Still from Four Women (Julie Dash, 1975)

Interview by Felicia Mings

I had the privilege of chatting with Jacqueline Stewart shortly after attending the March 28^th L.A. Rebellion film screening of shorts by Ben Caldwell, Barbara McCullough, O.Fummilayo Makarah at the Gene Siskel Film Center. This event kicked off a series of film screenings across Chicago that dig into the archive of the L.A. Rebellion, a collective of former students of UCLA’s School of Theater, Film and Television who were dedicated to exploring the social, cultural, and political issues of their time—the 1970’s and 1980’s.

My interest in the intersection of curatorial practice and art education made me extremely excited to delve into Stewart’s experience of curating a collection that contains historic, documentary, and fictional works by seminal African American filmmakers.

Felicia Mings: What drew you to this curatorial project?

Jacqueline Stewart: I am a film historian specializing in African American film and when I was doing research on early black filmmakers, I found it frustrating that very few of the films had survived.  I ended up conducting most of my research by looking at old black newspapers. This really sparked my interest in learning more about film archiving and preservation, and through Jan-Christopher Horak, Director of the UCLA Film and Television Archives I had the opportunity to do that.

For future film programmers and curators, could you share a bit about the process of collectively curating films with Allyson Nadia Field, Jan-Christopher Horak and Shannon Kelley?

Chris Horak and Shannon Kelley have more experience in curating and programming than Allyson and I. Chris has curated work for decades as an archivist presenting public programs on a variety of subjects at UCLA, George Eastman House and abroad.  Allyson and I are scholars, and we were able to bring a deep historical knowledge of African American film to the project. Each member of the team brought different strengths and bodies of knowledge, which helped determine what would be in the show.

There are two different versions of this film program, an extensive one that ran for three months in the fall of 2011 at the UCLA Film and Television Archive, and a shorter version that is on tour. I will focus on the shorter version that is currently in Chicago. For this program one thing that we came to agreement on was spreading the attention across as many of the filmmakers as possible. Some of the filmmakers are more widely known than others. People who know a lot about African American film are familiar with Charles Burnett and Julie Dash. There have been a few retrospectives of these individual artists, but the work of many others has been left out. [1] We wanted to show work by each filmmaker participating in the project, and that is why we only included one feature film by each of the better-known artists in the program. In addition, we wanted to include work they created as students and as well as their shorter films because people tend to focus on feature length films. The tour consists of four programs made up of shorts, and eight programs that show feature length films that are each preceded by a short.

Still from Define (O. Funmilayo Makarah, 1988)

After the program is done touring, how can people access these films?

At the UCLA Film and Television Archive there is a copy of everything that we have uncovered during the course of the project—the archivists have said that the material has been gaining a lot of use. The archive’s website features an extensive L.A. Rebellion section that features some short student works.  We hope to possibly have DVD releases of some of the films some time in the future. Although, an issue that comes up around these films is often copyright. As students, the filmmakers often used music without purchasing or clearing the rights to it, making DVD distribution one of the biggest and most expensive challenges. Therefore, it will be a slow process but it is one that the archive is committed to. Milestone Films released Burnett’s Killer of Sheep and My Brother’s Wedding and some shorts on DVD in 2007.  And a number of shorts and early student works by others are distributed by Third World Newsreel and Women Make Movies, for rental or purchase.

Who are the African-American students and emerging filmmakers that you are watching out for? How is this new wave of artists work similar or and perhaps divergent to the work of the LA Rebellion filmmakers in relation to content, form, and possible social and political aims?

One person that comes to mind, although she is not a student, is Cauleen Smith, and her film Drylongso. Cauleen comes to mind because she went to UCLA for film school, and she pursued her undergraduate degree at San Francisco State, studying under L.A. Rebellion filmmaker Larry Clark who directed Passing Through. Cauleen was inspired by him as a teacher, and talks in incredible detail about how he taught students to shoot dark-skinned people using proper lighting and film stock appropriate to their skin tones. He was very thorough about these issues that many cinematographers ignore or take for granted, and you can see that Cauleen works to show that beauty and diversity in her work. She is descendant of this movement.

