Direct-er's Cuts
Salvage Vanguard Theater, Austin
June 15, 2012

By Caroline Koebel

Devon Damonte, 40.movm 2012, 16MM, Black & White, 0:40, Sound Photocopied rubbings & clear tape. Courtesy of the artist.

Direct-er’s Cuts, a touring 16mm film program curated and including work by Steve Cossman, centers around a clear organizing principle: the artist averts the camera’s dominion in the filmmaking process by exploring—and exhausting—all other means by which films might come into being.

One historical work anchors the otherwise contemporary program: Free Radicals (1958/1979)¹ by Len Lye, the New Zealand-born pioneer of direct film. To make Free Radicals, Lye scratched the film emulsion, resulting in a microcosm of negative and positive space and polyphonic visual rhythm that together with a soundtrack of music by the Bagirmi tribe of Africa sculpts a transfixing experience. His actions exist in a time-space continuum evoking our cave-dwelling ancestors and extra-terrestrial communications. The simplicity of his ingenuity remains a beautiful thing. Tyler Cann, Len Lye Curator at Large, says of Lye’s work, “it’s full of energy, and it energizes you as a spectator.”² Exactly.

A Joy (2005/2011)³ by Jodie Mack rivals Free Radicals in its ebullience. Because the two films are so markedly different—Mack works in explosive color using acetate, patterned contact paper and ink and the soundtrack is the electro-pop of Four Tet—while both achieving exalted states, there is a reciprocity between them that creates a third element. The excitement threshold of each, already maximal, is thereby elevated even higher. In terms of the abstract optical poetry evident in A Joy: ever-shifting composition teeming with intense color, relations between hard and round forms, pattern amidst chaos, occasional nods to representation (i.e., circles uniting in flower form), I am reminded of another historical antecedent: the awe-inspiring animation of Oskar Fischinger.

Although each work is made using direct film techniques (i.e., cameraless), Direct-ers Cuts is surprisingly varied and not a single title feels redundant or incidental; rather, there is much resonance between films (witness the Lye-Mack verve). While Gums (2012)⁴ by Aaron Vinton is on one hand nothing like Mack’s A Joy, there is nonetheless an engaging interplay between the two. In this panoply of digital imagery affixed to celluloid a hypnotic movement of color, shape, pattern, texture, abstraction and representation is all enveloping and once again I lose the sense of watching from without and instead find myself existing within.

Frenetic movement carries to Eric Stewart’s Fe (2010)⁵, a silent film comprised of hand-processed “photo-grams of magnets in a magnetic field”⁶ that out of constant flux conveys quietude. Devon Damonte’s 40.mov (2012)⁷ is an ingenuous tribute from the heart and the hand to one Moviola editing machine and its home in Portland at the Northwest Film Center, where a multitude of filmmakers have “lovingly cut” on the weathered yet invincible tool “millions of miles of film footage.”⁸ The filmmaker made rubbings of the Moviola which he then photocopied and taped onto 16mm film leader. For Pillager (2011) Joshua Lewis repurposed his talents as a film lab technician (at Negativland in Brooklyn) to perform photochemical sleights of hand through elaborate hand-processing and bleaching.

Ancestors (2012) by Douglas Urbank had its inception in “old photographs of unidentified ancestors”⁹ found upon his mother’s death. Scanning the images, he then altered and collaged his forebears together, along with other elements including excerpts from letters, onto hand-painted 16mm film leader. The result provokes reflection on the semiotics of images: the picture as conveyor of subjective (or personal) meaning v. the picture as picture—territory explored by the Pop artists, such as Warhol.

Cossman’s own film Tusslemuscle (2007-2009)¹⁰ is a rapid flow of single frames of flowers—7,000 distinct hand-spliced images collected and excised from stereoscopic View-Master reels. At 24 frames per second, 1,440 frames per minute, that’s a mania of visual stimulus to process even with the subject’s delimitation to “flower.” The challenge posed here to a type of spectatorial and cognitive endurance test (witness “muscle” in the title) reaps its own rewards, especially considering the voluminous labor necessitated by the making in the first place of the film, striking an accord between maker and recipient. The thrill of the viewing experience settles into a sense of failure to retain what was once present—granted, only momentarily—and it is in this awareness of loss that I can grasp the filmmaker’s point about Tusslemuscle conveying “impending disaster.”¹¹ But not entirely: I’d have to see the projected 16mm print again to know better whether I ultimately find the film more condemnatory or celebratory.

