Cursed houses eye and ear text 6

music as the settler/melancholy
poetry of collisions, though fatal

bookending colonialism
drifter enters the body of colonialism
a first nation citizen drifts across an ocean

an un-owned land is siezed, occupied, parcelled and sold
in the end her land was her grave
THAT too was violated

foreign bodies as virus to the nation

experimental techniques applied to the telling of histories gives the film full power of poetry

ALL FALL DOWN

there was one shot close to the ground , across a frozen body of water, a barrel enters the frame and is emptied of hot water that flows over the frozen surface towards the sun, as if to extinguish it.

the sadness of lives stolen would have that the sun had never shined.

in another part the hand processed film was pushed to such a contrast that the body seemed burned into the grass with light.

How to talk of a revelation, of a film? what is a film?

I do not want to speak of film but what it does.
this document traces the effects of a long gone genocide, and now the buildings crumble

A Murder and a Dream unit 5a ear and eye texts

I talked with Barbara Hammer about these generations of artists finding each other written about in the last blog. She mentioned that we search for the people who came before us in their works and we cannot see them, only traces of them. This was before her performance in the cafe of the Hamburger Bahnhof.

The performance started with Barbara pushing a projector around the room through the audience, casting the image of her younger self against the walls, in two corners of a wall, along the ceiling, and on pillars. The image showed a young Barbara in many activities which seemed to want to push the frame that held her; running to its edges, sitting in a window, pushing the walls with her hands, and while these images were fighting the frame itself, the projection seemed to help her along, extending the frame, thus her body far along the wall, split into several areas of the room. Finally, the projector held its position, and the image of the young film maker showed her attacking the screen, the frame with a knife. Meanwhile the older Barbara was actually behind the screen and began slicing into it, into herself with a real knife. The young Barbara began hanging in shreds, her torn body moving on the falling pieces of the screen, while the older Barbara emerged from behind the screen, having done some kind of cinecide, leaving as she said earlier in the cafe, only traces behind.

When the New Barbara emerged, she walked towards the projector until she eclipsed its light. At this point two projectors began casting images onto a huge balloon hung from the ceiling. It seemed some dream travel of various cities and landscapes, and because they were slightly out of synch with each other it seemed like a dream struggling to remember itself. As the curved images danced on the surface, the audience sat on the floor all around the balloon, and it appeared to me that we all collectively held this dream in space above us in wonder.

Family Affairs Eye and Ear Text Unit 5

Looking at the window of the filmhaus at Sony Center you can see on the left hand corner an installation by Ludwig Schönherr where he filmed in 16mm off the television. You see Speed matching its times. The speed of the edit or exposure shows us girls, fashion, automobiles and freeways, politicians and celebrities. All shot from 69-70. The speed of those times meets the speed of structural films, where theory is somehow in synch with art and technology. I am speaking here of the events of 68 and the texts of the situationists in there theories of Spectacle. Television, Internet seem to be a little late in the game for pure speed.

But if Schönherr’s films record the spectacle with a pace equal to Debord’s theory of lived experience replaced by spectacular representation, unlike Debord, Schönherr seems to look at that fevered time without separating into judgments. Fashion sits on par with John and yoko’s peace bed, freeways are given the same exposure as speeches, and his critique seems to be in the form. The nervous, frantic, fearful and beautiful pace of the films records what he sees. All of the above.

Also in a historical context is the installation, Factory of Gestures on the first floor of the filmhaus. 7 monitors sit side by side organized by themes that examine how film has used the human body from 1910 to the contemporary, examining categories of beauty or physical gestures such as an upraised palm in an attempt to see what those gestures and acts have meant and have changed over time.

Birgit Hein’s photos from the late 60s to early 70s show a community contemporary to Schönherr’s. In these photos we do not see artists working but simply living. A naked child, friends socializing and informal snapshot photos. The faded and touching photos are touching in the way that I can trace MY history and lineage from one generation to the next. The theme of the Material of things like television and film inevitably exposed my own history, my personal vision of a Big Bang.

At times I have made flicker films, to begin with having never heard of them or seen them. I also have been accused of being a structuralist without knowing what such a creature was. I always have believed in disorientation, speed and saturation as artistic and political principals. But in making works that have sometimes been similar to those who have made them before me, I could care less for originality. I have always felt like a fractured mirror or broken disco ball, whose reflective surfaces are actually eyes in search for kindred spirits, and maybe all our works over time are like bonfires wanting to be found. I want to be next to the heat.

