.

Then that question carries a hope for art?

Certainly the panel sees it this way. Regardless I can't separate this work, the work we saw, from its political content. Perhaps the next generation of work...

I would like to think an initial motivation for making this art is as catharsis initially, like women quilting. One example is the last piece about cutting the camouflage pattern from a pair of army fatigues [an excerpt from 120 Minutes of Silence by Jessica Lagunas]. perhaps they just have to do something. To make 'art', you could say, to maintain some kind of sanity, a way forward, to live life.

ARTIST'S PROJECT: REORDERING by SARAH JACOBS

2009-05-05T01:18:00.000-07:00

A project by Sarah Jacobs for More Milk Yvette, May 2009. REORDERING is part of SONG OF THE DATA STREAM www.songofthedatastream.net

GOB SQUAD MEET DOMINIQUE GONZALEZ-FOERSTER or FILM AS THEATRE

2009-04-26T08:49:00.001-07:00

More Milk Yvette has been quiet lately, mainly because it has been off moonlighting for SPILL:OVERSPILL, a collective critical writing programme that has been taking place as part of the SPILL performance festival. The following piece first appeared on the SPILL:OVERSPILL site, and explored suggestive connections between Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster's recently closed Turbine Hall installation TH.2058 and Gob Squad's, Saving the World, Greenwich Dance Agency, 9-10 April 2009.

If Gob Squad had filmed their piece Saving the World a few months earlier, then, amongst the passers-by on the South Bank, they might have encountered Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, off to Tate Modern to install her Turbine Hall installation. It would have been an intriguing encounter, for Saving the World and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster's recently closed TH.2058 seem to be in conversation with one another, both through themes of archiving, saving, addressing and imagining the future, and in the boundaries they observe, re-draw and disregard between film, installation, and performance.

TH.2058 was an installation of beds, books, films, and other peoples sculptures, evoking a future when the Tate Modern turbine hall becomes a combined archive and air raid shelter. Saving the World sees Gob Squad spend a day on the South Bank, video recording passers by to create an archive of contemporary existence for some unspecified future date. Both pieces have at their core an accumulation and a saving. Both place themselves at the centre of London's diversity but are haunted by an experience, intuition, anticipation or memory of some ecological or other catastrophe. Both see the artist as a kind of fiction writer, scoring scenarios to be acted out: by sitting on the beds in the Turbine Hall and reading, or by asking passers-by for their thoughts on sex, nothingness, and the soul.

All this, no doubt, reflects different artists filtering the world around them with a somewhat shared sensibility, training and professionalism. As these processes manifest in the pieces themselves, Gob Squad foregrounds the newspapers and encounters of the world; Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster foregrounds a certain art history, an accumulation within her installation of certain art historical precursors (including several previous Turbine Hall installations). It's curious, then, that both end up in a similar place, suggesting art is the real news, and articulating this through a fluid sense of medium becoming theatrical.

For both Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and Gob Squad this focusses on a sense of film. Film re-defined, partly as an event, partly as something not confined to the screen: in Saving the World people literally talk to the screen and, more theatrically, come out of and go into the screen. Entering the Greenwich Dance Agency to see the piece last week, film seemed to be becoming installation, but then revealed itself, somewhat cheekily, as theatre. One consequence of this is that the consciousness and materiality of the video itself becomes more a shared property of the whole experience than something just involving the projected image.

Aside from the different economies and professional networks of artists working in galleries (like Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster) or performance festivals (like Gob Squad), this is also a debate about live presence, moving beyond a sense of mediated and unmediated to a more variegated sense of liveness and place. Gob Squad's search for interviewees on the South Bank, for example, is partly a search for those open to having part of their identity mediated (via the group's video cameras) in ways beyond their control and that they might never see. Viewing Gob Squad and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster together foregrounds how, for all the ways this is a response to globalisation, media culture, non-place and instantaneous data transfer - it's also a working through of an artistic lineage with a particular sense of the possibility of the moving image.

A longer essay than this, for example, might use Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster's library of films screening in TH.2058 as a partial viewing companion for Saving the World. This wouldn't create a set of easy parallels. But, to pick only a few of the more famous examples, I think the suggestiveness of viewing Gob Squad in the light of Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty, or Chris Marker's La Jetée, or Alain Resnais Last Year at Marienbad, are immediately apparent.

Actually, without checking I'm not sure TH.2058 did include the Resnais film but it certainly enters into the dialogue, as does Warhol's Screen Tests, literally re-created in the Gob Squad's Kitchen and becoming a research methodology in Saving the World, where groups of passers-by stare silent and still into Gob Squad's cameras. Gonzalez-Foerster doesn't include Warhol in her loop of films but the aesthetics of the Screen Tests can certainly be related to TH.2058's ideal of audience participation: a figure sat on the beds, as absorbed in a book as Warhol's subjects were in the 16mm camera before them.

Relations of film and theatre is a vast topic that could be traced in essays by, amongst many others, André Bazin, and Susan Sontag. Here, I want to highlight such dialogues manifesting as uncertainty, but in different ways. TH.2058 seemed always there, its films on a loop, but then the installation closed and it vanished. Gob Squad's subjects are saved for DVD-posterity, but confined to the show's limited (and for now completed) performance times. For both artists, film promises capturing and archiving, then delivers a richer, more substantial offering of the intangible and disappearing.

Not that these pieces are at all grim or po-faced about the apocalyptic scenarios they propose, for either London or the possibilities of film. Gob Squad's attitude to such issues is summed up in the closing party-scenes of Saving the World where they cavort in bear-clown costumes made of multiple soft toys. It reminded me of Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster's artists' talk at Tate Modern in March which covered the Starr Auditorium lectern in gold tinsel and had a DJ play Latin Jazz records, before ending the evening with the lights suddenly out and a soundscape of tropical rain.

More Milk Yvette has also been writing on Pacitti Company's A Forest; Julia Bardsley's Aftermaths: A Tear in the Tear of Vision;Victoria, Tim Etchells and the Uncertain Pedagogies out of Performance in That Night Follows Day; and Rajni Shah's Dinner with America.

THE BROKEN FESTIVAL MACHINE AND THE NUMBERS by CS LEIGH

2009-04-26T03:44:00.001-07:00

Filmmaker to Festival Director: "Please sir, can I have some more?"

1. In the introduction to one of her books Pauline Kael lamented that when she started writing movie reviews people used to come up to her on the street to say how lucky they thought she was to be paid to go to the cinema, but how that had changed over time and for the most part she earned only the public's sympathy for having the fortitude to endure so many crap movies. I'm paraphrasing as the internet search I did found several versions of the original text all of them a bit different and I'm too far away from my Pauline Kael library to check it now. A visit to the closest bookshop revealed that most of her books are out of print. But I feel exactly the same way about film festivals. I am about to attend my twenty-first Cannes Film Festival. I remember the feeling of elation that overcame me on my first visit and it stayed with me for about ten more. But that has now been replaced by a sense of resignation. I go for the meetings not the films which is something I never thought I would say.

