In New York, as part of MOMA's Modern Mondays: An Evening with Dara Friedman (yesternight Dec 7, 7:00 p.m.)
Miami artist who presents and discusses her film Musical (2008), which was recently acquired by MOMA. Friedman invited about sixty ordinary New Yorkers to suddenly, surprisingly break into song—seemingly in mid-stride, whether in the middle of a block or inside a building."
MOMA also has the Tim Burton show.
Sophie Calle retrospective at the Whitechapel Gallery in London
The Artur Zmijewski show of Polish video maker is at X Initiative and Projects 91: Artur Zmijewski is at MOMA.
When decrees start raining down from the Englishman's castle - or rather would-be moat jumping politicians - on how best to eat biscuits in order to avoid coughing and spluttering or even worse the increasing and easily misused over-use of surveillance on citizens. Perhaps time to take another look at our meager existence. Psychoanalyst and psychotherapist Robert Bosnak: "it is becoming more or less recognised within many sides and fields and schools of psychoanalysis that we are a very dissociable collection of states. This used to be seen as abnormal psychology but we begin to see more and more that that is more or less the norm. If it becomes extreme then you get people with what used to be called
Multiple personality. So then the states are completely disassociated, they have
no contact with each other. In the normal way the states are relatively
independent and autonomous and there is contact between them, but it is not that
I am a single self that over/during my life fractures. No, I am as far as I can
see it, a multiplicity of states that is in a constant state of
interaction."
Cyberdreamwork -an internet dream network
Embodiment: Creative Imagination in Medicine, Art and Travel (Routledge, 2007)
Bosnak is now a European émigré residing in Australia. American director Spike Jonze, rather than using studio sets to create another world, chose to shoot Where the Wild Things Are on location outside Melbourne. This adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s 1963 kids' story book translates oddly as a film and some adults attention may wander: those who've outgrown stories and fairy tales. Along with the kids, though, those who still harbour wonder won't wane in the film's beauty and naïveté. "Each ‘wild thing’ represents specific emotions, echoing Max’s relationships in the real world," said Lance Acord (ravishing widescreen Super 35 cinematographer and DP on the director's other 2 features Being John Malkovich and Adaptation).
Architect Le Corbusier wrote in The City of Tomorrow and its Planning: “nature presents itself to us as a chaos … the spirit which animates Nature is a spirit of order ”
Barry Patten's famous design for the Myer Music Bowl (1959) in Melbourne.
"Inside all of us is...everything we've ever seen, everything we've ever done, and everyone we've ever loved." 18 of the story's 338 words.
The gentleness of Spike Jonze's large beasts (actors in costume while the CGI of the creatures’ faces was done at Framestore in London) is all the more poignant when the scary roar arrives. De facto leader of the pack Carol (voiced by James Gandolfini) is somewhat secretly a frustrated architect (other beasts being more adept at demolition) and creates a tableau vivant for the young boy (or rather King Max manqué) to pop his head through. Overtones of Hans-Jürgen Syberberg's film Karl May about the prolific and popular C19th German author who wrote adventure tales set in America's Wild West without ever leaving his desk or prison cell. More so, as later in Where the Wild Things Are, Carol has overseen the building of a communal village for Max and the beasts. But when the hippy-ish beast KW returns with two adopted owls (well, more like kidnapped as she pelts them down from the sky to Max's befuddlement), Carol metaphorically hits the roof over this extended family. The scary part comes when Max (quite humbly) asks Carol whether, as King, he can have a small private place within the new structure. It's a scene akin to that in Mike Leigh's film Happy-Go-Lucky when the pent up driving instructor goes berserk almost strangling his student Poppy - and for the first time ever she looses her contagious smile. These many pellucid moments of human ennui allow Where the Wild Things Are to succeed in being far more than just a trip down memory lane.
To be away from home and yet to find
one's self everywhere at home, to see the world, to be at the centre of the
world and yet remain hidden from the world.