So to come back to my generation in this weird family tree I would like to mention that in works we can speak to each other from one generation to the next and close the gap in real time. The works of Marie Losier in the lobby of the Arsenal do this with form and content. Genesis P. Orridge, for example was a huge influence on me and what I make. I saw her face either trying to get out of the little house Marie had made for her, or taunting me to get inside.

Hmmm….. in this poetic lineage I have found generations of gangs, clans, groups of artists who made things before me and now adorn my own imagination like some incredible palace of perversity. Did all this happen because my first memory is watching on television the assassination of Robert Kennedy?

The Inevitably Explosive Plastic Material. Text

If all cinema is involved in the use of ghost or ghosting these things and acts move by a series of complex relationships. A film maker has a relationship to a subject that is filmed, then creates a new relationship by setting it next to another. Finally, a personal relationship is constructed with several others in the duration of a film. This then is projected over the head of an audience onto a white screen with light. The light is then reflected into the eyes of an audience where all these relationships explode into millions of new ones. Memory, time, emotion forms new meaning in every viewer.

Cinema is the movement of these things through a collective body and sound is the movement of vibration through space. Today at 6:00 p.m. in the Hamburger Bahnhof and then later in The Arsenal at 10:30 there will be an opportunity to experience this movement of sound and image relationships in an intensified, concentrated and challenging form.

Barbara Hammer, who appears to be as genuine and friendly as inspired and talented gives performance first in the Hamburger Banhof with the Presentation of Available Space and Bent Time, both works that challenge the constraints of the frame itself in a burst of joyful dislocation.

Later in the evening at THe Arsenal, Wilhelm Hein presents a material film accompanied by live music. I saw a test screening a while ago and can say it is fucking beautiful. 35mm cinemascope, intense washes of color, scratches and general mayhem. Add live music to this lovely and jarring experience of the visual and you will have the material of the film translating to a physical human material that becomes increasingly unstable.

Text Unit 3 They fell from the sky

What if there were a time when folks just appeared and vanished from the sky.

I went into a room for some reason i could not remember. But somebody knew me and seemed to be expecting me. She greeted me with a smile and gave me a bag with some gifts that were books about films, which made me really happy because I love films. the room became full of people, and one person came and went from an adjoining room with coffee and pastries for everyone. In a corner I saw Marie and Seb. They were just there for some reason and we were all so happy to find ourselves in the same room. It seemed like a slot machine where some unknown person pulls a lever and BOOM, you are in a different place with other people from Manila, Paris, New York or Toronto. It was understood there would be an important event later where we would meet again, and one by one, we all vanished again.

The event happened in another room where we all faced forward. One, two and three operas were performed, but it went by fast. The third opera was performed by a crying woman who did not sing but made us feel like singing. At one point she opened her mouth in a single, devastating gesture. All the sorrow in the world was released and let go. And though it was heartbreaking to watch we were grateful for her to free us from sadness, and we thanked her with applause.

After we left the room. We gathered in a circle and drank our hearts out, laughing at the joy of the present moment. In this room people fell from the sky to join us for a while before ascending again. Gradually everyone was gone, and i took a taxi home with my man, C.C. and dear dear Paul rowley, who fell from New York. With a quiet, drunken joy we rode home and talked of films. At my flat we ate fried chicked and cous cous.

In recollecting all this I realize that one of the functions of a film festival is to build community, or several communities. these appearances and vanishings put before my eyes so many people I love. Relationships are formed, dissolved and reformed. We look at the screen and an opera lets go of all the sadness in the world. This is our work, to make and recieve visions of communities amongst ourselves and place ourself in engagement with the world we live in.

I spoke of in this cryptic unit getting my accreditation, watching Tre Puccini, going to the opening of the Forum Expanded, seeing dear friends again, getting drunk and watching folks in elevators.

