Jan Svankmajer: The Complete Short Films
Bfi films [www.bfi.org.uk]
The film critic Anthony Lane once wrote: ‘the world is divided into two unequal camps; those who have never heard of Jan Svankmajer... and those who happen upon his work and know that they have come face to face with genius.’ He is quite right. This is the first collection on DVD of the complete short films by the Czech Surrealist filmmaker and animator. And what a great collection it is. Since he released The Last Trick in 1964, which was borne out of his experiences in theatre, Svankmajer has created wonderful, imaginative, funny and weird films that wear their Surrealist influences heavily. Breton called Prague the ‘magical capital of Europe’. Svankmajer has this magic in his blood and injects his work with nightmarish scenes of ‘disembowelments and bodily ruptures, cannibalism and disgorgements...’ Can you imagine a British director making this kind of work? The collection includes Punch and Judy (1966), Jabberwocky (1971) and Meat Love (1988). Essential viewing.
Richard Long: Selected Statements & Interviews
Haunch of Venison
Richard Long with one of his works in 1967
Richard Long interviewed by Betty van Garrel (1971) – an early interview, published in
English for the first time, taken from Richard Long: Selected Statements &
Interviews published by Haunch of Venison
BETTY VAN GARREL: Is the environment in which you work as important as the artistic intervention in that landscape?
RICHARD LONG: They constitute an entity.
BVG: What usually comes first, a suitable environment or the idea for a project?
RL: Which comes first, the chicken or the egg? Last year I went hitch-hiking across America. I wanted to see Nashville, having been interested in country music for some years. Wanted to see the Smokey Mountains, where that traditional music has its origins. As I was walking in those mountains, I saw the river...
BVG: Was this the start of REFLECTIONS IN THE LITTLE PIGEON RIVER (Great Smokey Mountains Tennessee, 1970)? A very atmospheric, poetic place. A stretch of riverbank lined with heavy shade from trees is reflected in a clear river which seems, for once, to be free of pollution. Beneath the faint rippling of the shallow water lie two intersecting lines drawn in stones. Lyrics by Johnny Cash are printed on the photograph: "I keep a close watch on this heart of mine, I keep my eyes wide open all the time, I keep the ends out for the tie that binds, Because you’re mine, I walk the line."
RL: Yes... Actually it’s hardly possible to talk about the reasons why. It involves a kind of mysticism. In the past the Cherokee Indians lived in that area. The piece in the river is, in fact, a reminder of those Indians. That’s the type of feeling it has.
BVG: Having climbed Mt Kilimanjaro in order to create a sculpture at the top, could you call yourself an experienced mountain climber?
RL: No, that journey was unbelievable – covered a whole range of vegetation. It took five days. Some people can’t cope with it; it’s a question of mentality. Some of the guides make that journey twice a week. I learned a lot in Africa – a kind of humility. When you see people there in that desolate landscape, see how they walk, how they stand – it seems to show a oneness with nature.
BVG: Why do you produce things, such as ‘Celtic Sign’ on Schiermonnikoog, which no one can ever find again?
RL: I did that deliberately. It’s the same as with everything else I do. All the works are done in solitary places, and I wasn’t intending to change my way of working for Sonsbeek.
BVG: Of course not, but what’s the philosophy behind this?
RL: It has to do with the silence of thought, with the silence of the woods.
BVG: Would it be possible to say that you work in a traditional way with untraditional means?
RL: That’s difficult to discuss, since whatever I say will have a misleading effect. It’s so difficult to pin down. One example: I wanted to create a sculpture 500 miles in length, so I did that. Afterwards it’s possible to go on and on talking about it, relating all kinds of theories about time and memory to it and calling it conceptual art if you want. I like very plain sculptures, and usually people look for far too much in them.
BVG: Your work is exhibited in leading museums and galleries, but what you make is difficult to sell due to the nature of the work. Does that give rise to financial problems?
RL: Do I look as though I have them? Most of what I make can’t be sold. I like that: it keeps things pure and simple.
BVG: Does that intense return to nature have anything to do with an aversion to society?
RL: No, not at all. It’s not a response to society; it’s not a decision.
BVG: As the photographs show, you roam across the most impressive and overwhelming landscapes. Is it not enough to appropriate those landscapes in an art historical sense as the Zero artists and the Nouveau Realistes did during the sixties?