Charles Baudelaire: The Painter of Modern Life (1863)
"Dreaming's not a luxury I allow in my company," barks ballet impresario Boris Lermontov (Anton Walbrook) in The Red Shoes (1948-based around Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale: a biography well-worth a Christmas read). And in spite of all the melodrama and wondrous artifice of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's now legendary film, or perhaps precisely because of their use of fantasy, this exquisitely digitally restored film (the Technicolor has to be seen on the big screen) still packs an emotional punch and in film historian Ian Christie's words "strike a blow for art and beauty amid post-war austerity". Even the opening minutes of audience members taking their seats is a choreographed swell. In our psychotically obsessed decade of celebrity there couldn't possibly be a more relevant film or one that pleaded so eloquently the defense of following one's star.
Martin Scorsese's The Film Foundation "that combines the best of the past with our digital present"
Frank Auerbach: London Building Sites 1952-1962 at the Courtauld - New York Times and Sunday Times interview
"Why do you want to dance?, "Why do you want to live?" is Lermontov's exchange with his new ballerina protégé. And he's not without worldly advice: "It is far more disheartening to have to steal than to be stolen from," encouraging his new young composer. Advice no doubt heeded by the 17 year-old dancers Irlan and Isabela who transcend the favelas of Rio de Janeiro for life in the world of classical ballet - Beadie Finzi's doco Only When I Dance (originated by producer Giorgia Lo Savio).
Marketing the film with The New York Times quote "...a real life Billy Elliot", there isn't much in this doco that hasn't been seen before, though, that doesn't lessen it's power, conviction or necessity. Potentially, Irlan really is a young Carlos Acosta (the Cuban Royal Ballet principal). However, this doco skirts interviewee potential on many of the questions it raises.
Frederick Wiseman's doco La Danse, The Paris Opéra Ballet (London Film Festival) is released by Soda Pictures next year.
In her review of New York City Ballet’s The Nutcracker, New York Times critic Roslyn Sulcas referred to W. H. Auden's essay Ballet’s Present Eden: "All real ballets take place in a world where there is no memory and no anticipation; the joys of life are those of the immediate and eternal present."
The Habit of Art plays at the Royal National Theatre
Philosopher Herbert Marcuse writes about the social meaning of biology - history seen not as a class struggle, but a fight against our civilisation's repression of our instincts: "Sex produces the energy, and it is repressed so the energy can be channeled into progress - but the price of progress is the prevalence of guilt instead of happiness."
Admirers of Nicholas Ray's Rebel Without a Cause (1955) will be drawn to another struggling youngster in the Eureka!/Masters of Cinema DVD release of rarely seen La tête contre les murs (Head Against the Wall, 1959), Georges Franju's (Les yeux sans visage) debut feature after making his name directing documentaries.A rebellious son is incarcerated in a mental asylum by his father (like the source novel's author Hervé Bazin). The film's lead actor Jean-Pierre Mocky was originally to direct the film having originated and organised the entire project: "psychiatry itself was a dreaded subject for filmmakers [at the time]", says Mocky in the short DVD extra and "an argument that persists today", over whether patients on the road to recovery should be released. Always value for money with Eureka - great print transfer and 47 page booklet with a non-sycophantic 1968 essay from Brit critic Raymond Durgnat and a 1959 interview with Franju: "The transformation of the 'natural' into the 'artificial' is definitely a question of angle and light." What may sound obvious bears closer inspection:
"only sick people dream of escaping" (44.01)
"society is a game and you have to learn how to play it" (57.57)
Many, many other great reasons to see this film: singer Charles Aznavour's brilliant first foray in front of the camera and Maurice Jarre's (Lawrence of Arabia) score, Schuftan's cinematography
Jean-Pierre Mocky's Les Drageurs
Frederick Wiseman's Titicut Follies
Le Corbusier’s first theoretical statement on Urbanism begins with the straight line and the right angle as the means by which man conquers nature.
At the Fifth European Psychoanalytic Film Festival (epff5) screening of Simple Things director Aleksei Popogrebsky (Koktebel, 2003) on (Artificial Eye DVD) wanted to avoid what Sidney Lumet termed "rubber-duck syndrome...that we should present the origin of his [a character's] trouble...the reasons he was depressed as a child...the minute he realises the 'muscle' is atrophic he does stupid things the minute he thinks." Ian Christie compared the film to Nikita Mikhalkov's Five Evenings (1978) describing Simple Things as "the prose of everyday life, unexceptional lives in unexceptional places". The film's cinematographer was experienced in documentaries and by continually framing foreground the central character, context drops away and is re-fashioned by his position in the film frame. This festival's theme was Screen Memories of Eastern Europe - Bernardo Bertolucci is Honorary President and there was a discussion of The Conformist (1969) and it's character's yearning for normality and its wake of destruction and Last Tango in Paris (1972). A presentation on film editing proposed three journeys in the process: that of the viewer, the actors and the director/editor. "Every cut is a question," explained NFTS (National Film and Television School) lecturer and filmmaker Asher Tlalim.
