With the announcement that the Soho Film Lab in London will be closing its 16mm print service – the UK’s last remaining 16mm print facility – an online petition has been started to try and get the new owners, Deluxe, to change their mind. According to an article written by Tacita Dean in the Guardian on Tuesday, Deluxe have reached the decision that printing 16mm is no longer profitable.
As Stuart Comer, curator of film at Tate Modern, writes in an email urging people to sign the petition:
‘Far from being obsolete, 16mm has enjoyed a huge revival of interest within the visual arts during the last 10 years by a new generation of artists. 16mm works are frequently exhibited in museums, biennials, galleries, festivals and art fairs in the UK and throughout the world. Works on 16mm film are also an important part of many major museum collections that rely heavily on labs like Deluxe Soho in order to preserve and display a medium vital to many key developments in modern and contemporary art.’
Last weekend I visited the Musée d’Art Contemporain du Val-de-Marne (Mac/Val), in the south-eastern Parisian suburb of Vitry-sur-Seine. Black bunting thrown up outside the Modernist-style concrete, glass and wood building gave a strangely sombre initial impression for a museum celebrating it’s fifth anniversary. The work by Fiona Banner – which replaces a typically brightly coloured decoration with the dark hues of foreboding – played a similar game to that achieved by head of temporary exhibitions Frank Lamy and chief curator Alexia Fabre, which presented a fifth-anniversary show (‘Let’s Dance’) alongside a re-hang of the museum’s own permanent collection titled ‘Nevermore’.
Since opening in 2005, Mac/Val has divided its huge, 4,000 m² exhibition space into temporary exhibitions, including solo shows such as Mark Wallinger’s Turner Prize-winning ‘State Britain’ in 2008 and Simon Starling’s first solo show in France in 2009. These are shown alongside changing presentations of its own small yet growing collection of more than 1,200 works by contemporary French and France-affiliated artists. Including works by Annette Messager, Pierre Huyghe, Daniel Buren and Christian Boltanski, the collection was made possible by the creation of the Fonds Départmental d’art Contemporain, a funding body founded in 1982 to support French artists by acquiring their work and therefore securing them an income. This protectionist approach to the arts was mirrored with the founding of Mac/Val itself, started with a government grant that made provision for a museum dedicated to contemporary art outside of central Paris. The area of val-de-Marne, with its history of artistic as well as political communities, benefited from a period of decentralization in French politics and perhaps local council’s enthusiasm to embrace large-scale cultural projects (much the same as in the UK last decade, when MIMA, the Baltic and Nottingham Contemporary all opened).
The fourth reconfiguration of the collection, ‘Nevermore’ (the title is taken from a Paul Verlaine poem) purported to be inspired by the alternation between memory and recollection – a well-worn curatorial gambit, but a good way of presenting works from a disparate array of artists’ works in the collection. As Fabre stated in her introduction to the catalogue: ‘for any public collection, memory is both its mission and it’s subject.’ Memorializing and historically-inflected work, as well as a fair dose of fiction, was the order of the day – from Messager’s fictional identities to Christian Boltanksi’s eerie shrine to three unnamed children, to Renaud Auguste-Dormeuil’s collection of 50 photographs based on the story of an East German woman political activist who in the 1970s agreed to have all pictures of her erased to prevent the authorities from identifying her. Auguste-Dormeuil’s re-making takes a woman – Sandrine B. – who agrees to have her history erased, cutting out the woman’s shape in each of her personal family snapshots to leave a black silhouette. Seen from afar you barely notice the difference till eventually your eyes detect the repeated absence – it’s a neat trick. Elsewhere in the cavernous space, a huge screen filled with a camera crawling over a seemingly endless expanse of skin was creepy but strangely mesmerizing (made by Thierry Kuntzel, who studied under Roland Barthes and who died in 2007), while Shilpa Gupta’s interactive installation Untitled (Shadow 3) ( 2007) – which she made whilst on a residency at Mac/Val in 2007 – whereby your silhouette is projected onto a huge white screen, is locked onto by dark tendrils bearing a assortment of objects that stack up on your shadow, was admittedly very fun to play around with (while no one else was watching of course).
