modernism and australia: documents on art, design and architecture 1917-1967

by Ann Stephen (Editor), Andrew McNamara (Editor), Philip Goad (Editor), 2007

This collection of 200 papers introduces the ideas of modernism and its influence on Australia. The main players of the time period from 1917-1967 convey in their own words the tensions, aspirations and paradoxes behind the reception of modernism. Each document is accompanied by expert commentaries from the editors. The first anthology covering modernist art, design, and architecture in Australia, it chronicles the dogged institutional resistance that greeted modernism, particularly in the fine arts, and yet reveals a surprising acceptance of modernism in the commercial realms.

museum: film: jack smith and the destruction of atlantis: mary jordan 2007

"Smith declared that all museums should be free and all true art belongs to the public. he likened art collectors to thieves who remove artworks from the public domain" david ebony, art in america may 2007 p. 47

taking note: p. adams on the films of saul levine

artforum may 2007 xlv no. 9 pp. 351-355

Saul Levine has been one of the most underrated filmmakers in the American avant-garde cinema throughout his more than forty-year-long career. His one-man program at the New York Film Festival last year was his first, although he had been included in group screenings there before. The five films selected were so old (made between 1967 and 1983) that they were promoted as restored artifacts. Only in the past decade has New York’s Anthology Film Archives devoted occasional programs to him. Yet if someone were to write a critical history of the avant-garde cinema in Boston (as David E. James did for Los Angeles in his magisterial 2005 book, The Most Typical Avant-Garde: History and Geography of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles), Levine would be its hero. He seldom leaves the city, where, as a professor at the Massachusetts College of Art, he has been one of the most influential teachers of filmmaking in the nation, and his energies have for decades sustained the larger community of avant-garde filmmakers in Boston.

The chief reason for his neglect, or isolation, may not have been his geographical location, however, but rather his long commitment to 8-mm and Super 8 formats (although he has blown copies up to 16 mm for distribution by the Film-Makers’ Cooperative and Canyon Cinema since the 1970s). A figure of the perennial Left, Levine has identified with and championed the small gauges as if they were marginalized citizens of the republic of cinema. By example, he has taught his students to cling to their artistic freedom by seeking out the least expensive modes of filmmaking and, as Emerson wrote in the essay “Experience,” to “hold hard to this poverty, however scandalous, and by more vigorous self-recoveries, after the sallies of action, possess our axis more firmly.” As a consequence of this ascetic attitude toward the medium, Levine embraced video much earlier than did those of his fellow filmmakers who shared his passion for the texture of celluloid. For instance, Stan Brakhage—with whom Levine studied in the early ’70s and who was, more significantly, the greatest influence on his work—resorted to painting on film in his last years rather than make the switch. When the expenses of 16-mm production temporarily drove Brakhage into a detour of making first 8-mm films (in 1964) and later Super 8 films (in 1976), he thought of his engagement with the smaller gauges as exemplary for younger filmmakers. Of those who followed his example, Levine has been the most persistent. He started shooting 8 mm in 1965, with Salt of the Sea, and to this day remains faithful to the small gauge.

Viewing a large span of Levine’s work in a short time reveals the grand scale of the project lurking within the humble titles and modest formal ambitions of his insistent efflux of lyrical films. In a sense, to use the terminology of William Butler Yeats, perhaps the foundational poet for this filmmaker who once imagined that poetry would be his vocation, Levine’s work might be seen as the antithetical counterpart to that of Jonas Mekas. They both give us a vivid feeling for daily life lived in urban America over the past forty years (add at least ten more for Mekas’s oeuvre); few other major avant-garde filmmakers are as convincing at disclosing a world filled with other people as Mekas and Levine (the tragically short-lived Warren Sonbert was of that select company). But whereas Mekas, an irrepressible vitalist, depicts his ambit as a perpetual celebration, an ongoing party attended by art-world celebrities, Levine continually probes the margins of the gritty surroundings in which he lives and works for flashes of illumination, purchased at the high cost of a skepticism that seldom permits him either the ecstatic self-exhibition that characterizes Mekas’s on-screen moments or the melancholy of Mekas’s quite moving voice-over interventions. Surprisingly for a filmmaker so taken with Yeats and so influenced by Brakhage, Levine shows no tolerance for mythopoeia.

