Gig #156: Select Experimental Film & Video @ Los Angeles (1965 – 2021): Sharon Lockhart, Peter Mays, Wallace Berman, John Baldessari, Michael Scroggins, Lynda Benglis, Adam Beckett, Jack Goldstein, Gary Beydler, Richard Newton, Bruce and Norman Yonemoto, Larry Cuba, Chick Strand, Pat O’Neill, Paul McCarthy, Thom Andersen, Morgan Fisher, Louis Hock, Allan Sekula, Fred Worden, Kandis Williams

 

 

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Sharon Lockhart Podwórka (2009)
‘Sharon Lockhart’s film, Podwórka, takes as its subject matter the courtyards of Łódź, Poland, and the children that inhabit them. A ubiquitous architectural element of the city, Łódź’ courtyards are the playgrounds of the children that live in the surrounding apartment buildings. Separated from the streets, they provide a sanctuary from the traffic and commotion of the city. Yet far from the overdetermined playgrounds of America, the courtyards are still very much urban environments. In six different courtyards throughout the city of Łódź, we see parking lots, storage units, and metal armatures become jungle gyms, sandboxes, and soccer fields in the children’s world. A series of fleeting interludes within city life, Podwórka is both a study of a specific place and an evocation of the resourcefulness of childhood.’ — Lockhart Studio

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Peter Mays The Star Curtain Tantra (1965-1969)
‘A trance film originally released in 1966 as THE STAR CURTAIN, about the settling and relaxation of the senses after a climax. “Sentences” of cosmic imagry were added in 1969 to form the vision glimpsed in the trance. Dialectic opposition of picture and sound. TANTRA played at the San Francisco Film Festival of 1970.’ — collaged

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Part 2

 

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Wallace Berman Aleph (1966)
‘Aleph is an artist’s meditation on life, death, mysticism, politics, and pop culture. In an eight-minute loop of film, Wallace Berman uses Hebrew letters to frame a hypnotic, rapid-fire montage that captures the go-go energy of the 1960s. Aleph includes stills of collages created using a Verifax machine, Eastman Kodak’s precursor to the photocopier. These collages depict a hand-held radio that seems to broadcast or receive popular and esoteric icons. Signs, symbols, and diverse mass-media images (e.g., Flash Gordon, John F. Kennedy, Mick Jagger) flow like a deck of tarot cards, infinitely shuffled in order that the viewer may construct his or her own set of personal interpretations. The transistor radio, the most ubiquitous portable form of mass communication in the 1960s, exemplifies the democratic potential of electronic culture and serves as a metaphor for Jewish mysticism. The Hebrew term kabbalah translates as “reception” for knowledge, enlightenment, and divinity.’ — The Jewish Museum

 

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John Baldessari I Am Making Art (1971)
‘A good example of Baldessari’s deadpan irreverence is the 1971 black-and-white video entitled I Am Making Art, in which he moves different parts of his body slightly while saying, after each move, ‘I am making art.’ The statement, he says, ‘hovers between assertion and belief.’ On one level, the piece spoofs the work of artists who, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, explored the use of their own bodies and gestures as an art medium. The endless repetition, awkwardness of the movements made by the artist, and the reiteration of the statement ‘I am making art,’ create a synthesis of gestural and linguistic modes which is both innovative (in the same way that the more serious work of his peers is innovative) and absurdly self-evident.’ — Marcia Tucker

 

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Michael Scroggins What Are You Looking At? (1973)
‘What Are You Looking At? was shot on the new ½ inch reel to reel EIAJ Sony Portapak’s that made portable videotape recording open to a wide range of people for the first time in history. Access to this artist friendly means of production allowed for a form of long take experimentation that was not constrained by the economics of shooting 16mm sound film. The video opens with a brief moment with Nam June Paik in the CalArts parking lot, Burbank, 1970, and moves on to the core of the piece which revolves around a casual morning’s recording at the Hillside House in Topanga Canyon, 1973, in which the young child, Tucker, directs the gaze of the videographer –and thus the video viewer. The synchronicity of developing events unfolds in a dance of subjective and objective relationships revolving around the question quoted in the title.’ — MS

