_____________ The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death
‘”The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death” is an exploration of a collection of eighteen miniature crime scene models that were built in the 1940’s and 50’s by a progressive criminologist Frances Glessner Lee (1878 – 1962). The models, which were based on actual homicides, suicides, and accidental deaths, were created to train detectives to assess visual evidence. This seven-year project culminated in an exhibition and a book, Corinne May Botz’s The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death (The Monacelli Press, 2004).
‘The models display an astounding level of precision and detail: shades can be raised and lowered, mice live in the walls, stereoscopes work, whistles blow and pencils write. My photographs highlight the models’ painstaking detail, as well as the prominence of female victims. Through framing, scale, lighting, color, and depth of field, I attempt to bring intimacy and emotion to the scene of the crime. I want viewers to feel as if they inhabit the miniatures – to loose their sense of proportion and experience the large in the small. Glessner Lee built the dioramas, she said, “to convict the guilty, clear the innocent, and find the truth in a nutshell.”
GLESSNER LEE WITH HER NUTSHELL DIORAMA DARK BATHROOM.
‘Most of the dead in Frances Glessner Lee’s models are women killed in their own homes. (Seventeen of the nineteen dioramas are set in homes, and eleven depict dead women.) Women fallen down stairs. Women with rope burns on their necks. Women murdered in the act of packing to leave, dresser drawers and suitcases splayed open to reveal miniature clothes.
‘Frances Glessner Lee began designing and building the dioramas when she was sixty-five and worked on the project for ten years. Her life (1878–1962) spanned two world wars, women finally getting the right to vote, and the beginnings of second-wave feminism.
‘Much is made of her lack of education. Glessner Lee’s brother had been sent to Harvard, but she did not attend college. This did not stop her from inventing an entirely new teaching tool for police investigation. In 1942, Glessner Lee was named a captain in the New Hampshire State Police force, with no formal forensic training. In a letter quoted in Corinne May Botz’s book, Glessner Lee explains her interest in constructing the dioramas and her fascination with the field of legal medicine. “When an opportunity came to me to start something new in the medical line. I was delighted to take it on. As a girl, I was deeply interested in medicine and nursing and would have enjoyed taking training in either one.” She was a mother and a grandmother—in fact, in much of the writing about her dioramas, her status as a grandmother is insisted upon, as if grandmothers should not have anything to do with murder and violence, should not invent and build models of crime scenes.’ — Nicole Cooley
Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death
____________ Murder Objects
‘The objects in these photographs were instrumental in cases of sudden and violent deaths. They pertain to solved-crimes, and are displayed in a glass cabinet at the Baltimore Forensic Medical Center. This series reflects my interest in how artifacts are displayed and viewed in particular cultural contexts and conditions. The mundane household objects reveal the transgressive possibilities of the domestic interior. During this time I was researching psychometry, in which psychics hold objects and receive psychic vibrations contained in the objects. I believed these objects would help to sharpen my psychometric abilities.’ — CMB
Nipple used as pacifier causing asphyxiation death of infant.
Electrocution. Note: Voltage Exit Burns
Elderly man who had daily medication prepared for him, cause of death related to pills left in container at time of death.
Lantern fueled by gasoline used by victim to heat automobile, which he was sleeping in. Victim died from carbon monoxide exposure generated by lantern. Note: Aluminum foil around heater globe and vent to restrict “light glow” of lantern.
Exhaust pipe cut by victim in an effort to camouflage a carbon monoxide suicide in a vehicle to have authorities rule as accidental.
Car Accident
Drug Paraphernalia
Pagan Motorcycle Club ID made from Tattoo on decomposed body.
A twenty-three year old woman was stabbed thirty three times with a pair of scissors in a drug related homicide. She was also bitten on the left side of her face during the attack. Bite mark impression castes were obtained from a suspect. He latter pled guilt to first-degree murder and received a life sentence.
