‘In photographer Amir Zaki’s vertiginous, depopulated views, usually long exposures shot at night, velvety dark blue-greens dominate, illuminated by eerie halos of electric light. Rooflines, cornices, garden walls, empty backyards with potted plants and outdoor furniture outline LA residences and the landscapes surrounding or intruding on them. It’s as if Julius Shulman abandoned black-and-white to do location stills for The X-Files.

‘In his new photographs, Zaki negotiates the chill, even noir aspects of Los Angeleno domesticity. I write “negotiates” (rather than, say, “interrogates”) because it’s difficult to discern what kind of meaning Zaki thinks his work is producing. Three photographs here were slashed, as were their mounting and framing, and whole sections removed (a horizontal or vertical “middle,” a corner that perhaps followed a roof slope). Zaki’s decision to crowd the three “cut” works chockablock with ten others in which the physicality of the photograph and its support is not an issue has disturbing and, I would guess, unintended—consequences. The excisions do not cam the weight of sculptural concerns; these aren’t Gordon Matta-Clark cut pieces done with photographs. If they are corrections of some kind, why would Zaki produce an edition of eight and cut each apart in exactly the same manner—and what is the relation of the “corrected” pieces to the unedited images? It would have been preferable to see fewer pieces with a stronger focus on what motivates this project, on whether and how the approaches produce different kinds of meaning.

‘Zaki has never denied digitally manipulating his photographs. It’s tempting to read his cutting away the print and its support as a return of the repressed real, an insistence on a physicality his medium may not really have. Photographs—shadow and light, eminently reproducible—are simultaneously objects and specters; digitization further complicates the photograph’s already complicated thingness. But rather than emphasize the images’ physicality, Zaki’s cutting seems to trash not only those cleft but, paradoxically, all the photographs, any potential importance of the meaning, along with much of his larger enterprise.

‘Zaki also showed a DVD piece, This Video Was Not Supposed to Exist. It Replaces Another One That Committed Suicide (all works 2001): Huddled near a backyard swimming-pool shed are two preteen girls and a boy of about six, the age Zaki was (an artist’s statement tells us) when Ian Curtis, the lead singer of Joy Division, hung himself. Copyright law forbade the exhibition of a video in which the kids recite a whole album of Joy Division lyrics (Zaki read the words aloud, the kids repeated them, and then the artist digitally removed his voice and the pauses). In the video that is shown, the kids instead explain why they’re not reciting Joy Division lyrics. While not entirely successful on its own, when combined with the photographs the digital video suggests that Zaki’s interests may not best be served by photography, or by an adherence to any one medium at all. A number of factors—that he offers a video that’s a stand-in for another; that he mutilates his photographs; that in the statement accompanying the show he emphasizes Curtis’s suicide and wonders whether the kids’ recitation of the lyrics’ “angst and depression” would be different if they were older—lead me to think that rather than domestic architecture per se, Zaki is interested in the architectonics of sorrow. He is attempting something much more considerable than the “ominous” nightscaping of Todd Hido or Miranda Lichtenstein. His concerns seem to exceed photography, to require additional concepts and media to witness the relations between locale and psychic climates, between palm trees and sunshine and suicide.’ — Bruce Hainley

 

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Further

Amir Zaki Website
AZ @ Diane Rosenstein Gallery
Book: ‘Building + Becoming’
Amir Zaki @ instagram
Interview w/ AZ
A CASE FOR PRETENDING: WHY IDENTITY IS A SHAM AND AUTHENTICITY AN ILLUSION
Book: ‘California Concrete: A Landscape Of Skateparks by Amir Zaki’
Podcast: On perception and artist Amir Zaki
Amir Zaki by Christopher Michno
The Light Thief: A Self-Aware Modernist
Podcast: Philosophy of Photography w/ Amir Zaki
Amir Zaki’s rhetoric of authenticity disrupts …
You don’t need rules to look at Amir Zaki’s photography

 

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Extras

Empty Vessel, the photography of Amir Zaki

Amir Zaki: On Being Here

Artist Lecture Series: Amir Zaki

AMIR ZAKI AT DIANE ROSENSTEIN GALLERY

 

_____
Interview
from Yield Magazine

 

Mike Rippy: Can you describe how you became interested in photography?

Amir Zaki: Sure. Let’s see. I grew up in a pretty small town in Southern California. My dad was from Egypt, my mom’s from Minnesota. They both moved to California from Minnesota after my dad emigrated from Egypt. We lived in a small town. My dad was a scientist, my mom’s a home economics teacher and nobody was an artist. That’s my long way to get to the part that nobody made art in my family.

We were fairly isolated from any extended family, and I basically, I’m 47 now, so I was a punk/goth kid in that era. Friends were “alternative”, which was the word we were using at the time. And basically in high school, I got a camera and was making these moody black and white pictures of friends smoking cigarettes and our weird haircuts.

MR: Sounds familiar.

AZ: That’s what I was interested in, that’s the subculture that I came from. Then, I got into university at UC Riverside. I was straight up from high school. I was young – I was just barely turning 18. I was a psychology major and then within a year changed to philosophy, and that’s an important move because my interest in philosophy stays to this day.

I’m really interested in both Eastern, Western – anything I get my mind on. But after about a year of philosophy, in that period of time, I met, who’s now my wife, but was my girlfriend at the time. She was interested in art, and philosophy started getting really dry for me. It was like I was just realizing that there were going to be some really difficult, boring classes, not all the fun, existential stuff I was interested in. In all of that, I landed in a photography class, encouraged by my girlfriend – wife now – and landed in a photo class, and it was taught by John Divola.

That was an important moment because a lot of time those beginning level classes are taught by a visiting lecturer, which could be great too. But I just happened to be very lucky that quarter. I had no idea who he was at the time, didn’t know anything about photography, but I had a little background in what I was doing, just being an interested kid.

All these things came together – philosophy, an introduction to a beginning art class taught by someone who’s a very, very gifted teacher and already an interesting artist. He just opened things up. It was really like, “Oh my God, I can express all these philosophical ideas, but visually.” Being from that generation – I’ve been thinking about this a lot with this whole NFT thing and these generational differences – is that, so ingrained in people from that era was this questioning authority, not conforming, and that’s what this felt like.

