Category: making movies

Jasper Johns Making Silkscreens, By Katy Martin

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Usuyuki, 1981
Alright, Katy Martin, who made two incredible Jasper Johns films in the late 1970s when you were practically a kid. Uh, actually, yeah, that’s about it. Just watch them.
Harvard’s Sackler Museum just opened a show yesterday, “Jasper Johns/ In Print: The Crosshatch Works and The Logic Of Print,” which features several complex, multi-screen prints Johns made in 1977-80 at Simca Print Artists in New York. Martin’s Super 8mm films documenting the making of are included in the exhibition.
Silkscreens (1978) is a hypnotic performance film showing the printers’ rhythmic routines as they create the 27-screen print, The Dutch Wives (1978).

On her website, Martin mentions folks like Yvonne Rainer, which makes sense, but Silkscreens also makes me think of the 1974 film Humain, Trop Humain, if Louis Malle had shot it in an cramped printing studio instead of a Citroen factory. Great stuff, and with a great, remixed, found/ambient soundtrack by Richard Teitelbaum, which, according to folks who know, like @JohnPyper, would drive actual printers crazy.

The other, longer film, Hanafuda/Jasper Johns (1977-81), combines footage of Johns himself working on two print editions, Usuyuki and Cicada, with audio excerpts of his interview with Martin. Johns kept complicating my notion of silkscreening as a very photomechanical process by repeatedly and extensively painting right onto the screen.
Whether it’s calculated or sincere, Martin’s unassuming questions seem very effective at getting Johns to talk. And after getting so much out of him, my favorite question is the last one, which is only in the published transcript, and which he tries, too late, not to answer:

KM: And then I wanted to talk something about meaning but
JJ: About what?
KM: Meaning. In the work. But I wasn’t sure how far to go with that. But I can’t help thinking about meaning to some degree.
JJ: Well, you mean meaning of images? I don’t like to get involved in that because I–any more than I’ve done–I tend to like to leave that free…. The problem with ideas ís, the idea is often simply a way to focus your interest in making a work. The work isn’t necessarily, I think-a function of the work is not to express the idea…. The idea focuses your attention in a certain way that helps you to do the work.

This Is The Least Gnarly Of Olafur’s Rigs

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image: JJ Films
The thing is, everybody in Iceland has a monster truck. Or a big ol’ van with balloon tires and a four-foot lift kit. The country only got a paved road in like 1979 or whatever.
But easily the coolest part of Jacob Jørgensen and Henrik Lundø’s 2010 documentary, Space is Process has to be the scenes where Olafur and his crew are traversing the Icelandic moonscape in a convoy of SUVs, climbing mountains, fording rivers, backing up the edge of glacier holes, etc. etc., to gather images for the photo grids and such.
I hope there’s an entire bonus disc of this footage on the DVD.
In his voiceover, Eliasson clears up a question I’ve always meant to ask, and confirmed something I’ve come to think about the photo works. First, the question:
Each grid of a particular natural feature is the subject of its own expedition. Which means he’s hunting them down as a batch, or as he put it, “documenting a little story of a phenomenon.” I’d wondered if this is how he did it, or if he shot and shot and shot, and then sorted and sifted, letting the typologies emerge out of the data.
But there are also photo grids that explicitly document a specific place or time, too; that follow along the course of a river, or a walk. Or the passage of a cloud overhead. So typology and biography–autobiography, in a way–are very close together. In System is Process, Eliasson does exclude the idea that his photography is somehow about [sic] getting in touch with his roots or his homeland or whatever.
But his deployment of story and narrative fits with how I’ve come to read the photographic works generally, as markers, documents, of the artist’s encounter with and passage through this particular landscape. Which happens to be where he’s from.
All this insight is then crowded out by the image of a giant, white Land Rover/armored car with–holy crap, is that a glass geodesic dome turret on top? I am sorry, Donald Judd’s Land Rover, but you’re gonna have to park on the street now. Because this spot is reserved.
olafur_dome_rover.jpg
Aha, there it is, tiny, in the extended trailer for the film.

