May 2009 Archives

Gritty skateboard wheels and the delicate, glossy surface of 35mm film emulsion would not seem to make a happy pairing. But in the hands of LA-based artist Jennifer West, who does unusual things to film stock, the union yields lush, trippy imagery and a witty practice that's both conceptual and performative. West just finished the long weekend with "The Long Weekend," a project put together by the Tate Modern in London which gives artists a venue and a weekend within which to present art. West showcased a new project titled Skate the Sky Film in which she arranged to have snippets of film stock subjected to skateboarders. "I have twelve hundred feet of film of wispy clouds in the LA sky that has been doused with inks and will be taped onto the ramp in the Turbine Hall," she explains in ArtForum's "500 Words" section. "Local skateboarders from the London skate scene, many of whom frequent the Undercroft, a skate spot just across the river from the Tate and a byproduct of LA skate culture's migration to England in the 1970s, will be invited to skate directly over the filmstrips, their wheels marking the film." Find video clips of West's work after the jump...

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To outsiders, Los Angeles avant-garde cinema has traditionally been obscured, neglected and elided, left out of the sweeping histories of American experimental film that find centers in New York and San Francisco, leaving the rich and varied output of LA makers behind. To LA denizens, though, it may be clear that this flawed history needs revision. Thanks to Filmforum, the UCLA Film and Television Archive and other venues, as well as scholars such as David E. James, who has avidly researched a broad range of LA films and artists, the city's filmmaking history continually finds more nuance.

The ongoing revision continues this week as archivist Mark Toscano joins LA filmmakers Thom Andersen and Morgan Fisher on Wednesday night (May 27) to present newly restored prints of films made by the artists, and returns again on Friday night (May 29) with even more local experimental filmmaking, featuring artists Pat O'Neill, David Wilson, Grahame Weinbren, Fred Worden and Roberta Friedman. The restoration of all 17 of the films that will screen took place at the Academy Film Archive, which has focused attention on restoring the work of local artists for the last five years. "As more films have come to the Academy, and more have been preserved or restored, a fascinating portrait of the Los Angeles avant-garde scene has begun to emerge," claims the blurb for the show. "Accordingly, the title of this special two-night screening series has a double meaning."

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Roiling tufts of sand rise up from the horizon line in slow motion, hushed and capacious clouds that spill across the ground such that the split between earth and air, hard and soft, dissolves. A four-wheeled ATV with an anonymous driver alternately appears and disappears, entering from the right, disappearing into the haze, then reappearing on the left, a ghostly apparition who only once in the video's seven minutes resolves clearly, a real figure with helmet, goggles and gloves.

This tumultuous, yellow-hued landscape and its elegiac nod to the murkiness of boundaries comes from LA-based artist Deanna Erdmann, a recent graduate of UCSD who in this project demonstrates a keen acumen, offering viewers an experience that is at once radiant conceptually and economical formally, achieving its goals without fanfare. Titled Donut, the video is installed as a rear-screen projection at Patrick Painter/Melrose Gallery. Viewers enter the piece directly from the street, stumbling from the brightly lit sidewalk into the dark gallery where a large screen is suspended so that it touches the ground and divides the large room neatly in half. While you may initially be tempted to wander about, moving up close, behind and around the screen, the video yields a more potent experience for the viewer who stands still, pondering the patterns of dusty clouds as they billow up and then deflate in the warm glimmers of sunlight. The sound, a motor-like drone, is not haphazard, nor is the image sequence and the orchestration of absence and presence: watch it through, and you'll find a hushed lyricism and a clear pattern as the sandy scene demonstrates its quiet message.

American girls aren't born; they're made. The idea isn't particularly new - Simone de Beauvoir made the same point about women more than 50 years ago, but the work of LA-based artist Charlie White in the series titled The Girl Studies explores the production of teenaged girl sexuality with unerring directness and a mix of affection, curiosity and critical acuity.