Caroline Koebel is a filmmaker and writer in Austin and is on faculty at Transart Institute.

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1. The film is readily available online.
2. Govett-Brewster Art Gallery Web site: http://www.govettbrewster.com/LenLye/Centre/LenLyeCentre.aspx Tyler Cann is quoted from a promotional video about the planned Len Lye Centre in New Plymouth, New Zealand. These words appear at approximately 5:00 into the video, but the entire video is recommended.
3. The 2005 version is available on Jodie Mack’s Vimeo page: http://vimeo.com/8375376.
4. Available on the Mono No Aware Vimeo page: http://vimeo.com/40558398.
5. Available on Eric Stewart’s Vimeo page: http://vimeo.com/16110260.
6. Program notes.
7. Available on Devon Damonte’s Vimeo page: http://vimeo.com/36649017.
8. Devon Damonte, program notes.
9. Douglas Urbank, program notes.
10. An excerpt is available on Steve Cossman’s Web site: http://www.stevecossman.com/TM.
11. Steve Cossman, Q&A.

Manscape: Male as Subject and Object 
Lora Reynolds Gallery, Austin
Through August 11

By Brian Fee

Michele Abeles, Man, Shadow, Table, Fan, Rock, 2009, Archival pigment, 36 x 48 inches, Courtesy of the artist.

I questioned the omission of Mariah Robertson and Michele Abeles from The Anxiety of Photography at AMOA-Arthouse last year.¹ These artists were spotlighted in MoMA PS1's Greater New York quinquennial, yet they were absent from an exhibition ostensibly about photography—though The Anxiety of Photography devoted wall-space to GNY peer David Benjamin Sherry's acid-toned self-portraits. I was pleased in Robertson and Abeles' inclusion in Manscape: Male as Subject and Object, a heavyweight summer group exhibition curated by Christopher Eamon for Lora Reynolds Gallery, but I wondered: Was Eamon consciously “taking male objectification to a new extreme?"²

Writing for Frieze, Chris Wiley noted that Robertson is among the most significant artists reengaging with lensless photography³, referencing her darkroom productions that frequently feature nude males under colorful layers of abstraction. Eamon bypasses these for Robertson's jewel-like prints of phalluses draped across vibrant Gestalt patterns. Robertson printed these in slightly reduced scale, articulating the exhibition's skewering of contemporary male identity, and though her own words create a more complicated picture. While asserting her position as a female photographer and role-model in an Art:21 documentary, Robertson's reliance on an internet-sourced nude suggests an approach of easygoing irreverence, rather than a blunt derision her subject's maleness.

Abeles' impenetrably titled Untitled_3_Bucket_IKB could represent the show's most pointed image. Here she eschews the nude—“canny rejoinders to the commonplace use of the anonymous female form as a prop for picture-making”⁴ —for bodily substitutes: a bucket, sponges and gloves, all soaked in deep ultramarine. It takes little stretch of the imagination to see Nouveau réalisme founder Yves Klein within this still-life, his hands and body relegated to painterly tools, recalling how he used nude female models covered in International Klein Blue as “living brushes.”

The New York-based Romanian artist and curator Adina Popescu's video Jeremiah⁵ presents an exception to the exhibition's otherwise still images. The smartly dressed actor smears French enunciation over terms like “keylogging software,” repeatedly dropping his eyes to read from a script, as we quickly become aware that it is not his words but Popescu's. At the film's conclusion, Popescu further dispels her actor's suave masculinity by having him quote from controversial French dramatist Jean Genet's The Thief's Journal:

“O let me be nothing but beauty alone! Quickly or slowly I will go, but I will dare what must be dared. I want to destroy appearances, the casings will be burnt off and will fall from me, and there will appear there, some evening, on the palm of your hand, calm and pure, like a statuette of glass."⁶

John Massey's inclusion provides a curious counterpoint: a Canadian male artist over a generation older than the women here, whose work treads the line between sculpture, video and photography. Massey's Studio Projections—newspaper images rephotographed as slides and projecting onto a maquette of his studio—operate within the image-appropriation ethos of Sherrie Levine, Robert Longo and others of “The Pictures Generation,” though Massey wasn't a “member,” By screening media clips like Sputnik into his space, Massey magnifies his personal reflections on newsworthy events of the late '70s. His suggestion of self (the bare studio) adds a sensitive tone to male imagery while manifesting his own male gaze.