2, For those of you familiar with Pauline Kael the title and form of this little jeremiad will no doubt bring to mind Kael's pull no punches Why Are Movies So Bad? or The Numbers, published originally in The New Yorker in 1980. For those of you not familiar with it forget about reading this post here. Go out and get that and don't put it down until you finish it.

3, Who needs film festivals in 2009 ? The only viable answer I can come up with are hotel chains and airlines. When I first went to Cannes it offered an opportunity to watch many films that I knew I would never have the opportunity to find again especially with English subtitles. In 1994 I watched 53 films in Cannes, though I walked out on a few. These included films from countries who didn't make or export many back then. Nowadays there is nearly no film screened at any festival that I couldn't find on my own and in any number of ways. The few films I want to watch that are rare or hard to locate will never show up at Cannes anyway and sadly they don't find their way on to schedules in Rotterdam, Berlin, or Locarno anymore either. Sometimes if we get very lucky they do get screened at the Viennale which still seems to me a festival with a valid mission.

4, Film festivals have turned into the Jay Leno show of the cinema circuit. Filmmaker shows up with good looking cast and somewhat less sexy crew, gets hotel room for two nights, a couple of drink vouchers, gives redundant interviews, has ass kissed for three days, and moves over on the sofa to make space for the next guest. The dirty little secret of the film festival machine is that it uses the artists to give the festival enough credibility to lure the commercial movie business into giving it A or B list films in exchange for credibility. For example Cannes opens with rubbish like DA VINCI CODE or Rotterdam gives us the world premiere of some shite directed by SOPRANOS actors who couldn't figure out where to place the camera if their lives depended on it and the respective directors get to feel like Godard for a day. Gone is the time when festivals served the purpose of shedding light on great but neglected cinematic talent. Unless you consider Ron Howard or Michael Imperioli geniuses languishing in isolation while the world looks the other way. There still might be good reasons for regional festivals to exist but the big three or four are just a marketing tool preaching to the converted.

5. I don't discount great filmmakers who are film festival stars like Atom Egoyan and Michael Haneke. They are among the greatest artists working in cinema today. I await their new films as previous generations waited for Ingmar Bergman to send down the next chapter of the Grail. What I do question however is the idea that these directors are guaranteed competition slots in Cannes year in and out as a matter of course. Has the film festival model just turned into a Greatest Hits collection? Does anyone need to be reminded that Ken Loach makes brilliant and brave films ? And does anyone need to go to Cannes to watch them anyway? There was a time when distributors did need Cannes to be guided to know what to buy. These days the distributors tell the festivals what to do and make the deals.

6. About ten years ago Rotterdam introduced an amazing strand called Exploding Cinema. They understood very early on a need to respond to new technology and, more than that, the ways cinema audiences's expectations and habits were morphing because of it. Many festivals have since introduced similar sidebars. For example at Sundance this year there was the bold and challenging New Frontier including films by Pat O'Neil and Sharon Lockhart and also installations and other film ephemera. Although this was very interesting it still offered very little that we could not find in musuems and art centers all over the globe. There was nothing cinematic about New Frontiers. I get the feeling these sidebars are now being created largely as a way to keep spectators interested as if the distraction of the laptop, phone, and whatever other popular device is selling like hotcakes these days are threatening the festival idea at its core and I suppose that's the point. They are. For heaven's sake, Rotterdam even had a Haunted House this year. What's next? Maybe a Lego version of Chloe Sevigny's likeness at the entrance to the Berlin Film Festival's Panorama screenings ?

7. The real problem is that the model is broken and outdated and nobody has the balls to admit it. It's just another naked Emperor. For filmmakers the relationship to film festivals is the same as Oliver Twist innocently asking the orphanage "Please sir can I have some more?" after feeling less than satisfied by his first meal under their roof. Why do we feel the need to be granted the right to show our work ? Are we bought so cheaply as a plane ticket, hotel rooms, and saving a screening fee? Why do we feel blessed when second rate beurocrats and third rate academics select our work? You don't need to go to Cannes or Venice anymore to keep up with the best new work. You go only if you want to know what Monica Bellucci is wearing on the red carpet and you can read about that on a blog too pretty much in real time. Festivals have become boring largely because the people who frequent them are too willing to play by the rules.

8. The great thing about this horrible moment we live in is that everyone is a curator, everyone is a festival director, anyone can programme pretty much anything on youtube or on their computer and can stream whatever they like out there to whoever is willing to watch it. I don't personally feel very excited about having my work shown that way. But there are other options. Warhol told us all that anyone can do it and maybe it took fifty years for his words to be born out. Of course that doesn't mean that anyone can do it well. But surely with the bar set as low as it is right now could it really be worse? I say this and I say it simply to my community. Show your work. Screen your films. Stop begging. Find new ways to distribute your work and create the next version of cinema.

CRITICISM TOWARDS PERFORMANCE NOTATION: A PRESENTATION AND WORKSHOP FOR SPILL:OVERSPILL

2009-04-06T02:16:00.001-07:00

Karl Stockhausen considers the idea that criticism is a form of performance notation...

For a presentation as part of the SPILL:OVERSPILL writer's workshop (28-29 Mar, 2009), I wanted to explore how certain forms of criticism can become a new form of performance notation. The theme emerged from looking through a range of recent texts, which have appeared on this blog and elsewhere. This included:

Texts developed in response to a range of live events, talks, and discussions.

Texts developed out of reading and research around a particular topic.

In both cases the process is often a layered one. Initial notes and transcriptions are developed later into a text resembling a performance script.

Often this meant using such notation conventions as numbered scenes, stage directions, and the dividing of text between different voices. But such conventions were rarely utilised in the logical manner of a conventional playscript. Instead, aspects of these devices were part of a broader effort to show language existing in space, being choreographed, not summarising or interpreting an event but seeking to open out of an event into something else.

This project began with a transcript I made of a Richard Foreman talk at the ICA in May 2008. This was appropriate because Foreman's own scripts and poetics are a key source for this kind of work, not just in themselves but in their indebtedness to open field poetics. For my SPILL: OVERSPILL presentation I showed the following images of Richard Foreman's 1972 essay:

For a second example I outlined my research into Robert Smithson's Cavern Cinema. This began with Smithson's own diagram-score-drawing-proposal for the project. I talked of how this had connected to Stockhausen's notations, through an interest in his own underground concert at the Jeita Caves in Lebanon in 1971, and also to the underground cinema events in the catacombs of Paris.

Robert Smithson, Towards the Development of a "Cinema Cavern" (1971) Pencil, photography, tape.

Working with these different histories - and the different texts through which these events become present - I showed my play script You Don't Know What's Down There: A Fantasia for the Cavern Cinema, recently published as part of the soanyway project. This, again, was an example of curating or choreographing material, and of writing involving a working in space with existing texts rather than the generation of large amounts of new material. Although, of course, the loss of such boundaries is often part of such texts.