Space is Process screened at the DC Environmental Film Festival [dcenvironmentalfilmfest.org]
Space is Process extended trailer via martin køhler’s vimeo [vimeo]
Previously, suddenly related: Richard Serra Suburban [greg.org]

Less Filling, Looks Great: Doug Aitken’s Song1 On The Hirshhorn

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We came out of the Hirshhorn tonight after the surprise [to me] screening of Space is Process, a 2010 documentary about Olafur Eliasson, only to find they were testing Doug Aitken’s Song1, a 360-degree projection on the barrel of the museum.
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I had been worried about how well buff-colored aggregate would hold up as a projection surface, but I tell you, it looked pretty great. Amazing, even.
And seeing it suddenly makes you wonder–and by you, I mean me–why doesn’t the Hirshhorn project things on the surfaces of the buildings more often? You know what, why not all the time?
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And that leads to the next logical question: what should be projected on the Hirshhorn?
Song1 is a hypnotic, laconic, melancholic sequence of closeups of an LA Basinful of people singing “I Only Have Eyes For You,” intercut with abstract CG motion graphics. Its narrative doesn’t seem anywhere as complex as the multi-screen Sleepwalker, projected on MoMA, but it seems thoughtful, and definitely works as a beautiful proof-of-concept.
But. So.
What else is going on the Hirshhorn Channel? The potential [or maybe the temptation] for agitprop and politically charged artworks seems either irresistible or anathema, depending no how involved one is in wooing Congress. The Hirshhorn and the Smithsonian at large are likely not interested in actually biting any hands that feed them.
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And starting Thursday night at 8pm, that strategic non-engagement pact will be on view from the Mall in full, dazzling force.

Star Wars: The Topher Grace Edit

As part of his study of the art of editing, and to do good for all mankind, the actor Topher Grace recut Star Wars episodes 1-3 into an 85-minute prequel which focuses on the transformation of Anakin into Darth Vader. Paul Sciretta attended a secretive screening of the Grace Edit, and prepared a detailed write-up for Slashfilm. Given what Grace had to work with, the remix sounds pretty good. But then there’s this:

Before the film screened a trailer for another film Topher Grace is remixing — Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of a Third Kind. I’m not sure that film needs a remix, or could even benefit from a remix, but am interested to see what the experiment will look like. After that, Grace hopes that other actors, editors and filmmakers will run with the ball, produce and showcase remixed films on a annual basis within this private community.
Jason Reitman has been directing live stage reads of classic film screenplays at LACMA, showing how a filmmaker can make different choices with an interesting cast can completely change a written screenplay. This seems like the next evolution of that, but also an exercise in storytelling with the use of crafty editing. I’m not sure I completely understand Grace’s motives in creating this film, but I enjoyed it regardless.

Close Encounters has already gone through several notable edits, as Spielberg tinkered with it. [The director himself considers the 2001 Collector’s Edition to be the definitive version.]
I’m kind of fascinated with this idea of using commercial films and their inputs as raw material, and especially with seeing people inside the Hollywood bubble, who are likely to be indulged rather than sued, softening up the crowd. I may get around to making my shot-for-shot remake of Gus Van Sant’s Gerry yet.
Topher Grace Edited The ‘Star Wars’ Prequels Into One 85-Minute Movie and We Saw It [slashfilm via umm,

Ladies Love The Mylar


This is fantastic, a 1955 industrial film by E.I. duPont deNemours, Inc. about their miraculous new plastic film, Mylar.
I mean, first off, it’s Mylar, so satelloons and Warhol balloons and everything else about the future.
mylar_dupont_tramp.jpg
But then there’s the film itself. The Mylar trampoline and trapeze–with acrobats. The circus-y knifethrower’s assistant in satin hotpants and beret, doing her ur-Vanna Whitest by turning the painted bullet point signs around.