Drug Paraphernalia
Drug Paraphernalia
____________ Haunted Houses
Haunted Houses is a long-term project in which I photographed and collected oral ghosts stories in over eighty haunted sites throughout the United States. The series was inspired by turn of the century spirit photographs and Victorian ghost stories written by women as a means of articulating domestic discontents. In being the medium through which the spirit of these houses was recorded, I continued the tradition of female sensitivity to the supernatural. When I photographed in haunted houses, I tried to open myself to the invisible nuances of a space. I photographed using a large format camera, with exposures often ranging from a few seconds to a few hours. Though the medium of the visible, photography makes the invisible apparent. By collecting extensive evidence of the surface, one becomes aware of what is missing, and a space is provided for the viewer to imagine the invisible.
Haunted Houses provides a unique way of understanding our relationship to the spaces we inhabit, and reflects romantic and dystopian notions of the domestic realm. The notion of hauntedness activates and highlights the home, revealing the hidden narratives and possibilities of everyday life. — CMB
Atlas Theatre, Cheyenne, Wyoming
Army Barracks, Vancouver, Washington
Séance Table
Old Bermuda Inn, Staten Island, New York
Private Residence, Clinton, Maine
The Roehrs House, Franklin Lakes, New Jersey
Private Residence, Hawthorne, New Jersey
Apartment No.2, Brooklyn, New York
La Petite Theatre, New Orleans, Louisiana
Vealtown Tavern, Bernardsville, New Jersey
El Rancho, Las Vegas, Nevada
Edgar Allen Poe House, Baltimore, MD
Rental House, Tivoli, NY
_______________ Mein Hauptbahnhof
The love of objects is called “objectophilia.” Objectophiles do not feel attracted to people and instead are sexually and emotionally drawn to certain objects. They exchange experiences on the Internet and hope that their sexual inclinations will be recognized and accepted.
The photographs in the series Objectophilia were made during my visits with objectophiles. They show various love objects including: a pinball machine, computer, World Trade Center, Berlin Hauptbahnhof, and steam locomotive. All of these objects were photographed with a large format camera and in a documentary style to serve as a counterpoint to the highly subjective and emotional video. — CMB
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p.s. Hey. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Um, I don’t remember. I spent several days searching for them when I was bored or had nothing more pressing to do. That’s funny: I just saw a current pic of Jared Leto yesterday and thought the same thing. Keanu Reeves and Johnny Depp looked young and ageless until they hit their 50s, and then, in what seemed like a flash, they looked weathered. Love live-streaming himself picking his nose and eating his boogers, G. ** David, Cool, I’ve been vegetarian since I was 15. Never a second thought, even back in the days when that meant eating in restaurants involved eating a lot of iceberg lettuce and potatoes. Not narcissistic, no, I don’t think so. Other than some organic socks supposedly in the mail to me from a LA friend, I got no Xmas presents. Hope the meal didn’t give you indigestion, and, yeah, I like you too. ** Misanthrope, I need to eat Chinese food. It’s not that common a cuisine in Paris, strangely. Can’t imagine you having a Xmas or birthday without some form of gift-wrapped Chalamet. Crazy shirt. Cooper as in the tire company maybe? Wear it proudly, buddy. A bonfire sounds nice. We were sure they going to impose a NYE curfew here, but they didn’t, they just cancelled the big fireworks thing. ** _Black_Acrylic, My pleasure, Ben. Oh, I just restored another one of your old guest-posts, coming up in the next week and a half. I’ll let you be surprised. ** Tosh Berman, I still need watch the last episode of ‘Get Back’. Everyone seems to think or know that Lennon was doing heroin during the shooting, so that might explain things a bit. He kind of perked up a little in episode 2. Maybe he did a speedball that day. ** Kage, Hi. My guess is that I really did. Blush, I mea n. The slaves post is finished, and it will be here on the 31st like clockwork, yes. I think it’s kind of a dark one. Darker than even usual, I mean. But I’m usually making least two of those kinds of posts at the same time, i.e. an escorts one and a slave one, so they blur together in my mind. Do you do NYE celebrations? If so, what? ** Steve Erickson, And there it is! Everyone, Join me in debuting Mr. Erickson’s new song “o m i n o u s d r o n e 7”. I’m glad you like Beckman’s stuff, of course. My memory of ‘Speed Racer’ is that it looked great but its script was rote and obvious. But I haven’t seen it since its release. ** h now j, Hi. Oh, great that you’re fans Beckman’s. Thank you, thank you for whatever you’re sending! That’s so thoughtful. Congrats on the new room and park proximity. I live two blocks from the Tuileries, so I know how helpful that is. ** Bill, Happy you dug it. My holiday weekend was no more of a holiday than any other weekend, which makes it sound like a bad thing, which it wasn’t. Yes, your shit weather is news even over here. Not exciting shit? I’ll imbibe your friend’s release, thank you very much! Happy homebound life until further notice. ** Okay. I thought today’s post would be a good one to restore, and of course I hope you’ll agree. See you tomorrow.