In the equally gargantuan space housing the temporary exhibitions, ‘Let’s Dance’, the title taken from the classic 1983 album and song by David Bowie, worked in the grey area between celebration and commemoration. (I first thought the reference a bit of a stretch – surely this is one of Bowie’s most upbeat, uncomplicatedly joyful songs? – till I remembered the achingly sad M. Ward cover of it …) Reflecting upon a variety of nebulous concepts relating to the idea of an anniversary, the works, from an equally disparate range of artists, oscillated widely in tone but somehow (almost incredibly) managed to hold together as a show.
Gaudy works like Phillipe Parreno’s christmas tree, Fraught Times: For eleven months of the year it’s an art work and in December, its Christmas (2009), Amy O’Neill’s Ghost Float (2004) and Stuart Haygarth’s Mirror Ball (2009) – a huge disco ball suspended for the ceiling made from cracked car wing mirrors – took the gaudy symbols of celebration and allowed them to collapse under their own bloated kitschiness. In contrast, not far away hung the terse photographs of Bruno Serralongue in his series ‘Homenaje’ (1997) documenting the 30th anniversary of the death of Che Guevara. Elsewhere exploring the meditative practice of repetition in the painstaking series of paintings by Peter Dreher started in 1974 ‘Day by Day is a Good Day’ – each year he paints the same glass of water at identical dimensions (5000 paintings and counting…) – and an accumulating sculpture by Saâdane Afif, Everyday (Neue Ruhr Zeitung, 2004), of local newspapers bought for each day of the exhibition.
Darren Almond’s wall of synchronized flip clocks (_Tide_, 2008) opposite Douglas Gordon’s Forty One (2007) from his birthday skulls project whereby – a skull which the artists cuts a star out of each year – again reflected upon notions of repetition and this time, mortality and more bunting was to be found in the beautiful, simple video by Melanie Manchot (_Cypress Street_, 2010), this time the bunting’s traditional primary colour makeup latticing the quaint Cypress Street in East London. A camera moving steadily down the road as a street party takes place till, almost magically, from the chaos of people milling around, it stops as the local residents gather for a group portrait. The party organised by the artist was the first the street had ever had. From communality to (mock) exclusion as you walk around Elmgreen and Dragset’s But I’m on the Guestlist! (2007) – a sleek door partially open in the middle of a wide corridor.
Unfortunately I had to catch a train before the opening party got under way so couldn’t tell you if anyone took up the show title’s offer or whether the anniversary was more celebration that commemoration. But with recent government funding cuts in the UK more than likely to be implemented at some stage in France – similarly affecting those institutions outside of the main cultural (capital) hub the most – the show’s deliberate reluctance to celebrate seemed regrettably timely.
Artur Żmijewski has been appointed curator of the 7th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, which will take place in early 2012. The artist is well known for orchestrating social experiments – as in his two pivotal works Them (2005) and Repetition (2007).
Visual artist Artur Żmijewski, born in 1966 in Warsaw (Poland), works almost exclusively with the media of photography and film. He is particularly interested in the power of art and its relation to politics. From an almost anthropological viewpoint he investigates social norms, morality and representations of power in today’s society and the effects that art have on it. Żmijewski studied in the sculpture class of Professor Grzegorz Kowalski at the Warsaw Art Academy from 1990 to 1995 as well as at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam in 1999. His work has been internationally shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions. In 2005 he represented Poland at the 51st Art Biennale in Venice. He is member of the Polish political movement “Krytyka Polityczna” and the art director of the magazine of the same name. Żmijewski lives and works in Warsaw.
The selection committee for the curatorship of the 7th Berlin Biennale consisted of Jacob Fabricius, Malmˆ Konsthall; Bartomeu Mari, MACBA; Matthias Mühling, Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau München, Munich; Joanna Mytkowska, The Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw; and Hoor Al Qasimi, Sharjah Biennial.
Established in 1998, the Berlin Biennale has become a major international event for contemporary art. Located in Berlin, in the midst of the vibrant cultural scene in the fast-changing capital of Germany, the Berlin Biennale has received an enthusiastic response from the audience as an experimental, forward-looking and contextual show. The six editions of the Berlin Biennale that have taken place to date explored a variety of exhibition formats and involved diverse curatorial agendas. Previous curators have been:
1st Berlin Biennale (1998): Klaus Biesenbach with Nancy Spector and Hans Ulrich Obrist
2nd Berlin Biennale (2001): Saskia Bos
3rd Berlin Biennale (2004): Ute Meta Bauer
4th Berlin Biennale (2006): Maurizio Cattelan, Massimiliano Gioni, and Ali Subotnick
5th Berlin Biennale (2008): Adam Szymczyk and Elena Filipovic
I imagine Christopher Nolan’s latest film, Inception (2010), is already being turned into a pop philosophy book. Perhaps it will be part of the same series as The Matrix and Philosophy: Welcome to the Desert of the Real (2002) and Harry Potter and Philosophy: If Aristotle Ran Hogwarts (2004). Inception ’s plot involves a team of corporate espionage operatives, led by Leonardo DiCaprio, who use dream-sharing technology in order to travel through the subconscious mind of the heir to a powerful business empire, played by Cillian Murphy. Their mission is to plant in his imagination the idea that he must break up his dead father’s monopoly. Set across multiple levels of the dream world, it is material ripe for introductory psychoanalysis seminars, themed group exhibitions and good old-fashioned late-night stoned conversation.
Perhaps the most clear message Inception offers is one about the market value of ideas. It is set in a world in which anything from the smooth running of the global economy to whether DiCaprio will be allowed to go back home again hangs upon a thought inside someone’s head, a world in which everything comes down to business. The anonymous steel-and-glass architectural backdrops against which much of the film takes place – the Modernism of banks and finance headquarters – are readily identifiable symbols of corporate power. (At one point in the film, DiCaprio’s character even expresses a preference for such buildings over the sweet clapboard house of his wife’s childhood home.) By the same token, the ridiculous amount of jet-setting the characters do – Tokyo, Paris, Mombasa, Sydney, Los Angeles – has, in contemporary cinema, come to represent the reach and power of extra-legal organizations. (‘Need to visit Beijing, Cairo and Washington in just 24 hours without the hassle of visas? Want to collect air miles fast? Join the CIA!’) In terms of the reach of DiCaprio’s fictional organization, Nolan’s film makes no moral apologies for business interests dictating the necessary means. DiCaprio’s team are mercenaries in suits, and although they are illegally jail-breaking Murphy’s mind ostensibly in order to prevent him from having a monopoly on energy supplies, it is also so that the wheels of capital can be kept greased for DiCaprio’s client (Ken Watanabe). Money dictates legal exception. And If all the metaphysics and neo-liberal amorality are not enough to chew on, there’s the film’s dubious attitude towards women. Inception features only two female characters, both flatly sketched: the young and brainy Ariadne (Ellen Page), who builds dream labyrinths for men to lose themselves in (Ariadne… mazes…geddit?), and the passionate but irrational and unpredictable ghost of DiCaprio’s wife, who is called Mal – a pun I’m sure isn’t lost on French speakers. The world, Inception seems to suggest, is for rational men.
In literary science fiction terms, Inception is at the JG Ballard/William S. Burroughs/Philip K. Dick end of the spectrum. It is the sci-fi of everyday reality tweaked and warped – of psychological breakdown and pharmaco-bio-technology – rather than the Isaac Asimov/Arthur C. Clarke/Frank Herbert school of space travel, epic galactic wars and alien civilizations. Plot-wise, Inception borrows tricks from action thrillers such as the ‘Bourne’ films (2002–7) – preposterous inter-continental itineraries, hints at shadowy governmental and corporate interests – and grafts these onto pop-metaphysical ideas in key with reality-bending films such as ‘The Matrix’ trilogy (1999–2003), Minority Report (2002), Paycheck (2003) and Nolan’s 2002 film Memento. (For the first ten minutes of Inception, you could, at a stretch, also argue that Nolan nods to the history of avant-garde film, as the opening narrative is boldly fractured and non-linear for a big production aimed at the summer box offices.) However, for a movie set across three levels of dream reality – where, theoretically, anything is possible – it’s notable how familiar its visual palette is.
Don’t get me wrong: despite a few howlers straight out of Freud-for-Beginners – such as DiCaprio’s dream-world elevator which no one must take down to the basement – Nolan engineers some impressive set pieces, many of which are all the more remarkable for using analogue special effects and live action stunts instead of CGI. I don’t mean to suggest, either, that seeing cities fold in on themselves or freight trains ramming their way through city streets at high speed are everyday sights for me (though granted, they may be for some of you). Rather, it is Nolan’s terms of expression that are banal and familiar, his syntax instantly recognizable from film and advertising.
One of the ways in which Inception shows its audience that they are watching a dream is by the use of different action speeds. This is achieved by extensive use of ultra high-speed photography: DiCaprio falling backwards into a bath so slowly we can see exactly how his body displaces individual drops of water; windows and grocery carts exploding in a Paris street, each piece of debris arcing slowly across the screen whilst DiCaprio and co-star Paige sit perfectly still outside a café. These often flow into what are known as ‘speed-ramped’ shots, where the action suddenly and quickly accelerates for a few seconds before returning back to normal or slow motion. All this time-stretching is supposed to look strange and dreamlike, suggesting jarring temporal shifts, yet it’s just an all too familiar styling from cinema, music videos and advertising of the past ten years.
Inception also uses clearly signposted shifts in scale in order to underline a sense of the spectacular. A common sequence is one in which a close-up on a character gradually moves outwards to an extreme wide shot that reveals a building or location of epic size. This device, of scaling up from human proportions to the monumental, is used in Inception most notably towards the end, where Nolan reveals to the audience the horrifyingly uniform but vast metropolis DiCaprio dreamt up with his dead wife: a city that just looks like one depressingly big financial district. Musical crescendos are key to signaling these shifts in scale: in the case of Inception its Hans Zimmer’s reduction of Edith Piaf’s ‘Non, Je ne regrette rien’ (1960) to a hectoring and relentlessly climactic Wagnerian sludge that underscores them.
Although Inception tends to shy away from colour-grading the film using particular hues – the washed-out blueish-green tones that give a classy feel to adverts for high-performance cars or premium Belgian lagers – it still makes use of heightened colouring: soft, warm, underlit beige to denote expensive, luxe interiors, or an over-exposed, sunny brightness to signal happy memories of home and family. According to the film’s director of photography, Wally Pfister, in an interview he and Nolan gave for the American Society of Cinematographers magazine: ‘We wanted to have the colour palette change quite a bit when we go from one location to another […] You immediately know where you are, even if we cut to a tighter shot or to something that is slightly out of context’. For a film about dreams, even dream environments artificially synthesized by precocious architecture students called Ariadne, that’s the problem: you immediately know where you are.
In the same interview, Nolan explains that ‘The underlying idea is that dreams feel real while we’re in them, which is actually a line from the film […] That was important to the photography and to every aspect of the film. We didn’t want to have dream sequences with any superfluous surrealism. We didn’t want them to have any less validity than what is specified as being the real world. So we took the approach of trying to make them feel real.’ It’s certainly to Nolan’s credit that he didn’t pack Inception with flying pink elephants or melting watches. In fact, I’d agree with him that his imagery cleaves close to a reality, but the problem is that it’s the reality of familiar high-end cinematic styles, of established visual conventions made with commonly used industry tools.
Inceptionsucceeds at the box office partly because it’s a straightforward action flick that speaks to us in a visual language that we are accustomed to. Of course, not every film that deals with dreamlike narratives has to be some kind of Last Year at Marienbad (1961) but Inception ’s intricate plot occludes its visual banality: it’s like someone talking to you in English but trying to convince you they are speaking ancient Latin. Although Inception shares none of the fuzzy warmth of whimsical magic-realist-lite advertising, the film nevertheless speaks in a similarly mediated language: a language that describes our world as one that is able to spin on a coin of creative fantasy at any moment – the big-budget fantasies of an advertising executive or Hollywood movie director. There is none of the weirdness, creepiness, intimacy, fun, eroticism, bewilderment or plain neurosis that really fuel dreams. Ironically, the film’s visual style looks just like one which might be used to sell fast cars or luxury hotels to the sort of big business types the film depicts. Inception is science fiction, business class.
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