We launched APEngine with the Kubrick Archive inspired films made by Animation students at the London College of Communication as a ‘live brief’ project.

As part of their latest project, LCC Animation students have made four short films for Moving House – a National Trust initiative – inspired by Khadambi Asalache’s extraordinary decoration of his house at 575 Wandsworth Road in south London. The house was created by Khadambi Asalache, a Kenyan born poet, writer, architect, mathematician and civil servant who came to England in the 1960s. He bought his South London home in 1980 and lived their until his death in 2006. The property will open to visitors in 2012.

Animator Lizzie Oxby led on the project and supported the students as they worked in groups of 6-8 to produce four animated pieces, each piece being based on one of the spaces/rooms in the house.

More information about the house and the project and links to the four films can be found at The National Trust.

Moving House is part of Stories of the World, one of the major projects at the heart of the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad.

Image by Jeremy James with original Photography by Hugo Glendinning Courtesy of Steve Jackman

Michael Carlson and Michael Atavar reflect on recent experiences of the intersection between artist film and documentary. First Michael Carlson…

Putting strict boundaries on a notion of artists’ film and documentary would be both impossible and self-defeating, but the obvious common ground that might define such a genre is linked to process. Later in this piece, Michael Atavar describes his use of ‘process work’ with filmmaker Steve Jackman, which both illustrates and demonstrates the point. There is a natural impulse toward the documentary to follow the process of artistic creation, yet there is an equally natural imperative born of film’s ability to, ‘unearth inner material’.

‘Form is never more than an extension of content,’ said the poet Robert Creeley, and artist film deals with artists is naturally embraces the materials of film narrative. Issac Julien mixed home movies, interview, ‘behind the scenes’ film footage and a Tilda Swinton essay into a portrait of Derek Jarman. Process forms the intrinsic link between art and film. We apply the concept literally to the visual arts, where we believe we ‘see’ work being created (think of Hans Naumath photographing Jackson Pollock painting on glass), and we understand instinctively that moving pictures are all about their own process, put together frame by frame.  In Chris Landreth’s Ryan this means appropriating the tools of animation to approach the animator’s life and work.

Ryan reflects the way documentary film has traditionally chased process while trying to discover what makes things the way they are. I think of filmmaker Mary Lance’s Agnes Martin: With My Back To The World, whose very structure, as well as its composition both reflects and illuminates Martin’s work, or Lucy Walker’s Wasteland, where the documenting of Vic Muniz’ project among the catadores of Rio De Janiero’s garbage dumps becomes part of the completed work itself.

Think back to the Tate Britain’s 2003 exhibition, A Century Of Artists’ Film In Britain, curated by David Curtis, whose broad boundaries included Duncan Grant and Gilbert and George, Kenneth Anger and Steve McQueen, and early shorts by Sally Potter and Peter Greenaway.  It’s a world of crossover; Andy Warhol static films grew into the crucial spin to the elements of artistic process when he filmed Larry Rivers in Sleep; Warhol’s progress from art film to exploitation feature-films provided the model for Sam Taylor-Wood’s career. Yet when actor Ed Harris directed Pollock, a mainstream bio-pic, for all its reliance on the story elements required of feature-film drama, he not only recapitulated Naumath, but made the crucial link between the process of creation shared by artist and the actor.

Our world of Einstein and quantum physics is one where nothing is certain, where everything changes, and where the act of looking at, measuring, documenting an object is assumed to force a change on that object. In the bigger sense, all art is now documentary, and in an immediate sense, the borders between fiction and documentary grow ever more flexible. In Clio Barnard’s The Arbor, that border is assaulted as actors mime the voices of ‘real’ people from Andrea Dunbar’s documentary, and Dunbar’s plays are restaged on the estate where she grew up and one of her daughters still lives a life filled with tragedy and pain. Some critics found the mix less powerful than a straightforward doc about Lorraine Dunbar might have been, yet Barnard moved directly at the crucial question of what process informed Dunbar’s creativity. Explaining Ryan, Chris Landreth quoted Anais Nin, and defined that crucial distinction which informs the new meeting ground of artist film and documentary: ‘we don’t see things as they are, we see things as we are’.

Michael Atavar:

I am an artists’ coach. I work with practitioners on their creativity and also with organisations, helping them to be more creative. I recently ran a mentoring session with Steve Jackman, looking at Ripple Army Flingy Move (with plié back bash), an artists’ film about the late, maverick choreographer, Jeremy James whose life ended in 2000 at the tragically young age of 38.  The r&d for this artists’ film was funded by Portland Green Cultural Projects.

There are several ways that I might work with clients: one-to-one contact, working within a group context, remote conversation, chairing a meeting. Typically clients might see me for a series of sessions. However, in some mentoring relationships, the contact can develop over time to cover a substantial body of work. On other occasions, the time spent can be more abbreviated and used to address a very specific issue.

I work with a variety of techniques, often using a therapeutic model, adopted from my Jungian training. However, I always place creativity at the centre of the working methods – using instinct, encouraging visualisation and developing the client’s own creative voice. Psychologist Arnold Mindell calls this ‘process work’ and that’s exactly what it is – an archaeological journey to unearth inner material.

My work with Steve Jackman was to interrogate the process through which he had come during the shooting of this film.

To make observations.

To notice any omissions or elisions.

To create suggestions for a further trajectory that the practitioner might want to follow.

I encouraged Steve to place himself in the material, to engage directly with the diaries of the late choreographer Jeremy James that are the source material for his project. Even to create himself some of the dance moves described on the pages of the diary – to think about more radical kinds of output for the material that he had already filmed.

During our session together, something also extraordinary happened.  Outside the room in which we were working, a child appeared, playing a pretend trumpet, made out of a piece of rolled up cardboard. I went to see what all the commotion was about and shooed the youngster away. However, when I returned, I realised that it was the ‘child’ that was attempting to get in the room – the chaotic and anarchic presence of the artist that, in a very direct way, was trying to come in to Steve’s practice.

In our work, once this clarity had emerged, it became a simple task of looking at the areas of artist’s process that Steve needed to engage with, in order to take his work to the next level.  I suggested immersing himself in an ‘I’ landscape, a place where embarrassment and failure were useful elements in helping him to move forward.

Perhaps also to address some of the sadness that he felt at Jeremy James’ tragic and untimely death. Here, in a series of empty rooms, stripped of other people’s opinions, forced to be alone, he could find his own true response to the choreographic material. Seeing things as he really is.