The series includes several photographs grouped as the Teen and Transgender Comparative Study; each photo unites a young girl and male-to-female transgender subject, inviting viewers to consider both a moment of transition, as well as the gap between what is considered the real and its copy. Girl Studies also includes a short animation titled OMG BFF LOL and a 35mm film titled American Minor. White's film and photos are on view through May 31 as part of the Hammer Museum's "Nine Lives: Visionary Artists From L.A." show, and American Minor will screen later this week as part of the 2009 Director's Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival, a prestigious event, and particularly noteworthy in that this is White's first film; it also screened earlier this year at the Sundance Film Festival. What makes this eight-minute short, a study of lip gloss and pale soft flesh, and White's work on girlhood in general, so gripping?

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"I was a cheerleader in school, but I also made the posters that the football players would run through," says designer Karin Fong, a SoCal native, one of the founding members of the design firm Imaginary Forces and the creator of dozens of excellent film title sequences and ads. Fong, who will join four other designers Wednesday night for a special screening of film openers hosted by Flux, adds, "I feel like I was a graphic designer all my life but just didn't know what it was until I was in college." At Yale, Fong studied animation, photography and drawing, and now says that her main regret is that she isn't a better writer. Why would a designer need to be a good writer? "There's a way of triangulating from the page to the screen, and the more fluid you are the better," explains Fong. "Everything, even design, works through narrative, so understanding how narrative moves is really important."

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A young girl's face appears as she turns on her webcam, steps back, folds up her shirt, and begins shaking her hips. Then another girl does the same thing. And another, and still another, until a line of frames unfolds across the wall in the darkened gallery, and the girls, each alone in her own room, form a chorus line dancing in machine-like synchronization.

"This seems to me to be a perfect reflection of our contemporary circumstances, each of us alone in our rooms doing these same moves, yet connected to each other," explains artist Natalie Bookchin sitting outside the Municipal Art Gallery at Barnsdall Park where her most recent video installation, Mass Ornament, is on view. The piece is part of the larger exhibition of projects funded by the Department of Cultural Affairs' City of Los Angeles Individual Artist Fellowships, and it offers an intriguing vision of YouTube as the locus of cultural identity. Bookchin, who is co-Director of the Photography and Media Program in the Art School at CalArts, continues, describing YouTube's power over her as an artist...

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"Music helps me edit," says the great motion designer Pable Ferro, who will be awarded a special medal by AIGA in September in recognition of his "exceptional contributions to the field of design and visual communication." It's well deserved - the guy is a genius! He goes on to explain that music "works in a tempo, and when I cut, it's with rhythms."

Ferro, who lives here in LA where he continues to design film title sequences and advise other directors, was eerily prescient in his design sensibility. He began working on commercials in the 1960s, where he experimented with the quick cutting and kinetic camerawork that would become his trademark. His first title sequence was for Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove in 1963, which boasts the designer's now completely recognizable skinny, hand-drawn lettering, as well as his deft use of metaphor. What is so striking about Ferro, though, is how clearly he understood the possibilities of multi-frame visual communication.

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Syd Garon recently changed his name. Why? "I don't want to do the same thing over and over," says the LA-based animator. He's now directing under the moniker "Syd + 1," and feels completely dedicated to the productive disruptions of collaboration as a working method. Proof? He's just finishing up a set of three music videos that were based on the collaboration between an animator and an artist for tracks that were in turn based on the collision of seemingly unlikely pairings of musicians. I know - it gets confusing. Anyway, the videos are part of a larger N.A.S.A. project - N.A.S.A. is North America/South America and is a collaboration between Squeak E. Clean and DJ Zegon, and for their recently released album The Spirit of Apollo, the pair brought in musicians such as David Byrne, Karen O and Kool Keith, among others, to lend voices and create compelling synergies. The videos followed suit, and Garon happily found himself working with artists Shepard Fairey, Marcel Dzama and Sage Vaughn, basically trying to make paintings move. What was that like?