What is the takeaway from Manscape? As far as Abeles and Robertson are concerned, I believe their intentions lie beyond subjugating the male gaze in art. Their rigorous dedication to analogue photography and their technical practices—injecting new vitality into classical tropes of darkroom manipulation and studio constructions, respectively— emphasize their roles in a larger contemporary artistic network. It is to Eamon's credit that this elegantly installed group exhibition encourages such insightful contemplation and deep returns.

Brian Fee is an art punk currently based in Austin, TX. His culture blog Fee's List covers his three loves (art, film and live music) occurring in his other three loves (the Lone Star State, the Big Apple, and Tokyo).

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1. The Anxiety of Photography originated at the Aspen Art Museum, Colorado, in May 2011 and was organized by Matthew Thompson, Associate Curator, before traveling to AMOA-Arthouse: http://www.aspenartmuseum.org/archive_anxiety_of_photography.html
2. Manscape: Lora Reynolds Gallery press release: http://www.lorareynolds.com/exhibitions/about/manscape_male_as_subject_and_object/
3. Chris Wiley, “Depth of Focus,” Frieze, November-December 2011: http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/depth-of-focus/
4. Ibid.
5. Jeremiah was originally performed at Galerie EIGEN + ART, Berlin, as part of Popescu's experimental play The Ethics of Pirating before his transfer to high-definition video: http://blog.frieze.com/the_ethics_of_pirating/
6. Jean Genet biography: http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/jgenet.htm

Bogdan Perzyński
Kirk Hopper Fine Art, Dallas
Through July 21

By Catherine Caesar

Bogdan Perzynski, 2001 (One Pair...) (part of diptych), 1997, Inkjet print, 27" x 40." Courtesy of the artist and Kirk Hopper Fine Art, Dallas.

Bogdan Perzyński’s current exhibition at Kirk Hopper Fine Art, I Will Have Gold, consists of three works: two photographic diptychs and a video project bearing the same title as the exhibition. It is this 2012 video that first captures the viewer’s attention, as it is oriented toward the entrance of the gallery, and the fixed camera is focused on the torso of one of three beautiful women. If watched from the beginning, the viewer is privy to the scenario taking place: the artist, behind the camera, prompts each woman to feign anger and launch epithets toward the camera/ viewer. Ranging from the relatively benign (“LOSER”) to the more vitriolic (“FUCKING ASSHOLE”), the insults become the main communication of the video, yet we are not offended by the expletives, thanks to their hollow, artificial delivery. As the first woman filmed attests, she is not an actress, and thus we concentrate less on her words and more on her obvious discomfort at pronouncing them before the camera. At one point she even asks Perzyński to leave the room so that his presence stops distracting her from her task. Although the “actresses” become more adept as the video progresses, we are left to grapple with the disparity between the sometimes-shocking insults and their canned, fidgety delivery.

It seems to be within this space between language and identity that the bulk of Perzyński’s work lies. In a manner that reminds one of Warhol’s screen tests, Perzyński’s camera allows us to examine closely the details of each participant’s face, while her tentativeness and candid reactions to the artist’s instructions provide glimpses into her personality, but at the same time the language, seemingly so intimate in its vulgarity, becomes removed, lifeless and insipid; I began thinking with regret and embarrassment, have I launched such insults myself?