Still from Water Ritual #1: An Urban Rite of Purification (Barbara McCullough, 1979).

Do you have other curatorial projects on the horizon that we should be aware of?

I have kept pretty busy with the LA Rebellion program touring, but I will be presenting something at an upcoming Orphan Film Symposium at the Academy Film Archive. Organized by Dan Streible, the Orphan Film Symposia bring together archivists, scholars, and filmmakers to discuss and screen neglected films. I have been working with S. Pearl Sharp, a filmmaker, poet, actor and activist who lives in LA.  She shared with me work she did back in the 1980s with the Black Entertainment Television network (BET). When BET first came on the air they would show older black films from the 1970s, and even back to the 1930s and 1940s.  These were preceded by short video introductions Sharp produced and directed with Thom Eubanks. These introductions are really informative pieces in which she talks with actors and actresses from the films such as Rosalind Cash, Max Julien and Ron O’Neal, as well as interviews with scholars like Henry T. Sampson.  These tapes reveal some of the early history of BET. It is important to me that these are all shot on videotape, as there has been a lot of attention paid to the preservation of film, but video is in more danger of deteriorating because people don’t attach the same historical value or see it as aesthetically significant. This project has made me start to think of strategies for preserving other African American video works.

Felicia Mings is a graduate student in Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her experiences in developing youth arts programming in Toronto and St. Catharines, Ontario has led to her interest in exploring intersections between curatorial practice, art education and community development, specifically in relation to contemporary African Canadian art.

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[1] In 2011 the MOMA did a retrospective of Charles Burnett’s work titled Charles Burnett: The Power to Endure. Many institutions have honored him.

The moment the LA Rebellion got named was when Clyde Taylor, curated a show at the Whitney Museum in 1986 called  “The L.A. Rebellion: A Turning Point in Black Cinema.” This was one of the first times these films and filmmakers were exposed to a large audience. It was difficult to get access to those films before.

Still from Pour vos beaux yeux (Henri Storck, 1929). Image courtesy of La Cinémathèque française.

On the occasion of her program with CATE, curator Andréa Picard spoke with Kyle Riley about the Toronto International Film Festival’s experimental film and video program, Wavelengths. Picard illustrates the program’s history and evolution, the challenges of curating shorts programs, her curatorial vision, and her first encounters with film. Coming from an art history background, Picard highlights the many intersections between the visual arts and moving image worlds and discusses the changing festival landscape.

Kyle Riley is a MA candidate at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the dual degree program in Modern Art History, Theory and Criticism & Arts Administration and Policy.

Kyle: I wanted to talk first about Wavelengths. I am interested to hear you describe it in terms of what it means to you, what your motivations are and how you see it playing a role within the film community in general and in the festival world in particular.

We’re now heading into our 13^th year, so Wavelengths has accrued its own history within TIFF, and has grown a tremendous amount. When Wavelengths was launched, it did so with four programs of shorts on opening weekend, as a forum to celebrate experimental film within a large festival, not unlike Views from the Avant-Garde at the New York Film Festival. Susan Oxtoby, who was the former Director of Cinematheque Ontario at the time, was the section’s founding-curator. The city of Toronto has a very rich experimental film community and history, and the organization’s commitment to non-commercial film and video has always been significant. In that way, Wavelengths was a natural progression, especially given Susan’s curatorial tastes and expertise. The Toronto International Film Festival is a big, very well attended public festival. It doesn’t have a market; its efforts are largely directed toward connecting an engaged and enthusiastic public, as well as attending industry from around the world with the films in its selection. The atmosphere can be electric, charged with the promise of discovery.