Beginning in 1967, with roughly a dozen short films under his belt, Levine spent six years reediting 8-mm prints of the Chaplin shorts Easy Street (1917) and In the Park (1915), incorporating television images of an antiwar protest in which the Boston filmmaker participated. The result was The Big Stick/An Old Reel (1967–73), his self-tutorial in montage, the ascesis of narrative, and the beauties of caustic rhythms. In the early stages of that work’s construction, Levine was teaching filmmaking at Tufts University, in Medford, Massachusetts, but he would soon be fired, if not specifically for his role in occupying a campus building during a protest over the dismissal of an African-American secretary, then for his political activism generally. Together with (my future wife) filmmaker Marjorie Keller, then a student forced to withdraw from Tufts over the same protest, Levine moved to Chicago to attend graduate school and to edit the national SDS newspaper, New Left Notes. A dual portrait of Keller and himself amid rounds of political protest is at the heart of Levine’s most impressive early film, New Left Note (1968–82). Its title conjoins the SDS publication with his still ongoing series of films, all called “Notes,” which may well be his central achievement as a filmmaker. (He has made thirteen films in this series to date.) The deceptively modest term identifies the primary conceit of these films—that they are epistolary gestures, made to convey the news of what is happening in the filmmaker’s life—while suggesting that they are also unitary points in an extended melody. The rapid montage of New Left Note effectively levels and integrates the welter of events and perceptions amassed in the film: Nixon on television, thousands gathered on the New Haven Green to support Bobby Seale, friends soaking in a public fountain, street marches against the war in Vietnam, and luminous glimpses of the filmmaker’s domestic life with his new girlfriend.

image: saul levine, new left note, 1968–82, strips from a color film in 8 mm, 27 minutes 45 seconds.

Exhibition 3: A Theatre Without Theatre

museu d'art contemporani de barcelona

may 25 - september 12 2007

A Theatre Without Theatre examines the relationships and interchanges between the theatre and the visual arts during the 20th century. Starting out from the theories expounded by Vsevolod Meyerhold, Antonin Artaud, Samuel Beckett and Tadeusz Kantor, among others, which profoundly transformed the classic theatre space, and their correspondence with historic avant-garde movements (Futurism, Dadaism and Constructivism), a story is structured that finds its point of inflection in the inventive fervour of the nineteen-sixties. This was a time in which numerous contrasts were formulated between the two disciplines that continued up to the late eighties. The exhibition presents a critical reading of the consequences of these contributions to art by highlighting paradigmatic moments and authors through itineraries that reconstruct a complex fabric going beyond the linear, chronological reading; from Hugo Ball and Dadaism to Mike Kelley, from Oskar Schlemmer to Dan Graham, from Minimalism to the post-Minimalist generations of artists such as Bruce Nauman and James Coleman.

exhibition 2: the secret public: the last days of the british underground 1978 - 1988

23 Mar - 6 May 2007

Featuring: Charles Atlas, Bodymap, Leigh Bowery, Victor Burgin, Marc Camille Chaimowicz, Michael Clark, Peter Doig, Duvet Brothers, Brian Eno, Cerith Wyn Evans, Gilbert and George, Gorilla Tapes, Richard Hamilton, Derek Jarman, Isaac Julien, Tina Keane, Sandra Lahire, Linder, Stuart Marshall & Neil Bartlett, John Maybury, Neo-Naturists, Julian Opie, Jon Savage, Peter Saville, Mark E. Smith, Wolfgang Tillmans, Trojan, Stephen Willats, and others.

A disquieting, playful, and intensely urban exhibition rooted in the political landscape of the '80s, The Secret Public examines the dark flowering of creativity which took shape in the UK between 1978 and 1988. From Leigh Bowery's five-night performance, filmed through the one-way glass of a London gallery window, to Jon Savage's photographs of neglected corners of London and Richard Hamilton's Treatment Room (1982) in which Margaret Thatcher's televised image hangs ominously over an operating table, this exhibition offers a re-evaluation of Britain's recent political past, highlighting the subversive tendencies and lasting influence of a group of artists working across art, fashion, film, dance, performance, video and music.

A time of heightened political, economic and social change - from the recession and civil unrest of Thatcherite Britain, to the advent of AIDS - the late '70s and '80s saw a creative energy emerge in the UK with its own particular and potent shape: a covert form that sat outside established institutional practices of the time, creating its own network of activities, events, economies and celebrities. As a generational grouping of artists and personalities, it is perfectly described by the title of a fanzine created by Linder and Jon Savage and published in Manchester in 1978: The Secret Public.
Just as the punk movement of earlier years represented a volatile, ambiguous celebration of violence, negativity and protest, the artists gathered together in this show responded to a darkening view of the world. Finding resonances in the area of performance, but also drawing on film, video, fashion and music, these artists fused a range of contemporary and historical reference, creating works exploring gender, and sexuality, and the use of the body as both spectacle and a metaphor for the social 'body'. Arguably, the period can be seen as a last outburst of radical experimentation before the onslaught of consumerism established an environment in which 'alternative' culture could immediately be co-opted into the mainstream.
By focussing on the years between the death of punk and the birth of the YBA phenomenon, The Secret Public invites a consideration of the UK's current artistic and cultural landscape in relation to these landmarks, directing attention to the connections between art and politics, and to the aesthetics of club and pop culture which figured so largely during this period and which continue to influence a wide range of artistic practices.

