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Odds & Ends VI – “It’s time we made a start…”

The Discovery Award – a chance to view and vote

The LOOP video art festival and art fair have established the Discovery Award “to support and recognize the recent production of videos and films by international artists through a free open call”. The exhibition featuring the finalist projects will be included in the program of LOOP. There’s an online video channel screening the films selected for the second stage of the competition that enables the audience to vote until 18 May for the ten works to be included in the exhibition. The online channel can be viewed here.

Adrian Melis’ Surplus Production Line (2014)

“Linea de producción por excedente exploring the shifting politics of labour within the framework of neo-liberalism, in which employees and job-seekers are forced into harsh competition with each other and alienating them from their personal feelings. Melis started a private company in Amsterdam…[read more here].”

Courtesy of Adrian’s vimeo site here (thanks to the Discovery Award for drawing the film to our attention).

http://adrianmelisobras.blogspot.co.uk/

Harun Farocki ‘On The Documentary’

“We documentarians often make Direct Cinema films. We look for events that occur as if they had been staged for a film. At the same time, we have to prove that we have found something and recorded it without writing or staging it. We might montage a sentence without the first words, or film a door half open—preferably not due to constraint, but to calculation.” Harun Farocki, read more here.

Thanks to e-flux and Trafic.

JJ Charlesworth on Why Art World Hypocrisy Stars at the 56th Venice Biennale

A polemic worth reading and discussing.

“What the Biennale doesn’t want to investigate is the mystery of its own creation. Why should it? Who really needs this vast moot for an increasingly homogenous and international style of slightly-political, issues-based art? Not the visiting public, for sure–we’ll look at anything, but we’re not the ones making it happen. No, who really needs it is the new global class of cultural entrepreneurs for which art has become a truly international opportunity, as the emerging economic regions seek to assert themselves on the world stage through the vehicle of the new global art culture. But however political these curators and artists think themselves, the art itself changes absolutely nothing. The Chinese still need oil, the European Union still shuts the door on immigrants, Libyans still drown in ships sinking in sight of the coast of Italy–little more than subject matter for yet more self-regarding political art.” J J Charlesworth, read more here.

Thanks to ArtNet.

A Few Post-UK Elections reflections from Marx

“Where it has come to power the bourgeoisie has obliterated all relations that were feudal, patriarchal, idyllic. It has pitilessly severed the motley bonds of feudalism that joined men to their natural superiors, and has left intact no other bond between one man and another than naked self-interest, unfeeling ‘hard cash’. It has drowned the ecstasies of religious fervour, of zealous chivalry, of philistine sentiment in the icy waters of egoistic calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of countless attested and hard-won freedoms it has established a single freedom – conscienceless free trade. In a word, for exploitation cloaked by religious and political illusions, it has substituted unashamed, direct, brutal exploitation.” Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party.

“Philosophers have only interpreted the world in different ways, the point is to change it.” Marx, Early Political Writings.

And from Simon Critchley – “It is time we made a start”

“No revolution is going to be generated out of systemic or structural laws. We are on our own and what we do we have to do for ourselves. Politics requires subjective invention, imagination and endurance, not to mention tenacity and cunning. No ontology or eschatological philosophy of history is going to it for us. Working at an interstitial distance from the state a distance that I have tried to describe as democratic, we need to construct political subjectivities that are not arbitrary or relativistic, but which are articulations of an ethical demand whose scope is universal and whose evidence is faced in a concrete situtation. This is dirty, detailed, local, practical and largely unthrilling work. It is time we made a start.” Simon Critchley, Infinitely Demanding – Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance, p.132.

Karen Mirza, Brad Butler’s Everything for Everyone and Nothing for Us (2014)

“Everything for Everyone and Nothing for Us is set in a TV studio, where a protester-in-training listens to audio extracts from a political speech by Margaret Thatcher. Having absorbed the sounds, the protester uses movement to exorcise Thatcher’s voice, retraining the body to resist capitalism.” Brad Butler.

Courtesy of Karen and Brad’s vimeo site here (thanks to the Discovery Award for drawing the film to our attention).

http://www.mirza-butler.net/

A Short Interview with Jean-Paul Kelly

Following our recent screening of Jean-Paul’s film A Minimal Difference (more about the screening can be found in the Past Screenings section here), we asked Jean-Paul a few questions linked to the work:

You often use found photographic and cinematic material in your work, A Minimal Difference features press images of the barricades from political protests in Bangkok, bodies piled-up after the 2010 Haitian earthquake, furniture from an eviction in Cleveland, and destruction in Gaza. What prompted you to use these particular images and do you see links between them?

My selection of sources, whether found or self-made or self-recorded, is rather intuitive, usually based on subjective sense. Unlike a journalist or an academic, I am not directed by a prescribed code of ethics or peer-review, per se, but can, and must, as an artist, adhere to what is ‘felt’ in forming the logic of the work I make. I think of this ‘sense’ as emerging from and pointing to the ongoing, agitated space between the source photograph (in this case) as a material, inclusive of its symbolic and geopolitical content, that is, as Kantian noumenon, and my experience of it as phenomenon. In my work I am usually ‘working-through’ an understanding of what this is: I am trying to analyse what drives my compulsion to certain photographs or videos or films and part of this investigation comes through making connections between them – content-based, formal, or more idiosyncratic connections – and abstracting those particularities so that I can make sense. It is both a mental and very physical exercise.