The section was named after Michael Snow’s Wavelength (1967), not only for the film itself but for Snow’s enormous achievements and contributions as one of the world’s greatest interdisciplinary artists. Despite his international engagements, Michael has remained very active in the Toronto scene. While he no longer plays free jazz on a regular basis, he still comes to the Cinematheque on occasion, attends the festival, and has recently been the focus of several exhibitions. It’s been a lovely, longstanding dialogue, and he continues to inspire not only the ethos of the program, but also many of the artists who come to present their work.

While Wavelengths began fairly small and modestly as a showcase for new work, it did so presciently with an eye towards the history of cinema. If I recall correctly, the first year included a gorgeous hand-tinted film by Segundo de Chomón. When Susan left to become the Senior Curator at Pacific Film Archive, I stepped into the role and grew the program. I wanted to ensure a space for visionary feature-length filmmaking as well. At the time (2005) filmmakers like James Benning, Harun Farocki and Heinz Emigholz had not played the Festival in a long while and I felt it was important to re-introduce them to the fold, especially given their recent contributions.

Though still modest within the scope of TIFF, Wavelengths has considerably expanded and now provides a curated space for short, medium and feature-length films and videos that defy easy categorization, such as cinematic essays and hybrid documentaries. Last year marked a major turning point in the program’s evolution, when we collapsed the former “Visions” program under Wavelengths’ umbrella. This new section dismantles the traditional boundaries between experimental film and narrative filmmaking, though we ensure that the feature-length works are definitely made by artists. We champion autonomy, risk-taking—aesthetic and political—unusual collaborations, a sense of urgency and experimentation in a broad use of the term. The former Visions section was my favorite in fact, as it showcased young auteurs making uncompromising works of cinema—ones which are likely to withstand the test of time. There you’d find films by some of today’s most important filmmakers, such as Argentina’s Lucrecia Martel and Lisandro Alsonso, Tsai Ming-liang from Taiwan, Bruno Dumont from France, and one of your most famous alumni, Apichatpong Weerasethakul. As a section that encouraged the pushing of boundaries both formal and of storytelling, its merger with Wavelengths comes at a time when increasingly diverse programs are teaching us that the term ‘experimental’ varies greatly from nation to nation, and story needn’t be incommensurate with formalism.

The shorts programs remain the core and still screen during opening weekend, while the features are spread throughout the entirety of the festival. I was a little apprehensive going in last year, but the changes were enthusiastically embraced. We saw much crossover with the audience and press, confirming my belief that true cinephiles are those with a near-inexhaustible curiosity and a thirst for great cinema, be it that of Nathaniel Dorsky or Tsai Ming-liang, Athina Rachel Tsangari or Aldo Tambellini, Luther Price or Wang Bing—each of whom is avant-garde in their own way. Wavelengths advocates for film and video as art across genres, and beyond categories. We certainly share affinities and a view of cinema with many international colleagues, but I think the merger of “Visions” and “Wavelengths” makes this section unique within the festival world. At least, we aspire to be!

So Wavelengths began as a way to create bridges between underrepresented film and video work and more well-known avant-garde pieces.

It was begun as a sidebar for experimental film, a section to celebrate great artists like Ken Jacobs and Peter Tscherkassky and to discover a new generation of film and video artists. Over the years, the section has grown to reflect the changes in the field, such as the inclusion of visual artists working with moving images. Recently, we’ve presented such celebrated artists as Thomas Demand, Tacita Dean, Mark Lewis, and Francesca Woodman. This facet has become an important progression, as it mirrors the changes in moving image culture while still insisting upon art on screen, and not just in the galleries in installation form. It has, perhaps not surprisingly, also changed my job immensely because I’m now not only working with distributors like the Video Data Bank, Vtape and the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Center, but also important galleries like Marian Goodman, Mathew Marks, David Kordansky, Eigen & Art, etc.  Let’s say in some cases, there’s way more paperwork! One of the most exciting things about Wavelengths is the inclusion of little or unknown artists alongside legendary ones and how it surreptitiously shuttles between disciplines while exploring the art of cinema.

Still from Slave Ship (T. Marie, 2007). Image courtesy of the artist.