RL: No, I want to touch the landscape... Feel it... One piece also involves my hand touching a river as it flows to the sea.
[From an interview published in Haagse Post, July 1971. Translation: Beth O’Brien]
Chris Burden with texts by Fred Hoffman, Lisa Le Feuvre, Paul Schimmel, Kristine Stiles and Robert Storr
Thames and Hudson in association with Locus +
Chris Burden is best known for his endurance performances, most famously Shoot (1971) when Burden was shot by a .22 rifle, and more painfully, Transfixed (1974) in which nails were [allegedly] driven through his palms as he was pinned to a VX Beetle – which was then revved for 2 minutes in a closed garage – echoing, or perhaps masking his screams of pain [but did he really go through with this?]
Endurance and pain was Burden’s speciality in his early career, a more excruciating example being Velvet Water (1974) in which an audience watched him on a TV monitor, [he is separated from them by a wall of lockers] as he announced ‘Today I am going to breathe water which is the opposite of drowning...’ After about five minutes Burden collapses choking and the monitor is turned off. Other works, like Bed Piece (1972) when Burden remained in bed for 22 days, were a little more benign. This book is a great visual record of Burden’s trajectory, and includes the beautiful Beam Drop (1984) when a crane dropped 60 large steel beams into wet concrete at the Art Park, Lewiston, New York. What a shame this was removed only three years later. This book is surprisingly thin on text, but many an art student would be advised to have a look at it to avoid stealing his ideas.
Miranda July
No One Belongs Here More Than You
Canongate
Reviewed by Claire Nichols
In 2005, Miranda July released a hugely successful film called Me and You and Everyone We Know. It won five prestigious international awards, including the Cannes Film Festival Award for ‘Best Feature Film’ that year. Me and You and Everyone We Know saw self-aware characters struggling to connect with the modern world. July’s characters are not only enchanted by it but at the same time haunted by its instant promises. We know this scene of course, and the lyricism of July’s film played on everyman’s narrative.
Miranda July’s first book, No One Belongs Here More Than You, pays us the welcome insights of 16 individuals inhabiting a similar environment. With first person narratives, July’s short stories, to a greater extent than her film, are the more poignant for their tender and private realisations of the modern world, her characters fantasising intensely, framed by, and never escaping from, their mundane daily lives.
Miranda July’s stories are fantastically melodramatic. The story of "The Swim Team" starts as an imagined conversation with an ex-boyfriend about a ‘secret year’ spent in Belvedere. ‘Just houses near a gas station’ - a barren land with nothing to do and practically no one to see. This confessional describes that year July’s protagonist spent in Belvedere creating a whole new social dynamic, for herself and the three local OAPs. She turned her home into a swimming pool, personalising the dream of socialist utopian facilities Belvedere had never had. Here, she taught these three local residents how to negotiate the carpet as a length of water and the furniture as apparatus. She maintains a self-serious position as coach of this new and beautifully absurd environment, proclaiming herself to be there ‘instead of the water’ and by the end of the story finishing up ‘the saddest swim coach in all of history’. This self-seriousness that you find in each of the characters in July’s stories unites them as victims of a dehumanised and dehumanising modern world, albeit ones with very rich dreams.
CN
The Public Catalogue Foundation: Oil Paintings in Public Ownership
An ongoing series published by The Public Catalogue Foundation
The Public Catalogue Foundation was set up several years ago to photograph and record all the paintings in publicly owned collections in the UK. At the launch, this was seen as a wonderful, if ambitious, project. The idea was to print - county-by-county - a series of catalogues to be published at regular intervals throughout the year. As there are an estimated 150,000 such paintings in the UK, some wondered if the scheme to digitise each image [these will eventually be available online] would take years, even decades. As it happens the PCF has, to its great credit, aready produced 16 catalogues. It is a fabulous endeavour, and no public gallery, university or library – or interested arts lover for that matter - should be without a full set. We usually only see 20% of the nation’s art on display at any one time. Now we can see a whole range of treasures [as well as plenty of howlers], and if you browse through any of these books you will no doubt unearth good work by artists that you have never seen before. It is very exciting, for example, to see Frederick Cook’s poignant paintings of urban ruins done during the Second World War, [Imperial War Museum collection], John Crome’s two almost identical paintings both titled Study of a Burdock, 1813 [Norfolk Castle Museum ] or Sofonisba Anguissola’s The Artist’s Sister, 1551 [Southampton City Art Gallery] What you immediately get is a sense of the richness of our regional collections. Perhaps all budding curators should study these books to get a fuller sense of the nation’s shifting tastes for acquistions. Even the least visually curious will enjoy having these important catalogue references. The 2007 titles are: Hampshire, Cornwall & the Isles of Scilly, Hampshire: Southampton and the Isle of Wight.