The Secret Public. The Last Days of the British Underground 1978 - 1988 is conceived and produced by Kunstverein München, and curated by Stefan Kalmár & Michael Bracewell. Associate curators are Ian White & Daniel Pies. The exhibition was made possible through the support of Kulturstiftung des Bundes and The Henry Moore Foundation.

exhibition 1: picasso, braque and early film in cubism

NEW YORK, April 20 - June 23, 2007—PaceWildenstein announces the first exhibition ever devoted to the role of early film in the development of Cubism. Picasso, Braque, and Early Film in Cubism, on view from April 20 through June 23, 2007 at 32 East 57th Street, New York City, deals with the critical role played by early cinema in the formation of Cubism. The exhibition recreates the excitement of the artists’ interest in film as they invented a new style of painting that could meet the challenges of a perceptually re-invented world. Bernice Rose, former Senior Curator of Drawings at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, curated the exhibition from an original concept proposed by Arne Glimcher. This exhibition is the gallery’s seventh and most ambitious exhibition devoted to the work of Pablo Picasso, in the more than 25 years that the gallery has represented his estate. The exhibition concentrates on the Cubist years 1907 through 1914 as the period in which early film became apparent as a vital formative element in Cubism.

trauma and visuality - art spiegelman's maus and in the shadow of the towers: katalin orban

representations 97 winter 2007 pp. 57-89

" in fact the interpenetration of memory and history discoureses - the two sustaining and helpfully moderating each other - can aid in avoiding both the radical abondonment of causality, continuity and agency and the false sense of agency supplied by a 'harmonizing narrative' ". p.85

benjamin and the traces of the detective: carlo salzini

new german critique 100 vol 34 no 1 winter 2007 pp. 165-187

"depicting the city as a place of danger and adventure, it [the detective novel] played with the fears and anxieties of bourgeois society, which like to indulge in the feeling of an ideological terror. it has also romantacized the dull existence of the city dweller and rescued the sense of individuality and singularity that modrnity has lost in the labyrinth of the crowd:. p. 184

the artist as historian: mark godfrey

october 120 spring 2007: pp. 140-172

"there are the projects that deploy photographs films discovered after directed searches in archives. some artists explore such material in detail to indicate the histories recorded in the images, while at the same time acknowledging the fallibility of the archive and the insrutability of the discovered images" p.143

"the artist is the historian who can open up new ways of thinking about the future. the future is one where the histories of the dispossessed are acknowledged ... the future is where nationalistic monuments fade into air and crumble away ... previously unrecognised stories are told, new voices created ... work is oriented to the future, and avoiding both nostalgia and despair, it remains ever hopeful." pp. 171-172

sgt peppers and cartographic memory of place

Ode to an England at the crossroads by James Button June 2, 2007: Sydney Morning Herald

But claims that Sergeant Pepper fathered hippies, psychedelia, progressive rock or the 1967 summer of love surely miss the point. The album is about something both more ordinary and more weird: England.

It is an England of brass bands, fun fairs and music halls; double-decker buses, home maintenance and holidays by the sea; rain, of course, and cups of tea. It is an England that is timeless and caught at a distinct moment in time, as the old ticks over to the new, lords and armies lose their grip on the land and a girl runs away from home to meet a man from the motor trade. It is England at a precise point in the lives of John Lennon and Paul McCartney, whose highly competitive partnership reaches its creative peak on Sergeant Pepper, before the bitter slide towards separation.

Experimental Cinema, The Film Reader

by Wheeler Dixon
Experimental Cinema, The Film Reader brings together key writings on American avant-garde cinema to explore the long tradition of underground filmmaking from its origins in the 1920s to the work of contemporary film and video artists. The Reader traces the development of major movements such as the New American Cinema of the 1960s and the Structuralist films of the 1970s, examining the work of key practitioners and recovering neglected filmmakers. Contributors focus on the ways in which underground films have explored issues of gender, sexuality and race, and foreground important technical innovations such as the use of Super 8mm and video. Each section features an editor's introduction setting debates in their context. The book concludes with a valuable filmography of key films available.