Aleksandr Petrov (Александр Петров) kicked off the festival (though arriving a day late) with his painted glass animations: The Old Man and the Sea (1999) (Academy Award for Animated Short Film), The Cow, Корова (Korova) (1989) and The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, Сон смешного человека (Son smeshnovo cheloveka) (1992) - "what takes seconds on the screen usually takes years [to animate]...compared to Freud I'm a complete amateur...it helped me with my own dream that I hadn't properly remembered...Dostoyevsky (The Dream) used to say we can't love without tormenting ourselves." Petrov's process allows for the disintegration of the definitive edge forever in the world of actual fictions not actual fact.
Romanian director George Dorobantu's Elevator shot on DV over 18 days for less than $500 (Chicago Film Fest entry this year) is based on a true story of two teenagers stuck in a London lift for 4 days and fashioned into a play by Gabriel Pintilei (staged next spring in London)- "a long relationship in a very short space of time" says the director "...a kind of 'stuck' road movie for me...I'm a fan of road movies and how this can change a person's life". The film resonates with the question of what happens when imagination is not enough in relationship to the reality - Michael Brearley (President of the British Psychoanalytical Society) suggested Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale and Perdita's 're-birth' - "an escapist magical answer in relation to a larger loss". Other films and much else was packed into the one and a half-day festival including a discussion on censorship with Maggie Mills (18 years with the British Board of Film and Video Classification) and the controversial rape scene in Gaspar Noé's Irreversible (2002) -a film new to most of the delegates and Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange.
Félix Guattari's posthumous 1995 Chaosophy: capitalism will keep enforcing neurosis as a way of maintaining normality.
Inconspicuous consumption
"Memories are not history but original creations by the unseen artist. The diverse colours scattered about are not reflections of the outside world but belong to the painter himself, and come passion-tinged from the heart- thereby making the record on the canvas unfit for use as evidence in a court of law...So it is as literary material that I offer my memory pictures....." Rabindranath Tagore
Is Jim Jarmusch incapable of ever making a film one resists seeing to the end? The Limits of Control (William S. Burroughs 70s title) teases and tempts the viewer: perhaps all just being a slight of hand wafted over one's eyelids, the second fleeting dream between falling back to sleep for an extra hour and waking. Burroughs: "Suggestions are words. Persuasions are words. Orders are words. No control machine so far devised can operate without words."
"among us there are those who aren't among us"
Most people say "Each one of us is a planet spinning in eternity...I say each of us are molecules spinning..."
"nothing is true, everything is imagined"
"Life is a handful of dust/dirt"
"The best films are dreams that you're not sure have happened," muses Tilda Swinton's character The Blonde. The Lone Man (Isaach de Bankolé) often frequents the art in Madrid's Reina Sofia. Bill Murray (The American) seems to be seen dying quickly in quite a few films lately (Zombieland). We know how he feels.
Christopher Doyle's cinematography (having honed his craft over the years in an Asian aesthetic).
Rimbaud's Le Bateau Ivre
The Jim Jarmusch Collection on Optimum DVD, Vol 2
A quote from the introduction to a new book on parametricism (the digital modeling of self-organising architecture - settlement patterns and connectivity of individual elements) - intrinsic to the work of Frei Otto and Zaha Hadid.
Digital Architecture: Passages Through Hinterlands
"Peter Cook [architect] colourfully described London’s architecture scene as having Englishmen too often “trying to be as cool as the Swiss, as coy as the Dutch and as straightforward as the Americans”. For half a century, away from the polite modernism of the larger London scene, a few schools and visionary architects have made London a leader in the theoretical and technical developments of an architecture that embraces digital speculation and conjecture."