 

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Lynda Benglis Female Sensibility (1974)
‘Two women, faces framed in tight focus, kiss and caress. Their interaction is silent, muted by Benglis’ superimposition of a noisy, distracting soundtrack of appropriated AM radio: bawdy wisecracks of talk-show hosts and male callers, interacting in the gruff terms of normative masculinity; male country-western singers plying women with complaints about bad love and bad coffee; a man preaching on the creation of Adam and Eve. The tape’s challenge may, in part, direct itself at the viewer. While one might find it easy to dismiss the gender clichés of the soundtrack, it may be harder to resolve the hermetically-sealed indifference and disconcerting ambiguity (lovers? performers?) of the two women. By turns conscious of the camera and seemingly oblivious to it, their dreamy indifference is a rebuke to the disruptive chatter hovering around them, and perhaps also to the expectations of those who watch.’ — Electronic Arts Intermix

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Adam Beckett Flesh Flows (1974)
‘A young artist, a career full of promise, a life of innovation and energy tragically cut short. Such a summary barely begins to describe the bright, fast burn that was rising star Adam Beckett (1950-1979), one of the first graduates of the CalArts Experimental Animation program, and a prolific animator, sketch artist, and effects prodigy. Known for his unique abstract film loops, as well as for his precise, yet organic work with the optical printer, Beckett’s work continues to influence young animators both at his alma mater, where he is frequently mentioned, as well as in the wider animation world.’ — Animation World Network

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Jack Goldstein Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (1975)
‘From 1972 to 1978, Goldstein produced a number of short films in which a single action is repeated continuously. For Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Goldstein appropriated the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio’s familiar production logo, which was used to introduce each of their movies. He did not simply re-use the original footage, but rather altered it, stripping away the company name, tinting the background a deep hue of red, and repeating the lion’s thundering roar on a continuous loop, thereby highlighting the artifice involved in commercial filmmaking.’ — MoCA

 

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Gary Beydler Hand Held Day (1975)
‘Over the course of two Kodachrome camera rolls, we simultaneously witness eastward and westward views of the surrounding landscape as the skies, shadows, colors, and light change dramatically. Beydler’s hand, holding the mirror carefully in front of the camera, quivers and vibrates, suggesting the relatively miniscule scale of humanity in the face of a monumental landscape and its dramatic transformations. Yet the use of the mirror also projects an idealized human desire to frame and understand what we see around us, without destroying or changing any of its inherent fascination and beauty.’ — Mark Toscano

 

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Richard Newton A Glancing Blow (1979)
‘An invitation was sent out with date, maps, and times for each location. There was no announcement to the general public. No permissions or special arrangements were requested or granted from city or state authorities. Spectators arrived and gathered at nearby corners. Traffic was moving along at a normal pace. Two cars, a 1963 white Dodge Dart GT, and a 1969 dark blue Dodge Polara station wagon arrived from opposite directions. As the 2 cars approached each other, the drivers moved in close and bumped, banged and scrapped their way along the bodies of the two Dodges. The drivers immediately turned the cars around and repeated the action – 5 sharp glances on the Whittier Blvd. Bridge in Boyle Heights, East Los Angeles, and 6 solid blows where Cañon meets Beverly Drive in Beverly Hills.’ — Ric Martin