Imagining Reality: The Faber Book of Documentary

by Kevin MacDonald and Mark Cousins
Imagining Reality is not an academic tome. It is an honest collection of views of cinema’s forgotten form, a form hi-jacked by television and then too often treated like news footage. Nicholas Fraser editor of BBC 2’s "Fine Cut" documentary strand describes documentary filmmakers as "the mendicant friars of our times, visiting one forlorn hell-hole after another in a vain effort to correct the growing view that everything is no more than virtual."

In a sense, cinema having largely turned its back on documentary in favour of fiction has helped preserve the documentary form, keeping it relatively safe from searching examination, whereas film fiction is now venerated like literature.

Cartographic Cinema

by Tom Conley
Cartography and cinema are what might be called locational machinery. Maps and movies tell their viewers where they are situated, what they are doing, and, to a strong degree, who they are. In this groundbreaking work, eminent scholar Tom Conley establishes the ideological power of maps in classic, contemporary, and avant-garde cinema to shape the imaginary and mediated relations we hold with the world. Cartographic Cinema examines the affinities of maps and movies through comparative theory and close analysis of films from the silent era to the French New Wave to Hollywood blockbusters. In doing so, Conley reveals that most of the movies we see contain maps of various kinds and almost invariably constitute a projective apparatus similar to cartography. In addition, he demonstrates that spatial signs in film foster a critical relation with the prevailing narrative and mimetic registers of cinema. Conley convincingly argues that the very act of watching films, and cinema itself, is actually a form of cartography. Unlike its function in an atlas, a map in a movie often causes the spectator to entertain broader questions—not only about cinema but also of the nature of space and being.

Philosophy Goes to the Movies: An Introduction to Philosophy

by Christopher Falzon, a philosopher at the University of Newcastle
Philosophy Goes to the Movies is a new kind of introduction to philosophy that makes use of the movies to explore philosophical ideas and positions. From art-house movies like Cinema Paradiso to Hollywood blockbusters like The Matrix, the movies we have grown up with provide us with a world of memorable images, events and situations that can be used to illustrate, illuminate and provoke philosophical thought.

Film Histories: An Introduction and Reader

by Paul Grainge, Mark Jancovich, and Sharon Montieth
Arranged chronologically, Film Histories is a wide-ranging anthology that covers the history of film from 1885 to the present. Each chapter contains an introduction by the editors on key developments within the respective period, followed by a classic piece of historical research about that period. Various approaches to film history are taken by the authors of the articles, exposing readers to different forms of historical research. Topics include: the history of audiences, exhibition, marketing, censorship, aesthetic history, political history, and historical reception studies.

Film Histories concentrates on the so-called historical turn in film studies, demonstrating that film history is about more than simply key films, directors, and movements. Also included is a preface explaining the structure and organization of the book. The contents are divided into sections on American and non-American research, thus designed to reach a wide student audience at the undergraduate level. Chapter introductions provide an overview of international developments in film.

Screening the Past: Film and the Representation of History

by Tony Barta: Research Fellow in History at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia
Film and television have been accepted as having a pervasive influence on how people understand the world. An important aspect of this is the relationship of history and film. The different views of the past created by film, television, and video are only now attracting closer attention from historians, cultural critics, and filmmakers. This volume seeks to advance the critical exploration scholars have recently begun. Barta begins by addressing the various ways the past is "screened" for our understanding and relates the art of film to other media. The essays that follow deal primarily with the changing perspectives of political and social developments--and changing concepts of ideology, gender, or culture--in films and television programs made for historically shaped reasons. Chapters by filmmakers explore issues of context and intent in their own projects. Scholars and general readers interested in film and cultural studies will find this an important volume.

Screening the Past: Memory and Nostalgia in Cinema

by Pam Cook
This lively and accessible collection explores film culture's obsession with the past, offering searching and provocative analyses of a wide range of titles from Mildred Pierce and Brief Encounter to Raging Bull and In the Mood for Love. It engages with current debates about the role of cinema in mediating history through memory and nostalgia, suggesting that many films use strategies of memory to produce diverse forms of knowledge which challenge established ideas of history, and the traditional role of historians. The work of contemporary directors such as Martin Scorsese, Kathryn Bigelow, Todd Haynes and Wong Kar-wai is used to examine the different ways they deploy creative processes of memory, arguing that these movies can tell us much about our complex relationship to the past, and about history and identity. Pam Cook also investigates the recent history of film studies, re-viewing the developments that have culminated in the exciting, if daunting, present moment. Classic essays sit side by side with new research, contextualized by introductions which bring them up-to-date, and provide suggestions for further reading. The result is a rich and stimulating volume that will appeal to anyone with an interest in cinema, memory and identity.