‘LIKE A BOOMERANG hurled across three-plus decades and carrying today’s viewer back with it to that fervent, hard-edged but oddly innocent downtown moment when the free-for-all 1970s (free because no one had or was willing to admit to having money) gave way to the more practical and materialist ’80s, Ericka Beckman’s Super 8 “Piaget Trilogy” (1978–81) arrives on the Anthology Film Archives screen. Its restoration in 16 mm was made possible by Anthology’s experimental film preservation project, which has recently focused on work from this period. I can’t remember seeing an actual boomerang in any of Beckman’s works, but so many of the trajectories of camera and object movement in her films evoke that kind of kinetic and aggressive back-and-forth that to include the thing itself would be redundant.
‘Beckman’s place in the pantheon of daredevil experimental moviemakers should have been secured in 1983, when You the Better, the thirty-five-minute, 16-mm film that followed the “Piaget Trilogy,” caused a riot at the New York Film Festival, where it preceded Jean-Luc Godard’s Passion. I recall that at the time, Godard, perhaps as a defensive maneuver, anointed Beckman as the most talented young American experimentalist. Two years earlier, Beckman’s Super 8 work was lauded by J. Hoberman in his catalogue for “Home Made Movies,” the 1981 marathon survey of 8-mm and Super 8 films he organized at Anthology. Hoberman described the films in what would only later be dubbed the “Piaget Trilogy”—they were partly inspired by the learning theories of the psychologist Jean Piaget—as follows: “Filled with images of disembodied limbs, toy-like models, and anthropomorphized furniture, scored to doo-wop mantras and abstract cheerleader chants, Beckman’s films suggest the amalgam of Max Fleischer’s oneiric Bimbo’s Initiation and Oskar Fischinger’s geometric Composition in Blue.” Of Out of Hand (1981), the last film in the trilogy, he memorably blurbed: “like an Allstate Insurance commercial as it might appear to an autistic child.”
‘Of all the artist-filmmakers who debuted in the ’70s, none have shown more consistency than Beckman. That is to say that each of her films is distinct from the others while also being part of a uniquely envisioned oeuvre. (You have to see her films to understand how derivative, clumsy, and vacuous Matthew Barney’s “Cremaster” cycle is.) What I wrote in 1979 in the Soho News about two of her early films—about their fragmentation, dreamlike displacements, and associative connections; about how clear, diagrammatic, often primary-colored iconography is placed within a shadowy, shifting, ambiguous space; about the incantatory power of her sound tracks with their repeated percussion riffs and nursery rhyme–like chants—applies to her more recent, technically formidable work as well. In the stunning 2006 Tension Building—an unfortunate omission from the Anthology program, though it can be found in its entirety on her website—she uses stop-motion, camera movement, and variations of focal length and exposure to transform the Harvard University coliseum into a giant thrashing machine. A mere three minutes, it seems to go on for hours, sucking you in like a black hole. It’s the only film that’s ever given me motion sickness.
‘Milking the Surrealist roots of Pop, Beckman creates brightly colored, psychologically threatening, sexually charged worlds in which her avatars are hurled to and fro, trapped inside a game plan whose rules they desperately try to discern. In what is probably still her most narrative-like film, Cinderella (1986), her heroine, decked out alternately in baggy overalls and a green bouffant prom dress topped with a blonde flip wig, is shunted between an industrial furnace that she’s forced to tend and the ballroom where she dances with the prince until she loses her chance to marry him because she doesn’t make it home by midnight. It’s not until she realizes that she can come home whenever she likes that she breaks out of the confines of the game. “And that night, I didn’t get home until two!” she exclaims, in one of the most thrilling moments of liberation in a Beckman movie. It wasn’t until looking at Cinderella again, twenty-five years after its debut, that I realized how deeply Beckman’s films were lodged in my brain in their entirety, as deeply as the childhood nursery rhymes and picture books that are undoubtedly their sources. They touch down where the wet dreams of girlhood arise.’ — Amy Taubin
J. HOBERMAN: Ericka, you arrived as a filmmaker with a distinctive style and strong interests. Your films seemed to interrogate the nature of “play,” as well as games, contests, and competition.
