A Film Is Not A Building

Los Angeles Filmforum presents

Film and book viewing: July 17–July 25, 2021
Conversation: July 25, 10am PDT / 19:00 CEST
With: Susanne Bürner, Susan Morgan, Verena von Beckerath
Curated by: Kate Brown

Program:

This program features three film about four buildings, each one a modernist house.

Dodge House, 1916
Written and produced by Esther McCoy
Directed by Robert Snyder
Cinematography by Baylis Glascock
Still photography by Mavin Rand
1965 / 16mm transferred to digital / 17 minutes

The film documents the Walter Luther Dodge house in West Hollywood, Los Angeles, California, and the life of its architect, Irving John Gill. The house was built in 1916 and destroyed in 1970.

From Susan Morgan:

As a writer researching a writer I revere, working with the Esther McCoy papers is an incomparable experience: the more I learn, the better it gets. Best-known for her landmark book Five California Architects (1960), McCoy identified the distinctly West Coast roots of American modernist architecture. Among that book’s featured five was Irving J. Gill (1870–1936), a master of machine age efficiency, essential forms, and refined aesthetics. Although Gill’s designs boldly anticipated mid-century modernism, his reputation was sadly eclipsed within his own lifetime.

When McCoy started researching Gill’s architecture during the early 1950s, she sought out his unheralded buildings, interviewed his surviving colleagues and supporters, published articles about his work, and curated a retrospective of his work (Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1958). Following the Irving Gill trail through the McCoy papers is a riveting and often heart-breaking saga. Throughout the 1960s, McCoy spearheaded a campaign to save Gill’s Walter L. Dodge House (1916)—the first truly modernist residence in the West, a stunning 6,500 square foot house on nearly three landscaped acres in the heart of West Hollywood. In 1939, the house and grounds were acquired by the city of Los Angeles through eminent domain and a municipal order set to build a school on the site. The school plan, however, was soon abandoned and the property shuffled between city and county agencies. For years, the house remained intact and was used as classrooms by a technical college: institutional-scale baking was taught in the kitchen and apprentice car mechanics practiced their trade on the grounds.

By 1963, the Los Angeles Board of Education declared the Dodge House “surplus” and the County Board of Supervisors re-zoned the area from R-1 to R-4, from single-family homes to apartment buildings. While the street underwent a radical condominium-ization, the Dodge House was slated for the wrecking ball. Unannounced, on a February morning in 1970, the entire property was demolished. A neighbor who witnessed the destruction reported: “I went out in the morning and when I came back two hours later the wrecking crew was there. They beat it and beat it and it wouldn’t go down. It was like an animal being beaten. They kept beating and beating and it finally cracked up. The trees didn’t want to go either but they beat them until by late afternoon everything was gone.” Gill believed that a “house should be simple, plain, and substantial as a boulder.” The Dodge House, with its serenely unadorned surfaces and eight inch thick reinforced concrete walls, was the fulfillment of that vision. Then, in a single day, it was gone forever.

Among McCoy’s papers, I came across a print of the 1965 film she’d written and produced as part of her campaign to save the Dodge House. Directed by Robert Snyder (1916–2004), an Academy Award–winning documentarian and son-in-law of Buckminster Fuller, this film—like the house itself—was almost lost. The Snyder collection at the Motion Picture Academy holds just one print, a silent, reversal master that can’t be screened. Baylis Glascock, the young filmmaker who served as the project’s camera man/editor/general factotum, didn’t own a copy and had reached various dead ends while searching for one. McCoy’s personal copy, a 16 mm reel inside a splitting cardboard box held together by a desiccated rubber band, had been in archival storage for more than twenty years; and I had no way of knowing what shape that print was in, when it was last projected, or whether it had been damaged over time by ordinary household indignities—spilled coffee, dust bunnies, or ashes from stray cigarettes. When I expressed my concerns to Megan McShea, the Archives of American Art’s audiovisual archivist, she took McCoy’s Dodge House film under her remarkably sympathetic and tech-savvy wing.

With a grant from the Women in Film Preservation Fund, Megan ingeniously facilitated the restoration of this important film. In the autumn of 2011, I presented the new, beautifully restored print twice: at the R.M Schindler House (1922) on Kings Road in West Hollywood, a block away from where the Dodge House once stood, and at the Museum of Modern Art in New York during their annual film preservation program. Each time, the audience reaction was tremendously moving: people were astonished by Gill’s design, McCoy’s awareness and dedication, and Glascock’s tender view of a now vanished place. In the Dodge House, Gill had tinted the plaster walls to capture changing shadows and daylight. His windows and porches framed garden views, mosaic-tiled fountains, and distant mountain vistas. The house’s cabinetry conveyed a Shaker simplicity; the Honduran mahogany glowed as warm as amber. As architectural historian Robert Winter, a dear friend and colleague of McCoy’s lamented recently, recalling the demolition: “If only they had warned us. I remember Esther called and said, ‘if we’d known, we could have at least taken out the banisters and saved them.

In McCoy’s script for the Dodge House film, the final lines are strong and poignant: “We prize the distant past,” she observed. “But if the immediate past is ripped away there will be no distant past for the future. Our heritage is diminished. And there is a hole in the fabric of history.” Hearing those words, I’m reminded once again of my gratitude to the Archives of American Art and how I much I treasure McCoy’s life and work.­ (SM)

A House of One’s Own—Me and My Neighbours
by Susanne Bürner
2013 / digital / 28 minutes
Los Angeles premiere!

The video is a psychograph of a modernist family house built in Saska Kepa, Warsaw, in 1929, which was once the private residence of one of its two architects, Bohdan Lachert. Josef Szanajca, Lachert’s fellow architect, died at a young age at the beginning of World War II. Both were important figures in modernist Warsaw, contributing to, among other publications, the influential “Praesens” magazine.

The video presents the systemic constellation sessions that took place to “discover” the house, with the participants taking on the roles of the house, the objects connected to it, and the other buildings in the neighborhood. The dynamics between these elements reveal unfamiliar perspectives on the building and raise fundamental questions with regard to its conception and architectural context. The building “speaks” as it becomes animated through the systematic constellation sessions. (SB)

Two Houses
Director: Verena von Beckerath
Assistant directors: Niklas Fanelsa, Momoko Yasaka,
& Maximilian von Zepelin
Camera, Sound, Editing: Jens Franke
Produced by: Bauhaus-Universität Weimar
2019 / digital / 38 minutes
US premiere!

The Two Houses research project at the Chair of Design and Housing at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar focuses on the interaction between the Bauhaus and Japan, based on two houses in the suburbs of Tokyo – Migishi Atelier and Bunzo Yamaguchi House. Both houses were designed in the 1930s and 40s by Japanese architect Iwao Yamawaki (1898–1987), a student at the Bauhaus in Dessau, and Bunzo Yamaguchi (1902–1978), who worked in Walter Gropius’ practice at that time, and are still privately owned today.

The Bunzo Yamaguchi House appears autonomous and timeless with its windowless facade made of light brick, only interrupted by another entrance to the upper floor, a garage door, an anterior area, which is truncated on one side, meeting a flush, shallow roof slope. The wood-clad side view looks like a rural farmhouse and reveals the traditional Japanese Minka joinery. The Janus-faced architecture combines European and Japanese influences that extend to original and contemporary uses in the garden and the outbuildings as well as to the interior of the building, where extensions and fixtures were added in the 1970s. The owners live on the upper floor of Bunzo Yamaguchi House, while the ground floor and the garden are sometimes used for photo shoots and salon concerts.