Perzyński, native of Poland and currently professor in the Transmedia program at U.T. Austin, has employed painting, installation and digital media to delve deeply into the nature of communication, researching various literary theorists and semioticians, seeming to relish in its gaps and fissures. Even if one remains unaware of the work’s philosophical underpinnings, the strangeness of language rises naggingly to the forefront. Across the wall from I Will Have Gold hang two diptychs from the artist’s 2001 series that juxtapose word and image. Each inkjet print includes a black and white photo of an individual lighting a cigarette: the top group, 2001 (One Pair…), features the artist himself, while the first “actress” cast in the video work appears in the lower pair, 2001 (Nothing Save…). Superimposed upon the photographs are quotations taken from a turn-of-the-century compendium of facts and data in the artist’s collection. The passages that Perzyński has chosen seem to be derived from the language of bitter estate wills aimed at depriving the author’s heirs of his possessions: “One pair of my trousers, free of duty and carriage paid, as a symbol of what she wanted to wear in my lifetime;” and “Nothing save a bag of sand to rub themselves with.” As in the video work, hostile language becomes syphoned of emotion, here by distance, anonymity and time. Perzyński deliberately fashions a tension between the impromptu nature of the photographic image, which consists of the fleeting, precarious moment of a match being struck and captured in one take, with the carefully-constructed text of a legal document. To me, the power of the work exhibited at Kirk Hopper stems from the shamed self-awareness that the language provokes: am I capable of such venom, such bitterness that extends immortally, beyond the grave? This shame, however, is mitigated by the seduction of Perzyński’s images, whether realized in the beauty of the women featured in I Will Have Gold or the clever trickery of the camera snapping the strike of a single match.

Catherine Caesar is an art historian specializing in American art of the 1960s and 70s, and Assistant Professor of Art at the University of Dallas.

On the Intoxication of Ruin (The Party Ends)

By Travis Diehl

Liz Glynn, Black Box, 2011. Courtesy of the artist and Redling Fine Art, Los Angeles. Photo: Calvin Lee.

III. (The Pyramid Summer)

I was crashing with some friends in Lincoln Heights in July 2010 when Liz Glynn started building a pyramid in their backyard. In the right place at the right time, I became one of the only people to see the cycle of III from the grading of its foundation to its eventual decay and collapse two years later. I watched, helped, brought supplies and drank beer as Glynn marked out its footprint in the shimmering heat. I saw the sunburned men who unloaded the pallets that formed the pyramid's tiered walls. And, because I'd been sleeping on a couch, I was invited to sleep inside the pyramid (soundly dosed with Ambien) as part of a death-and-resurrection ceremony, the first performance of the series. Over an afternoon meal of bread, fruit and wine laced with tranquilizing herbs, nine of us—all friends and acquaintances of Glynn's—admitted our irrational fears: heart attack, death, incontinence. Expectations and inhibitions fell away as the sedatives took hold, and we slipped into stoned, restless sleep. Like guests at a costume party, we were not ourselves; we played the role of guests. Our deaths were chemically induced—but the fears we performed were our own, and those who performed honestly awoke renewed, shaken back to life at sunset by a procession of nine wakers.

The pyramid of III was the venue of a series of nine performances based loosely on the financial crisis and general climate of uncertainty. Among the events were a discussion with a cryonics expert, out-of-body attempts broadcast live on pirate radio, and a night of “gambling with other people's money.” While artworks in one sense, these performances were also carefully curated parties, decorated with ancient history and imminent collapse. Drinks and food were selected accordingly—a mixture of absinthe, Goldschlager and ginger beer paired with guided meditation, for example—adding to the air of intoxication. Ruin was the theme, yet this party remained insulated from encroaching financial realities; we feasted like Romans under siege.

Like a pyramid scheme, the guest list unfolded from a handful of friends, and by the final night over a hundred people had come to witness the pyramid's destruction, grilling “various fowl,” drinking champagne, chatting, perhaps piecing together the summer.1 We were invited to drop our burdens, in whatever form, into a pit within the pyramid. At dusk, Glynn read a passage from the Egyptian Book of the Dead, then set the pit on fire, sending a plume of smoke snaking above the neighborhood. She ascended the pyramid and pried off its wooden capstone. A handful of us joined in, tearing it down, pallet by pallet. Most guests, however, preferred to watch. They milled around with their drinks during the slow dismantling. Soon the fire department charged up the dry hill and doused the grill and pit. Their flashlights danced on the half-unbuilt ruin. Someone rushed the uncooked fowls down to the house and into the fridge.

