Images Blog 2009 - 7

With the bulk of the curated On Screen programmes scheduled between the Sunday and the Thursday nights, the last few days of the Images Festival were largely characterized by Live Images programmes and/or ‘lectures’. On Thursday evening I attended the double programme 43 After 66 - now, what is with that title? Well, the “66” I believe must refer to the year of both Tony Conrad’s The Flicker and Andy Warhol’s Chelsea Girls (or does it?). Anyway, this curiously titled programme used these two cinematic landmarks as pints of departure, with varying results.

Ian White’s recitation/performance Ibiza: a reading for “The Flicker” quite cleverly commenced with a narration about a young British gay man’s not unusual but initially quite promising weekend in Ibiza, with no strings attached and all the right elements in place. Well, actually the right elements were not in place and there were strings attached, but things did happen anyway. Specifically, The Flicker kicked in, its projection motorik almost completely obscuring the not unamusing narrative. The Flicker, that behemoth of modernist (and assumedly straight) experimental cinema. No drama, no plot, no images except incessant and increasing flickering white on black screen. Most Images denizens presumably know the one. But not in this context, they don’t. The Flicker begins with a warning to epileptic viewers and others with medical issues and/or limitations

(potentially compromised immune systems) to think carefully before proceeding further. Only then does the fun begin - and The Flicker does get faster and faster but it starts off pretty intense to begin with. Ian White has accomplished nothing less that sexualizing

(or re-sexualizing) flicker movies and modernist experimentalism, and I say Hallelujah. After The Flicker concludes, White then leans back at is light table and reciting lists from Internet gay male personals. These are lists of all those not wanted - undesirables rather than desirables. And they are personals, so they are specific. No femmes, no fats, no drama queens, no druggies, no Asians, no blacks, no drag queens. No no no no. Every three or four negatives he kicks an erect beer bottle over and then restores it to erect position. One is down, and then up again. These negative personals are oppositional to the consent involved in both watching and doing the flicker, and I am all for consenting pleasure.

Ian White’s not-so-wild Ibiza sojourn was followed by Althea Thauberger’s re-signing or re-working of Warhol’s double-framed Chelsea Girls. The Factory demi-monde has here been transferred to a Victoria (BC) social-housing complex - into that very grey area between social realism and soap-opera. It has been a while since I have viewed the original, so other audience members had the advantage of comparing maker’s and re-maker’s structural parallels and departures. Despite a few moments where I could recognize visual and structural dialogue between left and right pictures and/or sequences, I found the exercise pointless and numbing. I did think of boundaries between acting and non-acting, and also questions of agency among the filmed or documented - I thought of the seme eternal questions pertinent to, say, Donigan Cumming or Larry Clark or countless others. But Cumming’s videos and photographs are far tighter formally - Thauberger’s stock was (presumably intentionally)blurry and not very sharp. Countless artists have played with parallels between documentary and performance - it’s hardly a revelation that Warhol was a documentarian.

On the festival’s closing night, Images presented two mixed-media works involving live and pre-recorded performance, live and pre-recorded music, and projected images. (and, with the second ensemble, a whole lot more). This closing presentation was almost sold-out due to prior ticket sales - the event was marketed by its co-sponsors the musical Wavelength series. The first of the two presentations was by far the weaker. The Toronto-based Ammo Factory Group (an experimental theatre collective) presented a barely-dramatized scenario involving a musician whose life quite literally becomes taken over by the narrative of a film to which he is overdubbing sound and voice. The musician becomes a sort of walking virus, one could say. This piece, actually titled The Voice Over, struck me as occupying a peculiar middle ground between American Idol and Alain Robbe-Grillet - it contained a pseudo-stylized linguistic repetition of scenarios or situations but without any bite - let alone wit.

The second act - the L.A. based Cloud Eye Control - was both far more spectacular and way more ambitious. Cloud Eye Control offered three pieces - Final Space and Subterranean Heart - sandwiched group member Miwa Matreyek’s solo-piece Dreaming of Lucid Living. This very talented ensemble mixed projection (how many screens, and where now a screen?), choreography, animation, and some quite okay music. Final Space was breathtaking, after Ammo Factory and after the necessary waiting. Its mechanics were obvious but that precision was part of the appeal. The second and third pieces were also impressive but lacking the initial impact. And I did find myself getting put off by a certain New Ageneses - I found myself being reminded of eighties new-media spectacles in which Reflexivity had been banished. In Dreaming of Lucid Living, there was no acknowledgement that not all dreams are good. Well, sorry my dear, but there have always been nightmares - well before Freud and possibly earlier than Poverty. But Cloud Eye Control’s techno-utopianism was loaded with eye-candy, and I was refreshed by the presence of an ensemble that both needed and loved to be simultaneously live and operating their machinery. This ensemble managed to overcame my general scepticism about live presentations which re-present what has already been presented and is therefore redundant.