Karl Stockhausen, score for Stimmung (1966).

Having looked at these different examples I drew up a short list of what characterised such pieces of writing:

statements

polyvocality

shifts in register

word as object

quotation (real/ misremembered/ invented)

associative thought

framing

use of white space

lists

loss of attribution

choreographic listening

Several of these statements prompted questions from other members of the group. I described choreographic listening as a process of watching or reading an event with an awareness of translating it into typographic space and also into a series of language-gestures. The loss of attribution point prompted questions about plagiarism. This made me realise how one of the tensions in this form of writing is a reconsideration of the notion of voice.

So what is the result and rewards of such writing? I am interested in how it produces exciting and engaging texts alert to a certain reciprocity between the space of an event and the space of the page and its constituent tools of letters, words, sentences, paragraphs and punctuation marks. On a level that is less explored as yet I am interested in texts as literal scores, generators of new events, and as literal embodiments - and exaggerations - of the processes whereby ideas and events become transmitted.

The notational possibilities of Black Mountain College...

A longer workshop could have moved into an exploration of this next stage. As, too, it could have considered a broader history of notation, moving from fluxus scores, experimental music, and Richard Kostelanetz's book Scenarios: The Right to Perform (1980), through to the more contemporary work of the journal Play: A Journal of Plays, the scripts of Mac Wellman and Erik Ehn, and the collaborations of Will Holder and Alex Waterman (captured in two excellent exhibition catalogues of music notation, Agapē and Between Thought and Sound).

It could, too, have explored interconnections with certain strands of experimental poetry, from the open-field poetics of Charles Olson that informed Foreman, to the LANGUAGE poetics of Bruce Andrews who, to a degree, summarises the concerns of this presentation when he observes in The Poetics of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E:

The page, like the windowed computer screen, can encourage a LOOKING THROUGH or a LOOKING AT approach -

Looking through: as a transparent, dematerialized virtuality, cinema-style),

or a LOOKING AT (as an opaque, action-oriented, control-panelled material reality).

As, too, to link back to where the presentation began, the notebooks of Richard Foreman - available online for others to make performances from - are a reminder of the reciprocity between writing and performance in relation to event, space and interpretation.

This essay - and the presentation it summarises - ends with several possibilities:

(1)An interchangeability between critical text and performance notation, where each becomes the other.

(2)A sharing of categories on a practical (use of stage directions and scenes) and conceptual level, but a maintaining of difference in how such scripts are read.

(3)A combination of criticism and notation pursued to the level of uncertainty, where the precise character and demands of the text remains mysterious, dependent on context, delivery, intention, and/or whim.

A PROPOSAL FOR A WORKSHOP

So for the workshop I thought it would be interesting to respond to a piece of work, thinking through this connection of criticism and performance notation emerging from the experience of a particular event. So this is the film _______ by the artist ______ which I chose for the way it engages a certain sense of _________ ,________ and ________.

I encourage you to watch _______ and develop and improvise a _________ in response, writing down any thoughts, ideas, drawings, diagrams and _________'s whilst thinking of the idea of criticism as a score AT ALL TIMES.

When _______ is finished we will have ten minutes to work those pieces of writing into an example of critical writing as performance notation. The film is intended to be shown on a loop so I will let it run through twice. Let's go...

WHY TWITTER IS GERTRUDE STEIN IN 2009

2009-04-06T01:29:00.001-07:00

Gertrude Stein and Alice B.Toklas at home, in 1923, pre-twitter.

Gertrude Stein uses Twitter. She doesn't call it that.

Gertrude Stein lost the continuous present. Then she found it again. She called it twitter.

Alice B Toklas thinks the whole thing is ridiculous. She sends the occasional e-mail, but nothing more.

Gertrude Stein twitters all day and night.

Gertrude Stein twitters in the park the park.

Twitter twitters twitters twitters twitters.

Gertrude Stein says a text is a text but twitter.

She is aware that it is easy to parody what one is parodying.

That it is not necessarily funny to be funny when one is being funny or not being.

Gertrude Stein knows the limits of twitter.

And all those who twitter in 2009 are being Gertrude Stein.

They are not being Alice B Toklas of that Alice B Toklas is very clear.

And so is Gertrude Stein. Gertrude Stein is very clear.

And to say "I am eating my lunch" is to be Alice B Toklas.

But to say "I am eating my lunch and it is a brown cow" that is Gertrude Stein.

And it is Twitter if it is 140 characters or less.

Which it is. And 2009 is. And Gertrude is but not Alice.

Gertrude Stein is so into twitter that she has terminated her MySpace profile.

Gertrude Stein still uses Google Chat but only practically.

It is twitter that offers Gertrude Stein the chance to connect to her earliest work such as Tender Buttons.

The space of the rectangle and the character limit define a space the mind can move through writing

The space defines and the space is to be filled and in so doing it is defined

Which is like a city or a global economy and Gertrude Stein knows it.

Gertrude Stein knows it is also the war.

She knows it is it when it is and Twitter is isn't it.

Gertrude Stein has many followers on Twitter although not Ernest Hemingway who is dead.

Gertrude Stein follows nobody.

Some suspect that Gertrude Stein might not be Gertrude Stein.

Some suspect that Gertrude Stein is Penelope Cruz.

Gertrude Stein knows that she is Gertrude Stein.

Gertrude Stein knows that she has always been Gertrude Stein and that the accumulated mass of her tweets proves it.

Gertrude Stein says you can always tell a true Mondrian from a copy and hence she is Gertrude Stein.

Gertrude Stein knows that Twitter proves she was right all along.

Alice B Toklas thinks most of Gertrude Steins followers look like idiots.

Gertrude Stein agrees but only looked very quickly.

Gertrude Stein is twittering now and has twittered and is.

Gertrude Stein and the twitter rectangle right now.

Twitter twitter twitter twitter twitter twitter.

Gertrude Stein would like to tell Picasso about twitter but he has most fortunately.

Thanks to Mary Paterson, who commissioned this piece last week as part of the Critical Communities project, organised by New Work Network and Open Dialogues. Following on from a series of micro-presentations where each member had two minutes to showcase their work and interests, we have been responding to issues raised by commissioning small pieces of writing from one another.

ULLA VON BRANDENBURG

2009-04-05T02:51:00.001-07:00

Ulla Von Brandenburg at Chisenhale Gallery, 19 Feb - 5 Apr, 2009.

Look at the Chisenhale website and the only image of Ulla Von Brandenburg's new show, is a paint-sample like grid of coloured squares. It doesn't actually feature in the show, but how it appears instead says something about what is going on in this thoughtful installation.

Walk into the space and the grid is present as a maze of coloured screens, hanging down in a manner quite loose and shower curtain like. It's possible to walk through most of the walls, although there are also clear paths that reveal an interlocked grid of small "rooms." In a couple there are a benches, and in one a projector showing a continuous 16mm film on a screen of purple cloth.