And so, Glynn's III ended as it had transpired: sprawling, omnivorous: fueled by delirium and inequality: a convergence of conflicting references poised between transcendence and obscurity. The set was decorated with fallen empires, and through these resurrections we both re-imagined and forgot our own decline. Egos dissipated and grew; thoughts were exchanged and consumed. The party ended, leaving behind a trail of fractured histories that had at times freed us from fear, and at times confirmed our deepest cynicisms. This process, like history itself, transpired within a leveling, amnesic haze.

The skeletal frame of the pyramid would bleach and warp in the sun for over a year—an ambiguous ruin. The several hundred pallets had been worth around three dollars each. But now the recession had deepened, trans-Pacific trade and trucking were down, and it would be several months before Glynn and her gallery could find a company that would take them for free. An ad-hoc pallet yard took shape around the house downhill from the pyramid site. Meanwhile, the pyramid's hardware was scavenged and the lumber trashed by locals. The guests were long gone, the hilltop was quiet and overgrown, and no one had stayed to clean up.

II. (The Artist's Club)

Glynn's Black Box was a licensed speakeasy occupying a vacant warehouse and former bookstore in West Hollywood for eleven nights in January of 2012. Her bar was the official after-hours destination during the performance festival of Getty's Pacific Standard Time initiative. If PST was self-congratulatory and nostalgic as it resurrected important west-coast artworks from obscurity, Black Box seduced performers and audience alike through an illegible present. Canonical artists mixed with younger and less infamous ones who had yet to enter the club of history. Among an uncertain number of happenings: Charles Gaines played piano behind Terry Adkins in a jazz quintet; Barbara T. Smith and Paul McCarthy reminisced about the 1980 Public Spirit Festival; John Duncan remixed recordings of volunteers doing “whatever he asked”; and Karen Adelman belted out a song from a stack of shipping pallets on the bar's final night.

I read a poem with nu-age synth act Sneaky Snake on the venue's seventh night—so here, too, I had inside (but by no means total) access. But getting in the door was just the beginning; one night was not enough. The Black Box series compelled guests to plunge deeper and deeper (higher and higher) through its levels—and in the process, collect as much “experience” as possible—for this party was charged with the aura of history in the making. Yet much of this history unfolded behind closed doors or at other times. Certainty dissolved like each morning's hangover into another night's binge. As the party grew stranger (rumors of psychedelics and striptease) and more crowded, the subtly magnificent mingled with the horrifying. For the performers, wrapped up in the scene, it was not much different. A fog machine whited out the whole space during Sneaky Snake's second set; the management pulled the plug on their third. The smoke hung around until closing time.

Like the unfolding pyramid scheme of III, Black Box depended on a balance of insiders and outsiders: those on and those off the stage; those who were there and those who weren't; the sober and the drunk. A wall of pallets divided the building into an open performance space and a lounge complete with bar, low stage and a baby grand piano. Redacted Facebook invites advertised the series; each night's entertainment was a guarded secret. Ivette Solare mixed custom cocktails with names like “Keep Talking” and “Swoon.” Performers and other VIPs drank for free from a small edition of handmade ceramic mugs—proof of their status. Upstairs, a “green room” hosted more intimate invitation-only performances, as when Glynn buried one person at a time under a mound of soil. And within this, accessible only by a select few, was a bank of lockers stocked with liquor infusions, champagne mini-bottles, odd photographs and other favors.

The party factor of the Black Box suggested openness and abandon, yet was in fact bound by the expectations and desires of high-powered socializing. If you knew the right people, for example, it was possible to borrow a mug or find your way upstairs. You could wind up locked in conversation with dealers, gallerists and anonymous barflies.2 You could get blackout drunk, find a bump of coke, wake up somewhere strange—and it would not be enough. The collapse would come, as it always does: the next morning, in the parking lot or—as it happened for me—alone in a foggy arena, inching around on a mechanical horse as its batteries died, glad I hadn't taken those mushrooms.