About the Authors:

Michael Carlson, author; journalist (Guardian, Independent, FT, Telegraph,Herald Tribune, Lobster, bbc.co.uk); critic (Spectator, TLS, Headpress, London Mag, Kamera) and radio pundit (Saturday Review, Open Book, Brief Lives, Strand).

Michael Atavar is an Artist and a Creative Consultant, author of ‘How To Be An Artist’.

This essay was commissioned by Portland Green Cultural Projects, January 2011

Animate began in 1990 as an Arts Council/Channel 4 scheme and has been supported by the Arts Council England continuously for 21 years.

We set up Animate Projects four years ago, following the sudden death of Dick Arnall, and produced animateprojects.org – a unique resource, with more than 140 films, many by key figures in British animation, including 11 British Animation Awards winners and five BAFTA nominations, as well as interviews, essays and background production materials.

We are very proud of the work that we have been able to support, and would like to thank all the animators, artists, filmmakers, writers, and partners that we’ve worked with over the years, and to everyone who has taken an interest in our work.

Our programme continues, with new works online, until March, and we hope to keep the website live for some time after that.

Whilst we are exploring options for April onwards, we would appreciate any expressions of support that might help.

Please comment on our blog or email us at info@animateprojects.org

Len Lye - Free Radicals, 1958

The Body Electric runs until 13th February 2011 at Ikon.

“Some nights I’d have a dream that my five senses were taken out of my skull, rinsed in a country stream, then stretched out to dry so that when I woke up they’d be as crisp as viola strings. But if they were put back wrongly I’d wake up seeing with my ears and hearing with my eyes – well, it has happened!” - Len Lye

Len Lye - Rainbow Dance, 1936, Courtesy the British Post Office, Len Lye Foundation Govett-Brewster Art Gallery and New Zealand Film Archive

As soon as Len Lye’s Trade Tattoo (1937) begins it takes hold of you in a rush of heightened sensation. You can almost taste and hear its joyful colours; its rhythm pulsates inside you, in your blood and in your bones. It is as if Lye’s own irrepressible energy had lain dormant in the celluloid just waiting to be activated by your presence. The colours, patterns and shapes are possessed by his crazy yet graceful spirit. Lye made work to experience; it is not ‘about’ something, it just ‘is’.

Trade Tattoo is currently being shown as part of Britain’s first comprehensive retrospective of Len Lye’s work; The Body Electric at Birmingham’s Ikon Gallery. A selection of the pioneering animated films he is most known for are on display, along with some incredible kinetic sculptures, paintings, marble sculpture and photograms. Lye was a man with a drive and clarity of vision that might seem almost unnatural, and yet he made work that speaks to our most primal selves, to the senses and the body. His work deals with the vast unknown forces inside and outside us, but with such a lightness of touch, with such wit and charm, that it never seems heavy-handed or pompous.

Lye’s playful, doodling approach to making art was as natural and vital to him as breathing. His work came from what he referred to as ‘the old brain – the deepest level of intuitive awareness’, and he wanted to connect to the shared ancient memory embedded into our cells. Groundbreaking films like Tusalava (1929) and Free Radicals (1958-1979) might be taking place at the beginning of time or on a microscopic scale; on the wall of a cave or the surface of your skin. Creation and evolution are living forces here, growing, mutating and dancing.

The kinetic sculptures which take up much of the second floor of the exhibition are elegant and supernatural. Lye used energy like it was just another material, and like with all his materials he pushed it to its limits. In Universe (1963-1976), Storm King (1965) and the almighty Blade (1959-1976) vast strips of steel are animated by hidden forces, transforming the space around you and within you. In Zebra (1965) a solid object with its own shifting volume and weight is created by a whizzing single strip of fibreglass. As with his film work, the sculptures speak to something beyond words or rational thought, something instinctive and deep within ‘the old brain’. That some of these were merely maquettes for scaled-up, colossal versions to be set into the countryside is testament to the scope of Lye’s imagination and ambition. Lye’s more tender and gentle side can be seen in Roundhead (1961), an exquisite series of circular metal rings which slowly rotate, the innermost of which is his wife’s wedding ring.

Lye was obsessed by movement, and his work outside of film and kinetic sculpture also conveys great energies, trapped or captured in time. Unit (c.1924), a marble sculpture of two figures locked in an embrace, seems ready to unfurl at any moment into some stone age robot, such is the tangible sense of potential energy locked into its simple form. One of Lye’s photograms, Marks and Spencer in a Japanese Garden (Pond People) (1930), depicts organic, hieroglyphic shapes suspended in air like smoke; traces of the artist’s thought process left hanging.

My personal high point of the exhibition is the film Free Radicals, which Lye began in 1958 and completed in 1979. Consisting solely of rough lines scratched into the black film emulsion with a variety of implements including dental tools and Native American arrowheads, it really is, as Stan Brakhage put it, ‘an almost unbelievably immense masterpiece’. These scratches become tangible, mysterious objects rotating in the darkness before you. They dance and turn with the wild, hypnotic drumming of the soundtrack. Ultimately the effect of the film, like much of the work in this exhibition, cannot be conveyed very well verbally, but it is a singularly powerful experience.

About the Author: Edwin Rostron is an artist currently based in London. He was born in Doncaster in 1977 and grew up in Newcastle Upon Tyne. He studied Fine Art at Sheffield Hallam University and Animation at the Royal College of Art. His work is an attempt to visualise the realms of the unconscious and takes inspiration from a myriad of sources including alternative comics, ‘Neo Romantic’ painters such as Paul Nash and Graham Sutherland, and the post-industrial landscape of North-East England, where he grew up. His animations have been shown at festivals such as onedotzero, Pictoplasma and the Australian International Animation Festival, and his comics can be found in shops and online at edwinrostron.com. Edwin was commissioned by Animate Projects in 2010 to make Of Unknown Origin.

Scherzo, Joe Diebes

Ryan Tre-who?  Oh, him?  He’s so oh-ten and that was, like, a decade ago or whatever?

I think we can take it as read that we are now living in the future that we (may or may not have) imagined when we were kids. What follows next will be probably be described as some kind of proto-future, obviously to be followed by a post-present that will ultimately end with a form of alter-future where our bodies have become entirely obsolete and the world is inhabited solely by super-powered disembodied brains. Where is art in all of this? No man, no mere mortal, can make art that can hit the medula oblongata on a gut level; art in the future will be made entirely by computers. Only a logic-based system will be able to tickle and arouse the central nervous system directly.