In my fourth blog for Images 2009, I recounted Live Images Event Number Four, which was Ben Cooley’s Power Point presentation Talking Points and Talking Ponies. Coonley comically attempted to apply structuralist apparatus-determinants to Digitalia and would up somewhere between Death of the Author and The Lunatic Machines are Taking Over the Asylum. Well, Live Images Number Five “democratized” the Digital Apparatus even further. I was keen to take in Hanne Mugaas’ and Cory Arcangel’s Art Since 1950 (According to the Internet). I, like many, believe that The Internet and its electronic systems have indeed effected definitions of art object and/or exchange and who exactly is an artist. But…one can only be so slack and get away with it. One can only be so offhandedly disorganized without simply losing interest. And Arcangel (Mugaas was the technician, or the brains?) did not sustain my interest. Even my dead cat knows that seminal art events (emphasis on body artists such as Chris Burden and Bruce Naumann) are endlessly “re-made” by You Tube pranksters. The 22^nd Images Festival had already established that original prints were destined to become copies of copies and therefore what exactly is an original anyway. Animal events loosely parallel to cinematic moments do not cut the mustard, and so on and so on and so on. When somebody stands in front of an audience and informs an audience that this is their third presentation of this lecture cum performance and - guess what - the first two presentations were disasters; that somebody lowers expectations and had better be pretty on top of his or her game if they intend to recover those expectations. But Mugaas’ and Arcangel’s presentation and aesthetic has nothing to do with recovering or re-examining anything - it is about detritus and general flotsam. Nothing more and nothing less. Over and out.

To me, this year’s festival has seemed to have a more polished edge than previous years. Not polished in a seamless, disappearance of experimentation and labour kind of way, but polished in the coherent and connected programming of related screenings and performances and in the way that each day seems to have a sub-theme, or leitmotif, all its own. While I’m reluctant to ascribe the festival planners powers of astrological manipulation, it did seem particularly fitting that yesterday, in tandem with the full moon, I got to speak with curator Brett Kashmere about his program “Saturn Returns” and the launch of the new journal INCITE!

Ben Russell, Black and White Trypps Number Three, 2007, still

Gabby Moser: Your notes in the Images program explain that the title of your program, “Saturn Returns,” refers to an astrological event that happens every 27-30 years in a person’s life and that you, and your generation of peers who are represented by the artists in the screening, are currently undergoing their first return of Saturn. How do you think your program relates to the theme of this year’s festival, “Print Generation”?

Brett Kashmere: I didn’t know the Images Festival had a theme until now (i.e. the time of this writing). It seems they’re keeping it under wraps pretty well! I’m not so sure the work in “Saturn Returns” relates to that theme, though. As someone who has worked in both analog video and emulsion-based cinema, I take the phrase “print generation” quite literally. It also sounds like a pre-digital term, which is somewhat out of sync with my program, as it’s fairly heavy on digital video. I don’t associate the words “print generation” with my generation, either, which is also the focus of “Saturn Returns.” “Print generation” makes me think of newspapers, which are all moving online, or out of business.

GM: Did the idea of the quarter-life crisis inform the program in any way?

BK: In addition, I just learned about the quarter-life crisis, via the cover story in this week’s Eye Weekly. So much late-breaking news. I wouldn’t call the first Saturn Return a crisis, exactly, although the second Saturn Return is commonly referred to as the mid-life crisis. I see the first Saturn Return as something more positive than that, as a threshold of self-discovery and self-definition. Thank God for the Saturn Return! I was pretty lost before it.

GM: Many of the artists in the program appropriate, remix and re-contextualize music, television and pop culture from the 80s and 90s, using everything from Michael Jackson and Sinead O’Connor music videos, to early video games and action movies. Why do you think this generation of film and video artists has returned to this era as source material? What do you make of their approach to the footage (which seems to me like a mixture of sincere nostalgia and ironic interest in deconstruction)?