Continue reading “Ladies Love The Mylar”

Douglas Gordon On Painting

Got posts stacked up like flights at LaGuardia, but I can’t get past these paintings by Douglas Gordon [right?] coming up at Christie’s London sale next week.
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They’re 1-m square monochromes of acrylic housepaint with a text and date that’s a reference to a work by another artist. Gordon did these particular paintings around 1993, the same time he was working on his awesome, breakthrough film installation, 24 Hour Psycho. Which, in retrospect, makes it a tough year for a Douglas painting to get much attention. But yet they kind of nagged at me.
And then as I found one of the only discussions of Gordon’s paintings, in a 1993 interview with Thomas Lawson for Frieze, it sounded slightly familiar. But of course, I’d not noticed it much, if at all, at the time. Here’s part of that discussion, which segues so nicely from the one project to the other:

DG: The idea is that these paintings, the way I imagine them, do have a ‘transcendental’ aspect, although I hate that word. Part of the background here is the whole range of ‘endgame’ painting theories, you know, like the Peter Halley/Sigmar Polke/Gerhard Richter positions, and also the Last Exit stuff that you wrote. These ‘thinking’ painters were important to me, partly because of the whole fuss about ‘Glasgow Painting’ in the 80s.
The paintings that you have seen have come about as a result of the attitudes and strategies that I had developed through working outside of a studio; you become steeped in a research, which isn’t based on physical materials.
I was in a show in New York a while ago, and it turned out that the space was the old Betty Parsons Gallery. So I did some research on the place and started making lists of the paintings that had hung on those walls during the 40s and 50s. I ended up making a series of paintings that related directly to these works by people like Ad Reinhardt and Ellsworth Kelly. But although this series came out of a response to a situation, the thing about painting in general is that it satisfies a desire to make work free of a specific context.
TL: I think I’m hearing you admit that you actually make paintings on spec, just like a studio painter would?
DG: Yes. You’ve found me out. But my premise is to take the field of painting as a context in itself – you know, you say the word ‘painting’ and hundreds of expectations or prejudices come to mind. It’s obvious that my interest in painting is not so much in the practical, physical side, as in the idea of it.
I’m interested in the fine line between my intentions and the perceptions of others; that moment when someone encounters something and realises that there is more to it than meets the eye. I’m interested in the moment when someone opens the letter, recognises that it is for them, and starts to wonder why they got it, and what it really means. The same can happen with these paintings: someone sees the piece that uses the title of a Baldessari book and thinks, well, yes Brutus did kill Caesar. But in 1976? And isn’t this the title of another artwork, by someone else, somewhere else, and so on? I would say that all of the work plays with recognition and expectation in this way.
TL: Is there a particular pay-off with the paintings if you crack the code, or is it enough to know generally that these texts refer to works by other artists not on show here? Is it enough to know that there is a clue, without needing to know what the clue is?
DG: I don’t think there’s a particular pay-off. People who don’t recognize the text as a title to a specific piece of art can still have a certain intrigue to play with. If you didn’t know that Slow Motion 1969 refers to a piece by Robert Morris, I think you can still find something that will resonate. Maybe people who aren’t trapped in an art history background can find more.
TL: Do you fetishise your material? Are they well made stretchers, well prepared linen grounds, and all that?
DG: I don’t make a big deal of production values. The paintings simply have to be clean and pragmatic so that there is nothing about them to distract from the ideas they contain. I use available materials and choose colour from a standard household paint chart. I just want the paintings to appear as neutral grounds, no drips, no spots.
TL: I don’t know. By the time you get done they’ll be agitated with blobs and cross hatches, and you’ll be talking up a storm about expressivity.
DG: Probably. Working with shaped canvases, and everything. The paintings are an important project for me, alongside the other things. I’m interested in the ‘big’ media. All those traditions with too much baggage. For instance, I’ve been interested in film for a long time. I always wanted to make an epic as my first film – a real movie, not Super 8 or anything. I thought it might be interesting to take an existing film and re-make it. I wanted a picture with a story which was very familiar to a broad audience; so I started to work with Psycho. What I decided to do was alter the narrative of the original by making it 24 hours long, and without sound.