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Bruce and Norman Yonemoto Vault (1984)
‘In Vault, Bruce and Norman Yonemoto rewrite a traditional narrative of desire: boy meets girl, boy loses girl. Employing the hyperbolic, melodramatic syntax of Hollywood movies and commercial TV, they decode the Freudian symbology and manipulative tactics that underlie media representations of romantic love, and expose the power of this media “reality” to construct personal fictions. Using the psychoanalytic language of advertising, cinematic and television texts to tell the love story of a pole vaulter/concert cellist and a cowboy/Abstract Expressionist painter, they rupture the narrative with psychosexual metaphors and references to pop media and art. Self-conscious strategies such as overtly Freudian symbols, flashback reconstructions of childhood traumas, Wagnerian orchestration and loaded cliches are wielded with deft irony.’ — MoCA

 

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Larry Cuba Calculated Movements (1985)
‘In the pure form of abstraction that Cuba pursues, visual perception is paramount. But because the images are generated via algorithms written in computer language, there is a paradox in trying to use words to describe images for which words do not exist. As Raphael Bassan wrote in a 1981 issue of La Revue du Cinema, “The computer animation establishes a parallel between visual perception and a structure of linguistic or mathematical order: it is concerned with establishing a new organizational field for the aesthetic material. …In the sphere of abstract cinema (lacking a better term), Larry Cuba’s research is, in fact, at the origin of a new direction which does not yet have a name…”‘ — collaged

 

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Chick Strand Fake Food Factory (1986)
‘Added to the National Film Registry’s 2011 list of culturally significant films, Chick Strand’s glorious short film Fake Fruit Factory guides us through the experience of women crafting papier-mâché fruit and vegetables in a small factory in Mexico. Filmed over the course of a year, the film focuses on close-ups of the production as we hear voices of the women making the objects for domestic and international sale. Through their thoughts and feelings, we gain a unique insight into their experiences through extremely candid conversation about sex, food and work. Utilizing the language barrier to speak frankly about their gringo boss and his Mexican wife, in his presence, the workers’ raunchy discussions bring us onto the factory floor and through the production line. A kaleidoscopic blend of music, atmosphere and gossip, Fake Fruit Factory is a beautiful ode to the voice of the worker.’ — Charlotte Cook

Watch it here

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Pat O’Neill Messages (2021)
‘Photographer, filmmaker and artist Pat O’Neill tells us about his photographs.’ — Sundance Institute

Messages 1

Messages 2

Messages 3

Messages 4

Messages 5

 

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Paul McCarthy Painter (1995)
‘Painter (1995) is a brilliant interrogation of the senility and late paintings of Willem de Kooning, complete with collectors and dealers puppet-mastering around him. It’s a video deploying, as so many of his videos do, the mise-en-scène of instructional television (from the Galloping Gourmet to Martha Stewart), but one in which the painter mumbles and cries: ‘You can’t do it anymore you can’t do it anymore.’ And later: ‘I can’t do this anymore.’ He means painting, he means art-making, he may mean life. At the end of Painter the artist gets up on a table, pulls down his pants and a collector with a protuberant fake nose sniffs at his bare arse, McCarthy’s own.’ — Dangerous Minds

 

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Frances Stark Nothing is enough (2012)
‘In her video work Nothing is enough (2012), Frances Stark draws from self-reflective Skype conversations with random men met online. She transcribes her libidinous encounters with an Italian architect, and sets them to a score of a slow piano improvisation. Lacking physical imagery, only two voices appear in the piece, depicted by different fonts. The artist and the architect question their own physical and intellectual engagement as well as how the Internet has changed their lives, raising the delicate moral issue of whether their behavior is bad or not. The video’s soundtrack is performed by yet another man she met online—one of the characters in My Best Thing (2011), a video also on view in this exhibition. Stark paid her chat partner-cum-composer for the use of his music, formalizing the collaborative nature of their relationship.’ — ICA

Watch it here

 

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Morgan Fisher () (2003)
‘( ) is a 2003 silent film directed by Morgan Fisher. The film consists entirely of insert shots extracted from feature films, considering the “status of the insert shot in an ingenious way”, according to film expert Susan Oxtoby. Fisher said of his movie, “Inserts are above all instrumental. They have a job to do, and they do it; and they do little, if anything, else. Sometimes inserts are remarkably beautiful, but this beauty is usually hard to see because the only thing that registers is the news, the expository information, that the insert conveys… By chance, I learned that the root of ‘parenthesis’ is a Greek word that means the act of inserting. And so I was given the title of the film.”‘ — collaged