Ghosts. Unit 2

Michael Snow mentioned at a screening at the Kunstweke tonight that the work he showed was a music video for unpopular music. The performance of the music that comprised the soundtrack and the recording of other performances that made up the images for the work shown raised several questions for me. A friend of mine once said regarding the sublime and difficult work of contemporary troubador Keiji Haino, "I can't help it if Haino is not popular music, ask who presents his work and how it is distributed why it is not popular". Seth Halloway was speaking specifically of a utopian possibility where the likes of Brittany Spears and Justin Timberlake would be distributed and presented equally to the public with the likes of Haino, Cage, and indeed, Snow, perhaps broadening our possibility of what would be popular music if more people had access to it.
I must backtrack a bit in order to mention my initiation into the wide world of cultural production ie; art, is from the point of view first and foremost as a fan, having cheated my way through primary school and never having made it to a university. I found art through popular culture. Warhol and Goddard through the Stones, Bunuel through punk rock, Snow and most of the 20th century's classical music by way of Kubrick. I was a serious fan and did my research. Another question; why do not more people have access to Michael Snow's group, CCMC?
Snow spoke of all moving images as ghosts, a thing I feel a complete kinship with him, instictually. He also made a point of describing specifically the difference between a music performance and a film and a film, something that for this fan and producer of sound and image means working with the raw materials to approaches an alchemical experiment in order to make a New Thing.

Another question; the New Thing. A phenomenon described in the mid 1960s applied to an emerging free jazz. I think of critic’s terms such as “sheets of sound”, “cascades”, or “sparks” to describe this then emerging form. It all falls shorts somehow, but still these terms kept me interested enough to always be eager to learn more about “difficult” works.
Soon after the New Thing, European improvisers abandoned rhythm in an attempt to free themselves of the tyranny of Time. It was exciting and yielded some great results. At one point during the screening at the Kunstwerke I remembered an old, black American phrase that Jazz and Blues were the Devil’s music. Then I thought of Jackson Pollack’s splatter paintings while I listened to Snow’s piano playing. I thought of Ghosts and that here I was watching three old white men conjure the devil with a fury. I watched and listened. What I saw were Ghosts.

I think if I had a piano for a year my life would be totally different somehow. As a way to sloppily end this missive I should mention Keiji Haino said in an interview once that the most inappropriate and oppressive instrument to be on stage with him would be a piano. On a live CD of his three piece improv band, Vajra, the three old Japanese men fucking ROCK. They get way out there, like Snow, only Japanese. Sparks, sheets and splatter, then they swing into an a capella traditional number that they end with a short piano solo. Like this, Michaels Snow’s band gets way out, and for the encore they swing, old fashioned style. I guess kindred spirits are everywhere like Ghosts.

Another question; how do they find each other and when will they be popular?

Michaels Snow also has a new work focusing on music as well. Puccini

Hanging Desire. Unit 1

The week prior to the explosion of image in Berlin we call a festival, i was fortunate enough to spend hours each day with the work of Ludwig Schönherr at the Halle A14 near the Hauptbahnhof. From the narrow platform outside the entrance where one time workers would load and unload trucks from this former warehouse, one looks across a busy street at what may seem to an untrained eye a shabby wasteland. Five or six trees stand tall and bare above a field of dead weeds and broken glass. The area is fenced off as if it were somehow a threat to the working order of a healthy city. Flanked on one side by an apartment building that has seen better days, and on another side by a row of unimaginative apartment buildings hastily put up in the years after the wall came down for a quick profit to developers. These are the types of things people build to fill in these spaces.

But enter the exhibition space and in Schönherr's work you will find clues to a poetic reading of such spaces in urban enviornments. Spanning some thirty plus years, the films, collage, and photography vary in form from landscapes and portraits to formal structuralism. In the structural contact sheet series you see the rare instance of an artist who is not afraid to engage in the material of popular culture without the distancing tool of irony. He embraces American cartoons such as Popeye and Superman with love in his formal structures, to the point of identifying with Clark Kent as a self portrait. A close look at accompanying texts and diagrams will give you not only a glimpse of how this artist thinks and organizes, but also one reads such nice statements as "Television as a Creative Force", and predictions for the proliferation of mass image production that anticipated the internet by over twenty years. This is not so much to suggest a Prophet status for Schönherr, as to paraphrase Walter Benjamin, "what need of fortune tellers when one need only walk down any street with eyes wide open to see the future"

Surely Ludwig Schönherr has walked our cities with open eyes, and these eyes have recorded Desire for us. For one week I hung these records of desire in the Halle with Daniel and Trixie in a cold where we could see our breath. Among these works I became particularly fond of one series informally called Magic City. it is comprised of photos taken in New York City in the 1970s from a space that appears to have been freed from all human usefulness. A dead Space. A space of desire, a poetic space.

In the space of cinema later this week we can see such spaces he recorded in Hamburg and New York.