Careful Looking

Rebecca Cleman
by Andrew Lampert, 2010, co-made with Saul Levine

This year I had the pleasure of being on the jury of Migrating Forms (along with Ben Coonley and Tom Zummer), the reincarnation of the New York Underground Film Festival, held annually at Anthology Film Archives. I am sincere about the “pleasure,” even if it required me to watch nearly every film in situ over two weeks. Though this culminated in my running out into the waning sunlight to let my eyes breathe – overall the experience was invigorating.

Migrating Forms is in its second year, under the direction of Kevin McGarry and Nellie Killian, who put together an astonishingly rigorous program. Along with a careful selection of films and videos on the festival circuit, MF had special programs devoted to Stanya Kahn, Kerry Tribe, and Ed Ruscha, artists whose expected context might be a museum or gallery rather than a theater. The intermingling of these “art world” figures with such “film world” figures as Jean-Pierre Gorin, Straub and Huillet, and Zhao Liang, demonstrates the festival’s interest in the fluidity of moving-image practice, and the breakdown of distinctions between film, video, and high art.

This approach shines especially against the backdrop of two major New York City art surveys that failed to deliver an analogous experience of the moving-image. Though the Whitney Biennial devoted an entire floor to media installations, the film/video program previously focused on experimental filmmakers was excised with little or no critical notice. Though this program had limitations, burying media artists in day-long group screenings, its elimination represented the loss of a cinematic reference or context, favouring the gallery display standard – the installation. The result was a more space-consuming exhibition of a more narrowly defined media art practice, without recognizing it as such.

Meanwhile, PS 1’s Greater New York compromised the media displayed on its main floors by installing it carelessly. Dani Leventhal’s 54 Days This Winter 36 Days This Spring for 18 Minutes, which I had seen in MF, was projected in a large uncarpeted gallery, so that the soundtrack was inaudible. Lucy Raven’s hour-long China Town was essentially displayed in a walk-through space, its subtle soundtrack drowned out by a neighbouring Kalup Linzy installation.

Light Industry’s Ed Halter and Thomas Beard offered a corrective, in their basement room cinema, with an excellent selection of film and video playing daily at 3pm, but when I polled visitors to the show many of them missed this space altogether, ghettoized as it was within the exhibition. To me this shows a limited interest in cinema as a unique site for artistic expression. Part of this might be a lingering suspicion of cinema’s seeming inflexibility and isolationism (perhaps they are thinking of Peter Kubelka’s design for Anthology’s 1970s screening space, outfitted with niche-like seats that partitioned viewers off from one another).

But what Migrating Forms accomplished in total was a celebration of cinema’s potential, allowing artists to explore aspects that might not be suited to a gallery context, without loosing any of the spontaneity or open-endedness associated with a white box free of fixed seating.

Rather than giving out cash-awards or predetermined prizes, the jury is asked to make up its own categories. Our highest honor went to Andrew Lampert, for his evening presentation/performance of The Golden Mean and Considerable Distance (Something Better), as together they represented what we most appreciated about the festival. In these works Lampert deliberately confused intentionality and chance, recorded and live event, injecting the evening with a sense of wayward experimentation.

Considerable Distance made a show of dodging a calculated outcome. As Lampert projected super 8 film from the audience, a separate audio recording provided the narrative of his creative process. In the recording, Lampert outlines the project’s formal constraints to his collaborator Zach Layton, explaining that he’s preparing a performance for Migrating Forms, for which he wants to use up the remainder of a partially shot film roll, which he will have processed the day of the screening and shown site unseen. Layton is charged with selecting and composing scenes on the fly, relating them somehow to the title, which was suggested by Nellie Killian.

Lampert has stated, “Celluloid is not cinema, not even close,” emphasizing all the components that go into the cinematic experience, especially those that extend beyond the artist’s control: the live audience with its expectations and limited attention span, malfunctioning equipment, badly printed films, sound issues, and countless other things that add up to a setting alive with accident.

Andrew Lampert’s The Golden Mean: Charlemagne Palestine, 2010, co-made with Saul Levine, still

And yet this space can also foster devoted concentration, as it did for The Golden Mean, a double-screen video recording of a complete performance by Charlemagne Palestine, shot from two vantages by Lampert and Saul Levine. It was pure coincidence that Lampert and Levine both turned up with cameras, but the end result is an attentive and dynamic recording of Palestine’s performance. What was so effective about Lampert’s evening within MF was that he simultaneously showed how the cinema can be a space for improvisation and recital, while also amplifying formal detail.

 

This was a quality threaded throughout the festival, beginning with the opening night film, Kevin Jerome Everson’s Erie (which received our choice for best long-form film). In the Q & A following the screening, Everson might have surprised a few audience members when he pointed to Ellsworth Kelly as an important influence, speaking of his own attention to the juxtapositions between Erie’s long takes, and the film’s simplicity of form.

This set the stage for other works, such as Harun Farocki’s In Comparison, Deimantas Narkevicius’s Into the Unknown, Paul Abbott’s Wolf’s Froth/ Amongst Other Things, and Dani Leventhal’s 54 Days, to name a few, that certainly treated their aesthetics and material with an attention comparable to the paintings, sculptures, and installations I have seen in museums this past year. It could simply be that the museum space is incapable of doing right by such works, but they ought to be represented somehow. With such a strong and diverse selection of work, Migrating Forms has made a convincing case for the significance of the cinema context in contemporary art practice.


Andrew Lampert’s site

The Whitney Biennial’s handling of media art this past year was the focus of a recorded discussion between Biennial curator Francesco Bonami, art critic Carolina Miranda, and Barney Oldfeld, curator of New Filmmakers at Anthology


Rebecca Cleman is the Director of Distribution of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI). She most recently published “A Parallax View,” on the history and legacy of political video, for the Moving Image Source: http://www.movingimagesource.us/articles/a-parallax-view-20100701. She lives and works in New York City.

 

Related

Skip to content