Given the noise and the attraction - and given how the screens aren't really immersive - it's tempting to head straight for the image, seeing it first from behind and then heading into its little cloth walled room. But the space is a lot of this piece: a structure definite but fluid, open but closed, finished but forever temporary, definite but vague.

Read the press release and there is a connection to psychological theories linking colour and personality. It's curious how these manifest, because it seems posited on a certain immersion whilst the installation remains functionally constructivist and more an idea than an environment. As rooms, too, each small chambre is uncertain of its function, its level of comfort, the demands it makes or the opportunities offered to those within it...

You woke me to show me the colours. Is this some kind of Josef Albers homage? Is the arrangement of colours systematic or intuitive? I sensed and responded, experiencing the later, sensing the former. It was before sunrise. A bench that doesn't look like it is for sitting on. I sit on it. Real enough, but still like a mock-up, an indication of possible experiences, a memory map, a trail of hidden symptoms, ideas and spaces tested with casualness, echoes in wood of what...

The film, too, seems be testing or exploring something, comprising a long continuous and looping take around a stately home. Serenely steadicaming down corridors, forever interrupting its flow to encounter posed individuals or groups. A woman looks in a mirror seeing, Magritte like, the back of her head. A tableau of a man dying in bed evokes a certain art history, but a small audience, dressed casually sit on fold down chairs like this is an impromptu art class. But they have no art materials...

Or two women stand static, holding a large plan flat against the wall. A man with his hands bound in some sort of cats cradle. Phone me. A man checking the corner of his eye in a mirror. Von Brandenberg writes how these are combinations of scenes from art history and personal memories.

Perhaps personal memories become art history and vice versa. Perhaps in certain light, memory resembles a forever new edition of E.H.Gombrich's A History of Art....

What motivates this camera? On the one hand it is a space explorer. Practically and poetically, the human subjects are often in light: looking out of windows, in pools of daylight. Or there are mirrors opening up the space, or keeping the present in the past. Sometimes the camera seems to be searching for human presences within the Marienbad-like building, holding to a scene or figure. Other times it goes up close to the figure only to brush past, continuing inexorably on its way, as if its (non-) interests are elsewhere.

There is, of course, the contrast between the coloured screens and the black and white chiarascuro of the film. Compared to the airy installation, the black and white appears a more solid, concrete world of forms, mass and light.

But Von Brandenberg's subjects are also frozen and artificial, somehow hesitant in the flow of life, whilst the coloured screens move and shift at the slightest breath or passing movement, not particularly gracefully but with a certain authenticity.

Let's seek an equilibrium between these two aesthetics, film and cloth, black and white and colour. A Building Echoes workshop. Look for moments of transportation: two walking sticks in the film are propped up in the corner of the Chisenhale gallery. A screen reappears over the hot face of a sleeping figure and someone - I missed it the first time - totally wrapped in a sheet.

I must say more to you about the act of projecting on the cloth-screen itself, where all the black and white certainty of the stately home becomes dependent on the fragility of the cloth screen itself. Similarly, the cloth hangings, for all their tentative fragility, emerge through such an act as a kind of ground, a support, upon which worlds - well, films - can be constructed.

I also thought a lot today about teeth. Goodnight.

In the Chisenhale Gallery foyer Von Brandenberg has painted the walls black, with a pattern of white splashes. It appears like woodland, as too it evokes a certain history of formalism, as too it evokes the light in the stately home, or marks scratched into film emulsion. It, too, like the screens, combines its careful specificity with a certain casualness: it tends to be almost missed in the dark of entering the Chisenhale space anyway, literalising and transforming the experience of entry into any exhibition here.

... different spaces... leaking into the others... colour become screen become film become cloth become forest...an effort... not to understand, but to equalise and keep diverse... I am moving out and moving in.. the same gesture... not going to feel completely comfortable... because uncontainable... this unstable lexicon of... you...

PETER COFFIN IS FILMING THE GARDEN

2009-03-27T01:48:00.000-07:00

ALL IMAGES: Installation view, Peter Coffin, Barbican Curve Gallery. Image copyright Eliot Wyman. Courtesy Barbican Art Gallery.

Peter Coffin, Barbican Curve Gallery, 11 Feb 2009- 10 May 2009.

If the other Sunday was about filming philosophy, then Peter Coffin's installation - at the Barbican Curve gallery - was about filming gardens. At first glance, there was much similarity between these two film-making roles, a productive interconnection between a stuttering, seminar leading Deleuze and a roaming, hand held shot of a bonsai tree.

If you haven't seen it, then the Barbican's Curve gallery is what it says it is: an arcing space encouraging installations flowing somehow from one end to the other, attentive to the drift and to the spaces slow unfolding as you walk along its maybe fifty metres length. It's curious that, remembering previous shows, the Curve seems to stretch and shrink from show to show. Coffin's gardens make the space long. You feel it must be nearing the end, then discover another ten large video screens around the bend.

Because if one wall of the curve is a floor to ceiling black curtain, the other side is sixteen separate video projections with but a small crack between them, ten or so foot high. These document a journey around a Japanese garden - the movement flowing and hand held, varying height and position. It's a portrait of the garden, from individual plants to the buildings surrounding the garden walls. But it's not a linear body-journey. Its impetus comes as much from the regular fades between perspectives, giving each screens unfolding a certain angular, cubist rhythm.

An over-easy, slightly innacurate analogy, certainly, but the scale of Coffin's work suggests a Bill Viola re-make of Marie Menken's Glimpses of the Garden. Coffin's focus on gardens, however, may be connected to certain kinds of spirituality, but it's very different to Viola's. Not just through its pace, but also with its roughness, its blurred qualities, its deliberate disjunctions and lack of any central iconic image. It lacks, too, any serene, metaphysical unfolding for a structure.

All of which are some of the thoughts that came, slowly wandering the curve from screen to screen. I had to make a complete passage along, and was heading back, before I realised there was a continual flow of a single image across all sixteen screens. I still wasn't totally sure of this. The movement, and the fades, made it deliberately uncertain, as did the shifting light across the images, that maybe came from filming at different times of day, trying to approximate shifting weather conditions in a cameras lurching, slightly vertigo inducing swoop.

All of which ignores a further important element. Dotted through the space are pairs of plinths on which are placed a variety of objects: a shoe, a skull, a pencil in a compass, a piece of bark, a starfish. As this list demonstrates, they are objects with a number of different registers: everyday objects, emblems, symbols, commodities, art objects, with a certain taxonomical moving between them. The objects are paired with plaster cast versions of themselves, which similarly offering a variety of translations, from a literal recreation of the object to a stylised transformation.

Initially, I found these obtrusive, although a friend of mine noted that he focussed on the objects rather than the projected images, anchoring himself amid the peripheral flow of garden-images. Viewed in the gloom from the exit they look like a rather boring display of bronze sculpture and it takes a while for their quirky individuality to emerge, their somewhat joking interplay of art object and commodity.