Joe Diebes is a New York artist focussing primarily in sound-based configurations around visual art. As part of the No Longer Empty group exhibition at last year’s Liverpool Biennial, Diebes exhibited Scherzo. A music film, Diebes’s cameraman Andrew Federman filmed cellist Rubin Khodeli, performing an original score by the artist, from ten different angles. Diebes then created a computer algorithm through which the projected film is played, cutting between each angle at fractions of a second and resequencing these shots to create a frantic and completely new ongoing composition that never repeats itself and never ends. Much like Trecartin, Diebes’s language (in this instance, his music) is frenetic and can only be absorbed by some form of aural and visual osmosis, and the results are equally formidable. The language, though it has been originally created for the purpose of being expressed specifically through the medium of film, the medium itself appropriates and translates this language according to its own systems; a system of which at least the necessary element has been user-generated and may still be programmed to act variably. Taken in this respect, Diebes’s algorithm the second player in a sport with the four components outlined by P Adams Sitney in his definition of structural film, and the game is being played out between their nuances.

Of course, Diebes is not the first artist to use algorithmic computations to create an original artwork; the practice is well-established within computer-generated imagery and fractal art. Admittedly the use of algorithms in film and video production is more sparse. A notable example is Variable Montage (2002) by Marc Lafia, exhibited that year at ZKM Karlsruhe in the wonderfully-conceived show Future Cinema, curated by Jeffrey Shaw and Peter Weibel.  The work is comprised of a tripartite image made up of twenty-seven still frames, which are each then divided into five permutational segments. Associated with each segment is a section from Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, varying in pitch and tone, overlapping along as the speed with which the images play. Lafia describes the piece as much an artwork as an ‘engine or structure for possible films’.

In an article published in the February 2007 issue of ArtReview, Jonathan TD Neil points to a series of filmmakers whose works accede, at least broadly, to the tenets of structuralist film, juxtaposing David Dempewolf and Hollis Frampton, Oliver Michaels and Michael Snow, and Bill Morrison and Ken Jacobs. Neil proposes that, though there he has only a handful of examples to draw from, “…we have seen such subjectivity replaced by notions of celebrity and…the artist’s persona…our tolerance for the former wanes, and the latter can no longer offer reasonable justifications for aesthetic moves, ‘structure’, in one complex form or another, may indeed be finding a new life.” This may be the case or this may be premature, as Neil himself states. What is interesting to consider though is how structuralist film as a concept marries an attempt at demystification of an object whilst remaining detached from making this process of demystification transparent and how artists such as Diebes and Lafia develop a tangible, organised and systematic methodology to make this process automatic. It may also be argued that being tied inextricably to a computational arrangement removes an element of contextual association during exhibition, especially if these ‘film’ works are considered alongside music or performance.

Looking at these works in the context of music and performance adds to associative elements of structural film.  Actively engaging an audience to predict and anticipate (in a reciprocal sense) the work as it unfolds, develops – lives its life, essentially – is a fundamental quality in differentiating structuralist form from, purported, experiential expressions of represented content. The dominance of (the traditionally narrative) cinema is thereby reduced. As someone who makes a living in exploring the effectiveness of digital platforms as a space for exhibition, reciprocity between an audience and film and video is of paramount concern to me, indeed web exhibition is almost entirely user-led. Showing a piece like Scherzo, constantly running on an endless string regardless of whether there is an audience tuned in, negates all notion of dominance; something which does remain, even perhaps which is inherent, within the confines of a gallery.

In the current period of time, where the white cubes of the gallery are commonly being transformed into the black boxes (with the pre-arranged seating) of the cinema, it is interesting to anticipate how a technology-based system utilised within time- and lens-based media can invert an ‘evolutionary’ timeline of artists’ moving image (and its creation) into reconsidering an art form movement considered by some, anachronistically, as a distinct moment in the development of modernist art history.

About the Author: Ajay RS Hothi is a documentary filmmaker. He is a research student at the Royal College of Art, focussing on art writing and it relationship to gallery-based exhibition, and is currently manager of tank.tv

Broadway, Black Sea, Vitaly Manksy

Vitaly Mansky recently curated a programme of ten Russian documentaries as part of the London Russian Film Festival. The films Mansky chose shed light on the vast, inchoate territory that is post-Soviet Russia, ranging from visions of the utterly destitute in Kaliningrad, to a studies of parenthood to a visit to a deaf wedding. A filmmaker in his own right, Mansky is also the president of Artdokfest, the Moscow documentary festival, and speaks passionately about his chosen medium whenever he can.

At a roundtable debate accompanying the screenings he countered the too-easy view that the internet democratises filmmaking, allows the dreams of the “little fat girl in Ohio” to become manifest. On the contrary, the internet flattens everything out, allows homogenisation. Web 2.0 on it’s own is a dead-end for documentary makers. Mansky hopes that documentary, in Russia as in elsewhere, will be saved by forging a real sense of community, not through voguish social networking trends.

Mansky’s film Broadway, Black Sea shows this idea of community being enacted – People from the social margins of southern Russia and the Caucasus, too poor to afford a holiday, gather together to form a makeshift holiday camp, and spend a few weeks singing, laughing ,playing and (emphatically) defecating together. The singing is hoarse but spirited, like the laughter. The playing verges on the dangerous, as a man slaps his unruly pet monkey. Mansky says he had in mind the teeming paintings of Brueghel, this certainly comes across, and one also feels a connection to Bakhtin’s notion of the carnivalesque; carnival as powerful creative and communal event rather than mere licentious spectacle. Although Mansky takes pains to show that after the chaotic revelry, life returns to normal, a torrential downpour lashing what little remains of the shanty town.

The aforementioned scenes of communal defecation are key to the film – They somehow manage to sidestep a sinister voyeurism, instead underscoring the community theme and the feeling of equality that Mansky senses at the heart of this makeshift resort, while stressing that life isn’t always pretty. Thus, Mansky’s notion of community is sharply defined, not fuzzy or cuddly.