Kostas Grigoriadis (Shampooo)
Parametric Urbanism: Clusters by Shampoo
Urban Reef
Boom! (Second Sight DVD) is Joseph Losey's 1968 screen adaptation of Tennessee Williams’ play The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here - "the shock of each moment of still being alive". Easy to see why it's one of camp director John Waters' favourite films. Wonderful John Barry lesson in film scoring and lighting, Douglas Slocombe (cameraman). Losey reimagines Wiliams' Southern decadence of body and mind on a private island off Capri. Wealthy, boozing and woozy and wailing Ms. Gosforth (Elizabeth Taylor) partakes of no breakfast to interfere with her "serious comments on the meaning of life" that she haphazardly fails to fashion into a memoir with the help of a young bereaved secretary. But along comes Chris Flanders'Angelo -Angel of Death' (Richard Burton) oozing insouciant sex appeal. Prowling round each other like animals in some luxurious island zoo they are fed and watched by African servants and a midget in military thigh leather boots wielding a Lugar. Noel Coward unexpectedly arrives like an unwanted boatload of Darjeeling tea and smoked salmon and is soon sent packing back to Capri. Reflections of Capri's Casa Malaparte where Mussolini exiled his architect. Angelo strides the parapets as if walking Malaparte's flat roof, a seamless edge of land and sea. Of Godard's Le Mépris (Contempt, 1963). Exiles of the mind and spirit tempting the last fatal boom! The disc includes subtitles for the hard of hearing.
Optimum's Joseph Losey Collection DVD set
Unmade Beds is an impressive line-up of young talent on a small budget from writer/director Alexis dos Santos. Is this London mumblecore? Is what you're searching for really what you want? One tries to ignore the golden windows on the far distant hillside but one is beckoned by them anyway. Through the valley and up that hillside. Seeing nothing, you turn around and there they are golden windows that surrounded you in the first place. What took place in the valley?
Guy Debord's Psychogeography (1955)
Merlin Coverley's Psychogeography (Harpenden: Pocket Essentials)
Will Self's book with drawings by Ralph Steadman (Bloomsbury)
Paper about a form of networked urbanism for East London:
"Embedded with self-learning behavioral and responsive systems, it allows for an intelligent choreography of soft programmatic spaces to create new leisure experiences, negotiating the changing effects of time, weather, programmatic, and crowd dynamical inputs, extending parametric processes to drive urban performance."
At the Wellcome Gallery is Identity: Eight Rooms, Nine Lives - part of a 6 month project on identity. As one interviewee on BBC Radio 4's Start the Week (Nov 23) explained the show questions our "base identity defined by our genetic code...our disposition to be victims" the opposite of being a 'human', "how society sees us, how society uses information - the political and moral choices...religion shaping our identity". At first glance the bright green dividers and unadorned wooden structures resemble a piece of modern installation art semi-circular to the spiral staircase ascending to Henry Wellcome's collection. You soon discover, though, that each room is packed with brain food. Lucky Fiona Shaw has had her work chosen as representative for the 'actors' room. Michael York displays his personal bathroom mirror and David Garrick his C18th actor's equivalent. Hereafter by United Visual Artists uses a high-speed camera creating ghostly mirror effects of any subject in its path.
Clive Wearing, a subject in The Mind Machine (BBC, 1988) is in the Samuel Pepys 'Diary' room. And though he had no short-term memory of daily life he could still continue work as a choir master even remembering music indicated by repeat signs in a score.
New to many will be the Surrealist photographer and writer Claude Cahun of whom Andre Breton wrote: "You are well aware that I consider you one of the most curious spirits (among four or five) of our times."
Disavowals (Tate Publishing)
The show is free so you can choose a room per week if such is your measured desire. Many interesting associated events, too.
If ever an actor uniquely branded his identity on a project it was Orson Welles. Adapted from a novel by Robert Kaplow, Richard Linklater's movie Me and Orson Welles centres around his 1937 Fascist interpretation of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar- his Mercury Theatre's first Broadway show at the age of 22. Egotist, philanderer, great actor, though disputed genius, this film of Welles is rather genteel as no doubt was the persona he presented to the world. A craving to be liked, to succeed, to make up for his childhood? It's also very romantic - who wouldn't like to meet a girl amid the antiquities of New York's Metropolitan Museum and run like the wind? In fact you almost feel like you oughta dislike Me and Orson Welles in some way. But perhaps the reason one can't is that one would be disliking oneself. The urge to be Mr. Welles. To be that kid on that Broadway stage. The memory of resisting at the last moment the bed of that older and beautiful woman you've been courting. And blissfully succumbing. Becoming foolishly besotted when all along you knew she would keep fucking the career success of an Orson Welles. Of flying too close to the sun and wondering, if indeed one's wings grew back, whether flight would ever again be on the agenda. How strong am I really?