Fresh Moves: New Moving Images From The UK
A DVD of film and video art by tank.tv
It is a nice idea – put together a collection of film and video pieces by 24 UK based artists on one DVD so you can watch them at home. More often than not, video made by artists can live or die by the context in which it is shown. And the duration of the show will limit the audience. Tank tv has – with help of Stuart Comer, Hans Ulrich Obrist and others – created a video snapshot of current practice – and wide ranging it is. Among the artists are Cerith Wyn Evans, Daria Martin, Runa Islam, Spartacus Chetwynd and Andrew Kötting, as well as emerging artists like Torsten Lauschmann, Anja M. Kirschner and David Blandy. The work is extremely varied both in form, tone, content and intent which is its strength, from Katy Dove’s lyrical modernist-inspired animation to Ergin Cavusoglu’s intense films of dark urban environments.
War Paint: Art, War, State and Identity in Britain 1939-1945
By Brian Foss
Yale University Press
‘The function of the artist is not only to "savour" the scenes of war for his contemporaries, but also to preserve them in all their humanity or horror, their courage of their violence, their nobility or brutality, for posterity.’ So wrote an art critic on the Scotsman in 1942. During World War II, Kenneth Clark set up the War Artists Advisory Committee [WAAC], primarily with the aims of documenting all aspects of the war, from the activities on the Home Front to aerial combat. Over six years about 400 artists were involved – a kind of fine art version of Mass Observation which, itself had started in 1937. It was much to Clark’s credit that he persuaded the paper shufflers that the war pictures should be deemed as publicity and therefore the domain of the Ministry of Information rather than the armed services, who, as Clark knew fine well, would have preferred grandifying dull portraits of admirals and generals.
Foss looks at the social relevance of the artists who would work in all aspects of the war, and links their activities into how Britain saw itself during the Second World War. Was it a picture of Britain? Yes and no. Undoubtedly the commissioners at the WAAC were interested in both documentary and propaganda. Some artists dealt with this extremely well [Paul Nash] while others made plodding accounts of what they saw.
The sheer range of work is seen here. Even though some of the work was, essentially, a straight record of events – such as Laura Knight’s factory scene Ruby Loftus Screwing a Breech Ring [1943] it was a period when many artists would do their best work. Leonard Rosoman’s A House Collapsing on Two Firemen, Shoe Lane [1940] is still the best image of the danger of the Home Front – based, as it was, on his personal recollections of that job. Many artists followed, at some point, what Stephen Spender dubbed the ‘spirit in the ruins’ sensibility – painting the destruction of buildings as a metaphor for the human loss. They were, as he put it ‘pictures of twisted girders that have something in them of twisted humanity,’ of which included here is the apocalyptic Fired City [1942] by the little known William Ware and The Elms [1940] by John Armstrong – an eerie depiction of a ruined suburban home. However, as Foss notes, critics soon got fed up with all this anthropomorphising, and as Eric Newton wrote in the Sunday Times in 1940 ‘their novelty has worn off: they are becoming an unsightly bore.’
Looking at the imagery now, we can, thanks to the WAAC, get a fuller picture of the time – beyond the newsreels, photographs and newspaper reports of the day, from Joan Connew’s quietly powerful Blackout in Bromley High Street [1942] to Leslie Cole and Sergeant Eric Taylor’s harrowing scenes witnessed at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945.
Foss’s story is meticulously researched – which might be too much for some, but as a record of a unique period in art commissions, this book is a good read. Importantly he ensures that the fullest possible range of the WAAC’s commissions get a look in, as previously the big names – Spencer, Moore, Nash, et al have tended to dominate the pictorial landscape and sense of identity of the Second World War.
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