Programmed by Michèle Smith
The Bruce Lacey Experience | Great Britain 2012. Dirs: Jeremy Deller, Nick Abrahams. 67 min.
So Many Ways to Hurt You (The Life and Times of Adrian Street) | Great Britain 2010. Dir: Jeremy Deller. 28 min.
Our Hobby is Depeche Mode | Great Britain 2008. Dirs: Jeremy Deller, Nick Abrahams. 73 min.
Programmed by Michèle Smith,
Aurelian Froment in attendance
To launch its 2014 season, DIM Cinema is hosting an evening of videos by the acclaimed French artist Aurélien Froment, in advance of his first Canadian solo exhibition. Froment often uses theatrical devices and the format of instructional films to draw the audience in as participants in these cleverly-crafted investigations into the transmission of ideas. Some of the videos take a specific object or practice as subject matter — a jellyfish, a boating knot, a yoga pose — and examine it through language, revealing the elusive relationship between images and words. Others follow the shifts in perspective witnessed by forgotten historical objects as their uses and meanings change over time from those envisioned by their designers. And still others are concerned with the mental processes involved in the construction of narrative and memory.
The Kidnapper’s Opera is a video-artwork based on a true story: On December 21, 1990, several young men, some of them teenagers, kidnapped the daughter of Canadian billionaire Jimmy Pattison in Vancouver. After receiving a $200,000 first payment on their ransom demands, the kidnappers decided to go on a shopping spree in a rented limousine; they were caught later that day conspicuously spending large amounts of cash at local shopping malls. Inspired by a quotation from Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera – “What is the robbery of a bank compared to the founding of a bank?” – the film considers how inequality is psychologically experienced in our society. The explanation for the behaviour of the teenagers focuses on the false desires of fortune and personal grandeur created by advertising, the media, and a sense of lack perpetuated by globalization. Structured like a play, each scene of The Kidnapper’s Opera is set and shot uniquely. Dan Starling, 2013, Colour, HDCAM, 90mins, Canada.
Dan Starling is a visual artist from Vancouver who works in a variety of mediums (drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, performance). Starling studied at Emily Carr University in Vancouver and Städelschule in Frankfurt and teaches at Emily Carr University.
Programmed by Michèle Smith
A falcon equipped with a tiny camera hovers over the desert like a living drone. Auguries are taken from the flight of starlings above the roofs of the Vatican. At ground level, a magician-mime uses conjuring tricks to interpret abstract art, shepherds watch over Glenn Gould practising a Chopin étude, and a prisoner secretly records his daily life on a smuggled phone in exchange for short video clips of the world outside. This month we’re mapping the conceptual terrain crossed by French artists in the past decade, from art and aesthetics to politics, philosophy, race, and citizenship. An irresistible cinematic amuse-bouche and digéstif will be served by Laure Prouvost, whose recent video installation Wantee, about the artistic friendship between her late (entirely fictional) grandfather and the Dadaist Kurt Schwitters, earned her a nomination for this year’s Turner Prize — winner to be announced in early December (Go Laure!).
PROGRAM
Owt | Laure Prouvost/Great Britain 2007. 3 mins.
Abstract Telling | Olivier Dollinger/France 2010. 16 mins.
Le Berger | Benoît Maire/France 2011. 15 mins.
Temps Mort | Mohamed Bourouissa/ France 2009. 18 mins.
Pruitt Igoe Falls | Cyprien Gaillard/France 2009. 7 mins.
Les Oiseaux | Laurent Grasso/ France 2008. 9 mins.
A Study of the Nature of Things | Laurent Montaron/France 2011. 12 mins.
On Air | Laurent Grasso/ France 2009. 9 mins.
Wantee | Laure Prouvost/Great Britain 2013. 15 mins.
Image: On Air (still), 2009. Courtesy Galerie Valentin, Paris, and Sean Kelly Gallery, New York © Laurent Grasso / ADAGP, Paris, 2013.
“Erth and Other Landscapes” presents a series of musings on nature, technology, perception, and time by two generations of renowned artists and filmmakers. The program commences with a journey from the origin of the cosmos to the appearance of a “brilliant streptococcus organism for which no antidote exists”; and concludes with a year-long study of a forest, enacted by following the continually shifting movement of colour, light, and shadow across natural forms, articulating then obliterating them into pure abstraction. Between these parentheses, Peter Hutton discovers the sublime landscapes of the Hudson River School in a mound of burning tires; Patrick Keiller recapitulates the natural history of the universe in the capricious ontogeny of his narrator; and, like postmodern Brueghels, Rachel Reupke’s tiny human dramas get lost in the flow of traffic through a panoramic landscape. These closely observed encounters pose questions about our relationship with non-human matter and forces, and draw out some of the complex links between the objective visible world and our inner hidden worlds.
PROGRAM
John Latham, Erth. 1971, Colour, 16mm, sound, 25mins, Great Britain.
Peter Hutton, In Titan's Goblet. 1991, B&W, 16mm, silent, 10mins, USA.