Welles even steals the show sitting in an armchair with his back to you and appearing only briefly in Trent's Last Case (1952)
Citizen Kane was recently re-issued by the BFI.
In The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self (Basic Books) Thomas Meitzinger argues that there is no such thing as a self - that doesn't deny a "selfy thing" that we feel but "owning the body as a whole..we identify with this image of our body because we cannot recognise it as an image". As with phantom limb syndrome "the map in the brain has to reorganise itself". Neuro-ethics.
The Matrix.
Diablo Cody's TV series The United States of Tara starring Toni Collette and directed by Steven Spielberg.
Sophie Calle’s Take Care of Yourself (Prenez soin de vous) first aired at the 2007 Venice Biennale and was extended through last summer at The Paula Cooper Gallery in New York and now downstairs at the Whitechapel Gallery: 107 women from all professional walks of life including American composer Laurie Anderson, the fado singer Mísia, the singer Camille a parrott, and a ballerina play their part in a video wall alongside the gallery's photos, texts etc. in forensically examining the break-up of a relationship. Jeanne Moreau reads the text in French, Miranda Richardson in English:
I received an email telling me it was over. I didn't know how to respond. It was almost as if it hadn't been meant for me. It ended with the words, "Take care of yourself.” And so I did. I asked 107 women (including two made from wood and one with feathers), chosen for their profession or skills, to interpret this letter. To analyze it, comment on it, dance it, sing it. Dissect it. Exhaust it. Understand it for me. Answer for me. It was a way of taking the time to break up. A way of taking care of myself.
The upstairs gallery has Calle's earlier work including including The Bronx (1980), with Calle courting south Bronx-ites in New York to escort her to somewhere they'd never been and/or would like to go. She became a fictional character in American novelist Paul Auster's 1994 Leviathan. In response, Calle tried to become the character and Auster responded with the project Personal Instructions for SC on How to Improve Life in New York City (Because she asked... ) She also collaborated with Damien Hirst, who wrote her a long passionate love letter in 1989. "Do I love you? Of course I do, your breath in the mornings, the way that your feet curl around mine when you sleep... ". Upstairs are the workings (and a video - which she says, like her, no-one will watch to the end) of a failed ATM camera project commissioned by a bank.
No one seems to like the new Hirst work on show in London: Wallace Collection and the White Cube. He was spotted late the other night taking Blackberry photos through the window of a Mayfair primitive/antiquities gallery.
Walid Raad's Scratching on Things I Could Disavow: A History of Art in the Arab World/ Part I_Volume 1_Chapter 1 (Beirut: 1992-2005) is at The Paula Cooper Gallery
Like Calle, Raymond Pettibon (Whitechapel Gallery 2001) did not start out with intentions of being an artist. New and old work is on show at Sadie Coles. The Guardian's Adrian Searle:
"But as Pettibon has said, his art - if art it is - is not comics, nor is it literature. (He also admits that it is not in the first rank, as drawing goes.) It is something harder to define, perhaps a record of a sensibility expressing what passes through it and shapes it, grasping moments (lived, seen, read, imagined) as they make their way through the artist."
Michael Kimmelman New York Times interview
The first major multimedia Man Ray show at a New York City museum since 1974, Alias Man Ray: The Art of Reinvention is on at The Jewish Museum and considers how the artist's life and career were shaped by his turn-of-the-century American Jewish immigrant experience and his lifelong evasion of his past.. "Relatively few people know that he was born Emmanuel Radnitzky to Russian Jewish immigrants. In fact, he spent a lifetime suppressing his background to the point of denying he was ever called anything but Man Ray.
The accompanying catalogue is co-published by Yale University Press
The Whitney Museum has Roni Horn aka Roni Horn that showed at Tate Modern earlier this year and travels to The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston in February. Horn is interested in doubling and identity: "I want to make the meaning of a work people's experience of it." Since 1990 Horn has been publishing To Place - photographs of lava, geysers, glacial rivers, and hot pools in Iceland.
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