ERICKA BECKMAN: My work has consistently centered on games, sports and play, as symbols for the private versus public self, and how this play impulse is challenged by narrative storytelling, with its sense of duty and need for closure.
JH: But don’t games imply a structure with winners and losers? The title of You the Better is a kind of a pun, isn’t it?
EB: My own concerns with the subject of play vary from work to work. There is room for many ideas and modes of address to interpenetrate and bounce off each other, much in the same way a group of people with divergent opinions can converse on a mutual topic.
JH: Your most recent piece shows a football game, not as a contest but as part of the stadium space.
EB: Tension Building is an ongoing project that is a composite of linked architectural spaces, some real and some models. It combines stop motion and live action filmmaking shot at the Harvard University Coliseum. It will be followed by two stadium locations in Italy built in the 1930s by Pier Luigi Nervi: the Palazzo dello Sport in Rome and the Municipal Stadium in Florence.
JH: What interests you about these locations?
EB: I am fascinated by stadium architecture because it is designed to provide two opposite viewing experiences, the visceral direct experience of watching a physical action close up and the passive experience mediated through filters of distance and delay. The Tension Building model features telescoping seating that expands and contracts like a folding cup, corresponding to the audience’s reactions to the wins and losses in the game being played below.
JH: The action literally bounces off the walls.
EB: I dragged my tripod and Bolex over the stadium seating. My camera became like a surveyor’s transit, following the repetitive lines of the design and transforming something still into a motion machine.
JH: This use of location is relatively new.
EB: Up until 2000 all my work was produced in my black box studio. I controlled the frame by building everything in the frame. I worked with props, animations, and miniature sets, as well as lyrics, graphics and visual text. For You the Better, I made game board drawings as a planning tool. With Switch Center I took the opportunity to shoot in a location. I was invited by the Béla Balázs Studio in Budapest in 2001 to produce a short film. Our collaboration culminated this experimental documentary, shot in the defunct Danube Water Works—an intact, yet nonfunctioning water purification plant.
JH: Did the location dictate a new sort of filmmaking?
EB: I did not arrive with a script or storyboard. The film evolved over a two-week stay, through my shooting and my drawing. I got permission take my Bolex for a regular workday at the plant. They provided me with one steady assistant, a janitor, who helped me move my camera around the perimeters of the concrete drums. I fell in love with the color that reflected off the grey drums as the sunlight passed through skylights.
JH: The water works struck me as a sort of 20th Century ruin.
EB: Yes, Switch Center is a tribute to the end of the romance with industrialization, and at the same time a reaction to seeing the Soviet architecture of the future transformed into a shopping mall or global corporate office.
JH: I love the way those Japanese videogame creatures materialize—it’s as though they’re beaming in from the universe of your earlier movies, specifically Hiatus, which is based on videogames.
EB: The Pokémon toys came into my storyboards on the day that I could not get back to work on my film because a Pokémon commercial was being shot there.
JH: That’s making good use of chance! Your work is truly idiosyncratic. Can you tell me which artists were important to your development? With whom did you study?
EB: I went to Cal Art for the contact with conceptual art and to mingle with the music school students. I wanted to study at a college that had a strong percussion department, and I was a fan of the percussionist John Bergamo, who taught while I was there. I also saw a lot of performance, notably the work of Guy de Cointet.
JH: Were you interested in films?
EB: I started making short abstract films based on action/image repetitive relationships. John Baldessari was making films with his students, but my favorite teacher was Vito Acconci. I liked the way he created screen space, as defined by the camera, for his body. The monitor was an extension of the space of the viewer, with Acconci somehow contained therein. He was a performance artist who used only spoken text, his body and a minimal architecture. His work is really about the space between himself and the audience. I liked the improvisational aspect. He had a set of concepts and he knew what concept he wanted to end on and the piece was his way of getting there.