How do the objects relate to the garden, and also to a broader epistemological intention of filming gardens? They have a definite rough, lab-like quality, as if Coffin is making a tool kit for how the philosophy of Zen gardens emerges in his own life, working with the impossibility of that task. Or read the other way: the gardens are both object and plaster cast, a set of translations and transformations of everyday experiences and impulses.

All of which added up to a thought-provoking experience, suggesting the filmed garden - a mediation of a mediation, a layering into technology - could still be a productive site for thinking about, through and with contemporary issues. Garden Pieces, a season of garden- related experimental films - curated by Peter Todd at BFI Southbank in April - will offer a further chance to explore all these ideas.

THE NO-FILM FILM COLUMN

2009-03-25T05:01:00.001-07:00

Doris Lasch/ Ursula Ponn, Le Musee Imaginaire, 2004, project for a record cover. Courtesy the artists. From Lasch/Ponn If you don't create your own history someone else will, Frankfurter Kunstverein, 27 Mar- 31 May 2009.

Seeing so many films it's hard for The No-Film Film Column to find things to write about. Of course, I could stop seeing films altogether and then I'd have lots to write about. But then I wouldn't be The No Film Film Column. I'd just be a column about whatever else it was I was doing, which wouldn't be interesting at all.

It's difficult. Anyway, today, this lack of No-Film Film subject matter is not an issue because The No-Film Film column got its hair cut. Yes, it's hard to believe it, but The No-Film Film Column has this endless cycle of wanting to grow its hair long, then getting all fed up of it and having it cut off. It's quite filmic in its way, both commercial film and experimental film. It's what links them. Eisenstein wrote an essay about it.

Let's not go there. Not yet. The other recurring theme of this column is cafes and I am indeed sat in a cafe , with a cappucino and a white chocolate chip and macadam nut cookie, which is neither here nor there (the general point, not the cookie, which is on a saucer).

Please, says the cookie using a chance nut-chip alignment for a mouth, one needs to hold to a firm sense of what's relevant and not to the subject at hand. Focus breeds narrative structure breeds coherence upon which The No-Film Film Column brand depends.

So, yes, having my hair cut. What about it? Well let's give in to the inevitable. It's like you have this vast amount of film material, and you don't know what you want to do with it, so you have a slightly awkward conversation where you hold it up and discuss length, then you cut it all up and then you blow dry it, put a little wax all over it, take £35 from its wallet and send it out into the street-cinema.

On the other hand, there could be a way of re-conceiving the process where it's all very relaxed and intuitive and where the faintest hand gesture or syllabic utterance leads to total understanding, leads to a magnificent haircut, leads to blow drying, leads to a little wax all over it, leads to a spring in the step, leads to the taking of £35 from your wallet, leads to the writing of a column like this.

This doesn't have to be haircuts. It doesn't have to be haircuts and film. There's no limit. It could be about global politics, although I think I rather said all I wanted to say about that in the last No-Film Film Column. It could be about macadam nuts, but that might lead to an argument. It doesn't have to be about anything. Just enjoy the feeling of a new haircut. For Christs sake, No-Film Film Column, relax.

Perhaps I am writing about haircuts because this column, too, occupies that brief pause where anxiety about fixity disappears, and the mind is still shifting in a void, a limbo looking for another limbo to Google chat with. It's like that period in the 1960s Robert Beavers talked about at Tate Modern last year - after censorship laws had been suspended and before the full onslaught of commercial pornography had taken its place.

It sounded beautiful, that period, when he talked about it. I'm not sure how one translates the mood he conjured with the historical detail, to actual historical places and times, and people doing things or not doing things or over-doing things, but it was remarkably redolent when he talked about it. It was as if such a period could only exist forty years later as a colour or a flaming aleph or a cloud of midges descending on an outdoor tai chi class somewhere on the West Coast of Scotland.

Doris Lasch/ Ursula Ponn, Untitled, 2003, b/w photograph, baryt paper on aluminium, 120 x 178cm. Courtesy the artists.

I think that might be what the No Film Film Column is all about. It's why it needs its film and why it needs its No-Film. Its about that space where one preoccupation falls away and the mind is still looking for another one. So as a sensation, as much as it can be expressed in language at all, it's a mix of rising and falling, exploding and imploding, speaking and listening, eating and drinking, walking and sitting down, extrapolating at vast length, eating a Turkish stew in Dalston, and taking a vow of silence again in order to break a previous one.

And also macadam nuts. Which is all well and good and should really be the conclusion, but, suddenly, I'm thinking Emperor's New Clothes. I'm thinking about the odd presence the story has in my mind, more confused than the version in many books. This includes:

a suddenly naked emperor... clothes that are no clothes, whipped off a body by a scepticism about power... a tailor who is also an experimental film maker... another tailor who dresses the King like he's a Super 8 movie, stockpiles polaroid films from German websites, and escapes death with only his love of Stan Brakhage intact...

This was no Jack Zipes re-telling. It was all getting a bit too film-based for The No-Film Film column. Don't forget Warhol:

I took a photo of the emperors new clothes and the emperor took a photo of my tailor. Then the tailor took a photograph of my new clothes and I took a photo of the emperor dressed up as the tailor. Then the tailor took a photograph of the emperor and I took a photo of the emperor and the emperor said he didn't know how to use a disposable camera but he took a photo of me anyway.

Then we all realised simultaneously that our vanity and pride was getting in the way of good photos. Then I realised I didn't have a tailor, why would I, duh, and the tailor I didn't have took a photo of the emperor who laughed, dropped his camera, and stamped on it, but not before he had taken a photo of all of us, although why bother I say if that was his intention, really.

Then the tailor made a run for it, clever sod, and I took a photo of the empty room and the empty room took a photo of my new clothes and the emperor took a photo of himself putting on what were really my new clothes but I wasn't going to say anything I'm no idiot...

Doris Lasch/ Ursula Ponn, Through the back door of a public secrecy, 2004, s/w Polaroid. 120 x 178cm. Edition 15, 2006, Courtesy the artists.

Oh now I am mental-swimming, said The No-Film Film Column. Yes, that's where the No-Film and the film and the macadam nuts and the cappucino meet the haircut. That's where it all comes together, and not like soup. But it's ideas alright, and they add up, one after another, in multiple directions, god help us, into architecture.

So, naked but for its pride, The No-Film Film Column heads off into the Hoxton night, lightly waxed, mildly delirious in the way only a No-Film Film Column can be, non-knowing, macadam nuts and all, its new, magnificent, hair.

KUTLUG ATAMAN at THOMAS DANE GALLERY

2009-03-21T02:41:00.000-07:00

Kutlug Ataman, fff, 2006-2009, film still, 10-screen video installation, continuous; with sound. Original music by Michael Nyman. Copyright Kutlug Ataman. Courtesy Thomas Dane gallery.

Kutlug Ataman, fff, 10-screen video installation, continuous with sound. Original music by Michael Nyman, 2006-2009. Thomas Dane Gallery 13 Mar- 18 April, 2009.