The Migishi Atelier features a light and sculptural steel spiral staircase immediately behind a large, ceiling-high, south-facing studio window; it leads to a Tatami room on the gallery level. The influence of the Bauhaus in Dessau is unmistakable. The studio is partly furnished and contains some personal objects, but it is unoccupied. Some walls show signs of settlement; the paint is peeling off others. The Migishi Atelier was converted after Kotaro Migishi died at an early age and his wife, the painter Setsuko Migishi, needed more rooms for herself and her family. Long abandoned, since the family had moved to an apartment house it had built at the back of the property after returning from an extended stay in Europe, it is now open to the public, used for temporary exhibitions and let as a photo studio. The film Two Houses documents the buildings’ architecture and tells the story of their inhabitants, providing glimpses of life in and with the buildings. It is accompanied by the publication Two Houses – Texts which includes interviews with Helena Capková, Terunobu Fujimori, Taishi Watanabe and Yoshiharu Tsukamoto as well as texts and images from the film and drawings of the houses in different stages.

Present to discuss the work: Susan Morgan, writer and editor of Piecing Together Los Angeles: An Esther McCoy Reader (Los Angeles: East of Borneo, 2012) will talk about the Dodge House film, which McCoy made in her effort to save the building. Morgan, in turn, saved the film. Artist Susanne Bürner will discuss the architects, Bohdan Lachert and Josef Szanajca, their building, and her film, “A House of One’s Own”.  Verena von Beckerath will present the “Two Houses” research project.

Bios:

Susan Morgan has written extensively about art, design, and cultural biography. With artist Thomas Lawson, she co­edited REAL LIFE Magazine, an alternative art publication produced in New York throughout the 1980s. A former contributing editor at Interview, Mirabella, Elle, and Metropolitan Home, Morgan has also been a longtime contributor to the photography journal Aperture. In addition to authoring artist monographs, profiles, and essays, Morgan edited and introduced Piecing Together Los Angeles: An Esther McCoy Reader (East of Borneo Books, 2012) and, with Kimberli Meyer, Director of the MAK Center for Art and Architecture at the Schindler House, co-curated Sympathetic Seeing (2011), the first exhibition about the groundbreaking work of writer and social critic Esther McCoy.  

Esther McCoy (1904–1989) was a gifted literary stylist, acerbic social critic, and one of America’s foremost architectural writers. McCoy recognized the Western roots of American modernism and witnessed the birth of mid-century design. As Reyner Banham, the ebullient Englishman who successfully hybridized architectural history and cultural critique, observed: “Until about 1960, the rest of the world had practically no idea at all about architecture in California, what is was like, how good it was, if it even existed. Then this extraordinary book came out in 1960, and suddenly—California architecture had heroes, history, and character.” That milestone publication – for Banham and a continually widening audience—was McCoy’s classic Five California Architects. “It was clear that she knew her stuff, was a real scholar, though she seemed to belong to no known academic faction or school of thought, and could write,” he declared. “The book was so damned readable it was in a different league than most architectural literature.”

McCoy’s prolific career had started out in the progressive circles of Greenwich Village during the 1920s and went on to flourish in the West for nearly 60 years; her six published books about architecture are regarded as “a Balzacian cycle,” an unfolding epic of the figures, ideas and issues populating a significant American scene. (SM)

Susanne Bürner is based in Berlin working in photography, film and artist books. Over a wide range of subject matter, Bürner explores the psychological dimensions of images, directing the viewer’s attention to questions of presence and absence, as well as to the projection of the viewer herself. Architecture plays a key role in her work as the human attempt of structuring space and society, as a method and attempt of ordering life.

Verena von Beckerath is an architect based in Berlin and a co-founder of the architecture firm Heide & von Beckerath. She pursued studies in sociology, art theory and psychology in Paris and Hamburg and studied architecture at TU Berlin. She was teaching and research assistant at UDK Berlin and visiting professor at TU Braunschweig. She held fellowships at the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart and at the German Academy in Rome Villa Massimo and was visiting professor at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY. Since 2016, she has been a professor of architecture at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar where she holds the Chair of Design and Housing.

Niklas Fanelsa is an architect and founder of the architecture practice Atelier Fanelsa in Berlin and Gerswalde. He studied architecture at RWTH Aachen and Tokyo Institute of Technology. After his studies he worked for De Vylder Vinck Taillieu in Gent and TBBK in Berlin. He was teaching and research assistant at RWTH Aachen University, BTU Cottbus-Senftenberg and at the Chair for Design and Housing at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. In 2019/20, he was emerging curator at the Canadian Center for Architecture in Montreal.

Momoko Yasaka studied scenography, display and fashion design at Musashino Art University Tokyo and architecture at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. During and after her studies she worked for Heide & von Beckerath and Studio Karin Sander in Berlin. She was co-editor and co-curator of Horizonte – Journal for Architectural Discourse and Horizonte – Lecture series and graduate assistant at the Chair for Design and Housing at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. Currently she is working for Weyell Zipse in Basel. 

Maximilian von Zepelin studied architecture at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. During his studies he worked for Jägnefält Milton in Stockholm. He was co-editor and co-curator of Horizonte – Journal for Architectural Discourse and Horizonte – Lecture series. He was graduate assistant at Archiv der Moderne and at the Chair for Design and Housing at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. Currently he is working for Edelaar Mosayebi Inderbitzin in Zurich. 

Jens Franke lives and works as an artist in Berlin. In 2014 he completed his studies at Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg in the classes of Jeanne Faust and Thomas Demand. His films have been screened at Kasseler Dokfest, Deichtorhallen Hamburg, Bundeskunsthalle, the Japan Pavilion at the 16th International Architecture Exhibition in Venice and Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof among others. His work focuses on topics concerning architecture and urban planning. A number of film projects have been realised in collaboration with architects. 

Kate Brown is an artist and filmmaker living in Los Angeles. She received an MFA in film from the California Institute of the Arts and a BA in landscape studies from Harvard. A programmer with Los Angeles Filmforum, she recently hosted Babette Mangolte for two screenings. In 2018, Kate made a film on Marcel Breuer’s last building, the Atlanta Central Library. She is working on a book on the same subject, now.

Suspended Time, on Caring, 2020. 9 minutes, digital, sound. © Maternal Fantasies Artist Collective, 2020. Image courtesy of the artists

Pattern in Contemporary Film

In person: Brian O’Connell, Jodie Mack, Charles Woodman

Curated by Kate Brown

Thursday, March 12, 2020, 70m

MOCA Grand Avenue, 250 Grand Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90012

Introduction:

Tonight’s program takes inspiration from the exhibition With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972-1985. Pattern in Contemporary Film investigates the way pattern, decoration, and typically-domestic subject matter is used as material in contemporary film and video. We’re lucky to have three of the four artists present: Brian O’Connell, Jodie Mack, and Charles Woodman. I say four artists but it’s more like 13 – as the absent party is Maternal Fantasies, a nine-person German artist collective.