Other of Mansky’s films call attention to the absence of kinship and common aims through a focus on individuals adrift in a harsh and confusing world. Anatomy of t.A.T.u profiles pop band Tatu, who were Russia’s Eurovision song contest entry in 2003, as the duo talk frankly about their feigned lesbianism and their deeply held (but perhaps confused) religious beliefs. Although the film is structured by the ‘triumph of adversity’ story of singer Yulia’s overcoming of throat problems to perform at the contest, what lingers in the memory long after the music has faded are the scenes of Yulia’s manager and parents arguing over her like she’s a commodity, balancing the short term exposure of Eurovision against the risks to longer term profit posed by her vocal problems. As in Mansky’s 2008 film Virginity, in which one participant plans to sell her virginity to the highest bidder, the sphere of the private and personal has become reified. In Mansky’s films Russian society often appears rapacious and ruthless – No wonder this need for a close-knit sense of community.

Anatomy of t.A.T.u comes across as a pop music film, with its fast-paced montage sequences, while Gagarin’s Pioneers appears to ride the trend of Soviet nostalgia. Russian Buddhists commissioned Mansky to make Sunrise, Sunset, about the Dalai Lama, and if the film seems to assume the necessarily pious tone, what ensures that we are woken from our reverie this time is the films trajectory – Mansky was given one day only to follow His Holiness – Ultimately he’s a media celebrity too, “a brand name” as Mansky comments.

Broadway, BLack Sea, Vitaly Mansky

Despite his belief that Russian documentary is in a dire predicament, it is clear though that Mansky is no martyr, he knows how to pitch a project and ensure its success. He flatly refuses to make fiction films though, it’s a point of principle for him – “Cinema was born as a documentary film”, he states. Although this opposition appears somewhat over-schematic, this makes his films a powerful antidote to many of the fiction films being made in contemporary Russia, using a naturalistic style but often without Mansky’s keen eye for situations that seem to contain the seed of a larger social or moral problem.

Documentary in Russia has a fractious history – From Dziga Vertov’s experiments (Mansky’s own inspiration) to the Stalinist policies of re-staging events for newsreel and doctoring photographs. Mansky is in possession of formidable knowledge of his medium’s history, and claims that the Putin administration is no longer even interested in the propagandistic power of documentary. Suspicious of the mawkish sentimentality of those who speak of “the death of cinema” predicated on the abandonment of film for digital, Mansky just wants to counter the oppressive silence of consensus. That’s the real death, not the mere passing of technology into obsolescence.

About the Author: John A Riley has written for Senses of Cinema and Film-Philosophy, and is currently working on his thesis on Andrei Tarkovsky.

There’s a particularly irritating school of thought for a brand of economic Darwinism, undoubtedly nurtured by Margaret Thatcher but reclaimed in recent years by politicians falling over each other to turn the rotten side of the apple away from us, and which is now applied to ‘culture’ too. It claims that, just as in biology, an economic natural selection is at work that not only fosters a spirit of competition and ‘keeps the market buoyant’, to use their language, but – a masterstroke – justifies the capitalist system itself. If it’s natural to be greedy and avaricious and cruel, if a life of gross inequality is innate, then how can we help it? We’re driven by our nature (and even supernature: the Christian church readily reinforces this message with 2,000 years of determinism… and reminds us we’re bad, into the bargain) — so let’s get on with selling one another.

The only thing that could subvert this dubious theory is the existence of something which flows contrary to competition, to capital, to boundary; which is free and beyond rule and without walls — something much like art itself, and in particular the independent, experimental, manipulated moving image. But the dubious theory has to be shown to work – a lot rests on it – and so art is shoehorned into the same grubby drawer as commerce and sport, forced to become entertainment (because while we’re not entertained, we might just start looking around for the cracks in the plaster) and told to trade in commodities in the ‘free market’.

And what better embodiment of this selfish, competitive, materialist order than sport? So it’s no surprise that the same government department which funds art also funds sport, and it’s no surprise that, increasingly, art is tied to sport itself. To sport! To the straight-ruled flags and the bloated stadiums; to the sexless bodies, dead eyes, hairless machismo; goaded by petty competition and pointless tribalism and pumped up on steroids. Sport, the antithesis of art, unchanging, unchangeable, rigid, rule-bound. Sport, which will never change the world.

We should ask ourselves, therefore: did we sanction these rules? (Did we even agree that there should be rules?) And did we decide on so reductive and pragmatic an approach that sees value decimalised, drained of its blood? We were complicit, perhaps, but blindly so. It is the result of a long, insidious process which begins in school with an unyielding programme of maths and sport: a gradual hardening, an empiricisation; a perverse, reverse coming-of-age ritual peppered with football and gymnastics and running, algebra and quadratic equations; a love-in with money and the worship of the money cardinals, and a preparation for a world of competition and flag-waving in which the human is gradually buried; passion withers and dessicates in the face of economic pragmatism. And, of course, greed. It’s no wonder that art only gets half a chance if it slopes off to the far end of the field for a furtive cigarette.

But in terms of the situation we’re faced with now, we do have a choice, and we can act. The situation may have been engineered by government departments and quangos and consultants, but we, as audiences, as participants, have responsibility too. We, for the most part, didn’t protest when Big Screens (they couldn’t think of a better title?) were erected around the country, their ‘content’ segueing seamlessly from live snooker to ‘local cultural output’, rigorously pre-selected and vetted, sedating the population. We didn’t protest, or at least loudly enough, when the flick of a ministerial pen siphoned off millions of pounds of arts funding to fill the growing concrete toothache of Stratford’s Olympic ‘village’. We didn’t do anything wrong, but we didn’t rise up either. Unless we realise that our power lies in the choices we make, and unless we continue to support the marginal, the artist-led, the budgetless, the grassroots, we’ll lose them too — and that is particularly relevant to the moving image, where the squeeze of sport on one side is matched by the squeeze of the Film Council et al’s industrialisation of imagination on the other.

The independent, the experimental, the challenging is more important than ever. It has become political once more. And this is why the radical moving image needs support… for individual works, of course; but also for events, for artists, for future audiences; to provide resistance to the creeping homogenisation and commodification of culture. But it is also why it has a duty to itself to innovate (in the true sense of the word, to introduce the new) and not be slave to nostalgia; to face the closing walls with the strength of a movement which is vital and which has currency, than one which busies itself with a retrogressive narcissism. To remember, of course, and to respond to and continue to be shaped by a past, but to look to the future, too, and to meet the challenges of the present with a strategy which is grounded in that which is contemporary.

About the Author: Adam Pugh is an independent curator and writer based in Norwich, UK. Until recently, he directed AURORA, an annual festival which focused on artists’ moving image. He is currently working on an exhibition for the Barbican, and on writing for Animate Projects, Artesian and others.