That’s one thing that really interested me about your screening last night.  You really seem to demonstrate an interest in moving image work that operates parallel to or even directly integrates object-based work.  For example, during your Q&A when describing the importance of Michael Snow you made it very clear point to address his object-based practice, and you included works like Chris Kennedy’s 349 (for Sol LeWitt) which makes a direct reference to a visual artist, and T. Marie’s Slave Ship, whose method of manipulating each pixel individually to slowly change the scene seems to be an extremely object-based way of working.

T. Marie calls them ‘moving pixel paintings’…

Yeah, exactly. 

As distinct as the history and evolution of cinema have been from those of the art world, its history and discourse, the trajectories have not been entirely separate all along. They’ve run parallel.  I think there is a little bit of cultural amnesia that comes with the fervent discussions about moving images suddenly being embraced by the art world. One can look to the history of several avant-gardes, from Russian Constructivism, to Surrealism or Dada, through Fluxus to see a dialogue between disciplines, including painting, photography, film, poetry and performance. Of course, it’s much more complex than that but in thinking of film as an art form, rather than popular entertainment, that dialogue has a long history, relatively speaking. That’s not to say that cinema has been completely understood or properly embraced by the art world, especially when we see just how poorly installed many moving image works are within galleries or museums. But we’re certainly at a point in time where moving images are so prevalent within the museum space that in the art world there is renewed interest in the cinema and its own history, narrative and otherwise.  Artists like Francesco Vezzoli for instance, or even, it’s too obvious now perhaps, but Christian Marclay, Jesper Just or Douglas Gordon, are mining the history of cinema.  Cinema as spectacle, cinema as popular entertainment and iconography, while the form largely becomes subsumed by their own formal preoccupations; in some instances, their lack thereof…and suddenly, the ethics of appropriation is one hot topic!

I think we’ve finally reached a time when the art crowd will commit to attending film programs with a set start time, as opposed to wading in and out of a black box. Wavelengths attempts to harness this interest by including a few big named artists to lure them in, to act as hooks, as say Francesca Woodman did last year. Once there, many appreciate the dialogue between experimental film and video with other disciplines like painting or sculpture or are simply impressed or inspired by what they see, and hopefully want to see more. This renewed interest in the cinema has also resulted in flourishing film departments in museums throughout the world. The best ones don’t just showcase film and video as supplements to their exhibitions but celebrate the art of film for its own achievements and merits and draw an enthusiastic crossover audience. Tate Modern and Le Centre Pompidou do this very well. I’m speaking generally here, of course, but I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that much of the art world needs to learn how to think, write and theorize about cinema.  I don’t mean a formal education per se but Cinematheques should be benefiting from this desire to see cinema presented in true museum-quality conditions, and in increasingly rare archival prints. The internet can provide plenty of context (true and false!) but the real experience is still to be found on the big screen. Real and romantic.

An exciting intervention, at least I found the gesture to be wonderfully polemical and incisive was Austrian Filmmuseum Director and curator Alexander Horwarth’s impressive film program for documenta12, which acted as celebration, as much as a speculative corrective. Presenting key works of cinema across all genres, from Classical Hollywood, Modernist European masterpieces to experimental film, the list could be interpreted as the non-existent archive or history of films that could have or should have been included in what is arguably the world’s most important art event. The films were shown in the cinema every day for the entirety of that documenta, the history of their non-inclusion rendered cheekily implicit. His inspired programming put Hitchcock, Chris Marker and Robert Smithson on the same program, linking notions of memory and utopia. His program (at least on paper, I was not there), while avoiding the trappings of pure chronology provided a fascinating excursive through film history, one which is too often shrouded in myth or hews to a staid historiography. The series also made it very clear that cinema is an art form reliant upon the conditions of its exhibition, i.e. that something special happens when films are properly projected in a cinema and collectively viewed. Similar issues are what compelled me to found the Film/Art column for Cinema Scope magazine. In some ways, it was a reaction against so many of the poorly installed moving image installations in galleries and museums that did a great disservice to the artworks by not honoring or understanding their fundamental properties and exhibition needs.  The damage done to poorly installed film works is so much greater than that of a poorly hung painting.