It was a realization that, “Oh, there isn’t a right answer. You’re not telling me go make these pictures. You’re saying here’s an idea. Go out in the world and use what you have.” It was fucking amazing. It was exactly what I needed. It was just luck. And so then I just started taking photo classes.

I’m a little bit of a gearhead. Some science interest, math interest, made photography very accessible. And what made it even better is that I became an art major. I realized I couldn’t draw. I never wanted to draw. I found it super intimidating. My girlfriend was great at drawing and painting. I hated it, and I realized I didn’t have to do it. That wasn’t what art had to be. I could be an artist and not know how to draw, and all that just seemed great. That was the beginning, and then grad school and all the other fun stuff, but that’s the genesis of where it came from.

MR: I didn’t know Uta Barth was also a mentor of yours, I guess you could say a teacher. I want to get back to that, but I also want to get back to the idea that your dad comes from a different cultural perspective. That’s really interesting, and I want to know how his cultural views of America have impacted you because you said that you butted heads a lot. How do you appreciate his viewpoints and how they impact and influence what you’re doing now?

AZ: Just to give a little bit of background about that. Okay, so my dad coming from Egypt was Muslim, and my mom was Catholic. We grew up with zero dogma. We didn’t grow up “religious”, but both my parents were religious. My dad was an incredibly independent thinker. He’s the only person in his family who left the country at 20 and moved across the world. He had to buck up and figure out how to survive in a very difficult situation alone and stuff. He was a tough dude, and he was also just very independent, even from his family. He didn’t take bullshit, he didn’t like religious dogma.

All that stuff is really important. A lot of his values are things that I shared. He just liked to engage. We’ve engaging in difficult conversations from the time that I was very young. Probably as soon as I could – like, 10, 12, or something. He always opened it like it was an open invitation to have a conversation. There were very little topics considered to be “off the table”. In fact, that’s also another weird thing about today, that so many things are getting added to the list of being “off the table” to talk about. That also really rubs me the wrong way.

My mom was the first of her family to go to a four year college too. They both came from really modest backgrounds. Those values were very important to me. I will say that something I’ve talked about a lot is the idea of feeling alienated. It’s not something I thought about consciously at the time, but as I get older, I see that my attitude toward photography, all of it is a hybrid, non-purest thing: analog sure, digital sure, black and white, color.

That’s who I am. I don’t come from any very homogenous cultural background, it’s very mixed. I surf. I grew up in Southern California. I’m half Egyptian. My mom is from the Midwest. My family from the Midwest, we look almost nothing alike but we love each other. There’s just all this kind of hybrid attitude is who I am. It translates to my photography and into my attitude about a lot of things. That just has to do with my folks.

MR: How did the skate park photography start? You said you were a surfer. I’m assuming you probably did some skateboarding too. I’ve seen some fantastic skater photography. Some of it is just like surf photography, the way it’s done. How did you pull yourself back and say, “No, this space on its own is worth documenting.” After I started looking at your work, I noticed that I have seen it in the past, like the lifeguard towers and things like that.

AZ: That was a really interesting period of time because I tapped into a bit of pop culture that I don’t normally tap into. But I got interested in conversations with the history of skate photography. That’s an interesting side note, but it was a bit of a perfect storm, so yes, you’re right. I grew up skateboarding – like ramps, backyard ramps. I lived in a very, almost rural place. We didn’t have access to anything like those concrete parks. There was one place that was about a 45-minute drive where all the tough older kids went to. I never went, it was just too scary.

When I turned about 30 – I went all through my 20s without skateboarding at all, just doing other things. Around 30 – I had a toddler at that time, and probably one of my many midlife crises – I lived in a place where there was this small skate park about 15 minutes away. And I just started skating again. By myself, I would go midday when it wasn’t crowded and just try to feel it out and learn how to skate these concrete parks. I just did that for a couple of years. Then falling gets really – I fell on my tailbone a couple of times. It’s like as soon as you start falling, at that age, it gets scary. On and off, skated some of those places with some friends my age for several years, from 30 to 40 probably. I think around 2015, I had the idea, the initial idea. I thought, “Oh, that’s pretty interesting.”

I think I went to one of the skate parks and tried to photograph and just realized all the obstacles. Kids are there all the time, fences, and I gave up very quickly. I just thought it didn’t work. I took a couple of snapshots, “That’s not going to work.” Put it on the back burner, and then around 2018, I don’t know how the idea came again, but I started scouting the local skateparks. “Let me try on my way to Riverside go to this park at 5:00 or 6:00 in the morning. That’s what I did, and it was fantastic.

I was the only person there. I walked into this place completely unmanned. I saw security cameras, and it was dawn, my perfect – I love photographing at dawn. I’m by myself, and I’m basically – it felt like I was hiking in a remote spot. I’m walking through the thing, I understand how they work and just started photographing and really looking at it like landscape. It just became so obvious that all the forms were taken from classical landscape, mountains, valleys.

What I realized, the potential was that I could access these things for a good hour or two when the light was unbelievable – and nobody was there because skaters don’t get up early for the most part. That set me off. I started scouting on Google and looking at as many that I could possibly find, running into problems with ones that weren’t accessible and things like that. I started writing to the people who ran them and said, “Hey, could I pay $40 to show up at five in the morning and have you let me in?”

All that stuff pieced it together. That was for about an 18-month period, or two years, focused on California. It was a bit daunting, but I realized that being inside of them was key. I know what you’re talking about when you say, “Yes, it seems obvious in a way.” But what is not obvious is that most people either just don’t see these things up close at all, because there are excavations into the ground that from a street level you miss completely, or if they’re a parent, they see them from that fence, they see them from an outsider’s perspective. Having experience in the spaces when I was younger, it was very natural for me to crawl inside, and to look at them as someone who skates would look at them. It’s actually funny, because when I had to interview Tony Hawk for this thing, it’s like skaters don’t think about them as sculptural forms or as photographic things at all. They’re just looking at a line to skate.

I see that, but I also have a photo background. Again, this hybrid thing, my personality led me into those spaces in an organic way. There’s nothing forced about it. I also felt like at a certain point, while I was doing it, I realized that the whole activity is something that I won’t be able to do forever, like crawling in and out of those things for another 10 years. I don’t think so. I’ll be too old to do it physically.