Adam has contributed articles to the German film magazine Schnitt, Vertigo and other publications, and to the annual AURORA publication, which he edited alongside its DVD edition. He has also delivered talks and curated programmes for various festivals and events worldwide, and served on the international jury at Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen.

Jeff Keen, Marvo Movie

Reflections on tradition and history at 14th Views From The Avant-Garde

Views From The Avant-Garde is a section of annual New York Film Festival dedicated to experimental film and video work. The programme offers an opportunity to reflect on the position of experimental film in the US. Anyone with a passing familiarity with this area will recognise many names in the programme from iconic figures such as Ken Jacobs and James Benning to other well established luminaries as Peggy Ahwesh, Robert Beavers, Nathaniel Dorsky, Lewis Klahr and Phil Soloman. Views then is a festival to see new works by different generations of filmmakers alongside each other. The focus, despite the presence of various works from outside America, is decidedly North American and its very constitution makes it a distinctly different proposition to similar festivals in Europe.

This year’s festival followed on from a divisive poll published in Film Comment in the summer May-June 2010 issue. The ‘avant-garde’ film poll, conducted for the first time by the magazine, attempted to evaluate a decade of experimental film from 2000-2009, with contributions from 36 critics, programmers and teachers. All of the filmmakers mentioned above where featured in the poll as were many others showing at Views.

What does the poll really tell us about experimental film in the 21^st century, and what does it bring to bear on new work, especially that shown at Views From the Avant-Garde? Gavin Smith, the editor of Film Comment and co-curator, with Mark McElhatten, of Views, states in the issue, that there is “now more fertile common ground and meaningful dialogue between the avant-garde, art cinema and the contemporary art world.” Yet coming to the festival from London and being used to European festivals positioning of ‘avant-garde’ or experimental film in the broader context of contemporary artists’ film and video, one of the first things that is striking about the festival is its adherence to a specific idea, or tradition, of ‘avant-garde’ which is separate to contemporary art.

‘Avant-garde’ film holds a distinct and unique position in American film culture, and the very fact that we can talk about it as a ‘tradition’ is a distinctly American achievement, to the extent that filmmakers work around the world have largely been understood in relation American work since the 1960s. By showing such an inter-generational programme, and by virtue of taking place in New York, the historic centre of the American ‘avant-garde’ and its founding institutions (New York Filmmakers Co-op, Anthology Film Archives, etc), the festival can be read as an attempt to make explicit the continuity of this specific ‘tradition’. Yet, founded 14 years ago, Views arrived a long time after the primary periods of discussion of ‘avant-garde’ film in the 60s and 70s. The very notion of an ‘avant-garde’ filmmaker now is harder to understand or accept, as the context that this term came from has changed so much. Claims of non-conformity, criticality or an uncompromising aesthetic, notions that accompany the historical idea of the ‘avant-garde’, appear out of place for many of the contemporary works championed in the Poll and shown at Views. Instead. many of the works are better described as ‘beautiful’ rather than ‘radical’, and acclaimed for their technical mastery rather than for breaking rules.

The constitution of filmmakers and films in the Film Comment poll speaks volumes of the list’s specificity. Out of the 50 top filmmakers only eight are not from North America and only 13 from the whole list are women. Out of the top 50 films of the decade only six are from outside of North America and only six are by women. There are other ways the list can be dissected – not least its emphasis on older practitioners or people who have shown at Views in the past -  but these simple tabulations show the list’s specificity and the area of practice it best accommodates. The inclusion of non-American work, especially that of Apichatpong Weerasethakul who is the only non-American or European in the list, shows not so much that there isn’t viable activity outside these continents, but that the very notion of ‘avant-garde’ film relates to a specific and largely American area of practice. The American bias of the understanding and to a large extent history of ‘experimental’ film is not a new issue. Jonas Mekas, one of the instrumental champions of alternative cinema in the US, commented on this in a recent interview:  “I think that the New York and San Francisco scenes were so active in the ’60s and the ’70s, that they had no energy to even get interested in what was happening in other countries. They were too much involved with themselves. Those movements in other countries escaped their attention.”

There are different perspectives at play within the US; just within New York you have the excellent alternative screening space Light Industry whose diverse programme explores how we can approach the history of this area, its work, critical debates and contemporary interpretations, in the context of a diverse arena of contemporary practice that ranges from film, video, performance as well as net art, new media and computer games. Or Migrating Forms the festival that takes place annually at Anthology Film Archives, and was developed out of the New York Underground Film Festival in order to better reflect and accommodate filmmakers practice, rather than impose a historically specific designation on contemporary work.

Despite the largely unacknowledged boundaries of the discourse being addressed by Views and the poll, there were many interesting works shown, and it would be detrimental to see the work solely through the limited prism of ‘avant-garde’ film and the historical peculiarities of the, as Peter Wollen argues, “broken and diverse”[1] history of experimental film.

This ‘broken’ history is highlighted at the festival through the various programmes of recently discovered or restored work, allowing the festival to broaden its frame of reference. This year the Views weekend opened with previously unseen films of Pierre Clementi, well known as a pivotal actor in European art house cinema under direction of Buñuel, Bertolucci, Jancsó and Passolini among others and an active member of underground cinema in France, from Zanzibar Group onwards.

Clémenti’s ‘Unreleased Reels‘ made between 1967-78 featuring the films Souvenir, souvenir (reel 27) (France, 1967-78, 27m), Positano (reel 30B01) (France, c. 1968, 28m) and La Deuxième femme (Reel J) (France, 1967-78, 48m) had laid untouched at the Centre Pompidou where Clémenti was allowed to edit his films, are only being shown publicly now following their recent restoration. The films are impressionistic reveries that trace a life lived in and through cinema, featuring a dense array of imagery drawn from various film shoots as well as scenes with family and friends. The films multilayered imagery veers from the kaleidoscopic to the diaristic showing his life, from youthful psychedelia to a reflection on his own cinematically saturated existence and his later years that poignantly reflects the fact that the counter-culture in which he lived and worked is changing. These played well against a presentation of recent BFI restorations of Jeff Keen’s work, whose own distinctively British cacophonous collages, describe another type of Bohemia and relationship to cinema and pop culture through film.