I won’t try to list the artists’ many accolades here, but I would like to note the breadth of their activities. Brian O’Connell is a sculptor and multidisciplinary artist. He is cofounder alongside Deirdre O’Dwyer of the experimental press Rakish Light. Charles Woodman is an electronic artist in video and expanded media, who works as much with improvisation as with prepared sound and image. His connection to the exhibition is personal: he is the son of ceramic artist Betty Woodman, and tonight we'll see one of their collaborations. When I was beginning to think about this program, Jodie Mack’s name came up as the standard bearer of pattern and decoration in experimental film. Her body of work is a study in the vernacular of household materials: commercially printed textiles, wallpaper, and other mass-produced objects often derided as non-art material. Mack makes a language out of these things to — as she says — “unleash the kinetic energy of overlooked and wasted objects and question the role of decoration in daily life.”

In their own words, Maternal Fantasies artist collective “experiments with mixed procedures borrowed from feminist practices, activist movements, and the Surrealists avant-garde to produce fantastical situations that lie somewhere between the everyday, the historic, and the transgressive.” The film you will see tonight is part of a kaleidoscopic project which will be publicly presented in May of this year, in Germany.

Pattern in this program has many meanings. It’s a shape that transfers information, from a clay form to a moving image, as in Charles Woodman’s video “Pulse Pastry Generator”. Brian O’Connell uses existing patterns – cycles of the moon and sun, chapter headings in an Italo Calvino book – to lend form and color to his 16mm film “Palomar”. Pattern is surface decoration. And, pattern is precedent: art historical, cultural, or otherwise. The precedents on which activity is patterned are given a close, critical reading by Maternal Fantasies in their work, “Suspended Time, on Caring”. The artists produce tableaux vivants. Based on classical or artwork references, these images are completely reconstituted to render a contemporary, poetic account of motherhood and care “freed from the corset of generalization”. Brightly colored props are scattered across these tableaux. The props speak their own language, they are a form of communication within the image, and they have a lot to do with its liberty and the pleasure of its composition. 

Thanks again to the artists for sharing their work.

[Postponed due to the corona virus]

program designed by Michelle Cho at MOCA

a low-res version is here:

Kevin Jerome Everson

In person: Kevin Jerome Everson

Co-curated by Madison Brookshire and Kate Brown

Thursday, May 2, 2019, 7pm

MOCA Grand Avenue, 250 Grand Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90012

Introduction:

Kevin Jerome Everson has been making films and art in other media since the 1980s. Born and raised in Ohio, Everson is a Professor of Art at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville. He has produced an extraordinary body of work, with nine features and over 150 short form works. This film count should be checked frequently, however, as it is constantly rising. Everson’s output is non-stop.

Among his many accolades, Everson received the 2012 Herb Alpert Award for Film/Video. He has been the subject of mid-career retrospectives, most recently, in March of this year at the Cinéma du Réel/Centre Pompidou. And, before that, at the Harvard Film Archive, the Glasgow Short Film Festival, the Tate Modern, the Modern and Contemporary Art Museum in Seoul, to name just a few. His work has been featured in the 2008, 2012, and 2017 Whitney Biennials; the 2013 Sharjah Biennial, and the 2018 Carnegie International. In 2018, Everson co-curated the Flaherty Seminar.

Using richly formal means, Everson’s work concerns itself with moments, gestures, and days in the life of working class African American people. His renderings are incisive and poetic, sometimes completely abstract.

Everson writes: “material, process, and procedure is all part of the content.” Through this decisively formal approach, Everson expands the frame and the nature of depiction. Summary is not the goal.

Everson’s work invokes the history of art, photography, and motion picture. He revisits old forms like the screen test or audition tape; made famous by Andy Warhol, but a working standard for any film or television show. He repopulates the form of the Lumiere brother’s iconic early film “Workers leaving the factory,” with recordings of other crowds leaving other places. Other films look like Seurat drawings.

“Polly One,” which we will see this evening, documents the 2017 eclipse, a light event like no other. The film is a material document of the fundamental act of photography. It is also a tribute to his grandmother. In this and other work, Everson asks “what is this ritual of photography and what are its results.”

The question of what’s in and what’s out of the frame is foregrounded as Everson returns to subjects, approaching them from different angles, fitting them with different frames. A story may be told twice. The past may be inscribed in the present. There is strategy to this volume. Meaning accrues.

Tonight’s program features work made recently, most in the last three years. But, as is perhaps typical for a screening of Everson’s work, this is just a selection of a larger body of work. Inotherwords, these are films made recently, but these are by no means the only films made recently.

In a recent review of early photographer Anna Atkins, Luc Sante writes: “With the invention of photography came the realization that the whole world was waiting to be photographed.” One gets the feeling, looking at Everson’s work, that he operates under a similar charge, but that, through his body of work, he is making the argument that the task will never be complete. The full picture lies beyond the frame. —KB

Screening:

Rita Larson’s Boy

2012, 10:53, 16mm transferred to digital, b&w, sound

Rita Larson’s Boy portrays ten actors auditioning for the role of Rollo Larson in the 1970s sitcom Sanford and Son. Rita Larson’s Boy is one of three films included in the Tombigbee Chronicles Number Two. The series of films are based on famous people and objects from Columbus, Mississippi, the hometown of Everson’s parents. The actor Nathaniel Taylor (1938-2019), raised in Columbus, portrayed Rollo Larson (Rita Larson’s “boy”) in Sanford and Son. Tombigbee is the river the runs though Columbus.

Oscar at 8903 Empire

2016, 1:50, HD, color, sound,

West Coast Premiere

“8903 Empire” is the address of proud homeowner Oscar Dickerson.

Improvement Association

2016, 11:44, 16mm transferred to digital, color, sound

West Coast Premiere

Improvement Association has Malik Hudgins, an UNIA life-long member of Philadelphia Pennsylvania, waxing poetically about life.

Rams 23 Blue Bears 21

2017, 8:06, 16mm transferred to digital, color, silent

Los Angeles Premiere

Rams 23 Blue Bears 21 is another take on the Lumiere Brothers’ classic 1895 film.

70kg (co-directed by Claudrena N. Harold)

2017, 2:30, 16mm transferred to digital,  b/w, sound

Los Angeles Premiere

70kg is about two University of Virginia grapplers taking instructions.

R-15

2017, 5:10, HD, color, sound

Los Angeles Premiere

R-15 is about the material that keeps southern homes warm in the winter months and the cool in the summer.

Carrs Down South

2017, 3:30, HD, color, sound

Los Angeles Premiere

Carrs Down South presents three generations of the Carr family waxing poetically about living and working in Salisbury North Carolina.

Round Seven

2018, 18:51, 16mm transferred to digital, color, sound

West Coast Premiere

Round Seven centers on the famous 1978 boxing match in Dayton, Ohio between Sugar Ray Leonard and prizefighter Art McKnight of Mansfield, Ohio. One of a series of films focusing on people and phenomenon related to the filmmaker's hometown.

Polly One

2018, 6:12, 16mm transferred to digital, color, silent

California Premiere

Polly One is about ninety-nine percent totality. Filmed in Saluda, North Carolina during the August 2017 solar eclipse. Named for the filmmaker’s grandmother, Bertha Everson, who passed the day before the eclipse.

A Good Fight

2018, 1:57, 16mm transferred to digital, b/w, sound

West Coast Premiere

Featuring the two-minute spar.

Westinghouse Three

2019, 3:00, 16mm transferred to digital, color, silent

World Premiere

Westinghouse Three is about an old consumer product produced at the Westinghouse factory in Mansfield, Ohio in the 1960s.

—Individual film notes by the artist.