Sounds crazy, but it just might work!
Hello, It’s Me! [frieze]
Feb 16, 2012, Lot 241: Douglas Gordon, five paintings, est. £50,000 – £70,000 [christies]

Robot Readable World, Or Human Is A Symptom Of Robot


I think part of my fascination with Google is the way it is reprocessing the way we see the world. It has its own way of looking, and that, it turns out, is what we see.
Timo Arnall‘s Robot Readable World goes wide and deep, documenting the “robot eye aesthetic” through an awesome collection of “found machine-vision footage.”
Robot Readable World, (5’09”) by Timo Arnall [vimeo via city of sound]

Has Erik Satie Been Performed On US Network Television Since 1963?


This 1963 episode of I’ve Got A Secret pops up periodically. From this week on Boing Boing to Alex Ross’s 2007 blog post searching for Karl Schenzer.
And it is, indeed, pretty interesting. John Cale was recently arrived in New York City–Ross notes that he got a ride down from Tanglewood in Iannis Xenakis’s car–and still a couple of years away and a stint under LaMonte Young’s sway from forming the Velvet Underground. John Cage enlisted him and some other sympathetic pianists to perform Vexations, an epic 1949 composition by Erik Satie, for the first time. That was Cale’s secret. Schenzer’s was that he alone stayed for the entire 18-hour performance.
Of course, Cage himself had appeared on I’ve Got A Secret in 1960, giving a raucous rendition of his composition, Water Walk, while dressed, typically, like a Methodist minister.

Three years later, Cale and Schenzer also exude a buttoned-up, Cageian seriousness, but what caught my attention was Schenzer’s namecheck of the concert’s sponsor, the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts, which Cage and Jasper Johns had just launched.
By 1963, I guess these folks were becoming better known, and certain of them, particularly Johns and Rauschenberg, were selling a fair amount of artwork. Yet as soon as they had two nickels to rub together, these artists were using the money to support and propagate the work of their fellow artists.
And it really amazes me to think that the cultural factions of the time were still so close together that this avant garde crew could turn up on a network TV game show. John Cage may have turned up at some point in the intervening 30 years, but it’s very easy for me to imagine that the first mention of Erik Satie on CBS was also his last.

On Close Encounters, Scriabin, Schoenberg, Bernstein

OK, here are some more details about how the crazy-awesome synthesizer/lightboard came together in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, courtesy of Ray Morton’s 2007 book on the making of the film.
close_enc_moog_jam_1.jpg
Maybe not surprisingly, it grew and evolved along with the crucial scene, known as the Box Canyon scene. Originally, Spielberg’s idea was to use run&gun documentary style film of humans meeting aliens on a very hastily constructed tent base. [the idea of the Mothership landing in a McDonald’s parking lot was nixed early on]. This grew to a runway, which became a stadium, which became a Box Canyon on the backside of Devil’s Tower.
Except that there was no way they could shoot all that at night outdoors, so they ended up moving the entire production to Mobile, Alabama, where they created the world’s largest soundstage out of a pair of WWII-era dirigible hangars, nearly bankrupting everyone in the process.
And though I mentioned Douglas Trumbull as a possible creator, Morton’s book credits Spielberg and art director Joe Alves [who, as production designer on Jaws, had also created Bruce the shark]

Inspired by Russian composer Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin (1872-1915), who had theorized that specific musical notes prompted listeners to think of specific colors, Spielberg came up with the idea of connecting the Moog synthesizer to an array of colored lights so that each time a note was played on the Moog, a corresponding color would flash in the array. Alves suggested that the colors appear on a huge video screen but Spielberg wanted something resembling an athletic field scoreboard. Developing this idea, Alves decided to segment the board into several rows of colored rectangular panels. He then needed to find a logical way to relate the colors on the lightboard with the musical notes being played on the synthesizer. He wasn’t quite sure how to do this until he saw a television program that featured Leonard Bernstein talking about composer Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951).
Schoenberg had devised a method of musical composition that utilized all twelve tones in the chromatic scale. Realizing that there were also twelve colors in a secondary progression on the color wheel, Alves decided to link the tones and the colors (beginning with middle C and yellow), which gave him a row of twelve rectangles running across the board. He then added three more rows on top, consisting of lighter tones and higher octaves, and two more rows on the bottom, consisting of darker tones and lower octaves, for a total of seventy-two rectangles A full-scale version of this color board would be created when the actual set was built.