Despite the festival marketing’s claims for survey programming (which tends to accompany any festival), Views offers a distinct perspective and focus on American contemporary practice, including its relationship to other cinemas and cultures. As well as restored historical work, the weekend featured various monographic programmes dedicated to a single artists as well as multiple new works by various prolific artists such as experimental animators Lewis Klahr and Janie Geiser or Jonathan Schwarz’s recent series of short in-camera edited films. Work of various artists such as Laida Lexthundi’s Llora cuando te pase/Cry When it Happens (USA, 2010, 14m) a brilliantly paced and constructed film which presents a fragmented series of events or actions in and around a Los Angeles motel and selected sites in the broader Californian landscape is an enigmatic, moving and complex work, or Dani Leventhal’s off-hand diaristic video Hearts are Trump Again (USA, 2010, 14m) which is disarmingly funny and refreshingly explores the ambiguity and performative aspects of first person video, present glimpses into very different and distinct practices.

Another archival presentation was of centenarian director Manoel de Oliveira’s Rite of Spring/Acto de Primavera (Portugal, 1963, 99m.), his second fiction film since his 1942 debut, is a remarkable Brechtian folk film, documenting the during their annual staging of the Passion of Christ by residents of the small village Curalha, which leads to a remarkable polemical denouement. Playing together with this was New York based Portuguese artist Fern Silva’s Servants of Mercy (Portugal/USA, 2010, 14m), which presents a variation on portrait film, subtly showing the redevelopment and changes of Portuguese landscape and society through the prism of his families old household helper, a remainder of Portugal’s older bourgeois traditions. Fernando Pessoa’s famous poem of exile “Oh sea, how much of your salt is from the tears of Portugal” can be heard song on the soundtrack, reflecting the gulf between the past and the present and the countries unique place on the edge of Europe. More striking and ambitious in its form was Silva’s In the Absence of Light, Darkness Prevails (Brazil/USA, 2010, 13m.) which manages to weave apocalyptic samples from the new Transformers films into its playful melding of documentary and staged footage of Brazil, to create a visceral anti-ethnographic essay.

Get Out of the Car, Thom Anderson

Photographer and filmmaker Tomonari Nishikawa presented two films constructed from interlocking imagery. Both Tokyo-Ebisu (Japan, 2010, 5m.) and Shibuya-Tokyo (Japan, 2010, 10m.) were produced in camera with a complex use of matte’s so the image consists of a fractured or cubist view, with various planes within the image presenting the Toyko suburb at a different time or from a different angle. The films rich soundtracks align them more with field recordings than expressive pictures of place, their very formality and robust polyphonic imagery creates a complex and yet very specific picture of street culture.

Thom Andersen, whose new film Get Out of the Car (USA, 2010) is already being widely discussed, follows his pivotal cine-essay, Los Angeles Plays Itself, both of which herald a range of work exploring how cities are filmed and how we can understand or counteract their representations. In collaboration with the Center for Land Use Interpretation, photographer and filmmaker Chris McCormak has been creating a filmed archive of abandoned buildings and sites across America, from residential areas and diners to huge plains formerly controlled and occupied by the military. The material in Future So Bright (USA, 2010, 30m.) plays like a catalogue of sites and although strikingly filmed, its argument seems to be overwhelmed by the task of documenting these locations, leaving little room for interpretation apart from a sentimental coda.

Julie Murray’s Distance (USA, 2010, 12m.) offers a more impressionistic exploration of desolate and abandoned landscapes yet has more power, underlined as it is by a reflection on the ruined and abandoned coastlines of America, from the Florida coast following the oilspill to the debris still left behind by Katrina. In a sense similar to Nishikawa films, David Gatten’s Shrimp Boat Log (David Gatten, USA, 2010, 6m.) perceives the world from a static perspective with starkly different results. Using a strict editing system, the film records the process of documenting passing shrimp boats in his family home in South Carolina, cutting between the titles log book and the coastal landscape outside, allowing us to watch the world passing by.

The apologetically titled Sorry (USA, 2010) is another manifestation of American artist Luther Price’s distinct almost sculptural handling of found film. Unlike the new work by Peter Tscherkassky which despite its accomplished construction leaves his materialist aesthetic looking very dated and hollow or the slight new video by Martin Arnold which again offers little more than his signature reworking of existent material, Price’s work presents a distinctly different sensation. Roughly hewn from existing films, his work, similar to his previous Biscotts series, uses film material not as a fetished aesthetic rarity but as a tactile object, re-cutting original material rather than reprinting. Sorry which juxtaposes an old Jesus picture with a documentary on the cosmos and one of fly reproduction, is exhilarating tactile, subversive and funny, his films are without credits or title obscuring any explicit authorship, and perhaps his work bares more resemblance to Jim Shaw’s Thrift Store Paintings in their cataloging of America’s discarded culture than the majority of found footage films. Another ironic picture of a deity was These Hammers Don’t Hurt Us (Michael Robinson, USA, 2010, 13m), an unusual tribute to Michael Jackson constructed from a mash-up Elizathbeth Taylor in Cleopatra with documentation of Jacko’s amazing costumes from his uncompleted final tour.

Bust chance (USA, 2010, 7m) by Stephanie Barber presents a similar mesmerizing display of objects, which in degraded video appear on a theatrical stage in front of a large, attentive Chinese audience. The objects appear without human accompaniment and their every action or inaction is followed by the tense exclamation or applause. This brilliant uncanny video presents a world of performing objects, a mini-exhibition of sculptural performers is as strange and alluring as Stephanie Barber’s other work at the festival, razor’s edge (Stephanie Barber and, USA, 2010, 44m) made with artist Xav LePlae. This highly unusual film is ostensibly an adaption of the W. Somerset Maugham novel, but rather than drawing from the book the film is taken from the artists half-forgotten recollection of it and restaged as a series of absurd actions in unspectacular locations, from a diner to a backyard in Baltimore. The works approach to adaptation from popular memory is similar to Xav LaPlae’s brilliant Bollywood homage I’m Bobby (2004) which restaged the 1974 classic Bobby with children across India. Here through that films exuberance is replaced by a hypnotic distended and reduced narrative of repeated actions and gestures staged in real locations allowing quotidian observation to leak into the film. Despite the weighty history that looms over the festival, these younger artists work largely resists any potentially restrictive context, showing a rich range of distinct and unclassifiable work.