Los Angeles Filmforum at MOCA presents

Babette Mangolte: DANCE/ART/FILM

Babette Mangolte in person!

Friday, March 15, 2019, 8:00pm

Echo Park Film Center, 1200 N Alvarado, Los Angeles 90026

Los Angeles Filmforum is the city’s longest-running organization screening experimental and avant-garde film and video art, documentaries, and experimental animation. 2019 is our 44th year!

Babette Mangolte returns for a second night of films that further explore the range of her artistic output. Since the 1970s Mangolte has filmed and photographed dance and performance, in many cases producing documents that have become primary in the recollection and retelling of these works. She has recorded the choreographies of Trisha Brown, Yvonne Rainer, Steve Paxton, Simone Forti, Lucinda Childs, and others. With Chantal Akerman, Mangolte filmed Pina Bausch in One Day Pina Asked… (1984). Mangolte’s work captures the process and performance of dance, the dailiness of practice, and the rigor and poetry of the form.

Tonight, Mangolte presents two films on dance in which art is a central figure. Nancy Graves’s remarkable set appears in Lateral
Pass, a choreography by Trisha Brown. Steve Paxton improvises in response to sculpture in Steve Paxton at Dia:Beacon. Mangolte writes:

In filming dance, I rely on instinct but also on the stills that I shoot beforehand in order to analyze the movement I will film. This process is, in a sense, equivalent to preparing a set of plates as Muybridge did for his series of motion studies. This mental preparation for each new dance piece adds to the possibility of improvising a camera work that will reveal the choreography rather than distort it. It also helps if I have a sense of the past work of the choreographer so I am confident that I already know the founding vocabulary that will come into play. Ballet emphasizes group formation and figures; modern dance is more focused on the dancer’s individual expressive qualities. Entrances and exits play an important role in shaping the dance and have to be part of the filming. So many false moves are possible that, to a large extent, the filmmaker feels restricted by the choreography, specifically in changing camera positions abruptly in the middle of a continuous section. Without knowing the dance to be filmed as well as the dancers, the filmmaker will be unable to anticipate how to reveal the dance in the filming. The first questions that the filmmaker must ask are: how should the film camera be moved to reveal the maximum impact of both choreography and spatial arrangement without obliterating aspects of it through cutting or camera movement? How can both spatial composition and specificities in the dancer’s movement be maximized in the framing? – “Movement, Motion, Velocity and Stillness in Filming Dance” 

“I do not repeat my films and all are very different in their methodology.” The next two films in the program examine artists working in different mediums. Je, Nous, I or Eye, Us revisits ideas and material from Mangolte’s 1977 film The Camera: Je or La Camera: I. In this telegraphic film, the relationship between the photographer, subject, and artwork is reappraised. Edward Krasiński’s Studio is a portrait of the Warsaw studio once shared by constructivist artist Henryk Staźewski (1894-1988) and his younger friend, the sculptor, painter, and installation artist, Edward Krasiński (1925–2004). After Staźewski’s death, over a period of fourteen years, Krasiński turned the space into an artwork that memorializes their history and makes new work of the past, its image, and the space. It is this artwork that Mangolte records.

The Avant-Garde Institute, formed in 2004 by the Foksal Gallery Foundation to preserve Edward Krasiński’s studio, describes it as follows:

In the apartment/studio that Krasiński inherited from Henryk Stażewski, a pioneer of avant-garde art in Poland, has been preserved a unique collection of works arranged by the artist in the years 1988–2002. The installation remains unchanged since Krasiński’s death in 2004. Its main feature is blue Scotch tape, stuck by Krasiński horizontally at the height of 130 centimetres, “everywhere and on everything.” “I don’t know whether this is art,” he commented, “but it’s certainly scotch blue, width 19 mm, length unknown…” 

Stażewski moved in the flat in 1962 with avant-garde painter Mewa Łunkiewicz-Rogoyska and her husband, Jan Rogoyski. Together they created a lively artistic space, one of very few then in Warsaw, a venue for busy social life and artistic meetings. In 1970, Krasiński moved in with Stażewski and the two continued the place’s tradition together. Following Stażewski’s death in 1988, his constructivist paintings were moved from the apartment to museums. Vacated by the great avant-garde artist, the space inspired Krasiński to create new works, which were largely informed by the studio’s space and history. Gradually, the studio assumed its present shape.”

Curated and with program notes by Kate Brown. Individual film notes by Babette Mangolte.

Screening:

Staging Lateral Pass

2013, digital, color, sound, 31 minutes

Choreography by Trisha Brown, Set and Costume by Nancy Graves, Music by Peter Zummo. Dancers: Trisha Brown, Lance Gries, Iréne Hultman, Carolyn Lucas, Diane Madden, Stephen Petronio, Lisa Schmidt, Vicky Shick, Randy Warshaw. Shot at the Walker Art Center, August 14 – September 2, 1985.

Exhibited at Museum Ludwig, Aachen, Germany for the retrospective Nancy Graves Project, 2014

The film chronicles the work of choreographer and dancers on the stage in Minneapolis preceding the premiere of Trisha Brown’s Lateral
Pass in 1985. Involving a complex set and colorful costumes by Nancy Graves, choreography by Trisha Brown, and improvised music by Peter Zummo, the film follows the dynamic between dancers, choreographer and the stage apparatus.

Steve Paxton at Dia:Beacon

2014, digital, color, sound, 8 minutes

Steve Paxton improvises his reactions to works by Robert Irwin, Fred Sandback, Richard Serra, Carl Andre, Dan Flavin and John Chamberlain exhibited at DIA:BEACON.  Music inspired by David Tudor. Music quotation by Max Neuhaus. Sound recording by Julie Martin. Direction of production by Kelly Kivland. Shot September 23 and 24, 2014.

Je, Nous, I or Eye, Us

2014, 16mm transferred to digital, color, sound, 7 minutes

Je, Nous, I or Eye, Us is a mini essay that responds to a question posed in the 1970s while I was making my film The Camera Je, La
Camera: I. The new film uses footage that was shot at the time of The Camera: Je but never used, and adds a series of titles about a photographer’s subjectivity then and now. The film was made for a curatorial project of Jacob Korczynski initiated by “If I can’t dance… I do not want to be part of your revolution” from Amsterdam and shepherded by Tanja Baudoin. Special Thanks for technical help to Lev Kalman.

Edward Krasiński’s Studio

2012, digital, color, sound, 30 minutes 

This 30-minute film evokes a day in the life of Polish artist Edward Krasiński. In the 1960s Krasiński was invited by the Constructivist abstract painter Henryk Stażewski to share his studio in Warsaw. After Stażewski’s death, Krasiński created in situ the minute objects that became both a shrine to his friend and a homage to his own installation work. Shot in Warsaw, Poland in 2011. 

Sources:

Babette Mangolte, “Movement, Motion, Velocity and Stillness in Filming Dance,” in Between Zones: On the Representation of Performance and the Notation of Movement, ed. Raphael Gygax and Heike Munder (Zurich: Migros Museum, 2010).

Babette Mangolte, “Voir Autrement,” La Revue Documentaires, no. 26/27, May 2016, 78-85; reprinted in Babette Mangolte Selected
Writings, 1998-2015, ed. Luca Lo Pinto (Berlin: Kunsthalle Wien and Sternberg Press, 2017).

“Avant-Garde Institute — Edward Krasiński‘s Studio,” (web page), accessed March 2019, http://www.instytutawangardy.org/en/studio.