Home movies are volatile material. Wedded to everyday events of holidays, children playing, shots of landscapes, birthdays, it's a footage sure of itself and its role. But add time - or a transferral beyond the original group of people involved - and it easily becomes a mysterious, highly emotional set of images; its simple, everyday actions turned oddly abstract.

That's even before one figures in the format. Whether shot on Super 8 or early video, Mini-DV or HD, such domestic actions are freighted with the material properties of the medium in which they were recorded. So Super 8 - whose domestic use was long outstripped by its importance for artists - has, to a degree, become memory itself, as if all our past experiences have to pass through its chemical processes, get stuck in its special envelope and sent off for processing.

All of which is a way of starting to think around Kutlug Ataman's fff, currently showing at the Thomas Dane gallery. Ataman has lots of home movie footage - the fff title stands for 'found family footage' - and I'll leave aside, for the moment, the question of whose home movie footage and how he found it.

A more urgent question is how such movie footage can be responded to in a way commensurate with a contemporary artistic practice; how the emotion, memory and nostalgia of such source material can appear in the gallery with some modicum of relevance or criticality.

Kutlug Ataman, fff, Installation shot, Thomas Dane Gallery, 2009. Copyright Kutlug Ataman, courtesy of Thomas Dane. Photographs by Jonnie Bassett.

A large black wall almost crosses the gallery from side to side, top to bottom. It's placed in front of the window, so forming its own blind, light flaring around its edges. On the wall are ten screens of different sizes, each protruding from the wall wrapped in a thick black frame.

The home movie footage is translated into the gallery in various ways. There are single screen and double screen images; double-circular images, which seem to suggest some incomplete stroboscope, the 3D only coming from the viewer. There are other screens with images that are break up into squares. Sometimes the squares fit incompletely together, so the image is like six or seven playing cards. Other times, the next image forms, a square at a time, or an intervention occurs of another image into one square.

All of which highlights how Ataman is mediating this material, subjecting its filmic transience to his own digital processes. Which, amongst other things, is a way of muting the emotion of the photos, placing individual moments in broader constellations of both form and content. Ataman's is a gentle formalism, however. No hard edged critique of its emotional qualities, just a square screen and a round screen and a double screen. And Michael Nyman.

Playing throughout, Nyman's music loop, too, has this affection and doubleness: only a step away from a certain emotional-schmalz but always, critically and crucially, a step away, mainly via the dissonance swirling behind its simple, repeating, stabbed-out motif. Unintentionally, this doubleness is also echoed spatially: there's but a thin wall, literally, between meaningful contemporary art and the expensive tat filling many of the galleries outside on Duke Street St.James.

There are various ways of watching fff. Focus on individual screens and become aware of the actions: a child playing in the snow; rough sea filmed from a ferry; beauty pageant; wedding, and so on through a parade of family activities. I would imagine for many viewers the spectatorial default becomes a vague drifting between screens, away and back, away, back, again, for the duration of their stay.

Kutlug Ataman, fff, 2006-2009, film still, 10-screen video installation, continuous; with sound. Original music by Michael Nyman. Copyright Kutlug Ataman. Courtesy Thomas Dane gallery.

Then there's how one perceives the ten screen wall-totality. This reminded me of Isaac Julien's installation of Derek Jarman's Super 8 films at the Serpentine Gallery in 2007: a model case of how to make lots of individually fantastic films completely uninteresting as a collective. Regarding domestic footage - and Jarman's films were a special case of home movie - the very absorption of such imagery in the life depicted, makes it hard to translate into larger configurations and juxtapositions of itself.

What the ten screens of fff don't do is add up to an articulate portrait. Nor does it allow the particularities of a period to become evident, like the accumulating of details in an historians argument. Instead, it becomes almost abstract, a set of tones and moods; elemental flickering of green, blues and whites; sea and garden. Representation, certainly, but human activity becomes broad, sculptural essences of playing, dancing, standing and sitting: the artists' equivalent of rarely played Super 8 reels in a box in the attic.

Read the press release and you find out where Ataman got his footage, and, to a degree, the explanations for some of the images (lots of shots of planes = family in the RAF). The images need the text for this to become clear, and in some ways the installation is more powerful without such information. Left to itself, such imagery more reveals the specific codings of a place, time and medium poised between representation and abstraction, detail and void, in thrall and threat to both Kodak chemistry and the artists own digital manipulations.

Then, of course, there's the odd sensation that it's also you up there, round screen and split screen self, your own home movie, beauty pageant, the relatives you never knew about because they aren't your relatives, yet...

DWIGHT RIPLEY'S GOING TO THE BALL: A PLAYLET ON MENKEN AND MAAS

2009-03-20T05:29:00.001-07:00

Marie Menken and Willard Maas at home in their apartment at 62 Montague Street, Brooklyn Heights, 1948. Copyright Frank Polach.

Any prolonged engagement with Marie Menken's films and paintings prompts a need to come to some understanding of her marriage to Willard Maas. Figuring the complexity and privacy of any relationship into a critical - or even anecdotal - discussion is always difficult. The starting point for Whitney Chadwick and Isabelle de Courtivron's 1993 study Significant Others: Creativity and Intimate Partnership outlines some of the key issues:

... we asked the following question of the thirteen contributors to this book: if the dominant belief about art and literature is that they are produced by solitary individuals, but the dominant social structures are concerned with familial, matrimonial, and heterosexual arrangements, how do two creative people escape or not the constraints of the framework and construct an alternative story? (7)

Tate Modern's Marie Menken symposium (15-16 Nov 2008) itself struggled with the balance between the abundant supply of gossip and anecdotes about Menken-Maas and how to think through - or even identify in a helpful manner - how their relationship related to their film-making.

Or, rather, it was also an attempt to articulate how the different, incomplete aspects of what we do know relate to each tother: Maas homosexuality; his relationship with Dwight Ripley; Ripley's role as patron of Menken's films; Menkens ongoing relationships to Ripley's (former-) boyfriends; and the role of the Menken-Maas house as a social nexus, a kind of proto-Factory in Brooklyn.

The Tate Modern discussions focussed around Carolee Schneeman's observation that it was offensive to find Menken "servicing the daisy chain" by serving drinks and cookies to Maas' boyfriends. My research since has involved several discussions that find Schneemann's remarks themselves offensive and insulting, simplifying a complex relationship into an argument that supports a personal agenda.

How to develop a new framework for thinking about this, though, is difficult. Maybe we have to accept a sense of fiction within a relationship . To this end I'm delighted to publish, courtesy of Douglas Crase and Frank Polach, a playlet by Dwight Ripley which offers a dialogue between "Marie" and "Willard."

Written c1951-52, Ripley sent the playlet to Menken and Maas, and it was maintained by them amongst their papers. As Crase suggests, it's fascinating whether such a playlet was known by Edward Albee, whose Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf, is often seen to be informed by the Menken-Maas marriage. Considering Menken's performances in Warhol's The Life of Juanita Castro and Chelsea Girls, the prospect of her acting out the following script is a rather mind-boggling one.