Footnote:
[1] Knight’s Moves, from Camera Obscura, Camera Lucida (Essays in Honor of Annette Michelson), Ed. Richard Allen and Malcolm Turve, Amsterdam University Press, 2003, p147

About the Author: George Clark is a curator, writer and artist. At the Independent Cinema Office between 2006 and 2008 he managed a range of touring projects including: ‘Essentials: The Secret Masterpieces of Cinema‘, ‘Artists & Icons’ and ‘The Artists Cinema 2006′. Independent curatorial projects include ‘The Unstable States of…’, ‘Without Boundaries: European Artists’ Film and Video’ and the retrospective ‘The Cinema of Miklos Jancso’ [co-curated with Travis Miles]. He has written for Art Monthly, Afterall, Sight & Sound, Senses of Cinema and Vertigo Magazine among other publications. He recently collaborated with the artist Beatrice Gibson on the script for a film commissioned by the Serpentine Gallery and Camden Council.

I-Be AREA, Ryan Trecartin, 2007

Ryan Trecartin likes the word ‘movie’, over film or video, because, etymologically, it is a derivation from the word ‘move’. We can be clear that he is not one for inactivity. He has exhibited in almost fifty group shows, performances and screenings since 2005 (and in this I include The Generational: Younger than Jesus at The New Museum in 2009, shows at the Guggenheim Bilbao, ZKM Karlsruhe, The Saatchi Gallery and at the Whitney, Liverpool and Gwangju Biennials). His sixth solo show, Any Ever, opened at The Power Plant, Toronto, earlier this year before moving to MOCA Los Angeles and which in 2011 will tour to MOCA Miami, Musée d’art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and MoMA PS1.

It would be task far beyond the word limit imposed here to analyse every element in Trecartin’s movies; they have been described as ‘frenetic’, though this implies a frenzied loss of control and is I feel an inadequate descriptive term. His works are the visual representation of information overload, indicating two things: one, that the audience can only receive at least parts of his movies by some form of audiovisual osmosis and two, that Trecartin is very aware of the cultural symptoms of the twenty-first century. At an artist’s talk prior to his solo show at The Power Plant, Trecartin said that “in two years time it (the dialogue in his movies) will seem slow”. Spoken of in these terms, the world that Trecartin presents us with can be seen as little more than a dystopian reflection of our own; a generation of post-adolescents whose dreams of The Hills rapidly turn into a self-inflicted, real-world descent through Dante’s nine circles of Hell, taking in Lust, Gluttony, Violence, Fraud and Treachery. The tragedy, at least in our world, is that though it is happening we do not know it.

His characters though are far more astute than to fall for that. They gleefully parade invented colloquialisms and turns of phrase in the first, second and third person and in the past, present and future tenses and yet have a clarity of speech which is direct, incisive and very funny. Bordering on the bawdy, it is never explicit. His characters revel in their world (and it is their world. Despite the similarities they really do not share it with us), are the kings and queens (mainly queens) of their world, this world of their own creation! This world, our own reflected in a funhouse mirror.

The curse of post-modernism is in the irony of being knowingly knowing; there is an inherent, but implicit, ironic satire when engaging with today’s popular culture. Still we jump in, eagerly baptising ourselves immediately thereafter with a satisfied self-referentiality. Come off it. Post-modernism is dead, and irony is, like, totally naff.

Why exactly Trecartin excels in what he does is a broad question. His works are absolutely contemporary – so much of the now that they are almost of tomorrow. Surpassing completely the notion of post-modernism, a commitment to the concept of the author (in post-modernism, modernism after that and romanticism before that), Trecartin with long-term collaborator Lizzie Fitch are anonymous and non-hierarchic as actors and creators within and of their own world. The aim of the twenty-first century seems to be to make the (developed, at least) world flat.  By having enabled new technologies to proliferate a homogenous media internationally, the culture that we inhibit has become the great leveller. Trecartin is making the distinction that he is specifically not sampling the many facets of our pop culture and reinterpreting it, building a manifest (knowing, ironic post-modern) work or series of works, nor what philosopher Alan Kirby calls ‘pseudo-modernism’, wherein the instantaneously generated (and, likewise, discarded), content becomes an important aspect of supposed ‘factual’ material.

Instead Trecartin gives us the theatre of the absurd. Irrational, floating in a recognisable but imcomprehensible universe. His characters seem to speak only in clichéd terms but their language is representative of a linguistic evolution of our own world, only at a more advanced level. It is a purposeful inversion of the decidedly modernist motif of elliptical language and while it may appear that they are imparting nothing of value, it is only because Trecartin is moving at a speed slightly closer to maximum velocity than the majority of his audiences (“I’m going to educate her Jesus fish and walk it the fuck out”). Neither are his characters simply flat stereotypes of our reality television shows, they are multi-layered composites of characters and characteristics that have become embedded within our multinational cultural consciousness.

Before we are made to ingest and decipher the cultural signifiers in Trecartin’s work, he himself has been there. He has eaten at the same table, finished and digested what has been presented to him. He compresses this, extracting the vital, fundamental, alimentary ingredients before presenting us with a diamond. Or the excrement, I’m not quite sure. Perhaps I’m just a product of this particular world but there is not an artist’s work right now that I would rather see.

About the Author: Ajay RS Hothi is a documentary filmmaker. He is a research student at the Royal College of Art, focussing on art writing and it relationship to gallery-based exhibition, and is currently manager of tank.tv

Any Ever, Ryan Trecartin

The third time I visited Ryan Trecartin’s show of video installations, Any Ever in Toronto, it was near the end of the exhibition. A small army of people moved from room to room, notebooks in hand, recording their thoughts. Like few other art events I can think of, the show contained within it the seeds of a conversation. See Ryan Trecartin’s work and you want to talk about it.

Trecartin opens up a space that is innate to video’s technological capabilities; yet, before him, no one had quite dared to go there. And treading where others fear to tread can produce fear itself. Fear and a reluctance to engage is one response his work tends to get. Fear because a goal of sensory perception overload would seem to be one of the first principles from which Trecartin operates.

Ramping up the confusion, he leaves no aspect of the world within the frame unaltered. His performers, some of them former aspiring Disney child stars, wear a hybrid of clubbing gear and campy almost-drag. Spaces are filled-up with bodies and things; in one video, a gaggle of boys and girls in blonde wigs simper and scream while crowded onto a bus. Competing with the actors are layers of motion graphics, of the kind you might see on an infomercial – that is, the graphics normally relegated to a netherworld of bad video aesthetics – which are overlaid or inset, or spin and scroll across the screen.