BK: I currently teach at a liberal arts college in the States, and most of my students are all over the 80s, in terms of music, style, etc. I see their appropriation of the 80s as totally ironic (even if they don’t know it) and devoid of nostalgia. But I feel very emotionally connected to the 80s, for good and for bad. That was when my sense of who I was started to form, when my identity was starting to take shape, but those were also agonizing experiences. I think a lot of the artists around my age (I’m 31) have complex feelings about the 80s, and that’s manifested in the work in “Saturn Returns.” There’s a pain in returning to that era, as it reminds us of how confusing adolescence can be, as well as how embarrassing our childhood pleasures were. The music and television of the 80s was really not very special. That said, I spent a lot of time in front of the TV during that decade, and that’s when I started to buy and mix my own cassette tapes. Those are my memories, and it seems natural to go back and explore that period. YouTube has made it pretty easy to re-visit the past. Too easy, maybe.

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Images 2009 Blog #6

There has been some improvement in the meteorological department, which has been rather brutal so far during the Images Festival. This provides me with a reason to get to more of the Off Screen Images, some of those outside the 401 Richmond building.

At Xpace I can see that this year’s exhibiting students are really playing with monitors - what kind of monitors and how to install them. They’re playing with video components in multi or inter-media installations, and doing it rather well. Liam Crockard’s contribution posits that punk isn’t dead - it’s just gone sideways. Literally, as the artist has made his monitor vertical while retaining horizontal punk documentation. A mound of earth for burial and a flaming wig on top of bare branches indicates suspension but not stasis. Brad Tinmouth also conveys suspension by positioning himself and his subjects in between channels. ON what appears to be the night of Barack Obama’s election victory, youths on the couch tune in and out of the reportage while the signal band’s waver. Therefore a clear mage cannot be formed. Jo SiMalaya Alcampo’s four station installation referencing the 1904 St. Louis World Fair references tourism and exoticism and the roles of fairs and museums and other heterotopic initiatives. Her use of audio from her first post tom score the entire installation is effective. And Mark Pellegrino’s installation in the basement is omnivorous - it’s a space station, it’s an analogue TBV station dabbling in digital culture but pre-digitaila. It’s CITY on good drugs. Ground Control to Major Tom, take your protein pills and put your helmet on.

Then I walked over to over to Diaz Contemporary and took in Brendan Fernandes’ installation The Hunting. This was a thoughtfully effective large piece, which I expected since Fernandes’ project in Liberty village during the most recent Nuit Blanche was one of that evening’s most memorable works. On there main gallery’s floor, he has created a circle of nine monitors - flashing SOS in Morse code (and also like in flicker cinema). The monitors are kneeling among three prayer stools hosting candles - the monitors are praying for forgiveness. On the gallery’s east wall, there are two stations for the same videotape and the stations are equipped with headphones. I put them the phones on and listen to the narrative. Against alternating stock of a pride of hyenas and a very snowy landscape, the voice reads a story about a sister’s attempt to take over a sibling’s monarchy. The juxtaposition between the hyenas and the snowy wood is important here - viewers are not restricted to geographical specificities. Hyenas are the ultimate scavengers, who think nothing of devouring their siblings and are thus the ultimate social Darwinists. The SOS signage flashes on these monitors too - perhaps too late but still insistently. And on the north wall there is a scrawled text of pidgin English. It reads: Fin year weey now. The endin is neera. For some reason I thought of an Irish dialect, but then I thought better. I thought of people and creatures which can negotiate socially without needing to dominate, perhaps without hunting? Do such people and creatures exist?

And then I did stroll into the 401 Richmond Building, where I must single out Takashi Ishida’s Toronto-EMAKI, at Wynick Tuck. Takashi Ishida is indeed both a painter and a filmmaker, and this duality is celebrated in his thoughtful installation in one of Wynick Tuck’s smaller gallery-spaces. Two Japanese picture-scrolls unfurl along the longer gallery walls, leading up to inverted monitors bearing the edited versions of the drawings on the scroll (or emaki). This is yet more exquisite abstractionism from this Images veteran, hosted by a gallery which represents some of Toronto’s best abstract painters.

In the evening, the Images Festival presented an event titled Avant-Garde Film Preservation and Access: Saving George Kuchar’s Generous Cinematic Corpus. George Kuchar is one of the dearly beloved all-time shit-disturbers, and what kind of a world would we have if George Kuchar’s prints were not preserved let alone restored. In the context of all post-print, post-film, post-art object playful rhetoric that has characterized this 22nd Images Festival, this emphasis of printing and reprinting is reassuring and timely.