Los Angeles Filmforum at MOCA presents

Babette Mangolte: The Sky on Location

In person: Babette Mangolte

Thursday, March 14, 2019, 7:00pm

MOCA Grand Avenue, 250 South Grand Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90012

Introduction:

Born in France, Babette Mangolte has lived in New York since 1970. Her extensive body of work includes photography, film, and installation. In 2017, the Sternberg Press and Kunsthalle Wien published Babette Mangolte Selected Writings, 1998-2015: I recommend this lovely book.

In the 1970s and 80s Mangolte documented the experimental theater, dance, and performance scene in New York. In many cases Mangolte’s films and photographs have become primary in the retelling of that work.

 She has recorded the choreographies of Trisha Brown, Yvonne Rainer, Simone Forti, Steve Paxton, Lucinda Childs; the experimental theater of Robert Morris, Richard Foreman; and performances by Joan Jonas, Robert Whitman, the list goes on. Mangolte continues to add to this archive by documenting recent work of choreographers with whom she has worked in the past, and by recording dance, installation, and performance by other artists. She is at work on a new dance film now.

In addition to her own prodigious body of work, Mangolte is lauded for her contribution as cinematographer on films by Chantal Akerman, Yvonne Rainer, Michael Snow, Jean-Pierre Gorin, and others.

In her writing and through her films, photographs, and installations, Mangolte explores what it means to photograph something. She asks what the nature of the relationship is – between photographer and subject, action and document, experience and its image. Using installation, she explores what it means to be a spectator and how we might enlist architectural space to change that meaning.

Mangolte has made eloquent use of photography to record action (whether it is dance, theater, performance, or light on a landscape). She draws a connection between her own work and that of Edweard Muybridge. At the same time, she acknowledges the pitfalls of photography; its capacity to erase action, rather than record it; its ability to mislead and distort.

Tonight’s film, The Sky on Location, shares many of the concerns running through Mangolte’s work, though here the subject is light, color, weather, and the American landscape – as it appears in the film’s frame and as it has been depicted in the past. —KB

Program notes:

Artist Babette Mangolte joins MOCA for a screening of her film The Sky on Location, a meditation on the American landscape. “The idea for the film came while I was traveling in 1975 on buses roaming the West. Spending often a night in the bus I was leaving a sunset in Arizona and waking up by sunrise in Wyoming. I noticed that the color of the sky changed from North to South and that color shift was what I tried to capture.” Mangolte constructs a geography through color while exploring ideas of wilderness unknown to her in her native France.

Screening:

The Sky on Location by Babette Mangolte

1982, 16mm, color, sound, 78 minutes

Script, Direction, Cinematography, and Editing by Babette Mangolte. Camera assistance by Ralph Cheney, Mark Daniels, Neil Harvey. Location sound by Ralph Cheney. Assistant editing by Maureen Judge. Music by Ann Hankinson, Johannes Brahms (Requiem) and Richard Strauss (Last Song).

The Sky on Location traverses the landscape between New Mexico and Washington, across seasons, by an indirect route. In a narrative composed of three voices, Mangolte and her ostensible travelling companions consider the American west as it is depicted in painting, photography, film, and literature, and as it may have been seen in the past, while looking at the specific conditions of the landscape in the film’s frame: location, elevation, season, weather, light, color, time of day. “While shooting I wanted to establish the mood of the landscape as in a Turner painting. And as viewers of the film we discover how much what we see is conditioned by what we already know.”

During the romantic period at the junction between the eighteen and nineteen centuries, the Europeans saw landscape in its majestic quality; they spoke of its “grandeur” and dreamt of climbing the Alps. But although the peaks could be inaccessible they were known and to think a landscape essentially as untamed and wild is a concept of the new continent with an unknown territory that had to be discovered. I traced the history of this discovery and domestication of the land in the painting of the Hudson River School where you see how the unknown was slowly colonized and tamed.  I also studied the photographic surveys of the 1850s and 1860s to prepare the filming.

… I went off the road, slept in the wild and exposed myself to the elements, to feel in my muscles and bones the weariness of the first emigrants who crossed that land. Can we imagine how somebody sees some unknown and awesome thing for the first time? For once my foreignness was an asset in making a film. I had no prejudice or misconception like the ones I heard from a friend born in Douglas, Arizona, who, when I told him I was going to trace the four seasons in the landscape of the West, replied: “But there are no seasons in The West”. He was wrong. The colors if not the shapes change radically from winter to summer, specifically the color of the sky.

I think landscape moves because the sunlight moves across it. And if you can capture the changing light you have transformed the land and the way we look at it. Although I shot mostly static shots I could evoke movement by fast cutting which is easier to do with static shots than panoramic or tracking shots. At first I had decided to shoot only spaces that were untouched by manmade structure and also that were totally emptied of humans. But distance and scale was difficult to show in shots that were never connected to a known dimension. The image of something that is a boulder could be just the image of a small stone. I included some human figure here and there that suddenly created the surprise effect of distance or proximity. You need scale to understand what you see and jolt your viewer. A shot that suddenly revealed the vastness or smallness of what you saw was needed to create that jolt.

The three voices are essential to break any possibility of contemplation and complacency and introduce the energy and excitation of being there.

– Babette Mangolte, September 2004

Biography:

Babette Mangolte (American, born in France) is an internationally known experimental filmmaker and photographer who has lived in New York City since 1970. Her body of work includes films, photographs, installation, and writing. Mangolte’s photographic archive documents the experimental theater, dance, and performance scene of the 1970s and 1980s. In 2017, the Sternberg Press published a book of her writing on art and photography, Babette Mangolte Selected Writings, 1998-2015.

Among Mangolte’s recent film work, Seven Easy Pieces by Marina Abramović premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in 2007. Two films on the choreographies of Yvonne Rainer, AG Indexical, 2007, and RoS Indexical, were completed in 2008. Mangolte’s film of Trisha Brown’s choreography Roof Piece, performed on the Highline in 2011, was completed in 2012. In the same year, she finished Patricia Patterson
Paintings using material shot in 1988 and 1991. Edward Krasiński’s Studio premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in 2013. In 2014, Mangolte made the short films Steve Paxton at Dia:Beacon and Je, Nous, I or Eye, Us. She is currently editing a new feature shot in Brussels in April 2015.

Working with photographs, films, and text in installation, Mangolte creates architectural spaces that propose various modes of interactivity for the spectator. Recent installations include: Presence (Berlin Biennale, 2008), Rushes (Cologne, 2009) and How to look… 2010 (Whitney Biennial, 2010). In 2013 she exhibited: Éloge du Vert, an installation about the color green at VOX, in Montreal; TOUCHING III, an installation on photography and the viewer, at Inhotim in Belo Horizonte, Brazil; and finally, an installation at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York for Rituals of Rented Island: Object Theater, Loft Performance, and the New Psychodrama–Manhattan, 1970-1980, a performance show curated by Jay Sanders. 

In addition to her own extensive body of work, Mangolte is lauded for her contribution as cinematographer on films by Chantal Akerman (The Room, 1972, Hotel Monterey, 1972, Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080, Bruxelles, 1975, News From Home, 1977, Un Jour Pina a demandé, 1984), Yvonne Rainer (Lives of Performers, 1971, Film About a Woman Who, 1973), Jean-Pierre Gorin (Routine Pleasures, 1986, My Crazy Life, 1991), Michael Snow (Rameau’s Nephew, 1973), and others.