JH: You appeared in his epic video piece The Red Tapes.
EB: I worked with him for a bit on The Red Tapes. He seldom did a second take.
JH: That’s interesting. Were there any filmmakers who impressed you?
EB: Jack Goldstein’s work reinforced my use of performance, the use of black space, saturated color and very formal compositions. Prior to seeing Jack’s films, I was only working with processes, formal structures to create an abstract image on film in time. I was not interested in Pop Art or painters like Warhol who used images from culture to make their work dialogue with culture. I was interested in meaning and I was drawn to conceptual art. Jack’s iconic images made me see that an artist can work with an image as a sign and can empty that image of its meaning and ascribe it with a new meaning.
JH: You are included in the upcoming Whitney Museum show “Rituals of Rented Island” along with performance artists like Julia Heyward and Michael Smith. Do you feel any affinity with their work?
EB: My thirst for performance work lead me to New York City, where I discovered experimental theater and many artists who I credit as influences—Julia Heyward, Laurie Anderson, Mabou Mines’s Shaggy Dog Animations, Robert Wilson, Steve Reich, Mike Smith, Jack Smith, and so many dancers. I liked the way Julia Heyward used her voice, not to sing or sound dreamy, but to speak out and yell, to speak like many different females, from young to old. She spoke her text in a monotone, like a percussive punk vocal track.
JH: I can see the affinities between her performances and your use of singsong chanting your Super 8 films.
EB: I liked her phrasing and her use of repetition. She would morph her words, or a phrase into another phrase. So the meaning of what she said just morphed into something else. I was impressed by the inner strength it took to use herself as subject and object of a social or sexual conflict. She spoke and made pieces about how her experience was in conflict with accepted social norms. However politicized, it always started with and returned to her own body.
JH: A lot of ‘70s performance artists made use of video. Why did you decide to work with Super 8 sound?
EB: Because you could project a film life-size in a room, and I wanted to stress the presence of the performance in my image. Video was attached to a box on a pedestal and I found that apparatus distracting. Plus you had to wear headphones. Only Julia and Laurie figured out how to use video. They built both performance and video segments that used their bodies, spoken word and sound. I wanted to make films that were documents of a type of performance that could only exist on film. I was invested in making an active art form, an art that moved, and that movement was the telling. Plus, I like the color of film. What I took away from all the performance work I saw in the late ‘70s early ‘80s was that repetition is a good thing and long works are a good thing. I discovered a new form of speech that only works in media, where speech, image and repetition over time replace old habits with new thoughts and behaviors. It’s a formula I found to be at work in all the artists (and advertising) that I saw from this period.
JH: Your early films were first shown at Artists Space and the Kitchen rather than at avant-garde film venues or the clubs that were favored by the punk Super 8 filmmakers. Was that context by choice?
EB: I hung out with artists who hung out at Artists Space. Paul McMahon (who appears in Out of Hand) was its co-director, with Helene Weiner. Paul was an artist and an organizer of art events in Boston before he came to New York. He created the Nancy Party Club at his loft, where many artists gathered to play music in a Sunday night “battle of the bands” atmosphere. I worked closely with Brooke Halpin, a composer from Cal Arts, who helped untangle my conceptual lyrics. He would help set them to music. He understood my need for simple, repetitive phrases, and that the lyrics were part of the rhythm of the image. Sound was not there to enhance the image but to integrate with it, to make a new meaning. I used voice as a narration track, a song that came from either inside the head of the main performer or from the game. It was a bit like the instruction narration in Owen Land’s films. He used voiceover from a person who instructs, and the film tries to follow the instructions.
JH: Can you say something about the difficulties in working with the Super 8 format and the specific techniques you had to master?
EB: I developed a technique where I would rewind my Super 8 camera and make super-impositions on top of the performance elements. The black space allowed me to superimpose images in the unexposed area of the frame and move anywhere in the world I constructed. I could move laterally or enter the image; constructing a fluid space that was logical became very important for my work.
JH: In virtually every one of your films through Cinderella and Hiatus and maybe even Switch Center, some usually young, usually female individual learns, through trial and error, how to act in (or upon) the world. It’s as though the films were about their own coming into existence. Did you feel that your early work in particular had an allegorical or even autobiographical content?