The specific photographs used as a source for the gouache and ink cells in A Minimal Difference, when studied, all employ a similar geometric composition; using a more or less central horizon-line and vanishing point that usurps the content of the picture – the people and objects depicted –t o become the subject itself, as such. I am compelled by the use of these visual strategies in the collaboration between photographer and photo-editor and how it lays-bare their processes of construction, selection, delimitation, and dispersion. Through these special compartmentalisations, made visible by the designs of the photographer and their editorial counterpart, the photograph presents as material and an experience of that material – rather than merely an experience of its content. My translation of these editorial choices into another artistic form with graphic lines and colours subjected to optical layering, motion, and durational augmentation exacerbates the artifice of the photograph: the treatment of these receding vistas –o f stone and tire barriers, corpses, furniture, and rubble – attest to the difficult relationship we have with ethics and aesthetics and its tactical, political articulation of the sublime toward catharsis and possible action. In these seemingly endless piles a monumental vastness replaces any sense of singularity – no one log amongst logs, no lone body in the mass grave – but only by surrendering to a constrained position of individual vision. My use of the multi-plane camera and its illusions to the errors of vision is directed by this dialectic.

A Minimal Difference also features more metaphoric pictures, amongst others, a logjam, clouds, and smoke. What prompted you to use these particular images, do you see links between them and with the images taken from the press?

As a counterpoint to the cells that reference photojournalism in conflict zones, these non-indexically sourced sections suggest more amorphous restrictions of vision and movement: like being in a jam or a haze. In this more personal, existential sense they are representative of the continuousness of the dialectic between the material and its experience–like the possible events occurring in the time that passes between wood being cut and burnt into nothingness.

Your use of abstract monotone images – squares, cones, spheres, etc. – often leads to (separate) discussions of Modernism and indexicality. Whilst these discussions are productive (and part of the richness of your work), it seems that you’re also, perhaps primarily, engaged in something akin to detournement, to Brechtian alienation to call us to question modes of representation and the role of the image. Is this correct?

Yes, the abstraction that occurs is two-fold: of course, the artifice of the figurative and representational tableaux is highlighted by the intersecting regular shapes and their colours, but an equal and opposite perspectival shift occurs to the square, circle, rectangle, and triangle, an experiential shift, akin to the parallax errors of the multi-plane camera, where the ethical implications of the original source material – and the sense that brought me to them – infects the shapes. In part, I am seeking to understand how non-objective elements like colour, shape, duration, and sound can hold the ethics, desires, and sense that resonate within real-world document – photojournalism, documentaries, on-line image streams, etc.

Do you hope that viewers will reassess, see afresh the events underlying the source materials?

Viewers will make their own sense from watching the work. To envision a possible reassessment of the source material would not dignify the exciting potentials of artifice and misreading (mine and yours), repeating the error of documentary photojournalism strategies, and those of photo-conceptualism and a great deal of research-based film and video, that often conceal – or worse, expose only to righteously disparage – aesthetic-narrative tactics. I only hope that the experience of seeing A Minimal Difference is a meaningful one.

http://www.jeanpaulkelly.com/

Blessed Blessed Oblivion

Inspired by Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising (1964), Jumana Manna’s BLESSED BLESSED OBLIVION (HD video, 21:00 min, 2010) is set in the car-body and barbers shops, body building gyms and car-washes of East Jerusalem, the artist’s home-town. The film weaves together a sensual portrait of male thug culture that reveals the pious rituals and male codes of honour, which mask narcissism and a disdain for and casual violence towards women, and, thus, suggests alternative zones of conflict within the Palestinian struggle.

http://www.jumanamanna.com/

“What makes her work not only captivating but brave is that she deliberately complicates the accepted—or expected—histories of places and people, revealing the contradictions they suppress.” Kaelen Wilson-Goldie in Artforum March 2014 (full article here courtesy of CRG Gallery, New York and Artforum).

Expanding The Archive: Jumma Manna in conversation with Sheyma Buali

“In A Sketch of Manners, as for my older works Blessed Blessed Oblivion and The Umpire Whispers, which are also filmed in Jerusalem, I wanted to bring attention to the multi-faceted social fabric of Jerusalem, and the particular kind of dark humour in the city. There is a certain mendacity in Jerusalem, as well as a certain quality of neglect, that is in contrast to the imaginary of the city as a holy, serene, ancient promised land. Religious travellers who have come here for centuries write travel logs about their experience of arriving in Jerusalem, and their subsequent disappointment at the normalcy of the ‘holy city’. Their fantastical projections are deflated when they arrive and see the poverty, the cynical businessmen selling identical souvenirs, and just the banality of daily life. I like to think that the projections of the various imaginaries of Jerusalem insert a subliminal spiritual layer in the city that you have to make an effort to tune into. It is precisely that foggy area between the melancholic mendacity and the religious fantasy of Jerusalem that I would like to capture. The frivolous characters I choose to focus on bring a perverted image of the holy city through their obsessions with artificiality, games and lies.” Jumana Manna (read the entire conversation here).

Courtesy Ibraaz, Sheyma Buali and the artist.

The Apparatus of the Game – Kate Sutton on Jamma Manna

Read here.

Courtesy Bidoun, Kate Sutton and the artist.

A fragment of The Umpire Whispers

Watch on vimeo here.