Los Angeles Filmforum at MOCA

Still Moving: Cinema, Photography, and the Real

In person: Domietta Torlasco

Co-curated by Kate Brown and Greg Cohen

Thursday, May 10, 2018, 7:00–9:00 pm

Conceived in conjunction with the exhibition at MOCA Grand Ave., Real Worlds: Brassäi, Arbus, Goldin, this program offers a series of thought-provoking films and videos that operate between the still and the moving image. Employing diverse formal and conceptual means, these works by Johan van der Keuken, Paul Sietsema, and Domietta Torlasco tackle the complex status of the reproducible image as both document and invention, posing timely questions about the systems of knowledge and the construction of identity often associated with film and photography, whether analog or digital. Much as Brassäi, Diane Arbus, and Nan Goldin probed the limits of “documentary” photography—ultimately in order to expand them—these contemporary artists of the moving image pursue a commensurate challenge, looking beyond traditional observational approaches to “the real” to address the speculative and projective dimensions of film, video, and photography alike. –GC

Screening:

At the Hour of Tea,

Paul Sietsema, 2013, 16mm, color, no sound, 17 mins

At the Hour of Tea presents five sequences that explore configurations of found objects — including an envelope, a typewriter, coins, an inbox, Roman glassware — each following a structure that concludes with an image of a composed tableau. These sequences and objects offer historical analogues for modern processes of consumption, production, and communication: collecting, arranging, and recording. Throughout the sequences a text is revealed piece by piece, gradually describing a historical painting in modernist terms. 

–Matthew Marks Gallery  

To Sang Fotostudio

Johan van der Keuken Holland, 1997, 35mm transferred to DVD, black and white, sound, 35 mins  

In To Sang Fotostudio, Johan van der Keuken records portrait photographer Li To Sang making studio photographs of business owners and workers on his street in Amsterdam. As much performance as document, the film centers on the ritual of photography, both moving and still. Through the film's construction, van der Keuken seems to question the contrivances of portraiture and documentary filmmaking alike. –KB/GC  

Sunken Gardens

Domietta Torlasco U.S.A., 2016, HDV, color, sound, 19 mins

An old roadside motel in Florida is revealed to be a prison for people in debt—the unemployed, the working poor, and the disenfranchised middle class. Part documentary, part fictional scenario, Sunken Gardens juxtaposes disparate materials—silent portraits, personal interviews, staged readings—to glimpse how lives are led in unseen quarters of our economic and justice systems.

–Domietta Torlasco  

Biographies:  

Paul Sietsema (born 1968) lives and works in Los Angeles. His work has been the subject of one-person exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, the Kunsthalle Basel, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Monographs on Sietsema’s work have been published by the Kunsthalle Basel, the Wexner Center for the Arts, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum.   

Johan van der Keuken (1938-2001) was a documentary filmmaker, writer, and photographer, based in Amsterdam. He published nine books on photography and film. His photographs were exhibited internationally, as were his over fifty films, which were shown at venues that include the Centre Pompidou, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Munich Film Museum.  

Domietta Torlasco is a filmmaker, critical theorist, and associate professor at Northwestern University. In her video essays, Torlasco mixes fiction and documentary to explore the political stakes of a series of aesthetic operations—the framing of spaces, the tracing of borders, the delimitation of enclosures (domestic or otherwise), wherein people are asked to live together. Her pieces have screened at national and international venues, including the Galerie Campagne Première in Berlin and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Torlasco is also the author of two books that investigate cinema’s capacity to remember forgotten pasts and imagine alternative futures, The Time of the Crime: Phenomenology, Psychoanalysis, Italian Film (Stanford University Press, 2008) and The Heretical Archive: Digital Memory at the End of Film (University of Minnesota Press, 2013).

State Film Project

In this ongoing project, I’ve invited artists to make 16mm films of the U.S. states. 25 people accepted, 3 have finished (Washington, Illinois, Massachusetts)

Owen Land

Human Resources Los Angeles

Sept 6 and 7, 2014

A program of all of the 16mm Owen Land films available to rent, shown alongside other artists’ work. Curated by Kate Brown

SATURDAY: PROGRAM I – 8PM

SUNDAY: PROGRAM II – 3PM

SATURDAY: PROGRAM I – 8PM

Film in Which There Appear Sprocket Holes, Edge Lettering, Dirt Particles, etc, 1966 (4.5 min)

"The richest frame I have seen in any film when you take into consideration all movements, lines, the beautiful white, and reds, and blacks," --Jonas Mekas, Village Voice

Diploteratology: Bardo Follies, 1967 (7 min)
‘’…a woman, in garish 1930s Technicolor, [waves] goodbye to a group of tourists on a pleasure boat.” – Ronald Bergan, The Guardian

“My films are not intended as entertainment or easy viewing. They do not attempt to engage the spectator on an emotional level. Therefore audience reactions are unpredictable, especially during Diploteratology or Bardo Follies.” – George Landow, Film-Makers Lecture Bureau Catalog No. 1 (1969).

The Film That Rises to the Surface of Clarified Butter, 1968 (9 min)

 “... as profoundly strange as its title” – James Stroller, Village Voice

Foregrounds, Pat O'Neill, 1978 (14 min)

 “…devoted almost entirely to carefully constructed spatial ambiguities.” —J. Hoberman, The Village Voice

Remedial Reading Comprehension, 1970 (5 min)

“Landow rejects the dream imagery of the historical trance film for the self-referential present, using macrobiotics, the language of advertising, and a speed-reading test on the definition of hokum. The alienated filmmaker appears, running uphill to distance himself from the lyrical cinema.” – Mark Webber

Astronauts, Margo Victor, 2014 (10 min)

An atmospheric space film.

INTERMISSION

What's Wrong With This Picture? 1972 (12.5 min)

"The first portion of this film is an old instructional film about being a 'good citizen,' presented intact; the second section is a color reconstruction of this black and white film by Land. The original film abounds in absurdities in both image and sound; [Land's] 'copy' is even more bizarre. Both are also extremely funny, and the humor is not totally without meaning: … each line of dialog, each direction given, implies a situation or character so absurdly plodding as to be almost inconceivable. In [Land's] version he creates an additional paradox - one of depth - by matting out certain parts of the frame." - Fred Camper

The Rule of 3 (version 2), Deirdre O'Dwyer, 2014 (11 min)

My gray paintings were hung on a sheet of white foam core, which in turn was hung on a plywood-decked chain-link fence in Los Angeles. I switched them out in turns as I switched between daylight speeds of film in a borrowed Bolex camera that went roughly 30 seconds each time I wound it. I hadn’t used a Bolex in 15 years.

Thank You Jesus for the Eternal Present, 1973 (5.5 min)

"... devilishly difficult... to write anything coherent about this film, which I very much love, respect, and admire..." --John Luther

A Film of Their 1973 Spring Tour Commissioned by Christian World Liberation

Front of Berkeley, California, 1974 (11.5 min)

"As an experience, it's mind-boggling." --Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

“The leader of the CWLF was Jack Sparks, a quiet, patient man from Indiana, who had a remarkable tolerance for the foibles of his flock. … he asked me if I would be willing to make a documentary film of a tour of the entire United States soon to be embarked on by Jack and a few other members… I said “I’m not a documentary filmmaker; I’m an avant-garde, experimental filmmaker.” Jack was quiet. Then he somehow communicated that I was the one he wanted for this project.” – Owen Land

Stroboscopic edits of three-frame segments of at least two subjects make this a unique documentary.