EB: Looking back, I see your point. The themes I explore can be slippery to depict in film. They concern memory and the preservation of identity. My Cinderella plays the “Cinderella game” up to the point of recognition that she has a choice to either accept or reject the commodification of her image. In the digital game world of Hiatus, my heroine is firmly planted. Her memories are the power she stores in her garden. Her struggle is to retain her identity when she finds herself the midst of a takeover by a start-up pharmacological venture. There have been a lot of “damsels in distress” in my work. I use this hook because a woman is constantly comparing herself to, or is being compared against, an idealized image of womanhood. When I go out on a limb I want my audience to know where the ground is.
JH: One last question. I understand you have a distinguished artistic lineage. Could you elaborate?
EB: My great-uncle, twice removed, is Max Beckmann. One of two brothers dropped the second N when he settled in the New York area in the 1840s. I never met Max Beckmann, though he taught in the early 1960s at my first college, and the local museum has a fine collection of his paintings.
JH: Thanks Ericka. Didn’t he say “we are all tightrope walkers”? I imagine he would be very impressed with his great-niece’s balance and skill.
___ Works
_____________ Hit and Run, 1977 ‘The film Hit and Run (1977) basically opened the door for me to work as a filmmaker. Here, I created juxtapositions through the superimposition of different activities: an equivalence between a word, a graphic and a performance. I can say now that it was based on performance; but more importantly it is based on gesture, and communicating physical and graphic directions, as well as temporal ones: rhythm.’— E.B.
_______________ Super 8-Trilogy (We Imitate: We Break Up, The Broken Rule, Out of Hand), 1977-80 ‘Between 1978 and 1981, Ericka Beckman created a landmark suite of experimental films. Known as “The Super-8 Trilogy,” these films are among the most iconic and original works of the “Pictures Generation.” Featuring herself, and a cast of artist-friends (including James Welling, Matt Mullican, and Mike Kelley), her work is informed by Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget’s theories on the cognitive development of children, the culture of televised sports, as well as the heyday of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s musicals. The films: “We Imitate; We Break Up” (1978), “The Broken Rule” (1979), and “Out of Hand” (1981) are not based on dialogues or a classical narrative structure, but on dream-like choreographed movements, songs, keyed-up colors, and special effects. As the artist states: “Film is creating a reality through the makeshift. My films move backward, using narrative structures as does the mind of anyone trying to grasp the meaning of images in their memory.”’— jrp/editions
Excerpt
________________ Out of Hand, 1980 ‘Out of Hand is a search film, where a small boy returns to a house that is being evacuated, to search for something that he left behind. His method is to follow hidden clues in this house and to respond to the hidden aids in his memory. Back and forth, between inquisition and logic, he constructs a search with two unknowns – ‘What it is’ and ‘Where it is.’ Each object he chooses has multiple functions, which extend both into the physical space of his search, and into the imaginary world of his perception and memory.’— EB
_________________ You The Better, 1983 ‘You The Better was my first 16 mm film. I was trying at this time to build a larger audience for my work than just the few venues that were in downtown New York for screening, so I moved to 16 mm hoping that I would be able to engage a larger distribution structure.
‘This particular film was created after a long, introverted period in my life when I was beginning to investigate what is behind performance. What is the language of action? How do we learn as children to do things? How is our identity formed through action? I wanted to make something work without using narration or dialogue, and because I was using this theatrical, industrial medium of 16 mm film, I knew that I had to have some kind of hook. When I was making the Super-8 Trilogy that was based on Piaget’s work (my sort of incubation period), I made a film that involved Mike Kelley doing a series of team sports outdoors. I said, “This is it: gaming structure is going to replace narrative for me.”
‘When the film came out it was so off the path of what you expect to see in a theatrical film because of its non-narrative gaming structure. Though it circulated quite a bit, I wasn’t able to show it the way I wanted to show it; I showed it on screens in museums in conjunction with a lot of art shows, but there was a really strong divide—a barrier in fact—between film and visual art in the late ’80s.’— E.B.