 

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Videos

9

8

7

5

1

 

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Photographs

BUILT IN 1920. DAMAGED IN 1940. RENOVATED IN 1928, 1992 X, 2021

 

BUILT IN 1927. RENOVATED IN 1936, 2021

 

BUILT IN 1904. DAMAGED IN 1913 X, 2021

 

BUILT IN 1872. DAMAGED IN 1887 OR 1888, 1889, 1914, 1926, 1934, 1947, 1950, 1977, 1978, 1983, 1986, 1994, 1995. RENOVATED IN 2000, 2021

 

BUILT IN 1905. DAMAGED IN 1943, 1993, 1995. RENOVATED IN 2008, 2021

 

THE BEAUTICIAN, 2023

 

THE CELEBRITY, 2023

 

THE CHEF, 2023

 

THE COLLECTOR, 2023

 

THE DESIGNER, 2023

 

THE GURU, 2023

 

THE HOMEOPATH, 2023

 

THE MONK, 2023

 

THE MUSICIAN, 2023

 

THE NURSE, 2023

 

THE PAINTER, 2023

 

THE PASTOR, 2023

 

THE PHOTOGRAPHER, 2023

 

THE SCIENTIST, 2023

 

CONCRETE VESSEL 47, 2019

 

CONCRETE VESSEL 55, 2018

 

CONCRETE VESSEL 38, 2019

 

CONCRETE VESSEL 16, 2019

 

STRANGERS, 2017

 

ROCK #6, 2016

 

ROCK #29, 2016

 

SILVER 7, 2014

 

SILVER 1, 2014

 

TILTED AIRSTREAM, 2014

 

TREE PORTRAIT #21, 2012

 

TREE PORTRAIT #17, 2012

 

TREE PORTRAIT #8, 2012

 

TREE PORTRAIT #28, 2012

 

TOWER 38, 2009

 

TOWER 46, 2009

 

VANAGONS AT DUSK AND DAWN, DAWN AND DUSK, 2009

 

ARTWORK #1, 2007

 

UNTITLED (OH 04), 2004

 

UNTITLED (OH-19), 2004

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** Anon, Hey. Okay, I’ll try those albums. So many people are so high on ‘Kid A’. A high probability I missed something my first go round. Exactly: confidence and being ready to articulate why your work needs to work in the way it does is pretty imperative. Very good plan. All the luck, and I’d be happy to hear how the work is going whenever. Love back to you! ** Misanthrope, He never rescued me unless there was some danger he rescued me from what I didn’t know about. Okay, well, glad you enjoyed the ‘Dune’ thing and his part in it. I’ll see it on a plane flight someday. Nothing like seeing intended mindblow spectaculars on a mini-screen with shitty headphones. It really sobers them up. Right, Daylight Savings. I don’t know why we get ours a week later but we do. ** Dominik, Hi!!! It seems highly likely that if you saw ‘Avalanche’ you would have trouble remembering if you did. What’s an example of a ‘strong people’ show? Love explaining to me why our producer made us take the words ‘a film by Dennis Cooper & Zac Farley’ out of the opening credits of the festival screener version of our film because it might ‘offend the financiers’ which he knows we don’t have, G. ** _Black_Acrylic, ‘Bagbuss’ looks most curious indeed, yes. Whoa, new PT episode already? You’re on fire, or I’m on fire and you’re lighting me. ** Steve, Any luck by the end of the workday, I hope? Everyone, Two new reviews from Steve, of Gouge Away’s DEEP SAGE here and Kim Gordon’s THE COLLECTIVE here. No, the Oscars start at 2 am my time, way past my bedtime. Seems extremely predictable from everything I’ve read. Happy Wes Anderson won one. Don’t care about the rest really. I think I saw ‘Devil Doll’, I can’t remember. I’ll peek or re-peek. Thanks. ** video_video, I did, and, yes, it’s totally killer. Ooh, internet sleuthing, let me think. That definitely could come in very handy. Thank you a bunch. No, I don’t know ‘August Underground’. I’m not sure I’ve even heard of it before. What’s your opinion? I’m guessing I should jump on it? Pray tell. Yes, it’s a real pleasure to be in touch with you. ** Cori, Hi, Cori. Thanks, I do try. Film Forum is great, a huge boon for LA and has been for decades. ‘LA Plays Itself’, I know. It’s a total classic. I love Thom Anderson’s films. One of the last times I was in LA I saw a retrospective of his films at the Academy Museum. Did you catch the John Waters retrospective there while it was up. I didn’t, of course, but so wish I had. I haven’t seen ‘Blonde Death’, which is strange because I was friends with the director Robert James Baker. You liked it? Should I hunt it? It’s possible to get published by a major press without an agent, but it’s quite hard, especially if you’re a new writer. With the indie presses, which is where virtually all the books I read are published, you don’t need an agent really. For years I had an amazing agent, really lucky, super dedicated and passionate. My current agent is a disaster. I don’t think I’m even going to bother to have her field my next books with publishers and just do it myself. But I’m a known quantity, so that’s easier. Anyway, I wouldn’t sweat too much about agents right now until you think it’s absolutely time. Thank you! ** Dengue Fever, Hi. It bolsters my interior life that you think of me, especially under those circumstances. I will sheepishly admit I’m not sure who Dengue Fever contains, but maybe god planned it that way? Anyway, hi, and I will endeavor to think of you at confronting points today. xo. ** Darby😌, Cool, welcome to the early bird club. So, did it fit? Oh, shit, or hopefully not ‘oh shit’, about court tomorrow. Let me know the deal. I’ve never been to the Caribbean, but I’ve been to Hawaii a bunch of times. My dad lived there. I even toured a sugarcane factory, and it had the most nauseating odor I have ever experienced. I can still remember the smell, and I still urp when I do. Sleeplessness, ugh, the fucking worst. Tchaikovsky is too dramatic for me, but I’m into drones and stuff. I hope he woke you completely up at least. ** Justin, Hi, J. Weekend did the trick, thanks. My pleasure on the Geiser intro. I haven’t seen ‘Perfect Days’, but I’m curious. I haven’t liked a Wenders film since ‘Wings of Desire’, but people have said he has regained his mojo. I’ll find an illegal link to it or something. Thanks, pal. ** Uday, Storage space? Wtf. How unimaginative. Surely you guys’ proposal can top that. Frat guys like you. That’s something. I don’t really know any frat guys, but I guess I can imagine them being nice. Thank you for your kind words. No, I’ve never been anywhere in Southeast Asia. Have long wanted to, Cambodia and Vietnam especially for some reason. And curious seeming, sex vacation-promising Thailand. The closest I’ve been is Hong Kong, if that’s even close. Why do you ask, my friend? ** Corey Heiferman, Hi. Thanks. Oh, I don’t know, I don’t think I’ve ever read LA Record before or since. Ah, of course, an alias. Eli Wallace, cool. I’m distantly related to Sam Houston of the Alamo fame. And a cousin of mine starred in a couple of James Bridges films: ‘Urban Cowboy’ and ‘Mike’s Murder’. Uh, let me think about late April re: Paris event musts. Nothing pops to mind yet. I don’t know anyone who’s done anything with Light Cone, but that’s a great idea. There’s also Re:Voir who are concentrated on experimental film and have an exhibition space and do film screenings at a nearby theater in the 10th, but I’ve never worked with them either. ** Right. Today my galerie presents a show by the photographer and digital artist Amir Zaki, an artist based in Los Angeles whose work I really like, and who has a show up right now in LA if anyone’s there and interested. See you tomorrow.

