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Odds & Ends I

“If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all.” John Cage.

In no particular order, a few things that have caught my eye of this week:

Stan Douglas at The Fruitmarket Gallery Edinburgh, 7 November – 15 February.

Featuring his film installation Der Sandmann, the just-completed The Second Hotel Vancouver, the video installation Vidéo, a reimagining of both Orson Welles’s film The Trial (itself based on Kafka’s novel of the same name) and Beckett’s film Film; photographs from Midcentury Studio, a recent series of photographs taken by Douglas posing as a fictional North American post-war press photographer; Corrupt Files, a sequence of large, beautiful, abstract images; and Hogan’s Alley a companion piece to The Second Hotel Vancouver.

More information about the Fruitmarket screenings here and the One Minute project here.

e-flux journal issue 59: Harun Farocki

NOW cinema, Greenwich, London, screening 28 November, Capital:Framing including Patrick Keiller Norwood, John Rogers The London Perambulator and Emily Richardson Memo Mori, curated by Gareth Evans.

More information here.

“The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.” Douglas Huebler, 1969.

Tramway Artists’ Moving Image Festival 2014, 15 – 16 November, including Hito Steyerl (see e-flux issue 59 – above – for Hito writing about Harun Farocki), Ryan Trecartin (see also Zabludowicz Collection, London), Hannah Perry,…

More information here.

“On a wall, using a hard pencil, parallel lines about 1/8″ apart and 12″ long are drawn for one minute. Under this row of lines, another row of lines are drawn for ten minutes. Under this row of lines another row of lines are drawn for one hour.” Sol LeWitt instruction for a work, 1969 (taken from Lucy Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialisation of the Art Object, 1973, Praeger, pp. 112-113 by Kenneth Goldsmith, Uncreative Writing, 2011, Columbia University Press p.131).

The Single Road blog curated by Alistair Rider & Thomas A Clark: ‘True art like true life takes a single road’ – Piet Mondrian. Alistair wrote an enlightening essay on Manfred Mohr for his exhibition one and zero at Carroll / Fletcher in 2012: scripted variations.

John Smith in Paris to 13 December – Gargantuan, OM, The Girl Chewing Gum, The Black Tower, Lot Sound, unusual Red cardigan, The Kiss, White Hole.

More information here.

One Minute Volume 8 at Furtherfield, London to 23 November. A new series of shorts curated by filmmaker Kerry Baldry. The screening is accompanied by One Minute Remix pt. 2, a selection of moving images from One Minute Volumes 1-7. The One Minutes contain an eclectic mix of approaches, techniques, media and processes, all having one thing in common – that they have been edited within the time limit of 60 seconds.

More information here.

Videobrasil open call for artworks and artprojects, submission deadline 16 November.  The selected artworks will compete for a cash prize of 75,000 BRL and nine residencies.

More information here.

 

Jem Cohen – Gravity Hill Newsreels

Following on from the two screenings of Jem’s work at The Horse Hospital, here’s a link to Jem’s vimeo site for the Gravity Hill Newsreels – twelve short observations about Occupy Wall Street (2011/2012, HD, Series One first 5 shorts, total time 24 min, Series Two 7 more shorts. total time 40 min.).

“The films are modest, small observations rather than broad declarations. There’s nothing definitive about them and they’re sometimes bumpy, searching experiments, like the movement itself. Some were shot in a day, cut the next, and just put out there. I didn’t want them to be precious … My concentration has been on making simple documents of a movement unfolding in daylight, rain, darkness, and in a moment of vital expansion––the Times Square mobilization of October 15. Of course, it’s never actually simple, especially with a movement changing so rapidly––there are things going on that are so inspiring and others that are really a drag. Do you document them both? And how do you do it without betraying either ideals or actualities? I am, after all, making these films in solidarity, as a participant, but I have real qualms about the suppression of ambiguity that almost invariably marks agitprop.” Jem Cohen, Art Forum, 2011.  The full text can be found here.

And here’s a couple of interviews in which Jem discusses the work: Walker Art Center, 2012 and The White Review, 2014.

 

 

William Raban 72-82

Looking forward to the pv of William Raban’s new film 72-82 at the Hackney Picturehouse on Friday.  Fortunately, it’s also screened on 13 Oct. as part of the BFI London Film Festival – details here.

If you can get hold of the winter 2012 issue of no.where’s magazine Sequence, there’s an interesting article by Raban – Politics and Experimental Film – A Personal View.  Here’s a few quotes as a taster:

“Four principles of political filmmaking:

(1) reflexivity: active audience participation rather than passive spectatorship;

(2) relexivity: revealing the modes of production rather than concealing them;

(3) relexivity: as understood in the social sciences – the effect that the researcher [film-maker] has on their subjects [content and audience];

(4) an ethical dimension of aesthetics – appearance determined by material conditions of production, it is not the pursuit of style.” Willam Raban.

“Art does not do politics by reaching the real. It does it by inventing fictions that challenge the existing distribution of the real and the fictional.” Jacques Ranciere.

“The problem is not to make political films, but to make films politically.” Jean-Luc Godard.