Trecartin himself, ubiquitous throughout his work, sports bitchy attitude and mastectomy scars. Faces are adorned with self-tan, white lipstick or day-glo swatches of colour; this is make-up applied to bring the work’s human element into alignment with its tawdry mise-en-scene. The scenarios play out among the accoutrements of a cheap Florida vacation; Trecartin produced the videos in the nine rooms of a rented house in Miami. His use of disposable IKEA dreck makes sense, considering the casual destruction the performers wreck on the place. People break things and smash Blackberries against the floor. Posters of things like fluffy white dogs on the walls further help to fragment the screen space, and everything is accompanied by the drone of cheesy synthesizer music. When the actors speak, their voices are sped-up, an especial irritant for some viewers. People talk into cell phones, or mimic this by holding thumb and pinkie up to their face, all the while mugging for the camera.

Trecartin’s extreme emphasis on artifice helps to reinforce the feeling that you and the performers in his work exist in separate worlds.  The focal point of a single camera lens means you peer into the frame, and they peer out at you. Trecartin’s actors seem stuck in a box; one in which they are always compelled to perform for the camera. Of course, such an existential state of affairs would only seem like hell to a portion of Trecartin’s audience. The actors he works with are adept at suggesting this is their native habitat. It’s a naturalism of sorts, if of a world organized along the lines of a hilarious late night trip to the 711, where fluorescent lighting, a riot of purchasable items and the drugs you took are responsible for your disorientating experience of the place. It’s a world as seen through the frame of TV, but with no discernible narrative – Sit-com or otherwise – to give it coherence.

Keeping the operatic pitch of Trecartin’s vision in check, ensuring that, finally, there is order in this world, is the absolute brilliance of the artist’s language and editing technique. As with every other aspect of the work, the lines delivered by the performers are fragmented and nonsensical – but what poetry! “Don’t worry, my death was really sexy and ultra tan!” Or in the opening moments of the video, K-CoreaINC.K (section a) (2009) “I really need a case of atmosphere. Are you finding Position? It’s such a hunt.” He achieves the imagined ideal of an invented language that remains comprehensible. The same could be said for his work as a whole.

In response, people I’ve talked to have called Trecartin’s work “empty.” “Visually stunning but vapid” opined a friend; another disparaged it rather grandly as “outtakes from the world’s worst reality show.” In contrast to this opprobrium, the most intriguing comment I heard is that Trecartin’s work gives us “a new way to look at the world.” Let’s shorten that to “new”, as in “what kind of news does this artist bring us”? My guess: Trecartin answers the question about exactly where contemporary art fits into the cultural landscape. As with the response to his work, the news is both good and bad.

In his excellent book, I.O.U.: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay (2010), John Lanchester observes that a postmodern era in finance led to the 2008 meltdown: “value, in the realm of finance capital, parallels the elusive nature of meaning in deconstructionism.” The financial world of course runs parallel to the artworld; at many points, the two intersect. As recent events have shown, both realms are adept at conjuring value out of practically nothing. Compared to the art profession, the financial world is a relative latecomer to this game, one who found itself seduced by the question: how far can you abstract monetary value away from its origin in real things before it collapses? It is still digging out from the wreckage of the answer it got. By comparison, the art system proves its resilience. It produces value around consensus that, however specious sometimes, is far from reckless. Art offers a model for the management of risk that is finely calibrated, and though it may conspire to elicit the occasional bad bet, it probably won’t ever collapse.

Trecartin’s work confirms something about this truth of the art world as purveyor of bankable assets. But he does this by showing us how the artwork as a value unto itself survives in spite of that. That’s the good news. The bad news is that, while the art business might be a centre of value production, it for the most part isn’t a centre of cultural energy today. It’s easy enough to find this energy elsewhere; I hardly need to name the culprit: suffice to say, if you are reading this, you are looking it.

The Re’search (Re’Search Wait’S), Ryan Trecartin

Trecartin smuggles some of this energy into the art gallery and its inhabitants, who are used to more calculated outrages, are amazed. Even the Guggenheim, while acknowledging YouTube’s power with its Play Biennial, balked at going the full distance in their efforts. Almost all of the 25 shortlisted videos are slick graphic animations. This isn’t what people care about on YouTube, which is at its best as a hybrid vernacular entertainment medium and communications tool. I took note when I heard my friend say Trecartin gives us a “new way to look at the world”, partly because it’s such a big claim, but more important, because it begs the question why is Trecartin accorded this honour and not Facebook and YouTube? Isn’t the Internet the new way we look at the world, so obvious we can’t see it staring us in the face? Why is it we need art to tell us what we are seeing is New, confirming the truth of what we already intuitively understood?

Trecartin relates to this new internet-defined field of play first of all as an unselfconscious participant. As a performer, image-maker and manipulator, he is one among the thousands who upload material everyday to the web. Second, Trecartin acts out his affinity with web aesthetics in his use of what Hito Steyerl has termed the ‘poor image’. While not making degraded images per se, the sheer busyness of Trecartin’s videos places his work within the visual field of the degraded image produced by illicit copies, cellphones, handheld video cameras, and webcams. Widespread access to video technology means the image proliferates, and on the whole, its legion of producers isn’t too concerned about quality.

The degree of visual noise Trecartin crams into his videos, places his work on the low end of what Steyerl identifies as the contemporary hierarchy of images, with “sharpness…and high resolution” being at the top; as Steyerl points out, this competition between image qualities is a form of class struggle. In Any Ever co-curator Jon Davies’ characterisation, Trecartin “transforms the space of the screen into that of the computer desktop with hundreds of windows open.” He degrades the video image by overloading it with information and indulging in its worst aesthetic tendencies.

A wildly accomplished practitioner of his craft, Trecartin is widely lauded but his work does tend to inspire a certain amount of aversion. I suspect this is because he single-handedly revives the dynamic between high and low art; something a largely ossified artworld had forgotten about. However, even though Trecartin’s work might expose other visual art conceits to be hopelessly dated, the significance of the work he makes goes beyond that. Trecartin is important because he reaffirms the value of art beyond its monetary worth. He shows us the role artworks can play in reducing the world to its purely visual dimension. His work helps us extract what is New from the morass of everyday experience so that we can see it as historically specific, of today and therefore quite alien to any idea we might have of the past. It’s the Shock of the New all over again; how surprising to discover again that artworks have to the power to deliver it.

About the Author: Rosemary Heather is a freelance writer and curator.