TRT 91 minutes

SUNDAY: PROGRAM II  – 3PM

No Sir, Orison! 1975 (3 min)

“The film grew out of the attempt to create a structure around my first original palindrome, "no sir, orison," written while working on WIDE ANGLE SAXON. "No sir, orison" is the answer to a question. The question soon revealed itself to be: "what's this, meditation?" Someone is praying in the aisle of a ... church? No, a supermarket. … The film might have been entitled "Practical Solutions to the Problem of the Supermarket." The protagonist is played by an artist who calls himself Hermen Euticalcircle, with whom I have collaborated on several live performances.” – Owen Land

Wide Angle Saxon, 1975 (22 min)

“Earl Greaves is polishing the grille of his Cadillac Coupe de Ville. He used to work as an assistant cameraman for a television station. … One evening he goes to a film showing at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. The film is long and boring, consisting of shots of red paint being poured on "a wide variety of objects," the last of which is a hotplate. Earl is so bored that his mind wanders all over the place. One of the places it wanders to is the realization that he is in fact too attached to his possessions, and he determines to do something about it ...”  – Owen Land

Astronauts, Margo Victor, 2014 (10 min)

An atmospheric space film.

INTERMISSION

New Improved Institutional Quality: In the Environment of Liquids and Nasals a Parasitic Vowel Sometimes Develops, 1976 (10 min)

"... the type of personal film which fits so many 'categories' it defies labeling." --D. Marie Grieco, EFLA: Sightlines.

The Rule of 3 (version 2), Deirdre O'Dwyer, 2014 (11 min)

My gray paintings were hung on a sheet of white foam core, which in turn was hung on a plywood-decked chain-link fence in Los Angeles. I switched them out in turns as I switched between daylight speeds of film in a borrowed Bolex camera that went roughly 30 seconds each time I wound it. I hadn’t used a Bolex in 15 years.

On The Marriage Broker Joke as Cited by Sigmund Freud in Wit and Its Relation of the Unconscious, Or Can the Avant-Garde Artist be Wholed? 1979 (18 min)

“Two pandas, who exist only because of a textual error, run a shell game for the viewer in an environment with false perspectives. They posit the existence of various films and characters, one of which is interpreted by an academic as containing religious symbolism. Sigmund Freud's own explanation is given by a sleeper awakened by an alarm clock." – P. Adams Sitney

TRT 74 minutes

BIOS

Owen Land (née George Landow) (1944-2011) studied drawing, painting and sculpture at Pratt, and acting, improvisation and a wide range of music at other colleges. He taught film at institutions including the Art Institute of Chicago, where he founded the Experimental Theater Workshop. He made at least 30 films between the 1961 and 2009, and several musical theater plays (including Mechanical Sensuality and Schwimmen mit Wimmen). His films have screened around the world.

Film curator Mark Webber on Owen Land:
Owen Land (formerly known as George Landow) was one of the most original American filmmakers of the 1960s and 1970s. His works fused an intellectual sense of reason with the irreverent wit that distances them from the supposedly ‘boring’ world of avant-garde film. His early materialist works anticipated Structural Film, the definition of which provoked his rejection of film theory and convention. Having explored the physical qualities of the celluloid strip, his attention turned to the spectator in a series of ‘literal’ films that question the illusionary nature of cinema through the use of elaborate wordplay and visual ambiguity.

Deirdre O'Dwyer is an artist living in Brooklyn and Los Angeles. A painter, O’Dwyer has made at least 4 films, including the 16mm Dear Self, which will be installed at Revolver II at Matt’s Gallery in London, Sept 10-October 5, of this year.

Pat O’Neill has been deeply involved in Los Angeles culture since the late 1960’s. A founding father of the city’s avant-garde film scene, an influential professor at CalArts, and an optical effects pioneer, he is best known for his short works from the 1960’s onwards which are highly graphic, layered and reflexive assemblages based on a mastery of optical printing techniques.

Margo Victor is a Los Angeles-based artist working in film, painting, and sculpture. Her films have shown in Los Angeles, at LACE, LAMOA, and other venues, and points beyond.

Kate Brown, curator, makes works on paper and film. Her films have screened around the country.

THANKS

This screening made possible by generous support from the Rema Hort Mann Foundation YoYoYo Artist Grant, and by Human Resources, the Film-Makers’ Coop, and the artists.

Thank you Mark Webber.

Midnight Show: Spengler/Menning

Echo Park FIlm Center

December 7, 2013

ISABELL SPENGLER

The Pitch, 2008

HD Video, 17min

“An off-screen voice – a hard-to-place Teutonic-Texan twang – recapitulates the loopy details of an idea for making an “Easy Rider for girls” to a fleshy woman in a sunglasses and a fur hat. As the plot descriptions become crazier… THE PITCH achieves bonkers verbal virtuosity.” – Melissa Anderson, Artforum, April 2009

ANITRA MENNING

Scab Glam, 1999

16mm film telecine to video, 29 minutes

A romp through the crass beauty empire of Miss Omega (Alex Mar). Featuring Matt Saunders, Luke Fischbeck, Michael E Chapman as Dan, and Menning, with an ensemble cast. PG 13.

Selections from the Venice Beach Biennial

Echo Park Film Center

curated by Kate Brown and Monique van Genderen

August 31, 2013

HARUKO TANAKA

I Love You, 2002

16mm, 2 minutes

California Telephone, 2003

16mm, 3 minutes

LAIDA LERTXUNDI

My Tears Are Dry, 2009

16mm, 4 minutes, color, sound

A film in three parts of a dialectic. Hoagy Land’s song is played and interrupted as guitar makes sound, two women, a bed an armchair, and the beautiful outside. After Bruce Baillie’s All My Life. The lyrics of the song reference the eternal sunshine of California and its promises. - LL

TUNI CHATTERJI

Sunset at Noon, 2012

16mm film, 6 minutes

Playing with the blurry lines between pure documentation and staged scenarios relating to ideas around Hollywood, this is a portrait of Sunset Boulevard at noon. - TC

LAURA OWENS

Laura Owens: Clock Paintings, 2012

Video, 4 min 21 seconds

From 2010 to 2012 Laura Owens created an untitled body of work consisting of ninety-two 24x24” “clock” paintings. Laura Owens: Clock Paintings compiles footage of these works from exhibitions at Kunstmuseum Bonn and Art Basel, documenting the breadth of the work and the slowly churning movement of their clock hands. - LO

KATE BROWN

X Niagara, 2012

Video, 5 min 38 seconds

Nic Wallenda crosses Niagara Falls.

MARGO VICTOR

Venus Crossing the Sun, 2012

Video, 1 min 36 seconds

A spontaneous document. - MV

JOE SOLA

Riding with Adult Video Performers, 2002

Video, 1 minute 12 seconds

Made for the 2002 California Biennial. - JS

99CENT CHEF

Hi I'm The 99 Cent Chef and I take the haute out of cuisine, creating recipes for the people. – NNCC

Tomato & Basil Bruschetta

Video, 2 min 25 seconds

“It's like an Italian version of fresh salsa, but served on toasted bread instead of tortilla chips.”