I. (Receding Reality)

Like an orgone energy accumulator, the pyramid at III enfolded a facile nu-age spirituality. This unqualified mysticism mingled with the “hard facts” of the recession, rendering economics irrational in its own right. During a performance titled “On Not Seeing Corruption,” Glynn interviewed an anonymous college acquaintance regarding his time at Madoff Investment Securities. Predictably, he pleaded ignorance of his company's crimes, though in the nuances of his testimony—meeting Glynn at a New Years Eve party; making a drunken pass in a taxi cab; and the terms of his trip to LA, which included a ticket to Burning Man courtesy Glynn's gallery—the Madoff “Ponzi” scheme no longer seemed so alien to the culture that had produced III. Within the pyramid's interstitial zone of metaphor, these new connections were effective to the extent that you believed them. The pyramid provided a boundary between the rational and the irrational, as good art often does, by which our world was reconfigured and resolved. Dusk settling in, the skyline ablaze, augmented by the vulnerability of drunkenness or sleep, things like death and financial collapse fell into place within a sprawling system; relationships, for a time, masqueraded as beliefs.

But this blending also loosened the boundaries of ethics. III framed the recession through an ambivalent figuration that suspended rightness or wrongness. The economic underpinnings and social exploitations of Glynn's projects, though palpable, were never acknowledged. The builders of III and Black Box (surely not Glynn alone) remained anonymous and unseen. Glynn's pallet ziggurat, perched halfway up a valley in a hilly Hispanic neighborhood, quickly became a local landmark—yet one whose purpose was obscure, impenetrable—a monument whose audience lived elsewhere.

That the drinks and décor were so carefully arranged speaks to an awareness of the art-event as a social setting (indeed, often preeminently so). Yet the inequalities and inadequacies of the party in decline were naturalized, not critiqued. This aspect seemed incidental to or merely supportive of Glynn's interest in history, obscurity and ruin. In contrast, consider Cyprien Gaillard's The Recovery of Discovery, 2011, also known as the “beer pyramid.” Here, Gaillard imported a huge ziggurat's worth of Efes beer, a Turkish brand, from Turkey to Berlin, following the path of so many plundered artifacts. As visitors climbed and drank the beer, crushing boxes and breaking glass, the work took its final form. Yet if Glynn's two series also positioned inebriation as the basis of the experience, an agent of detachment and indulgence, it was not so brutal or clear—less a darkly humorous extension of the art world's alcoholism than another carefully groomed element within the party's larger spread. Drunkenness was atmospheric at the Black Box, ritualistic at III. In both cases, drinking did as much to erode preconceived boundaries as did Glynn's recession-chic sets and historical programming. It was, after all, a beery and familiar ungrounding. This drunkenness was real, hard, sloppy, freeing, damaging—part of a predictably unstable chemistry.3

Draped with historical references and flavored with systems of belief, Glynn's parties treated the outside (non-art) world with ambivalence. And as the work shirked responsibility in the name of experimentation, this ambivalence overpowered its complexity. The pyramid of III and the Black Box were frequented by rumors and avatars. In its way, this liminality restored a kind of control, a metaphorical agency. A banner draped in the pyramid interior on the final night echoed a slogan from the UC student protests earlier that year: “WE HAVE DECIDED NOT TO DIE.” Not yet. Not tonight. Yet these series embodied a cynicism about politics and political art, tending towards nostalgia and escapism, ultimately courting rather than confronting decline. A dis-ease persisted as the pyramid slowly came apart, its pallets carried, dragged, then tossed drunkenly down the hill against the house and yard below: the feeling that ruin was not only the theme of this party, but its chosen end.

Travis Diehl is an artist and writer based in Los Angeles.

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1. “Each invitation stated 'you must bring a guest.' As pyramid schemes go, the audience doesn't necessarily grow exponentially; rather, it almost folds in on itself. Many who came frequently in the beginning were absent until the end, replaced by a new group. The audience grew far beyond the circle of people I see regularly. . .” Liz Glynn, in conversation with Corey Fogel, Public Fiction 2, Summer 2011.
2. Glynn hired a handful of people to sit at the bar and mingle with the guests; their mugs were red, the performers' black.
3. Elsewhere, in other artworks similarly primed for failure, Glynn has held a dance party on fragile plaster tiles (Smash the Solid State/Pick Up the Pieces, 2008) and has restaged an unsuccessful demonstration of R. Buckminster Fuller's tensegrity principle (Utopia or Oblivion, 2011).