First off, how hilarious that Alves got the idea of a Schoenbergian twelve-tone scale from Bernstein; Bernstein hated that shit. I’m going to guess that Alves is referring to Bernstein’s notorious Norton Lectures at Harvard in 1973, in which he argued for tonal music as a universal language against Schoenberg’s chromatic system. The lectures titled, The Unanswered Question were aired on PBS.
Previously: Close Encounters Jam Session

Considering The Eameses As Artists

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A few months ago, I was asked to write something about Ray and Charles Eames by the folks at Humanities Magazine, published by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
The NEH had provided some funding to Jason Cohn and Bill Jersey’s documentary, Charles & Ray Eames: The Architect and the Painter, so a straight-up review wouldn’t really work. But I was encouraged by the documentary’s title, and its exploration of Ray’s role in the duo’s collaborative process, and so I decided to float the idea that there’s a lot to learn by considering the Eameses as artists:

Throughout their own careers, whether making architecture, furniture, toys, annual reports, or films, the Eameses presented themselves as designers. And despite their forays into education, computing, and international diplomacy, that’s how they are typically seen. But calling the Eameses designers while trying to account for their polymathic legacy can be problematic, particularly if we’re picturing the designer as a lone, heroic genius: Charles Eames as the Howard Roark of American consumer capitalism. It invites many esoteric and academic questions about process, context, gender, and collaboration, which are interesting but hard to resolve. When considered from an artistic perspective, however, many of these complications evaporate. Accepting Ray and Charles Eames as artists and their studio work as art gets us away from the arbitrage over who did what and how. Plus, it enriches and deepens the contemporary understanding of their role in the culture of their time.

That’s John Neuhart up there, by the way; he built the Eameses’ greatest object besides their house, and one of the greatest unsung, unrecognized artworks of the modernist era, the Solar Do-Nothing Machine.
Modern Love, Humanities Magazine, Nov/Dec. 2011 [neh.gov]

The EAI High Definition Video Guide

Whether you’re sitting at home, poking at your remote to stretch, squash, and crop your Criterion movies; or preparing a video group show in Miami, Electronic Arts Intermix’s High Definition Video Guide is an indispensable source of basic technical information:

If we agree that mindfulness about the proper display of electronic art is necessary to maintain the integrity of the work, then a basic awareness of how this new medium works is crucial. In what ways is HD different from other forms of video? How do these factors visibly affect the picture? How can older analog works be properly displayed with today’s technology? All in all, how will HD video impact collection, exhibition and preservation?
This addendum to EAI’s Online Resource Guide explains HD technology and its implications for curators, conservators, registrars, art historians and educators. The goal is not to mandate best practices, but to offer the foundation of a consistent vocabulary. Even more, the aim is to initiate dialogue across the field about the challenges and possibilities in this new chapter in the history of the moving image.

Thanks to Ed Halter of Light Industry, who included EIA’s HD Guide in his Best of 2011 list in Artforum.

On Bruce McAllister’s DOCUMERICA And Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty

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One of the startling images Alan Taylor included from the EPA’s DOCUMERICA collection is by Bruce McAllister. The caption:

A train on the Southern Pacific Railroad passes a five-acre pond, which was used as a dump site by area commercial firms, near Ogden, Utah, in April of 1974. The acid water, oil, acid clay sludge, dead animals, junked cars and other dump debris were cleaned up by several governmental groups under the supervision of the EPA. Some 1,200,000 gallons of liquid were pumped from the site, neutralized and taken to a disposal site.

Hmm, is that the only photo McAllister took of railroads and toxic industrial dumps near Ogden in the early 1970s?
No.
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“THE UNION PACIFIC RAILROAD’S CAUSEWAY ACROSS THE GREAT SALT LAKE THREATENS THE ECOLOGICAL BALANCE OF THE LAKE, 07/1972”
McAllister’s acid pond is “near Ogden,” but it turns out it was even nearer the Great Salt Lake. The site was called Little Mountain Salvage.

Continue reading “On Bruce McAllister’s DOCUMERICA And Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty”