The future isn’t what it used to be – no one seems to talk about it so much these days. Of course, this wasn’t always the case: in the 1960s Eastern Bloc, artists, scientists, engineers and architects were conscripted to realize the Utopia of full-blown Communism. And the future meant space travel.
This is the subject of Star City, a smart new group show at Nottingham Contemporary curated by director Alex Farquharson and Lukasz Ronduda, which looks back at Communism’s visions of the future. (Martin Herbert’s review of Notts Contemporary’s opening show, David Hockney/Frances Stark, is here.) The subject of a 2000 film by Jane and Louise Wilson, Star City is also the USSR’s once-secret cosmonaut training facility just outside of Moscow (which, sweetly, actually translates closer to something like ‘Starry Town’).
Jane and Louise Wilson, Star City (2000), installation view
As frieze contributor Owen Hatherley noted in Militant Modernism (2009), ‘A history of the Soviet avant-garde could be written through its aspirations of the interstellar.’ This was one of the many subjects of last Friday’s rangy ‘Futurological Congress’ in Nottingham. Named for the 1971 Stanisław Lem novel, the day-long event looked at the fictional and political implications of the space race, and saw enlightening contributions from Cold War Modern curator David Crowley, ‘Star City’ co-curator Ronduda (on Julius Koller), The Otolith Group’s Kodwo Eshun and Russian Studies professor Rolf Hellebust, among others.
Other highlights included Otolith’s performance–lecture Communists Like Us (look out for Nina Power’s monograph on Otolith in the March issue of frieze, out next week), a guided bus tour led by Pawel Althamer and great documentation of Aleksandra Mir’s 2007 Gravity project at the Roundhouse, for which she fabricated a spaceship – watch it below:
It’s Monday morning and the frieze mailbag runneth over, so let’s see what it has in store for us today.
One of our trusted contributors emailed me this link to a YouTube video that will at last fulfil the wishes of all of you who ever wondered how Hitler would react to the announcement that Jeffrey Deitch had been named Director of Los Angeles MOCA:
Update: I admit: I thought this was a humorous satire of art institutions in LA, until someone just pointed out to me that Jeffrey Deitch is Jewish, a fact that I have to admit I didn’t know and didn’t even contemplate (nor have been able to confirm as of yet) when I first saw it, as that would immediately sap any traces of humour from the parody. I trust that whoever made the video didn’t intend it as anti-Semitic, but now it’s impossible for me to see it any other way. I obviously didn’t mean for this to be offensive, so I’ve just left the link for you to click or not click depending on whether you can see this as innocently poking fun or something else.
Here is something that is not funny: many of you may know about the Impossible Project, a team of engineers, scientists and former Polaroid employees who have made it their mission to rejuvenate the production of analogue integral film for Polaroid cameras, in part by saving the last remaining Polaroid production plant in the Netherlands. According to a recent press release, the project, which was going well, has come upon an ‘unexpected problem’ and might, in fact, prove to be impossible. Let’s hope not. For more information about this ambitious project, visit The Impossible Project
And finally, from the extremely urgent frame-related news department, from a Palm Beach-based PR company, a press release boldly headed: “PALM BEACH PHILANTHROPIST & INTERNATIONALLY RENOWNED ‘FRAME GURU’ CALLS PALM BEACH HOME.” For those of you currently residing in Palm Beach, you will be relieved to know that the ‘frame guru’ is “spending much of the winter in Palm Beach, donating hundreds of thousands of gift certificates for his works and services to philanthropic efforts.” According to the release, the frame guru “never wanted to mix business with his home away from home paradise until he realized the value he could offer art collectors in the Palm Beach community.” Thanks to his efforts, the residents of this paradisical community will never have to go without frames.
In his 1819 satirical poem, Don Juan, Lord Byron wrote, ‘I hate all mystery, and that air / Of claptrap, which your recent poets prize.’ Coincidentally, after nearly 60 minutes of sitting through Keren Cytter’s theatre performance, The True Story of John Webber and his Endless Struggle with the Table of Content, I had written only one word in my notes: ‘claptrap’. I don’t even use that word, ever, but something about the nature of this particular performance, or it taking place on an exceptionally chilly Sunday night, made me feel like just the kind of curmudgeon who would roundly declare a piece of theatre ‘claptrap’. However, claptrap – defined as insincere or pretentious language, or, ironically, in its obsolete form as ‘something contrived to elicit applause’ – sums it up pretty well.
For her first feature-length play, Cytter, who was recently nominated for the National Gallery Prize for Young Art here in Berlin, has collaborated with the dance troupe she founded, D.I.E. Now. The work, originally commissioned for ‘If I Can’t Dance I Don’t Want to be Part of Your Revolution’ has been shown in other incarnations at PERFORMA 09 in New York and at Tate Modern, and ran for four nights at the HAU 3 in Berlin. John Webber is ostensibly about a man who wakes up to find that he’s been transformed into a woman, which, according to the programme text, ‘has a domino-effect on society, sexual policy and identity, finally leading to a revolution’ – though these events are, at best, vaguely suggested by what transpires on stage. The five members of D.I.E. Now engaged in a mixture of both acting and dance to convey the story, though it was often hard to tell which was which. More disappointing, though, was the sense that they appear to be neither trained dancers nor actors. I was hoping to see performers who had honed at least one out of the two crafts; instead I got a painfully thin man in saggy jogging shorts and multiple glimpses at the meshy control-top of the lead dancer’s pantyhose.
For John Webber, Cytter mines not just every contemporary cliché of theatre and dance, but also video and installation art: at times, a projection on the stage featured what looked like archival footage of psychological experiments or academics discussing sociological research – the kind of stuff that abounds in current video art. This was, however, the only concrete reference to anything outside the insular and confusing world of the play itself; the rest of the action was concentrated on the mostly bare stage, and the ambiguous love story among several characters of shifting gender. Jammed into that framework, the play also included: shadow play, a smoke machine, minimal props, confessions, voice over, dubbed voice over, fake YouTube clips, barefooted dancers, good posture, bad posture, pointed toes, legwarmers, fractures in the fourth wall, repetition, repetition, self-referentiality, multiple voices, false starts, the death of the author, new age music, pantomime, stage fighting, slow motion, references to Revolution, love triangles. Despite containing all this in its 60 minutes, it had not one of the essential elements that can make a live performance compelling. It had neither comedy, nor drama. It had no spectacle, no depth, nor any traces of authentic emotion. This might be Cytter’s statement on the condition of society today, but in that case, I wish she hadn’t recreated it – again – as artifice.
What’s the story of Avatar? In the news, it’s a different one each week. This week it’s simply that of the most successful movie ever, soon to cross US$2 billion, James Cameron surpassing his own Titanic. Last week, the story was that Avatar had been bumped from 2-D screens in China, despite continuing strong attendance, to make space for the epic Confucius featuring Chow Yun Fat in the title role. (Funny that a pioneering hero of Hong Kong gangster drama, with its twisted Mafia-Confucianism of family ties and honour, would eventually be the impersonation for the comeback of Confucianism as semi-official doctrine in China; even more funny after Chow Yun Fat had been edited out of Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End in 2007, as the character he played was supposedly ‘vilifying and humiliating the Chinese.’)
Even though it’s not uncommon to limit the run of foreign films in China to support local productions, the speculation was that authorities had started to feel uncomfortable about Cameron’s sci-fi fantasy apparently having struck a chord with many Chinese who, confronted with images of a native populace driven from their soil by bulldozers, couldn’t help but think of ruthless development projects in China of recent years, and said so in many blog entries. And in fact, the image of the huge solitary tree in the film had a slight similarity to the famous image of a ‘nail house’ from a few years ago – developers in Chongqing had excavated a ten-meter-deep pit around a house that been the home of a family for three generations, the owners of which had refused to leave it for two years.
But that very same image of the tree as big as a skyscraper, with people running for their lives as it falls down in flames, is also eerily reminiscent of 9/11 (an association that is reinforced in the film with a redneck commander instructing his soldiers with pep talk about fighting terror with terror, an obvious allusion to the Bush years of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo).
In more general terms, Avatar is an amalgam, as if in a strange dream, of many of these kinds of allusions and associations, and you can look at it being very clever calculated to capture the widest possible audience globally, playing many cards at once; but by way of the very same strategy, it also could be seen as capturing the widest possible 3-D panorama shot of collective anxieties about the future (ecology, war, loss of social love and security etc.). And in the same contradictory way, it is this all-encompassing ambition that is interesting about it, but also what is off-putting.
I saw Avatar late, after my wife Sarah had texted me during the intermission of the screening she had gone to: ‘I’m already bored to death, don’t bother seeing it, Pocahontas meets the Smurfs’. Though she’s right about Pocahontas and the Smurfs, there’s more to chew on. And not just Dances With Wolves and other popular myths of ‘civilization’ versus ‘native’ that get recycled on a regular basis as in this case. I went with my friend Jons who is a graphic designer and he couldn’t help but point out that it is strangely ironic that the language of the natives, Na’Vi, is subtitled with a Celtic type reminiscent of the ones used in corporate Irish Pubs. In the same vein, the music that comes on when they are around is a tooth-ache mix of tribal drums, saccharine strings and Enya-type ethereal solo and choir voices.
Compare for yourself:
The effect of all of it is that this starts to make what is otherwise an in parts quite mindblowing 3-D vision of what an alien bio system could look like – mutations of earthly forms abound, hovering mountains etc. – feel interrupted by the audio equivalents of aerial shots of a Scottish distillery and a Maori tourist performance for a corny commercial. But is that important, is that significant, or am I just whining about high-brow aesthetic sensibilities? Point is, Avatar is not just its plot and its role models. Cameron deserves respect for having changed the way women are portrayed in mainstream action cinema, and Sigourney Weaver in this movie is not least a self-quote re. Aliens in that respect (and, as a kind of inversion of the old Romantic myth of the dead woman in the water, he is arguably also the first to have portrayed a romantic dead male that way, with DiCaprio in Titanic).
But do we really only follow the role models offered, when it’s possible for the audience to pick and mix and relate the story to whatever seems appropriate to them? There are obvious ‘messages’ implied in this film such as: don’t go and destroy nature for the sake of industrialization and greed; don’t justify your war by saying the opponents are just beasts etc. etc. But these are not exactly what is new and interesting about that film. Not in the least. What is new and interesting about it is not the mere use of technology either; some of the more sophisticated computer games have had similar effects, the 3-D glasses replaced so to speak by the player’s ability to navigate the environments. What is new in some way is the powerful strategy to amalgam all these different things – myths, plots, ethnic aesthetics, game environments etc. – into one big, big whole. It’s like Steve Jobs presenting the iPhone – with all its features and surprising capabilities – but with a tacky Microsoft design. In the computer world that might be a minus – the great hybrid product that combines well-known features into a new smoothly-running whole with a great interface, but then bad design… But in cinema, this seems to be precisely the winning formula.
Magazines and newspapers in late December and early January are awash with ‘best of…’ roll-calls of the past 12 months and forecasts for next dozen, and the current January–February issue of frieze is no exception. But before 2010 unfolds too far, there’s one item I really feel deserves mention as one of the real highlights of 2009: the DVD box-set released last year by the British Film Institute entitled Gazwrx: The Films of Jeff Keen.
Gazwrx surveys the 50-year – that’s right, 50-year – career of British artist and filmmaker Jeff Keen, and is essential viewing for anyone with even a passing interest in the history of experimental film and video. Keen’s films – from his first 8mm work Wail, made in 1960, to recent films such as Joy Thru Film (c. 2000) and Omozap Terribelis + Afterblatz 2 (2002) – are high-voltage visual shocks, eruptions of pulp imagery, eroticism, violence, language games, uncensored imagination and sheer giddy exuberance. His early films are love-letters to cinema history: to silent film and B-movies, to slapstick, thrillers, exploitation flicks and sci-fi apocalypses, his later works disquieting parades of video news imagery and documentation of his own creative processes. Frankenstein and Godzilla share the screen with Keen’s own cast of heroes and villains such Motler the Word Killer, Dr Gaz, Silverhead, Omozap and Mothman (often played by friends and family). Edited into machine-gun sprays of imagery, Keen’s pedal-to-the-metal, high-speed films are like animated collages – action painting with the stress very much on action. (‘If words fail use your teeth’, as an inter-title in one of his films declares.) In an interview from 1983 included on Gazwrx …, Keen argues how his fast cutting technique emphasizes the brutal way in which film works – the claw of the projector dragging the film through the gate, 24 frames per second, rapidly devouring and spewing images – although, as he also wryly puts it, ‘speed is relative, you know?’
Keen was born in 1923, in Trowbridge, Wiltshire. He spent World War II working on experimental bombers and tanks; an experience which was must have been an influence on later works such as Day of the Arcane Light (1969) and the various iterations of his Artwar film throughout the 1990s, which feature images of warplanes, or civilian aircraft taken from the found footage or at airshows. After leaving the army, Keen moved first to London, where he encountered abstract and Surrealist art, and then to Brighton where he met and married Jackie Foulds, who features in many of Keen’s films from the 1960s and ‘70s. He was aged almost 40 when he made his debut, Wail, partly as a way of helping maintain a college film society which he was involved in running. In the early ‘60s his films found their way onto the UK’s small amateur film circuit, and later gained more exposure on the nascent underground film circuit of the late ‘60s, at venues such as Better Books in London (a hub for the city’s counterculture scene) and with both the BFI and the London Film-Maker’s Co-Op. Throughout the 1970s, ‘80s and into the ‘90s, Keen found support for his work from both art contexts (including the 1977 Hayward Gallery exhibition ‘Perspectives on Avant-Garde Film’) and British television, during the early days of Channel Four, when it had a commitment to more radical forms of broadcasting, rather than the trashy makeover shows and miserable reality-TV it peddles today. Early in 2009, Permanent Gallery in Brighton held ‘GAZWRX & RAYDAY’, an exhibition of works by Keen and Ian Helliwell, marking the launch not only of the BFI DVD set, but also a boxed edition of Keen’s lively broadsheet publication Rayday, produced by Permanent Gallery.
With their blunderbuss shots of plastic toys, comic strips, advertisements and pin-ups, a number of Keen’s films from the 1960s – such as Cineblatz (1967), White Lite (1968) and Marvo Movie (1967) – might be said to share certain formal similarities with British Pop Art, in particular the work of Eduardo Paolozzi, yet Keen never considered himself a Pop artist in the sense that it is understood today as a historical movement. For Keen, popular culture is just part of the contemporary landscape, there for the taking, and he admits to a nostalgia and preference for the handmade (though I’ve often thought that the handmade is a characteristic peculiar to 1950s and ‘60s British Pop – dowdy austerity Britain, dreaming of America’s glass, chrome and plastic visions of the future.). And it’s in the handmade, homespun quality of Keen’s films that much of their power resides. Though much of his work is made on 8mm and 16mm film – the filmstrips often scratched into, bleached or painted over, giving them a distinct sense of physicality, and often involving multiple projection – the handmade quality is evident even as Keen moves forward with technology: a good example being Omozap Terribelis + Afterblatz 2, which features animated, computer generated drawings made with a My First Sony toy. Also striking is the sense of community one gets from these works: friends and family all happily taking part, whether playing roles or just appearing in the many diary films from which Keen also sources much of his imagery. Mad Love (1972–8), for instance, is an affectionate homage to silent film and film history, constructed from still shots and tableaus featuring relatives or fellow artists and writers acting out scenes fondly spoofing or imitating movie genres; in Keen’s words, friends ‘playing at being stars’.
In this regard, Keen is a fellow traveller of US experimental filmmakers such as Kenneth Anger, Jack Smith and Andy Warhol: his films convey a strong ‘can do’ attitude and sense of creative self-sufficiency and artistic self-empowerment. This could also be described as a punk sensibility, and some of his work – especially where they seem to evoke a kind of Cold War fear of impending apocalypse, as in the desolate landscape depicted in Day of the Arcane Light, for instance, or the violence of Artwar – seem to have a distinctly post-punk quality to them. In addition to its avant-garde aspects, Wail, for instance, predates Bruce Connor’s use of B-movie and medical imagery in his video for Devo’s Mongoloid (1978) by nearly 20 years, and many of the imagery used in the films suggests similar rock’n’roll, horror film and comic book reference points to Off the Bone-era Cramps or The Very Things’ The Bushes Scream While My Daddy Prunes. The eerie soundtracks to Marvo Movie (which also features the voice of the brilliant poet Bob Cobbing) or Instant Cinema (1964–5/2007) could even be straight off an early 1980s record by Throbbing Gristle or Cabaret Voltaire.
Gazwrx is a rich compendium of Keen’s work: it features four DVDs, and a highly informative booklet that, along with notes to the work and a biographical essay by the box-set’s producer, William Fowler, also includes a selection of the artist’s striking posters and drawings, which visually shout and scream with the energy and anger of a Jean Dubuffet or John Heartfield. Hopefully, with the release of Gazwrx, his work will now find wider audiences and in this new decade bring Keen – now 85 – the recognition he deserves as a pioneer of avant-garde film.
Title taken from a short epigraph by Jeff Keen published in the booklet for Gazwrx: The Films of Jeff Keen