Composting with The 99 Cent Chef

Video, 4 minutes 11 seconds

“With shovel in hand the Chintzy Composter shows you a simple method that reduces the garbage you throw away by about half”

HARUKO TANAKA

Here there now and then, 2012

Video, 4 min 38 seconds

ISABELL SPENGLER

The Pitch, 2008

HD Video, 17min

“An off-screen voice – a hard-to-place Teutonic-Texan twang – recapitulates the loopy details of an idea for making an “Easy Rider for girls” to a fleshy woman in a sunglasses and a fur hat. As the plot descriptions become crazier… THE PITCH achieves bonkers verbal virtuosity.” – Melissa Anderson, Artforum, April 2009

INTERMISSION

ANITRA MENNING

Bookfiends, 1998

16mm film telecine to video, 19 min 25 seconds

Julian (Alex Gourevitch) fights a book addiction. Roy (Pete Grana) writes a screenplay. Dan (introducing Michael E Chapman) passes through the film like heat. Shot in Cambridge, MA.

Scab Glam, 1999

16mm film telecine to video, 29 minutes

A romp through the crass beauty empire of Miss Omega (Alex Mar). Featuring Matt Saunders, Luke Fischbeck, Michael E Chapman as Dan, and Menning herself with an ensemble cast. PG 13.

DAVID TUCKER

Auto Pos, 1996

16mm, 8 minutes

Auto Pos is an experimental construction in six sections, all using film elements scavenged from the process of making optical effects for commercial films. It was assembled entirely on the optical printer. - DT

SEEMA KAPUR

Destination To Be Determined, 2004

16mm, 22 minutes

An experimental narrative about a woman who has become lost in the vast desert landscape.  Here she is serendipitously confronted with an extraordinary band of dancing chickens that present her with a “gift” which she decides to leave behind in exchange for the unpredictable chaos of the world. This film is part of a series of five short films entitled Ema’s Opus in which the filmmaker’s alter ego is the main character. -SK

Program TRT: 135 minutes

Artist Curated Projects (ACP) presents

Tucker Stilley

Lines of Sight: Experiments in Eyetracking

Opening reception March 23, 2013 4-6pm

Closing reception April 13, 2013 4-6pm

Multimedia artist Tucker Stilley chops, collages, and recombines images and sounds, with a wry, generous take on artmaking that leaves few stones unturned. This ACP show will feature all new work, including a massive series of "Soul Prisoners", images of souls caught in the process of police booking; "RGBTotems", resin drenched vertical panels; and random "broken voice" sound elements assembled from his journals. His eye movements have created some of his most stark and arresting images. Recorded over days or even weeks, the tracks of his eyes reveal, cosmic, even volcanic eruptions, like galaxies colliding. Everything on Stilley’s hybrid computer is raw material. With “brute-force computing”, searches, actions, maps and gestures become "Meta-art", and with witty selectivity, Stilley brings us the world refracted, shattered and illuminated, face-first on its mysterious side.

Mostly paralyzed with Gehrig's disease, Stilley uses a bizarre hybrid PC/Mac eye tracker system to make art: “Because l can move nothing but my eyes, we use my eyes to move my computer mouse. An infrared beam illuminates my face and causes my eyes to reflect brightly, like a cat's or wolf's, and the angle of this reflection is carefully calculated against known points on the computer screen. This way, the computer knows where I'm looking and places the cursor there... this is eyetracking."

An artist for over thirty years, Tucker Stilley, 51, attended Studio for Interrelated Media, at the Massachusetts College of Art. He has worked in Boston, San Francisco, and LosAngeles as a media artist, sound designer and film editor. Previous exhibitions include the MFA, Harding House and ART, Cambridge, MA, and The Monte Vista Projects, REDCAT, Keystone and Octopus Garden Salon, Los Angeles, CA.

Curated by Kate Brown, Sam Durant, and Randi Malkin Steinberger.

LA AIR: Kate Brown: Vilas Kortas

Echo Park Film Center

March 28, 2013

A short program of films shown at the public screening of my film, Vilas Kortas, made during a residency at the Echo Park Film Center.

9/1/75 (1975), James Benning
16mm, color, 22.00 min
Twenty-two minute tracking shot through campgrounds in Southern Wisconsin.

Werra (2002), Margo Victor
16mm transferred to DVD, color, 45 sec
Victor's “illustration of the mirror stage phenomenon in Lacanian psychoanalytic theory.” Too good to see just once.

Vilas Kortas (2013), Kate Brown
16mm, color, 10 min
Celebrating cars, film, sound and Los Angeles. Made during the March 2013 LA AIR residency at the Echo Park Film Center.

Thanks to the EPFC and the Film-Makers’ Cooperative

Fine Art and Film on the Beach

Co-curated with Monique van Genderen

at the Hammer Museum's Venice Beach Biennial

July 2012

Abstract paintings and artist films by: Isabell Spengler, Laida Lertxundi, Haruko Tanaka, Anitra Menning, Dave Tucker, Jedediah Cesar, Laura Owens, Joe Sola, Caitlin Lonegan, Deirdre O'Dwyer, Yunhee Min, Katie Grinnan, Kate Brown, Monique Van Genderen, 99Cent Chef, Tucker Stilley, Lindsay Moffard, Tuni Chatterj, Margo Victor.

The following is a quote from an article by Paul Soto, in Art in America, July 18, 2012:

"This past weekend saw the "first and only" (a promotional brochure touted) Venice Beach Biennial, a festival of performance, sculpture and installation organized by Hammer Museum curator Ali Subotnick as part of "Made in LA" [through Sept. 2]. The event significantly expanded that survey's mandate to present the work of locals, including vendors and artists in their own right who regularly sell their work on the beach.

…Artists Kate Brown and Monique van Genderen, mimicking the vernacular of local vendors, brought small-scale paintings and DVD bootlegs (made by the likes of Alice Könitz and Laura Owens) to sell. "We mashed two ideas together: abstract painting, as the boardwalk is heavy on figurative works, and bootlegs, but here of artists' videos," explained Van Genderen. Katie Grinnan's work on view at their site, a YouTube capture projected on a slab of concrete, married their two concepts in a single form. Bootlegs were on sale for $20-$2,000. Brown remarked, "People are actually seeing these obscure art films. We have a portable DVD player, so customers have been able to get a preview. We hook them in thinking it's some sort of pop film." 

http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-features/news/venice-beach-biennial/

Tom Chomont

Echo Park Film Center

Thursday,  May 10, 2012

1200 N Alvarado

LA CA 90026

8pm

tickets are $5

curated by Kate Brown

All-16mm program includes:

Ophelia/The Cat Lady (1969)

Love Objects (1971, Holland)

The Mirror Garden (1967)

Epilogue/Siam (1969)

Jabbok (1967)

Phases of the Moon (1968)

Oblivion (1969). 

The Tom Chomont films will be preceded by a 16mm program:

Glimpse of the Garden by Marie Menken, 1957

Fire of Waters by Stan Brakhage, 1965

Lemon by Hollis Frampton, 1969

Futuristic Death Ray and Anna/Anna by Clay Dean, 2003 and 2010

16mm preservation print courtesy of the UCLA Film & Television Archive.Preserved by the UCLA Film & Television Archive for The Outfest Legacy Project for LGBT Film Preservation and through the Avant-Garde Master Program. Preservation funded by The Film Foundation and administered by the National Film Preservation Foundation. Thanks also to the Film-Makers' Cooperative, Jim Hubbard, and Clay Dean.