* (restored/expanded)

 

‘In his account of the origin of art, Pliny asserts that the history of art begins with the tracing of a shadow. In the apocryphal story, the daughter of Butades, a potter of Sicyon in Corinth, traces her lover’s shadow on the wall soon before he is to depart. The potter then presses clay to the outline to form a relief. Victor Stoichita notes that “[t]he real shadow accompanies the one who is leaving, while his outline, captured once and for all on the wall, immortalizes a presence in the form of an image, captures an instant and makes it last.” The various artistic inscriptions based on the shadow are a marker of the one who has left. In some ways they are more than the person because they persist after the individual is gone; yet, they are also less, lacking expression, detail, or depth. In the experimental films of Janie Geiser, the shadow itself also becomes the space of projection, the space where the imagined other, in the form of a video image, makes its unexpected return.

‘Three of Geiser’s films employ the use of rephotography from a television monitor: The Fourth Watch (2000), Ultima Thule (2002), and Terrace 49 (2004). Each film was shot on 16 mm film, though at key moments during shooting the camera was turned to the television screen. Therefore the rephotographed footage, which is drawn mostly from film history — Disney animated features in Ultima Thule, silent horror films in The Fourth Watch, and television cartoons in Terrace 49 — appears not as film but as video images. They stage an intermedial encounter: the confrontation of film and its video ghosts. As such, Geiser’s rephotography strategy reclaims film for film. Yet, the video intermediary remains, leaving its indelible mark, its medium-specific scar.

‘Geiser’s rephotography films both borrow from and exceed the categories of animation and found-footage filmmaking. Typical of her films, Ultima Thule and Terrace 49 use stop-motion animation strategies, with dolls, wooden figures, toys, and various “found” textures such as wallpaper and scientific diagrams. The heterogeneity of her films is a nod to her involvement in the theater arts and puppetry, where her performances combine a diverse array of elements, including live actors, filmed sequences, and even the occasional glimpse of the puppeteer’s hand. In the three rephotography films, the layering of the found footage elements over the stop-motion animation adds to the density and complexity of the film frame. Beyond the typical concerns of found footage, such as the self-conscious recuperation of film history or the shifting vectors between mainstream and avant-garde cinema, Geiser’s films force film and video into contact with each other as media. When considered alongside found objects, the addition of found footage, or “moving” objects, complicates the status of the animated element. The interplay of filmic layers creates a complex aesthetic of collage, a term borrowed from art history but also used in cinema to describe the collage film or, more generally, the principle of montage.

‘The collagist structures of Geiser’s rephotography films engage critical issues of surface, space, and film history in distinctly hauntological terms, which, following Derrida, constitute an aberrant space, wholly other, infinite and ungraspable. While the found footage films of Bruce Conner, Phil Solomon, and Martin Arnold, which manipulate or resequence their source material, maintain the underlying linearity of the narrative cinema they implicitly critique, Geiser’s gesture is more akin to cubist collage in the way she collapses disparate media within a single frame. In her work, video and film, two distinct systems of representation, are forced into explicit spatial contact. In their uneasy encounter, they contaminate each other, destabilize the integrity of the whole, and produce an elusive, uncanny space that belongs to neither medium. The radicality of Geiser’s gesture, however, is less that it produces an extramedial space, than that it reveals unstable, impure elements already present within each medium. By way of the intermedial encounter, film and video are exposed for the limits of what each may represent and what, in the end, may fall outside the realm of representation altogether.

In Geiser’s rephotography films, the video-generated images act as a kind of “surface-declaring device.” Where collage artists might layer objects and images, a collage filmmaker like Geiser adds to this combination a layering of exposures, collapsing multiple views and temporalities onto a single celluloid plane. While collage bears an implicit connection to montage and film in general, the hermeneutic strategies applied by collage filmmakers are more explicitly aligned with that of their fine-arts counterparts, emphasizing material properties of the medium or critically examining the mass cultural imagery from which their “reality fragments” derive. Yet, even within the milieu of collage filmmakers, Geiser is unique: collage filmmakers typically compose in timed sequences, laying one strip of found footage after another, but her practice is more closely related to the shared spatial terrain of collage artists because of the way she composes a multiplicity of views within a single frame. Depth here refers not only to the three-dimensional representation (or presentation) of an object, after a Bazinian notion of composition-in-depth, but also to the density of an image overlaid with multiple exposures.

‘In this way, the rephotographed video images of Gesier’s films cast peculiar kinds of shadows. Because the 29.97 frames per second of video fit awkwardly into film’s 24 frames per second, the video images appear to roll across the screen. This is most pronounced in The Fourth Watch, where, at any given moment, part of the rephotographed video image is visible while the rest is not. In these blank spaces, different layers are exposed, if only momentarily. The films are thus pervaded by an indeterminancy of image, a vagueness that suggests the surface is not fixed but imbued with its own depth, like a body of water. The presence of video alongside film recapitulates the terms of the image and object in collage; yet, as collage films, Geiser’s work incorporates the added dimension of time and, with it, time’s uncanny surprises. Although the intermedial exchange between film and video foregrounds the flatness of the film screen, the element of time suggests an indeterminate thickness of that surface. Time, too, is a form of depth, compressed in painting but given extended form in cinema, as seen in the temporal disjunction between film and video artifacts. In Geiser’s work, time renders visible another dimension of collage in the juxtaposition of two systems of moving image representation. More than a disjunction in luminosity or color, the most significant gap is that of time: film and video adhere to different rhythms and cannot synchronize. To adopt the eloquent title of Geiser’s 1999 film, the alignment of the two media necessarily results in “lost motion,” pockets of time that point to an unrecoverable beyond. The combination of collage aesthetics and cinematic time in Geiser’s work thus offers more than a flat optic sea; it produces one in which anything can emerge, or be hidden away, at any moment.’ — Genevieve Yue

 

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Stills

 

____
Further

Janie Geiser Official Website
Janie Geiser @ IMDb
‘Imitation of Life: Films by Janie Geiser’
‘Experimental Narratives: Janie Geiser’s Evocative Puppetry’
Janie Geiser’s films @ FANDOR
‘Cardboard, Paint, and Style: A Brief Look at the Work of Janie Geiser’
Janie Geiser @ Facebook
‘Miwa Matreyek and Janie Geiser on Collaboration, Wonder and the Importance of Tinkering’
‘Stage Light’
Janie Geiser @ MUBI
‘THE SECRET LIVES OF INANIMATE OBJECTS: THE FILMS OF JANIE GEISER’
‘Janie Geiser Recasts the Cinema of Attractions’
‘Toward a Feminist “Coney Island of the Avant-Garde”‘
‘Five Women Animators Who Shook Up the Industry’
‘The Sharpest Point, Animation at the End of Cinema: Janie Geiser
‘The Intrigue of Animating the Inanimate’
‘Puppet Noir: On Janie Geiser’

 

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Selected Theater

‘In addition to her celebrated films. Jamie Geiser is one of the pioneers of the renaissance of American avant-garde object performance. Geiser creates innovative, hypnotic works that merge puppetry, film/video and performance. Geiser’s performances have toured nationally and internationally, and her films have been screened at museums and festivals around the globe.’ — collaged

 

FUGITIVE TIME (2014)
‘Conceived/Directed by Janie Geiser, and developed with an ensemble of Los Angeles performers and designers, FUGITIVE TIME is a multidisciplinary performance inspired by the dual histories of illness and health in the early 20th Century.. Promoted as the land of eternal sunshine, LA became a haven (and often final) destination for sufferers of tuberculosis. FUGITIVE TIME merges puppetry, miniature landscapes, film, live-feed video, and music/sound to create an immersive, elliptical meditation on the body, illness, nature, and time. This history was paralleled across the US and Europe, as part of a global Sanitorium movement.’ — JG

Excerpts

 

Clouded Sulphur (2013)
‘Created in response to the tragic, unsolved murder of a 15 year old Los Angeles girl, Clouded Sulphur (death is a knot undone) navigates a complex terrain of family, loss, revenge, and unexpected hope through a multidisciplinary performance work that merges puppetry, projection, text, and music. Set at the edge of Los Angeles, where the untamed landscape meets the city, the performance centers on absence and the range of feelings that flow through brokenness (revenge, disbelief, unexpected floods of compassion and hope).’ — JG

Excerpt

 

The Reptile Under the Flowers (2011)
‘The Reptile Under the Flowers is a peepshow/diorama performance in 12 scenes that incorporates puppetry, mechanical performing objects, small projections, music and sound to create a an intimate miniature spectacle. Performed by an ensemble of 15 performers for groups of 8 people at a time, who travel through the diorama-performance. The Reptile Under the Flowers builds its narrative through the accumulation of small actions and events, without text or dialogue, and follows the intersecting lives of a father and son.’ — JG

Excerpts

 

_____
Interview
from L.A. Record

 

What was the first puppet you made like?

Janie Geiser: The first puppet—beyond experiments—was actually from college. I was taking a fabric design class, and it was getting back to how fabric was made, like the weaving and things like that—and I’m not prone to that direction. For our final project, it was kind of left open, and since we had been doing a lot of hand stitching, I decided to make a hand stitched puppet. I made it by cutting out an arm, covering it completely in wool embroidery, and then the face, and the eyes, and it ended up kind of looking like a skinny Charles Laughton which wasn’t my intention at all. I was just kind of doing it free form. It was kind of a magical character for me. I liked it. It showed a certain kind of obsessiveness I have—every single bit of it was covered with stitching—so it had a kind of satisfying quality of obsession about it. So I called him Charles Laughton because it reminded me of him.

In a lot of your films, your puppets seem to be flailing about, dealing with all kinds of boundaries and limits. Do you think inanimate objects have emotional lives?

JG: Oh, absolutely! Not that they have them themselves, but we project them onto them. A lot of puppeteers get into, ‘It’s alive!’ and I think we’re bringing it to life through the person performing it and the collaboration with the audience. And it’s because we just bring many powerful associations to objects, and so using that inherent power, that’s already there—it’s kind of like a Rorschach test. You see an inkblot and project into it really emotional things and memories. I think it’s the same thing with objects, and that’s why I’m really into using found objects in my films. The first couple films I made, that were more kind of full films, like the puppet film, and then I made a couple of painted, cut-out films, which I like but started to think they’d all start looking alike if I kept working that way. From the beginning, I was putting objects into them as well, and I got really excited about what they can do, and now I’m always on the lookout for new characters.

Jan Svankmajor said that having puppets when he was a kid was an amazing gift because he could use puppets to play out all life’s injustices, correcting them, taking revenge. Why do you like working with puppets? What do you get out of it?

JG: I don’t know that I’m taking revenge, but I am for myself, trying to get closer to the meanings of things, and hopefully other people are able to find something in that. These ‘Nervous Films,’ they’re about the nervous energy and the world we live in now, how crazy everything is right now. Maybe it’s battling despair. If I’m really paying attention—which I do, unfortunately—to the politics and how things are going everywhere, I would be in despair. I have to have something to do to fight that.

What about the world today are you most nervous about?