Marie Menken, If Earth in Earth Delight, 1951, oil,sand, glass and thread on masonite, 11.5 x 17.5 inches. Courtesy Douglas Crase and Frank Polach.

Some other connections: I also found it constructive to consider the script as a written equivalent to the performance style of Jack Smith and Mario Montez, highlighting, as Crase has discussed, the role of a certain sense of Englishness within the Menken-Maas milleu.

Alongside Albee, a further useful connection would be to the intense and hilarious improvised domestic strife of Brigid Berlin and Charles Rydell in Warhol's Fight (1975), one of a number of pilot TV-melodrama's on show recently at the Haward Gallery in Other Voices, Other Rooms.

GOING TO THE BALL by Dwight Ripley [ca. 1951-52]

Marie (stepping on to the terrace): How is my wig?

Willard (coolly): Your wig is not on fire,

Nor is it drenched in sauce. It is a wig,

Neither minuscule nor over-big,

A snowbound cirrhus perched on a base of wire:

A mild peruke, unfitted to inspire

Passion, distaste, ennui or secret love.

Marie: Then you don't like it?

Willard: But I do, my dove.

It is most suitable, a sweet peruke

That makes you less a duchess than a duke.

Marie: And so it does! Well, how d'you like my dress?

It is an oldie dyed for this one rout.

Eight hours I spent; Adele and artfulness

Were my companions. All you boys were out.

Willard: A Long Day's Dyeing! It becomes you well.

Marie (on a note of doubt): Am I a vision, or do I repel?

Willard: You are, my dove, a vision. But for sloth,

Willie's companion, I would cut as gay

A figure. Let's be off!(A pause.)How's my beret?

Marie: First let me feed the birds, and pour us both

A slug-slug. Your beret? Quite a surprise.

The red brings out the color of your eyes.

Willard: I was a-boozing till that milksop Dawn

Shoved me to bed. A-boozing and a-wenching,

Bacchus and bold bacchante-goosing faun

All rolled in one!

Marie: A-sucking and a-frenching

Is what I'd say. But never mind. Take this

And swallow quick lest we Scavullo miss.

Willard: Farewell, sweet Crocus! Aye, the nimble day

Will have released your trills ere we return

With throbbing megrim, once again to learn

That mixing gin and whisky doesn't pay.

Marie: And you, dear Jug-jug, sing until you burst

While we regret our uncontrollèd thirst!

(to Willard) Another swig?

Willard: Why not?

Marie: Oh, it will be

Fantastic! That I'm sure of.

Willard: You create

Fantasticness where'er you go, chérie.

Marie (under her breath): Especially so when I am overweight.

Willard: You're not! You look divine, a mixture new

Of snow and blood and sapphire luminescence,

A mad mélange of scarlet moons and crescents

Sewn on a sea of Mediterranean blue!

Marie (gratefully): Of all the wives i' the world, a poet's wife

Must count herself most singularly blest,

To hear the squalor of quotidian life

In stanzas rich from dawn to dusk expressed!

Willard: I know it. Lucky girl!(A pause.)

But aren't you too

Scanning your sentences the way I do?

Marie: It's just a habit, dear. Right now I'm scanning

The sea to catch a glimpse of that S. S.

United States. I'm mad for Captain Manning!

Willard: He's not my type at all, but Dwight –

Marie: Oh yes!

He'd go insane for that one, though I think

The fact the Captain doesn't smoke or drink

Might be a –

Willard: Quite. An obstacle, let's say,

To games involving complicated play . . .

But anyway the liner left last night.

Marie: It did? Oh dear. I'll scan the sea no more.

Willard: I wish we could persuade Rupert and Dwight

To come to Pavlik's party! Such a bore,

This sour distrust of revelry!

Marie: Oh, I know.

Sometimes I wonder if their attitude

Isn't more rough on them than merely rude

To others. Paradox (excuse the mot)

Is but a cage wherein the owner sits,

Fed by a Crocus of enormous girth.

To him the bird is caged, he's at the Ritz,

And every fag should be erased at birth.

Willard: Well, some at any rate... Yet darling Joe-joy,

You must admit, is utter bliss and blow-joy:

A doll.

Marie: I know. Of course he is. But then

Think of the dreadful would-be gentlemen

Like Colby!

Willard: Or the self-important kids

And would-be-teentsy-weentsy ingenues

Who hop around the Village, kangaroos

Hoping to God you'll think they're katydids . . .

Ben is a doll. (A pause.) Hark, darling! I'm not sure,

But isn't that Scavullo at the door?

Marie: It is. (She goes to the door.) Come in, come in, come in, come in!

The playlet ends and we, my dears, begin!

CURTAIN

NOTES: Adele is Menken's sister, frequently described as her sidekick. Scavullo is Francesco Scavullo the fashion photographer. Crocus and Jug-jug are most likely caged birds. Captain Manning was the name of the skipper of the S.S. United States in 1951-52. Dwight is Dwight Ripley. Pavlik is painter Pavel Tchelitchev. Joe-joy is Joe LeSueur. Colby is Colby Walworth, director of an annual antiques show held at the Park Avenue Armory.

Copyright Frank Polach. Reproduced here with the kind permission of Frank Polach and Douglas Crase.

IT JUST DOESN'T FEEL DONE WITH: DELEUZE, VINCENNES AND THE KENNINGTON OVAL GASWORKS 1975-2009

2009-03-17T04:46:00.001-07:00

All images: Silvia Maglioni and Graeme Thomson, Facs of Life (2009, work in progress).

Facs of Life. Presentation of work in progress by Silvia Maglioni and Graeme Thomson. Gasworks, Sun 15 March 2009

Silvia Maglioni and Graeme Thomson were at Gasworks on Sunday afternoon to present Facs of Life, their work-in-progress, one of whose beginnings was seeing a 17 hour marathon of Deleuze teaching on Italian television

The artists showed us some of the footage they had excitedly videoed. Filmed at University of Paris VIII in Vincennes (1975-6), it was part of a conscious attempt to "film philosophy."

The camera was passed between participiants, attempting to create a fluidity of point of view that matched the rhizomatic and lines of flight of its subject.

The following text is both reconstruction and response, based on memory and my hand written notes during the event.

NOTE: The atrocious quality of the image made everyone almost unrecognisable. It had foiled attempts to place the footage in official archives, but fits well with contemporary concerns and Deleuze, too, cautioned against restoring it.

Thomson outlined some of the reasons for their attraction to the film, and their desire not to historicise it but to respond to the aspects that seemed still in need of response and completion.

(1)The films themselves still had the feel of rushes, remaining to a degree formless.

(2)The attraction to the material was one of desire not knowledge, as in: I want to be there and share this experience.

(3)The rhythm of the lessons themselves appeared as a musical composition of discourse.

(4)A sense of (political) urgency, but also a feeling of calm and dilation. There is all the time in the world for the ideas to come out.

More fragmentarily:

intensive life... not molar but molecular... footage that exists in LIMBO:

EXAMPLE 1: When Marielle Burkhalter wanted to put them in an archive, the university said the quality was too poor and threw them away. Burkhalter was able to retrieve half of the original tapes from the trash.

EXAMPLE 2: Deleuze himself worked on a five hour edit, but was unable to clean up the image. Was this before he wrote the letter: restoring will destroy more than it will save. So the work ends up stranded

between a personal and an historical archive

in a zone of uncertainty not official

between immanence and transcendence

between Deleuze's lessons/ a university at war

an archive and it tries to destroy itself

NOTE: A recognition of the authenticity of this situation is also a loss of communicating on the level of content, something which always gives a philosopher vertigo but makes certain kinds of filmmaker laugh helplessly.

Maglioni and Thomson showed some of the original footage, but their work and the Gasworks event was very much about the present, and most of the three hour seminar was a presentation of their work-with and out of this footage.

AN EXTRACT

An extract from a 25 minute loop re-working images of the members of that Vincennes class. A beautiful film, almost a poetics for how the atrocious original image quality was feeding into contemporary concerns about presence, identity, pedagogy, and communication...

... in its flow and flood of presences both material and immaterial...

Sometimes, seeing a brief clip and not speaking French, it was unclear if this was a wonderful educational experience or just someone lecturing to a group of silent students. This film seemed to admit of that uncertainty, maybe as the basis of the educational experience itself.

In the disintegrations of its imagery, it also highlighted education as the presence of physical bodies, but made it impossible to read those bodies through familiar codifications of gesture or posture, leaving

Work with the plastic matter of the archive. Multiple semiotic components. A soundtrack made of processed sounds of tape buzz, chairs squeaking, Deleuze's breath and respiratory problems, dragging between phrases

between statements, re-filming the footage in HD video, camera's green eye in the screen a quotation of Hitchcock's Rear Window, going through the screen, mirror/window/wall, transversing, Cocteau and Orphee, to see what is behind as though it's ahead of you

CONCLUSION: IMAGES HAVE MORE FUTURE OR PAST THAN THE PEOPLE WHO LOOK AT THEM IT IS WE ARE THE FRAGILE ELEMENT

Intensive life of images in the future... it just doesn't feel done with...

FINDING ORIGINAL STUDENTS

The film makers decided they wanted to find some of the Vincennes students. These students, revealed in all the uncertainties of the original footage, had become fictional characters to the film-makers.

The original university had been demolished, and replaced by a woodland that revealed no traces of the previous architectural inhabitants. People who lived in the area, said Thomson, were no longer sure there had been a university...

Establish a relation with each subject, particular to meeting them. Because of the past but only inhabiting the present: A middle-aged man and Maglioni standing awkwardly in a forest amongst trees. A student stood at the side of a busy motorway at dusk, reading aloud.

The same student sat on the crash barriers in an underpass. The busy motorway in front of him and the layby area behind. The physical landscape looks like a split screen. Then he is in a warehouse space playing the trombone...

As Maglioni and Thomson worked on their film their was unrest over educational reforms of Nicolas Sarkozy. So they filmed a group of current students at Paris 8. To respond to Deleuze lectures and mythical Vincennes. At the time of the videos, too, this was what they were asking. To be 2009 in 1972. To be 1972 in 2009.

MISREMEMBERED STATEMENT BY A STUDENT: Ideas are in corners and recesses and obscure corners. We want to be part of society. We want to articulate our immersion, not set up some sense of apartness. But there is the idea of obscure corners to be remembered amidst all this talk of education as service and normalization...

and so history is crossed... so what is to be done with... is unusable... d'un film à venir...

less a territory and more a trajectory... with every student an encounter... what was between us...

finding a situation for the polyvocality of a person... possible extensions of the body.. compressing then and now into a key word...

and all linked... in the manner of the rhizome... in the manner of the rhizome talking...

the power of an exhausted film form still retains... not between students and workers.. the university itself the factory...

A RESPONSE: Your film seeks to respond to the avoidance of professionalization. "There's nothing worse than specialists" said Deleuze, by which we can understand now "there is nothing worse than Deleuzians."

So to respond properly to Deleuze's lectures we have to attune ourselves to their qualities of IMPROPER TRANSMISSION, the qualities that do not fulfill Deleuze's edicts, where faithful becomes distance to faithfulness.

A RESPONSE: But how do you find a critical position in-through your engagement with all this material?

WORK-WITH

SOME ANSWERS: One of the students had become a philosopher and that was the only straight interview we did. It was very sad. We realized what interested us was more: how do you film a becoming of thought?

Deleuze prepared fully for the lectures, cultivated a stuttering, not knowing what he'd say at the moment of speaking, the film, too, approximating this...

The critical approach has to emerge in the films textures and in the dissonance between elements, in an IMPERSONAL CINEMA which expresses not our position but releases another body...

... relaunching a Nouvelle Vague art practice

that gesture that way of smoking

creating a film that already existed

guy known already from a Bresson film

individuality transversed by gesturality

WE HAD AN ARGUMENT: How to film the student in the word-wood. The camera static like Straub filming Pavese. But we are not fixed like Straub. We do not have a fixed revolutionary position. So we make the floating version, the drift of our camera... without subjective direction...

RESPONSE: THE DE-PERSONALIZED CINEMA ALLOWS MULTIPLE VOICES NONE OF WHICH ARE LOCATED IN A BODY. IT IS A VENTRILOQUIAL AND POROUS CINEMA COMPOSED OF I SAY IT AGAIN MULTIPLE SOUNDS AND IMAGES NOT TIED TO VOICE OR BODY INTERVAL CONSTANTLY I SAY VARIES BETWEEN YOU AND SUBJECT VIOLENCE OF THOUGHT BECOMES IMAGE I

WE HAD TO VACATE THE BUILDING

Re-filming the archive and remembering the event as an image of the force of thought, not the representation of a speaker.

Think of Deleuze and the way that force of thought hits the voice. The theatre of his - our - mine - voice - there's been a crime but where is it and what are you insinuating... the storyteller has been seized

Think of it as the end of the Chris Marker's San Soleil where there is an eradication of representation in order to bring up

KEYWORDS: RUSHES. RHIZOME. TALKING. ATROCIOUS. DESIRE. NOT DONE WITH. LIMBO. MOLECULAR. WORK-WITH. RESPIRATORY. TRANSVERSING. VINCENNES. MEETING. HITS. CORNERS. POLYVOCALITY. IMPERSONAL. CRITIQUE. FAITHFUL. BECOMING OF. GESTURE. ALREADY. ARGUMENT. SEIZED.

FACS OF LIFE was part of the events program accompanying A Long Time Between Suns, an exhibition by The Otolith Group (Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun) at Gasworks 15 Feb- 5 Apr 2009. The next event is Collaborative Filmmaking: A Discussion with John Akomfrah, founding member of the black audio Film Collective (1982-1998) on Wed 1 April 2009, 7-8.30.