The first George Kuchar video I saw was one of his Weather Diaries. He was schlumped like a decaying mastodon on a feculent motel La-Z-Boy, farting like a bagpipe, his aging testicles drooping out of his soiled boxershorts, complaining about the state of his uncooperative colon, narrating the tedium of his life like it was a tawdry pulp novel, and I thought: “at last. I am understood.”

I’m probably being factually inaccurate. But factual inaccuracy is an imperative responsibility when dishing Kuchar. My recollection is probably a conglomeration of any number of Kuchar tapes, flickering around my head in a swirling, bubbling mess of mixed metaphor, seducing me with their melodrama, tantalizing me with their endless demonstrations of how to age badly. Oh, the Kuch! May your gassy, liver-spotted grip on me never slacken!

Tonight’s event, aptly named Talk to the Pie, is a panel discussion on saving Kuchar’s glimmering cornucopia of video and filmic ejaculations from the cruel ravages of Time, that she-minx who weaves us all asunder in her cruel entropic web. I will leave the tech-talk to the experts, those scuttling madmen of tumescent technologies, Those Who Toil against time’s cruel march, hunched over the gleaming restorative clockworks of tomorrow’s age. Instead, I will wax purple on La Kuch.

There was a whole swack of kids who came of age in America in the ’50s who, I would argue, not only made New York City into the den of iniquity and underground mecca it came to be, but who defined what we now know as the queer avant-garde; the Kuchar Brothers are a pillar in that temple. They hid in their little closets, poised to wreak glorious queer revenge on a world that tried to shame them out of existence. Little Kenny Anger was flirting with motorcycles and Aleister Crowley in LA, Jack Smith was fluffing the peacock plumes of his homemade turban, and the Kuchar Brothers, their heads roiling with the sensationalistic glamour of Hollywood, were set to unleash their particular heady brand of reprocessed technicolour magic.

O Kuchar, how do I love thee? For thine endless complaining; for thine ability to turn any situation, no matter how mundane, into a tawdry B-movie; for the refusal of thy body, that most flawed of vessels, to be at all graceful or dignified in any way; for thy cats, Tippy and Lilly; for thy mother, She of the Constant Misery and Astounding Longevity (R.I.P., finally); for thine unflinching bravery in the filmic display of thy bowel movements and, erm, underwear tracks; To the depth and breadth and height of thy ever-rumbling gut; may your ever-percolating cinematic corpus, bloated with camp and bedazzled glamour and questionable acting and feverish voice-over reign supreme!

There was something appealing to me about seeing the student films - mainly because I am always curious as to what is sprouting in the minds of the future generations.

9pm Screening at Joseph Workman theatre. Gotta love Toronto; waiting in the line-up for the screening amongst residents of CAMH - one of which was shouting “when you die you will rise” and another walking briskly through the lobby saying “Shalom” to everyone he approached. It is Passover after all..

The event was packed with eager young filmmakers and their support teams of friends and family, faculty from York and this really sweet guy from a company called V-Tape who got up to speak and was so nervous and cute about it. I felt the love in the room - I realized what a huge undertaking it is for Images to run this festival. We are so lucky to have people in our cities/communities who CARE about art (huge kudos to the Images folk..) and actually DO things to support them.

The films were a mish-mash of thought, image, music, style, and ‘potential’ genre. 11 short films, all just a few minutes in length, the festival chose a wide variety for this showcase. Films that stood out to me - I loved “They Will Never Catch Us”by Frank Aschberg & Gabriel Watson of Sweden - and not just because it was a series’ of shots of men having their pants pulled down in slow-motion (the most full-frontal maleness I have ever seen on screen, mind you) but because it was brilliantly shot and everything about it worked. The music was perfect. Fascinating also, to see a slowed-down set of reactions to this prank. Balls were literally flying… hilarious.

“Annual Report” and “Those Crazy Insides” showed some incredible and unique animation. Annual Report was thought-provoking without being at all in-your-face about it. And Those Crazy Insides was well, too hard to describe without knowing what type of animation I was watching.

There was the punchy and fun “It Only Hurts When I Cry” by Daniel Macintyre (I think this kid is gonna do some neat stuff). Also, “Morning Will Come” which blew my mind with its poetry-in-motion, I couldn’t believe that it was a student film.

In seeing these films I realized how much film has changed since my younger days (ha ha - I’m only 31, but you know how fast technology is moving) and how technology is influencing the younger generations. This shift allows for so much experimentation and mixed media. This is obviously a huge bonus in short film when you have only a few minutes to tell your story.

All in all, nice work O Future Generation. I wonder who won the award…