JG: A kind of ignorance—not stupidity—but willful ignorance, and a kind of meanness that’s out there, and a greed that’s out there. It’s exemplified in all the budget debates. People would sacrifice everyone who needs help, and they don’t need help because they’re not trying, but because everything in the system is failing them. For political game, people are trying to turn the argument to make those people—it’s the most frustrating thing. You hear people saying things like, ‘50% of Americans don’t pay taxes.’ Well, what that really means is they actually don’t make enough money to pay taxes! It’s characterized as if they’re good for nothing, lazy people—50% of the people in America—and there are new ways that the corporate people are being described as the productive class, the job creators, and all these terms that ignore the greed that’s going on. And I feel despair for the planet. I have a thirteen-year-old son, and I can’t show him that despair. We talk about these things, and I wonder, what is his world going to be like if we keep heading in that direction? But it’s a beautiful day out… ha! We need all these things: food, clothing, shelter, and meaning, and people find it in different ways. I find it through making things. It helps me stay alive and sane—even if what’s in the film is kind of agitated.

The press release says Ghost Algebra suggests one of the original meanings of the word “algebra” is the science of restoring what is missing, the reunion of broken parts. What was missing from your life when you made this film? What has since come back together?

JG: I was actually having a strange health problem, where is sort of where the whole “Nervous” films have come from. I haven’t really ever talked about this, but it’s been a couple years now. I just suddenly started feeling all the electricity in my nerves. It was … unnerving. All those nervous words suddenly became real. It might’ve been caused by something getting pinched, because it did happen right after I had a massage, and I was having a massage because I was so tense. It could’ve been a vitamin deficiency. It could’ve been a combination of things, and they never figured it out. I went to all kinds of doctors, had an MRI, been to a neurologist, and what seemed to help the most was a combination of acupuncture and herbs. But my body was not a familiar vessel anymore.

Would you have preferred to know what the specific problem was, or was not knowing more comfortable? Which would cause most anxiety for you?

JG: I think the not knowing. I never had physical anxiety in my life, and as it went longer, and nobody could tell me what to do to make it better, that’s when anxiety kicked in. So I made Ghost Algebra at the height of not knowing. It’s not about me in that sense—though there are a lot of body parts in there—I was transmitting another kind of nervousness that we have about war. The woman is looking at this old World War I compound by the ocean where they’re hiding and she’s looking into it and seeing the history of sadness and war and killing and bodies. I’m not so interested in being completely autobiographical and confessional because I don’t think my story is that important. I’m more interested in using things that are motivating to me and looking at them in a bigger picture way, but through a very small world.

Your films deal a lot with childhood, with looking back at the past, but seem to suggest that the wholeness of the past is entirely retrievable, because stories are never revealed in their entirety. What’s something experienced as a kid that will always stick with you that you think you remember in its entirety?

JG: It goes to my father. I was not sick very much as a kid, and I come from a big family of six kids, and I was the second child. Looking back as an adult, I feel like part of what I’ve always have longed for is the kind of attention that you get from your parents—I mean they loved us all equally, somehow—but that attention that you get when you’re really little just kept going to the next kid. So I even helped my parents a lot with the next kid as part of that system of love. But when I was about four or five, I got some kind of bad fever. It was like 104. So my parents too me to the hospital, because they had actually lost their first child to some kind of virus. She got a fever and was dead in two days. So they were really sensitive to fever. I was there for a couple of days, and my dad picked me up. He wrapped me in a blanket and lifted me and carried me and I hadn’t been carried in a long time because there were always littler kids to carry and I remember it was an amazing feeling. I still carry my son, probably for that reason. He’s getting too old though.

Nancy Andrews told me that she thinks life and death are always arbitrary—“We think we control such things, or someone controls such things, but it might all me dumb luck or no luck.” What do you think?

JG: I think that’s pretty true. You can stop smoking maybe, but you might just get hit by a car too. There’s murder, there’s war, and those are not random, but maybe it’s random who survives and who doesn’t once you’re in it. I remember my dad my dad telling me about this scar he had. It was at the end of World War II, and a bullet just grazed him. That’s pretty random. That’s luck. Some kid gets shot in a drive-by—that’s terrible luck. Often they have nothing to do with it. They just were there at the wrong time. Drunk drivers. There’s some control with personal behaviors you have, but it’s usually the other person’s personal behavior that unduly effects you. We’re all going to die—it’s nothing profound to say that—but we push it. I found this book at the Last Bookstore downtown, and I haven’t read it yet, but it’s The Denial of Death. I do think we just live because we don’t want to think about the other option. That was the thing with the nerve problem. I just thought, ‘I really don’t want to die right now. At least til my son is twenty to die.’ I don’t want him to be one of those kids whose mother dies when they’re thirteen.

 

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16 of Janie Geiser’s 20 films

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The Red Book (1994)
‘The Red Book is an elliptical, pictographic animated film that uses flat, painted figures and collage elements in both two and three dimensional settings to explore the realms of memory, language, and identity from the point of view of a woman amnesiac. The Red Book suggests the ways in which language defines us, and reaches back into dismemberment myths about the creation of different tongues through the breaking apart of bodies (in this case, the woman’s body). As the film progresses, the submerged images of her stored memory appear and collide with the present world in circular rhythms, and there is a sense of irretrievable loss.’ — JG

the entire film

 

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Lost Motion (1999)
‘Lost Motion uses small cast metal figures, toy trains, decayed skyscrapers, and other found objects to follow a mans search for a mysterious woman. From an illegible note found on a dollhouse bed, through impossible landscapes, the man waits for her train which never arrives. His wanderings lead him to the other side of the tracks, a forgotten landscape of derelict erector- set buildings populated by lost souls. Dream merges with nightmare in this post-industrial land of vivid night.’ — Freewaves

the entire film

 

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Spiral Vessel (2000)
‘A found psychological test kit yields puzzle figures with cutout ears, cutoff heads, and pullaway body parts. The ear opens into an interior world of shifting science book images which, when isolated, evoke mysteries more than they reveal facts.’ — JG

Excerpt

 