That really speaks to what I thought was an interesting contrast between Chris Kennedy’s 349 (for Sol LeWitt) and Henri Storck’s Pour vos beaux yeux.  The intentionality of that contrast seemed so apparent.

It was a bit crazy!

Yeah!  That was so interesting to me, but it makes perfect sense in light of what you’re saying about trying to collapse that perceived distinction between art and cinema in an attempt to show that it is a very similar dynamic that has existed throughout the twentieth century. 

Absolutely.  Just thinking about that artwork by Sol LeWitt: it’s a wall painting, and what is a wall, if not traditionally very flat.  So is video.  It’s flat, or as filmmaker Jean-Pierre Gorin colorfully puts it, it’s a big block of Formica!  Its compression affects your perception because of its pronounced lack of depth (also with the color-melding as can be seen in Chris Kennedy’s hyper-edited video).  There’s an internal binary occurring, however.  Then to segue immediately to the Storck, which is also relatively flat in that it was largely shot on a stage, is very theatrical and awkwardly and charmingly artisanal. But it was shot and projected on 35mm and thus we feel the depth of field with its swirling grain, despite the acute foreshortening of its mise-en-scène.  I knew it would be jarring but I wanted to know how it would affect the senses to go from one to another, with their 70 year gap.

Still from 349 (for Sol Lewitt), (Chris Kennedy, 2011). Courtesy of the artist.

I liked how you described it as ‘disjunctive programming,’ because visually it is such a stark contrast.  Is that a strategy or device for you to sort of jolt people out of thinking about film genres?

It’s not a strategy, but I am very much aware of giving works their own breathing space, which is a very difficult to do, especially in a festival context.  Creating shorts programs is more difficult than perhaps people perceive it to be. One doesn’t simply want to put works together that deal with the same theme. Whether films are 1 minute or 23 minutes long, I consider them original works of art, and want to ensure that they have the right context and the proper breathing space, which is always a challenge. I don’t want to create a program in which everything melds together and produces an overall impression, as I wouldn’t be doing justice to the individual works.  You have to find a way to allow them to exist on their own, while also complementing the other works in the program.  I tried to do that in last night’s program, despite it being a sampler, it meant to give the audience an idea of the kinds of films and videos we’ve championed. I wanted to ensure a few threads to awaken the audience’s imagination. Whether it was the painting thematic, or the more political works—and how they’re implicitly political, not overt—the films contributed their own textures and expressions while forming a cumulative one that worked along several lines. Compelling and mysterious ones, I hope. Mystery as strategy? Or perhaps contradiction or paradox, such as the sensual in the austere. Maybe we should be talking principles over strategy!

When you say that the way that you structured the screening last night in a way that you wouldn’t normally do, how would you describe what you would do in a more institutional context?  How would you describe your curatorial practice as a film programmer?  How do you approach curating Wavelengths, either thematically or structurally?

That is a difficult question to answer categorically because programming for Wavelengths is very different from curating for other institutions or other contexts, where I might attempt to subvert or fill in the canon. Wavelengths is very much a forum for new work, as festivals mostly are, with a few restorations to enrich the dialogue. Four fairly taut short programs (lengthy shows can be a drag and deter from the strength of the individual works) means that the competition is fierce with very limited space relative to the number of submissions. In all cases, I look for films that move, surprise and inspire me, that momentarily quell my existential panic, that remind me of the power of art to change the way we look at and feel about the world, that evince a certain urgency, that restore the power to moving images in a world run rampant by so many meaningless ones. I am a formalist at heart so if something doesn’t appeal to me on a formal or aesthetic level then it’s difficult for me to engage with it. I try to make the program as diverse as possible while never making any token concessions. In that way, the curating process is collaborative as my reach only extends so far. I rely on the generosity of others from around the world to suggest works that eschew or do not have access to traditional distribution channels. I solicit directly from filmmakers, galleries, artists, distributors and other curators.  By and large, the programs cohere around a theme, not so much for convenience’s sake (such as marketing concerns for instance) but under a certain curatorial rationale that when successful is also provocative and surprising, like the art it represents. Disjunction can also work wonderfully in this context.