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the entirety
_____________ Cinderella, 1986 ‘CINDERELLA is a musical treatment of the fairy tale. I have broken apart the story and set it as a mechanical game with a series of repetitions where CINDERELLA is projected back and forth like a ping-pong ball between the hearth and the castle. She never succeeds in satisfying the requirements of the ‘Cinderella Game’. The film was shot MOS, the dialogue is lip-synched, and along with the out-front score and effects track magnifies the film’s sense of alienation.’ — E.B.
_____________
w/ Mike Kelley Blind Country, 1989 ‘This collaborative video project is based on a short story by H.G. Wells called “The Country of the Blind”—about a man who travels to a country of blind people and attempts to dominate their sensual, feminine culture with his male, sight-derived power. Following this theme, Blind Country begins with animated fruit dancing over Mike Kelley’s body and the admonition of “Northerners” to “refill the quickly emptying sack.” In the male-dominated land of the North, candy-spurting pinatas stand as phallic symbols. Presumably castrated, and stripped of his authority, Kelley acts the buffoon as he is led through the murky land of the South, a “female,” earthy, “realm of the senses” opposing the phallocentric world of the North.’— vdb
__________ Hiatus, 1999 ‘Madi plays an interactive on-line computer game in the privacy of her apartment. Wearing a computer corset that stores her programs in a “Garden Interface”, she propels her go-go cowgirl construct WANDA through the game world, encountering an assortment of logged-on players and game identities who trick and confuse her. An aggressive male character WANG logs on, and inserts his cold architecture into her coordinates, draining the power in her corset. His expanding architecture threatens to overtake her Garden Reservoir. To confront this powerful take-over artist, she must rely on her organic memory and is forced to establish some psychological boundaries to protect her identity and preserve her freedom.’— vdb
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______________ Switch Center, 2002 ‘SWITCH CENTER is a tribute to the futuristic architecture of the Soviet post war period, and a reaction to seeing it transitioned to shopping malls or global corporate office structures. I was invited by Balazs Bela Studio in Budapest to produce a short experimental film in Hungary. I was the first American artist to be invited by this famous film collective after the fall of Soviet power. The collaboration took place in August 2000, culminating in SWITCH CENTER, a ten minute experimental documentary shot in many defunct Danube Water Works locations on the outskirts of Budapest. The architecture of a 1960’s water purification plant, left intact for 25 years, inspired me to recreate the factory in sight and sound, and to juxtapose that with the present. While I was meditating on the animation of 3-story water tank, a Pokemon commercial was being filmed down the corridor.’ — The Film-makers Cooperative
___________ Frame Up, 2005 ‘The sound for the work came from actual recording on the location, plus many found sounds from department store recordings, where I recorded toys and games and of course an actual pinball machine. Editing is where the chance or “play” aspect was featured. Since I had multiple cameras covering the same day’s labor, I assigned cameras and shots to each screen. Then I linked game sounds to all the shots I chose to work with. At this point there was no linear structure just a “bin” of shots and their sounds. Then I turned “off” the video monitor and cut a soundtrack from the found sounds. I gave myself one rule: I would start in unison and then build a separate soundscape for each screen. This allowed me to let go of building a competitive relationship between the two screens. Then I opened the video monitor and took a look at my action cuts. This first edit governed everything that came after – the graphics, the length of the shots. My second rule was to heavily rework the first edit. It was a joy for me to take a very important architectural site and turn it into a simple pinball game, and to make the workers of a remarkable structure turn into handlers for the game. And why not? Isn’t that a joy itself to turn work into play?’— E.B.
________________ Tension Building, 2018 ‘Since 2002 I have been making films that re-visualizing architecture as a machine. I turn various architectural sites into motion machines, by animating the space with adjustments in lens framing, exposure variations and camera movement. The design of the space dictates the animation design. My current film ‘Tension Building’ is composed of 1930’s concrete stadiums built in the US and in Europe and a model replica of them.’— E.B.