 

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Louis Hock Feral (2004)
‘Louis Hock is an experimental filmmaker and School of the Art Institute graduate whose work has been referred to as a “hypnotic study in motion” (Nora Sayre, The New York Times). “Our eyes are virtually goaded out of our heads” (Richard Eder, The New York Times). A recent work, Feral (2004), asks the viewer to contemplate theatricality of our homeland security experience.’ — First Person Cinema

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Allan Sekula Gala (2005)
‘I decided to slow the shutter speed just to see into the dark recesses of the music center on opening night. It was a way of going “behind the scenes” or into the wings. I was thinking of it as a silent movie device, a way of looking at the rehearsal for the opening as a big experiment with images thrown onto a challenging surface, a gigantic outdoor cinema screen. They were projecting videos, of Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting, of Ed Harris painting in Pollock (2000), a veritable feast of creative gestures. The only imaginable way to respond to such spectacle was to regress to “primitive” film modes. But all in all, what I’ve made here is an ethnographic film of sorts, with the symphony audience as disoriented voyagers in a potentially hostile environment waiting for their limousines at the corner of First and Grand, fearful of being swept away by an invisible torrent into the Los Angeles River. It’s a view of the Los Angeles elite rather different from what we see at the Academy Awards, for example. The carnival in Venice must have been like this. While one waited for the gondola, everyone was drunk and wearing a mask but at the same time feeling sort of miserable. The frightened West Sider downtown. I think the discomfort of people waiting for their cars is a sign of how hard it is to re-center this city.’ — Allan Sekula



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Fred Worden Possessed (2010)
‘Once, when I was about 18 years old, my friend Eddie Moulton and I were taking a short cut across the local hig- school parking lot and we happened to notice that one of the school buses parked there had an open door and we could see the keys sitting on the driver’s seat. It was a Sunday afternoon and no one was around, so just for the illicit thrill of it we got in and drove the bus from one end of the school parking lot to the other. I think if the cops had caught us driving the bus, the charge would have been something like “joy riding.” A similar impulse explains Possessed. I had a strong, slightly illicit, urge to commandeer the original train sequence from the 1931 film Possessed and make it move in such a way as to give the girl (Joan Crawford) what she thought she wanted: a position on the inside. To do that, I had to create my own (all encompassing) vehicle. By my count, the original sequence provides three orders of motion: the motion (and stillness) of the passengers on the train, the motion of the train itself, and finally the motion of the girl (Joan) outside of the train. By injecting my own additional level of motion, I was able to move Joan from her position on the outside looking in (played melodramatically as desire’s longing for the just-out-of-reach) to a position inside, looking around (played as pure vision). But maybe that’s really just my fanciful imagining and, as such, pretty much situates me in Joan’s original position: projecting desire onto a handy passing vehicle. In the end, at least this much is true: we both love staring into this passing train. In fact, we never seem to tire of it.’ — Fred Worden

 

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Kandis Williams Eurydice, 2018
‘Williams’ ‘Eurydice’ is an immersive two-channel video installation which includes footage of performances by the same name. These performances take the Greek myth of Eurydice as their starting point: Eurydice, daughter of the god Apollo, is sent to the underworld but offered rescue by her lover, Orpheus, under the condition that he not look at her until they have left. Despite his great journey to save Eurydice, Orpheus is unable to resist looking back at her, and she is immediately condemned back to eternity in Hell, lost in the act of being seen. Williams’ project revisits the myth’s dynamics of spectatorship and agency to explore the status of the Black figure as a symbol, co-opted in an immediate cycle of fetishization and erasure. Drawing from psychoanalyst Bracha Ettinger’s structure of the “matrixial gaze,” the system of discontinuous influences from which we develop senses of identity, Williams surrounds the viewer with layered and contrasting images, challenging intuitive processes of reconciliation by embracing or rejecting a logic of coherence. Within these schema of representation and rupture, the viewer is left to their own devices, asked at once to draw from and discard the frameworks by which we make meaning of what we see.’ — curate.la