Patrick Keiller, The Clouds. 1989, B&W, 16mm, sound, 19mins, Great Britain.
Rachel Reupke, Infrastructure. 2002, B&W, video, sound, 14mins, Great Britain.
Nathaniel Dorsky, Compline.2009, Colour, 16mm, silent, 18mins, USA.
Emily Richardson, Aspect. 2004, Colour, 16mm sound, 9mins, Great Britain.
image: The Clouds, Patrick Keiller (1989)
“His work is unashamedly polemical, but the polemic is in favour of the proposition that the same discontinuities, paradoxes and breakdowns in communication that are at issue in cinema are also at work in our mediated lives" - Will Bradley
Programmed by Amy Kazymerchyk
Luke Fowler was introduced to Scottish psychiatrist, R.D. Laing’s Kingsley Hall experiment (1965-1970) while he was working on his own series of social and psychological experiments called The Social Engineer (1999). Fowler’s interest in Laing’s practice, and the documentation of Kingsley Hall, evolved into the film What You See Is Where You’re At (2001). Laing’s hypotheses on the “double bind”, the family nexus, and ontological security in books such as The Divided Self (1960) and The Politics of Experience (1967) shaped Fowler’s own concerns with family, community, and collaborative formation; self and social representation and perception; and truth and authority. Fowler takes formal influence on these matters from structuralist film, the Situationists, the Free Cinema Movement, and free improvisation. All of these elements fold into Fowler’s poly-rhythmic compositions of sound and images — formal experiments, in tune with divided selves.
The Way Out profiles Xentos “Fray Bentos” Jones, one of the founding members of the post-punk band The Homosexuals. Pilgrimage from Scattered Points reflects on the English composer Cornelius Cardew (1936-1981) and The Scratch Orchestra (1968-73). Bogman Palmjaguar is a portrait of man who takes refuge in Scotland’s remote bog lands, as his only asylum against medical incarceration. All Divided Selves is an expanded collage of R.D. Laing’s life and practice.
PROGRAM
6:30pm
The Way Out. 2003, Colour, video, 33 mins. Co-director: Kosten Koper.
Pilgrimage from Scattered Points. 2006, Colour, video, 45mins.
Bogman Palmjaguar. 2007, Colour, video, 30mins.
8:30pm
All Divided Selves. 2011, Colour, video, 90mins.
Luke Fowler (b. 1978) is an artist, filmmaker, and musician based in Glasgow. He has performed with experimental groups Lied Music and Rude Pravo, and runs the independent label SHADAZZ. Fowler was awarded the inaugural Derek Jarman Award in 2008.. In 2012, he was shortlisted for the Turner Prize for his solo exhibition at Inverleith House in Edinburgh, which showcased All Divided Selves (2011).
The Mirage of History presents a series of artists’ practices that share a documentary approach to explorations of the spatio-temporal unknown. The point of departure is a visionary film made by Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson in 1968, in which Smithson walks with Michael Heizer through the captivating scenery of Mono Lake in California, reading excerpts from geological textbooks as invocations of an “archaeology of the future.” In a similar way, Armando Andrade Tudela films the Marcahuasi plateau in Peru: his gaze lingers on this landscape, a place resounding with manifold stories and representations, as though it holds traces of a “cosmic antiquity”. In their attempt to locate the “islands of history” (Marshall Sahlins), these artists seek out spaces of reinvention and permanent revolution that contravene the conditions of possibility for history itself. Joachim Koester documents the remains of Aleister Crowley's Thélèma Abbey, where filmmaker Kenneth Anger and the sexologist Alfred C. Kinsey once met. Michael Stevenson retells the story of Manfred Gnädinger, alias Man—a modern Robinson Crusoe whose life was destroyed by the ecological disaster of the Prestige oil tanker spill in 2002. And Mariana Castillo Deball recounts the story of a female scientist from CERN in Geneva, interspersed with images of gems from the collection of the French writer Roger Callois.
PROGRAM
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Xenochrony, a word that derives from the Greek xenos, strange or alien, and chronos, time, is a studio-based musical technique developed in the early 1960s by composer Frank Zappa. Xenochrony is executed by extracting a guitar solo or other musical part from its original context and placing it into a completely different song. “The musical result”, says Zappa, “is the one of two musicians, who were never in the same room at the same time, playing at two different rates in two different moods for two different purposes, when blended together, yielding a third result which is musical and synchronizes in a strange way”. Starting from here, we will explore a series of artists works who, luminously, use similar techniques of montage and adventurous dislocation to produce a specific form of knowledge. To be evoked: the writing of history “in between science and fiction”, fables, "adventurous coherences" and documentary fictions, dust breeding, fictocriticism and “the dispersed science”.
Scrivener’s Monthly is a series of public presentations that explore the space between material practices and spoken words: a periodical that talks. Set alongside the exhibitions program at Western Front, this experiment in “not publishing” involves readings, performances, and other articulations.