_______________ Reach Capacity, 2020 ‘The origin of ‘Reach Capacity’ is The Landlord’s Game, a board game conceived in the early 20th century by Lizzie Magie. The aim of this game was to demonstrate how different economic systems operate, including their effects. First you would play according to capitalist rules. This version we all know, as the Monopoly board game was directly derived from it. As soon as one of the players acquired a monopoly the game would be over, but in in Magie’s version the the board was reversed and you would play on based on new, socialist rules. This would end the monopoly, causing wealth to be distributed fairly. ‘Reach Capacity’ borrows this structure, including a frantic first part in which project developers make one towering building after another go up – the towers being symbolized by simple surfaces in neon colours. But in the second part the rules of the game change and thus the action changes. The film turns more poetic and Beckman directly addresses the viewer though sung texts. ’Reach Capacity’ offers food for thought on the value of labour, as well as on what value actually is.’— mleuven
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p.s. Hey. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Merry, merry after Xmas! I didn’t do anything out of the ordinary on Xmas. Really, not a thing. But I didn’t mind. However, if your generous love had been real, it could have been the best — or, well, the weirdest maybe — Xmas ever! Thank you! Love as a very wealthy man who collects burned Smarties who happened to be walking by your friend’s place when the oven disaster occurred, smelled smoke, recognised the precious smell that emanates from burning Smarties, opened his bank’s wire transfer app on his phone, and knocked on your friend’s door, ready to make a very generous offer, G. ** Billy, And Merry Xmas just a little late to you, Billy! ** h now j, I hope your Xmas was a joyful thing. I’m fine enough, all in all. And you? Well, if the address you have for me has the postal code 75008, it’s my current address. Mysterious. Hugs to you! ** David Ehrenstein, What an excellent favorite Xmas song! ** Tosh Berman, Thank you, sir and pal! ** David, Hi, My day was no sweeter than usual, but my days are generally sweet-ish at the very least, so no problem. Nice dinner there, and vegetarian me could even have eaten it unless you left something out. That’s really sweet and tender and sad about the woman and you. A real Xmas. I’ve never known whether Boxing Day was about boxing, the sport, or about putting things inside boxes. ** politekid, Hi! They did. Unfortunately for everyone here, the post they will probably inspire will likely be an Emo Machinima thing, which I feel safe in imagining will please exactly an audience of two aka you and me, but hey. Poetry has this odd intimidation problem, and I get it while not completely understanding why, given how skinny and svelte poems tend to be/look. No arguments! Congrats! Dutch Skype! I’m a fan of the Dutch, so that sounds great too. I know the name Hilary Mantel, but I’ve never read her. Let me know if you think I should. My day was nothing to remember. Nice walk, empty streets, Belgian waffle at the fete foraine, semi-dreamy, a few texted greetings with far flung friends. And now … the future! ** _Black_Acrylic, Cool. So it’s Boxing Day, as in the sport, and not Boxing Day, as in the opposite of unboxing? I always hoped it was the latter. I’m sorry to hear that about the Leeds team. I don’t know how PSG is doing. I suppose if they weren’t doing well, I would hear about it. ** T, Hi. Oh, thanks, I always aim to spoil y’all. That’s funny: the only Xmas present that I know I’m getting is some organic socks — I have to wear organic clothes, long story — from a friend of mine in LA. What were the odds? My Xmas was nothing. The walk was nice, but, no, no revelations occurred therefrom. Mm, pre-NY, I need to sort things out with the film producer, ugh. I need to write something. I’d like to go sit in a movie theater and watch something, maybe the ‘Matrix’ film. Nothing too exciting. Hope you get back here as soon as hoped. I think new restrictions are coming down today, but I think it’ll mostly be vis-vis the vax pass. Wow, very nice wish for my today. I’ll keep my eyes peeled. I hope yours involves you happily discovering the unexpectedly luxurious effect of your new socks. ** Steve Erickson, Hi. My Xmas was so uneventful that I have all but forgotten what happened. Yum, vegan Mexican. Your Xmas so wins. I like the idea that ’70s muzak could become more grating than it inherently is. ** Kage, Kage! Nice moniker there. My Xmas was only sublime if nothingness constitutes the sublime, which certain philosophers would probably posit. So it possibly was. Aw, thank you, you’re so kind. I suspect I’m blushing, but there’s no mirror handy so I can’t say for sure. And I wish you an ultra-extremely poetic 2022! ** Okay. I have this feeling that very few of you readers are familiar with Ericka Beckman’s work, and that is why I reasoned a post starring her and her things would be in order. See you tomorrow.
Update: Due to a complicated technical issue with my server, the blog will return a few days later than originally planned. I will announce the exact return date on my socials as soon I know it. My apologies.
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