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The Spider’s Wheels (2006)
‘Geiser was inspired by the heroines in early film serials, known as the “serial queens,” along with the display of heightened feminine power in film throughout history and how they are reflected in political and cultural movements. The Spider’s Wheels is a cinematic diorama-installation combining projection, sculpture, and film. The piece is centered on the star of a fictitious serial about a female detective known as “The Spider.” Found footage of a contemporary actress playing a silent film star heroine is projected throughout the different areas of the installation. The projection areas include sculptural areas such as a Plexiglas box with metal flaps that serves as a silver screen, a wire mesh screen resembling a web that rises and falls in a three-minute cycle while the footage is projected onto it, and a staircase that leads to a door where the viewer must look through a peephole in order to view the scene.’ — collaged

Documentation

 

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Ghost Algebra (2010)
‘Geiser’s ‘algebra’ theme seems to peek through at times in images of severed limbs or broken bones, teeth, spilled blood, and of course the various number machines that pop up. The word algebra apparently used to have a meaning related to restoration or reunion, sometimes applying to the setting of broken bones which was often done in medieval times by a dentist who also performed bloodlettings. Interesting. But this film is not really about mathematics. At least not the usual kind. It’s about piecing together a vision of the world. Immersion.’ — Candlelight Stories

the entire film

 

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Kindness Villain (2010)
‘In Kindless Villain, two boys wander through a stone fortress, while the history of never-ending battle forms traces in the waters below. Seemingly alone in their island world, the boys succumb to fatigue, and to rituals of power. Scratched phrases from an ancient recording of Hamlet reveal a sad cry for vengeance. War is a child’s game, played quietly in this forgotten world.’ — JG

Excerpt

 

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The Floor of the World (2011)
‘The title comes from a phrase in a book by Mozambican author Mia Coute: “The floor of the world is the ceiling of the world below.” Collage images and objects are use to suggest narratives of burying, uncovering, building, destroying, longing, and loss. The sound collage uses vinyl recordings, including a 1940’s radio play of Frankenstein, as well as recorded live sounds. Premiered at 2010 NY Film Festival.’ — JG

Excerpt

 

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RICKY (2011)
‘The realms of childhood, war, and loss echo through Ricky. A found sound recording forms the spine of the film…an scratched audio letter from father to son.’ — JG

Excerpts

 

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Arbor (2012)
‘From a set of photographs found in a thrift store, Geiser creates a liminal space between representation and abstraction, figure and landscape, fiction and memory. ARBOR suggests the fragility and ephemerality of memory and its artifacts through subtle manipulations of the photographs: reframings, layerings, inversions, and the introduction of natural elements, including flowers and leaves. The photographs’ subjects rarely engage the camera; they are glimpsed, rather than seen. They look elsewhere, and wait for something inevitable. Gathering on a hillside, lounging on the grass beyond now-lost trees, the inhabitants of ARBOR cycle through their one elusive afternoon, gradually succumbing to time or dissolving into landscape, reserving for themselves what we can’t know—and becoming shadows in their own stories.’ — JG

Excerpt

 

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The Hummingbird Wars (2014)
‘A collage film, collapsing time and place: turn-of-the-last-century performers apply stage makeup as if for war, to engage in battle for the soul of the world. The injuries are more emotional than physical, but cut deeply just the same. A visual/aural collage film, drawing on sources as seemingly disparate as Ibsen’s A Doll House, Japanese Gagaku music, makeup illustrations for 19th Century actors, the biography of a Shakespearean performer, blooming and decaying flowers, and a World War 1 First Aid Book, The Hummingbird Wars suggests theater in a time of war, which is the theater of any time.’ — JG

Excerpts

 

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Look and Learn (2017)
‘Look and Learn excavates the visual vocabulary we use to operate and construct our daily world. Look and Learn explores the juxtaposition of two material image forms: instructions (furniture assembly diagrams, how-to manuals, safety instructions, maps) and photographs—here mainly 1950’s era school class photographs and images from photography manuals. The instructions fight for time with the school photographs, the kind that place a group of individual students into an unforgiving grid. The school photographs suggest a more orderly time, when the instructions might actually be followed. The photographs themselves become another kind of diagram, forming barely glimpsed guides to the students’ future world. They look ahead, to the 60’s and 70’s, when the imagined order of things will be exploded.’ — JG

Excerpts

 

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Fluorescent Girl (2018)
‘Fluorescent light reflects on a girl’s image, while looking at book of photographs by Paul Strand in a New Hampshire bookstore.’ — JG

Excerpt

 

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Valeria Street (2018)
‘The starting point for VALERIA STREET was a frayed Kodak box of 7 slides that fell off a shelf of collage materials in my studio. Curious, I put them on a light box. The slides depicted a group of 5 men, staged around a conference table in a generic office setting, curtains closed. The men were looking down at a set of drawings or documents. At the center of the frame, in the middle of the table, was one man. He held a pen in his left hand. When I looked through the camera lens, I saw that this man in the center was my father. I had no memory of when these slides came into my possession. They must been in some boxes of ephemera that I saved when my father died twenty years ago. The photographs were awkward and artificial—staged documentation or re-creation of some kind of presentation/signing of documents. My father was a chemical engineer with a large petro-chemical company. The situation at the table is a familiar one of male power—a group of men gathered to make decisions. The men were arranged around the documents like the disciples in The Last Supper, or the guild members in Rembrandt’s painting “Syndics of the Drapers’ Guild”, or numerous iconic photographs of presidential cabinets, boards of directors, or chambers of commerce.’ — JG

Excerpts

 

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Reverse Shadow (2019)
‘I do not claim to fully understand the complexity of Janie’s work, but there’s a particular intuition that is paramount when approaching it, as with any great work of art. Reverse Shadow is the latest product of Janie’s genius, and it’s the result of her endless imagination which has give birth to dozens of films, installations, puppet shows, performances and a vast mixture of all the former.’ — Jose Sarmiento Hinojosa

Excerpts

 

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22 Light-years (2021)
‘22 Light-years draws on a range of visual sources, including photographic negatives, diagrams, found patterned papers, and archival footage. These sources merge, sometimes uncomfortably, with video that was screen-recorded while operating desktop home design software. By creating digital floor plans, landscaping, and roofless homes in real time, and manipulating those videos to move them further away from the software’s intent, Geiser fabricates a digitally lush, elliptical, uncanny world, where home planning never results in a tangible home. The familiar material elements (negatives, diagrams, flower seed packets) wear the skin of the immaterial realm, suggesting time as simultaneous, mutable, and unknown.’ — JG

