Friday, August 19, 2005
8:30 - Live music by Rabbit
9:00 - Reclaiming streets, bodies, and minds with graffiti, tattoos, and guts. With curatorial assistance by the Video Data Bank.
On the lawn at Automotive High School
50 Bedford Avenue, Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
Dress warmly (it's cooler sitting still than in the streets).
In the event of rain the show is indoors at the same location.
Theft Is Property
Presented by Rooftop Films with curatorial assistance by Dara Greenwald and the Video Data Bank.
It is easy for a sensitive individual to become disheartened in these dark days of demagoguery, corporate mind-control schemes, eminent domain land-grabs and civil rights abuses. When boorish television commentators casually debate whether or not it is acceptable for our government to imprison an American citizen without trial and then intentionally drive him to the brink of insanity in order to get him to confess to some undisclosed "crime," it is tempting to merely lapse into a permanent state of despair.
But it is always easier to despair than to fight, and on this evening we bring you a collection of short films by and about brave artists who refuse to allow their bodies, streets and minds to be controlled by the ubiquitous homogenizing forces of the dominant culture. These films are not dry Poli-Sci treatises; like much of the best political art, these films enthrall and entertain as they vividly represent the exhilaration of people performing, painting, welding, singing and dreaming freely, regardless of the consequences. We follow sophisticated and talented street artists as they pursue their clandestine mission to bring variety and beauty back to the streets of New York; we see the wildly varied work of body artists from all over the world reinterpreting the surface of the human form; we read the astute observations of a pop fanatic who is infuriated by the false packaging of the folk music of our day; we even see documentation of a man's seemingly inexplicable desire to tape his own head to public structures in Chicago.
Many of the films in this program explore the artists' thorough belief in artistic and intellectual freedom, and encourage the viewer that such idealism in art is still possible—and still vital. But perhaps the film that makes the strongest argument against group think and ideological standardization is Jaqueline Goss' How to Fix the World. In this wry and amusing film about futile Soviet attempts to reorganize the language and logical systems of Uzbeki farmers, Ms. Goss subtly tweaks all of us for our intellectual rigidity. Though we are first amused by the farmers' inability to understand the logic of Western word association games, slowly we begin to realize that the oddest thing of all is how difficult it is for us to understand their organizational systems. It is an important lesson, lest we imagine our minds to be much more open than they actually are.
Rooftop Films would like to thank Dara Greenwald and the Video Data Bank for their curatorial assistance. Several of the films in this program are taken from the VDB library. Founded in 1976 at the inception of the media arts movement, the Video Data Bank is the leading resource in the United States for videotapes by and about contemporary artists. Click here for more info.
THE FILMS:
Public Discourse (Brad Downey and Quenell Jones / 38:00)
An in-depth verite study of the passionate artisans producing various forms of illegal installation art—including the painting of street signs, advertising manipulation, metal welding, postering and guerrilla art. Downey and Jones present an in-depth study that follows the art-making from initial idea through to exhibition, and explores their use of subversive messages, mimicking of advertising methods and the presentation of three-dimensional sculptures to the public.
Ancient Marks (Ethan Boehme / 10:00)
A mesmerizing short based upon the photographs of Chris Rainier, which explore the amazing ancient traditions of body art, set to the music of Ravi Shankar's daughter, Anoushka Shankar.
Large Gourd (Justin Cooper / Chicago, IL / 6:00)
"Well, the whole thing actually started out as a formal exercise. I was very interested in the image of a man with his head taped to a pole, a light post for example, in the public sphere. When the police started to get involved, though, I realized that it was turning into more of an overtly political piece so I just went with that. All of the stuff I told the cops about being a freelance graphic designer or a new father, all that was improvised and totally bogus, of course....It did hurt and I lost some hair during the project."
—Justin Cooper
How to Fix the World (Jaqueline Goss / 29:30)
Adapted from psychologist A.R. Luria's research in the Islamic outskirts of the Soviet Union in the 1930s, How to Fix the World brings to life Luria's conversations with Central Asian farmers learning how to read and write under the unfamiliar principles of Socialism. Colorful digital animations based on Max Penson's photographs of collective farmers play against a backdrop of landscape images shot in Uzbekistan in 2004. At once humorous, conflicting, and revelatory, these conversations between Luria and his subjects illustrate a particular historical moment when one culture attempted to transform another in the name of education and modernization.
5% (Tony Cokes / 10:00) 5% is a ten-minute work that questions the cult of pop stardom, deconstructs music industry practices, considers the problematics of live performance, and suggests other, more anonymous working strategies.
Oh Dear (Nicolas Provost / 1:00)
A simple yet moving story of children and a baby deer set against the background of a go-kart track.
Wiper Sync (Jamie O'Neill / 3:47)
A bizarre rumination on coincidental synchronicity in which Jamie poses as a "Dale Carnegie type" named Kurt Weibers as part of his "Global Point Strategies" project, which we will venture to say is a satire of corporate motivational speakers who masquerade as philosophers, in this case by "presenting a non-human centered approach to creativity production."