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Dubbed a "peepshow/diorama performance," The Reptile Under the Flowers brings LA visual/theater artist Janie Geiser back to the Foshay Masonic Lodge for another must-see event. I still shiver now years after visiting an earlier "walkthrough performance" by Geiser. It was also at the Masonic Lodge (which itself is a space to be experienced!). Geiser had staged a tale across several mini-stages on which artists controlled puppets who performed the story. Visitors moved quietly in groups of five or six from stage to stage, peering into each vignette and piecing together the story. Strangers quickly became intimate as we found ourselves pushing forward together to see more, and as we realized we were experiencing something both magical and transformative. The story grew increasingly intense, the almost silent drama moving toward its tragic conclusion such that, by the last stage, everyone in my group was pressed in close to witness the indescribably sad demise of our heroine. Afterwards, as a group, we stumbled back out into the lobby of the Lodge, which acted as an anachronistic gateway buffering the return to the real world. Geiser, who avoids the term "puppet show" for good reason, produces performances that stun and amaze, offering visitors powerful and wonderful visual/theatrical/storytelling experiences unlike anything else. If you want to experience Geiser's newest show, get your tickets now!

After more than 70 years and the explosion of visual culture, the stunning animated films of Oskar Fischinger remain unparalleled. Fischinger, who emigrated to Los Angeles from Germany in 1936 and became one of the city's central figures in a burgeoning avant-garde filmmaking community, created dozens of dazzling visual explorations of sound. In Allegretto, for example, he used cell animation to make geometric shapes dance in a visual version of a score titled "Radio Dynamics." For his Motion Painting No. 1 from 1947, Fischinger used oil paints on plexiglas to craft an intricate, almost mandala-like meditation on sound, color and motion. Film historian and CalArts professor Bill Moritz described the work of Fischinger as "optical poetry" in a book of the same title, and the term underscores the challenges of finding the right phrase to capture Fischinger's beautiful melding of sound and image. While Fischinger's work is celebrated - his films have screened at numerous events internationally this year, and currently three of his paintings are in an exhibition at The Long Beach Museum of Art - the films risk continued deterioration as they age. What will happen if these films are lost forever?

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"In a weird way it's a direct reflection of where we are in society now - everything is data," says music video director James Frost, whose video for Radiohead's track "House of Cards" just won Creative Review's prestigious "Best in Book" award. The video, which premiered last July, did not use cameras in any way, but instead was created in collaboration with scientists at UCLA who used high-tech scanning and laser systems to capture and then visualize 3-D information of the band's lead singer, Thom Yorke. The resulting images are gritty bits of evanescent data that perfectly capture the song's sense of longing. The video also suggests the significance of digital information as an aesthetic form. I've been re-reading Anna Munster's provocative book Materializing New Media: Embodiment in Information Aesthetics, which concludes with a call for an "ethico-aesthetic paradigm for information," by which she means a way to think about aesthetics that accounts for technology. "Aesthetics in contemporary culture cannot rise above and remain undisturbed by the machine, for the machine is more intimately than ever an arranger of our perceptual apparatus," she writes. Frost's video perfectly captures this aesthetic, coaxing emotional yearning out of information, and crafting a portrait of being that feels exactly right. "Our lives are digital," says Frost. "In that sense, the video definitely felt apt." Find Creative Review's nod to the video here, and the original Google post, with the making-of video and further information here.

Four entwined naked bodies become a fleshy, pulsing machine at one point in Film Montages (for Peter Roehr), an 11-minute film by LA-based experimental filmmaker William E. Jones that will screen on Monday at REDCAT. Combining and repeating shots borrowed from '70s gay porn films, Jones pays tribute to the work of 1960s German conceptual artist Peter Roehr, known for his fascination with repetition. Starting with an image of dancing spots of light on a nighttime highway, Jones uses the movement to create what's essentially an algorithmic music video. Separated from the flow of the narrative, the montage sequences highlight gestures (the odd movement of a hand or arm), reveal patterns and textures (soft blue jeans against shiny leather) or capture moments that might otherwise pass unnoticed. The program features several other short films, including The Fall of Communism as Seen in Gay Pornography, an early project that offers a trenchant analysis of power and politics, focusing on the East European porn industry. Jones reveals the power discrepancies between consumer and consumed in pornography, noting that "symbols of the old and new coexist in the fantasy world of gay porn." He continues, "Anachronisms may go unnoticed by consumers who fast-forward through the boring parts. But patience has its rewards." It certainly does. These powerful films move well beyond the cheerful simplicity of many mash-ups, opting instead for smart, compelling analysis.