Excerpts

 

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Chameleon Law (2022)
‘A few years ago, I was given a set of faded vintage 35mm slides by a neighbor. Recently, during this pandemic, I finally found the time to look at them. Most of the slides had taken on red or pink hues, evidence of time and change, the loss of blue and yellow pigments. These vermillion hues gave the slides’ subjects –mountain landscapes, long-span bridges, tourist sites—a simultaneously sublime and corrosive appearance. In Chameleon Law, the time-altered images, alternately depleted and extreme, suggest a heated landscape of the past and future. The title of the film comes from a concept articulated in the allegorical / surrealist novel Mt. Analogue. Chameleon law rocks us asleep and prevents us from seeing the other 99% of the possibilities that are at hand in each situation. With conventional ‘common sense’ we easily fall prey to the chameleon law. Like the witnesses in the film, we have a choice to see beyond what we know, to avoid falling prey to chameleon law, as the landscapes of the world fade to red.’ — JG

Excerpts

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** Jack Skelley, Jack! Fancy that! One day you simply must do a post about electric Miles. That’s almost an order. Thanks, bud. Keep it loving, Dennis. ** Anon, Greetings, mysterious one. The only Radiohead I really liked was ‘OK Computer’. Other than that, not so much. But point me at something to try. Thank you, let’s learn from each other. Hm, on your question … It depends on whether you can honestly see the editor’s point. Like, if you can reach a state of objectivity and see a way whereby de-weirding (in the editor’s terms) your work could enhance it in some way without losing the essence of what makes your work yours and special and original. I mean if de-weirding it would merely clean the work of unnecessary filigree. Does that make sense? For instance, when I submitted my first novel ‘Closer’ to Grove Press, the editor said they would publish it if I revised the first chapter, which he thought was too dense and overly artful to ease the reader into the novel properly. I thought about it, and I decided he was right even though I’d pretty carefully planned the novel to start that way for what I thought were very good reasons. But, really, you need to protect what it is about your work that is essential to what you want to do. It’s a dilemma. What are you thinking you’ll do? I’m very curious to know. Thanks for sharing that and for the high five. Love and a lustrously unfolding Monday to you. ** Cori, Hi, Cori. Yeah, my blog can be weirdly persnickety re: comments sometimes, and I’ve never been able to figure out how to fix that. Cool about the workshop. Good old BB. I’ll look into Jose Hernandez Diaz’s work, I don’t know it. Oh, yes, I actually blurbed the first edition of Siken’s ‘Crush’. I like it a lot. I don’t think I’ve read ‘War of the Foxes’. I’m ‘friends’ with him on Facebook, and he’s doing these very strange AI generated visual pieces these days that he’s sharing there, very odd, haunting. La Brea, cool. Big congrats on the novel and the play! Wow. What are you doing to get them to the public? I look forward to reading/seeing them in the hopefully near future. Cool, you’re doing great. Tell me more. Thanks! ** Dominik, Hi!!! My weekend was some last-ish film work stuff. Uh, I watched a terrible old disaster movie called ‘Avalanche’ starring Rock Hudson and Mia  Farrow, but I like every disaster movie, even the seriously not good ones. Not much else. Some writing. Please tell love I appreciate the warning not to try to watch ‘He Went That Way’ for the first time. Love telling me what time of day I could go to Krispy Kreme without having to wait in line for over an hour to buy one donut, G. ** video_video, Hi, vv. Very nice to meet you. That’s a great clip of ‘7 and 7 is’. I’ve never seen that incarnation of Love before, and I’m a pretty hardcore fan. Curious. If you haven’t seen it, this is a really good clip of the second generation (‘Four Sail’ era) Love playing ‘August’ live in Copenhagen in 1970. Thanks for the share! Have a great one! ** Charalampos, Good start on the poetry books accruing. Glad you’re working on your work and seemingly excited about that. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hey. Oh, I could restore your Acid House post, yes, and I will do that. Watch this space. Whoop re: Leeds United! Hot times in your neck. ** Bill, Hi. Are you a yearly victim of the Santa Ana Winds? Wait, I don’t think they have them up there where you are. They’re the desert’s punishment. Man, they’re tough. Oh, wow, fascinating: The Dorothea Tanning show. Very nice. I really need to go out and see art. This week. ** Steve, Thank you again, Steve. Oh, man, surely your doc has gotten back to you today. I’m so sorry, pal. ** Growl, Hi. Weekend was okay. Oh, uh, too long and boring and complicated to explain the stressful Friday. Film stuff. Nothing entirely new. Yikes, that mayor, that town. Wow. Glad it was one-day-er only at least. ** Darbyyyy 🐒🐒, Did you manage to conk out pre-11? As an early morning person, I do kind of miss sleeping until noon. Not that I ever did. Nowadays when I wake up at 6:45 am, I feel like a lazy ass. Did your cat’s neck fit inside said collar without consequent suffocation, I sure hope? Not a bad plushie right there indeed. It must have an interesting back story or lineage or something. ** Uday, Hi, U! Thanks for digging Steve’s thing obviously. This week? Today there’s some last film stuff to do pre-submission. If that goes smoothly, then I’d like to see some friends I haven’t seen in yonks due to film consumption. Maybe see a movie or two. Work on some fiction. Further bat ideas around with Zac about our next film. Eat a pizza. And Mexican food. Stuff like that. Wait, your queer organisation could take over the frat house? That would be amazing. What happened at the meeting? The suspended frat boys will freak out, won’t they? Luck today! ** Corey Heiferman, Hi, Corey. I only just remembered there’s this big contemporary art world figure in LA named Marvin Heiferman. But that’s probably a common-ish name? Cool guy. I’ll look for the Chris Tonelli book, thanks. Big trip plans there, very nice. Paris should be plenty splendid in late April, albeit a little rainy maybe, but it’s always a little rainy here. Cool. Hit me up me with the deets, obviously. And do link me to your weekly newsletter/blog thing when it’s realised. Very nice. Big day and week to you, sir. ** Okay. I decided to restore and update/expand an old blog post about the wondrous animated filmmaker Janie Geiser today, and I hope it hits your spots. See you tomorrow.