 

 

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p.s. Hey. Warning: my head is still clogged, and my brain is only semi-usable. ** Tomk, Hi, Tom. Thanks. Fleeting doesn’t seem to be doable but short-lived is still the hope. ** Conrad, Hi, Conrad! Oh, that was you asking that question? I thought, is that Conrad?, but I didn’t have my glasses on, so I wasn’t sure. Thank you for being there. I have to do an event for the ‘Jerk’ DVD at Potemkine on Friday night, otherwise the Grandrieux screening would be very tempting. The Roni Horn was nice, not amazing. I think I’ve seen Gonzales-Torres’s lightbulb string pieces so many times that they don’t have anything left for me. The DG-T hologram piece is quite eerie and very nice. I haven’t been around the galleries of late due to busyness and now sickness so I’m behind. I want to see the Sturtevant show at Ropac. And I guess the probably shitty show at Palais de Tokyo. You seen anything you recommend? Nice to see you, bud. ** David Ehrenstein, Happy you liked it. ** Jack Skelley, Hi, Jack! Shit, I owe you an email. Sorry, I’ll get on that. I’ve just been overly swamped lately. Book updates! I look forward to them, natch. And to seeing you on Saturday. xo. ** Dominik, Hi, D!!!! I don’t think I’ve ever wanted every copy of anything either. I do want to have everything Robert Pollard puts out, but that has become basically an impossibility at this point. Your love of yesterday would be so nice. Maybe my seriously impaired brain can come up with some interestingly dumb or weird film scenarios. Maybe I’ll try. Love making cigarette smoke a miraculous decongestant, G. ** Tosh Berman, Hi. Right. I actually did a post about his project here at some point, although I’m not sure I’ve restored it yet. I remember what a total wow that blank album cover was when it first came out. The first blank rock album cover that wasn’t a bootleg. Thanks, Tosh. ** Thomas Moronic, Hi! I planned to tell you I was going to do that when you were here, but I spaced and forgot to mention it. It was so good to see you, sir, and I’m happy to hear your trip revived you! Love, me. ** _Black_Acrylic, It does not seem at all impossible that Oscar will have some kind of show in your vicinity, and I will hope so. He’s amazing. ** Misanthrope, If you do want to make it a gif, you can use the site ezGif. I’ve never made a gif from a photo there — only from video –but I know it’s possible. I have a serious dislike of Mexican fusion, or at least I’ve never eaten any that wasn’t just an unnecessarily self-consciously clever abomination. If it ain’t broke, … etc. I’m not a fan of chains, but I’m very grateful that Paris has a Chipotle. Thanks for the well wishes. Yeah, I need to get this stupid cold behind me immediately. ** Steve Erickson, I’m feeling slightly worse, but thank you. I’m grateful for the ‘slightly’. I am definitely not immune to extremely horrible US news of which you speak. Oh, sure, about Vox Populi. I’ve liked them, but I haven’t dipped in for a while. I should. I think some extremely watered down and re-populated version of then still plays here sometimes. ** Robert, Hi, Robert! Thank you! Awesome stuff you’re reading. Yeah, Thomas Bernhard, incredible, right? Do you have a fave? Are you in a situation where you can concentrate on greatness input and output of whatever sort for a while? Happy to see you again. ** Right. I made you a gig of films and videos instead of music this time, all generated by that city-shaped fount of the weird and new aka Los Angeles. Some really good stuff in there if you have the time and inclination. See you, hopefully less foggily on my end, tomorrow.