Last year, for instance, I showed Pipe Dreams by Lebanese artist Ali Cherri. The video deals with the rapidly changing situation in Syria and how artists grapple with history as it unfolds. I juxtaposed it with a Lillian Schwartz restoration because Cherri’s video is about the first Arab astronaut, and Schwartz’s is a completely abstract (and newly revealed to be 3D!) film called UFOs. It was a somewhat cheeky move to segue from a political work to a playful, eye-popping one, but I think the effect was greater for both because of that difference. One could argue that they are both dealing with space: the space of history, actual space, cinematic space. Disjunction can sometimes awaken rich readings, rattling our brain out of our customary ways of thinking. I like to play, to be conceptual on some level, but never (at least I hope not) to the detriment of the films I am showing. I often think about curating films and videos in terms of sculpture, whether or not that is a “proper” approach. Conceptual sculpture, then! Texture plays such an important role, even more so now that we are living in a multi-multi-multi media world. I think of texture as an elusive quality that one must attempt to bask in, like time regained. I love the paradoxes that cinematic texture conjures, in all of its illusionism. This again points us back to proper presentation conditions, and the splendor of the big screen for film and video works alike (though different). I wish all curators and film programmers, myself included, had the luxury of pre-screening works in their exhibition copies projected on the big screen. It makes a world of difference—laptop viewing does a poor job of representing an artist’s expression meant for large-scale in-cinema projection.

Still from Pour vos beaux yeux (Henri Storck, 1929). Image courtesy of La Cinémathèque française.

So you began curating Wavelengths in 2006.  Is this sort of process that you are describing, the things that you are interested in and the spaces and conversations you are interested in creating, something that you arrived at as an approach right from the start or has there been a gradual movement towards this in your practice at Wavelengths?

Prior to that I was programming at the Cinematheque, and I continued to do both for six years.  In some ways, I am always looking toward the past in order to grapple with the present. I have such a profound love for so many films from the history of cinema that I am motivated to discover new work that will withstand the test of time, to find traces of greatness from artists I’ve never heard of. In all of my work, I’ve attempted to veer from a prescribed canon, have attempted to suggest alternate ways at looking at bodies of work, to fill in gaps and to look in unorthodox places, to follow my convictions, to risk being unpopular in my choices in order to defend work I belief in, to take a chance on work that I don’t fully understand, as well as to say no to certain artists or works which can be the most vexing of all. I think the canon is obviously important, but by its very nature, it exists because of visibility, because someone championed and wrote about those works. It’s overwhelming to think about the films that we will never see or even heard about. The internet of course complicates this by granting access, but way too much.  It’s a floodgate that both helps and hinders discovery. Many Farber’s seminal essay on termite art certainly guides in me in endless search.

That’s great.  My last question is for you personally. Again, given our discussion about your art history background I was curious how you arrived at your interest in experimental film and video.

Well, it’s because of one work! And it’s not related to film or video at all.  It’s an 18^th century painting by Jean-Siméon Chardin called The Jar of Apricots from 1758, which belongs to Art Gallery of Ontario.  I fell madly in love with this painting, which is, in my opinion the masterpiece of their collection.  It’s a still life, but for Chardin a very unusual one as it’s oval-shaped making it both very rare in his body of work, and some argue a lesser painting informed by the fashion of the times. I disagree, of course!  While I was studying art history at the University of Toronto we were often sent to the Art Gallery of Ontario to study works in the flesh for our papers so I was there weekly. I would often be writing on Rothko or Agnes Martin or Sol LeWitt, and then I would go visit “my” painting.  I would spend obscene amounts of time with it much to the bemusement of the guards, one whom became a great friend over the years. I was a bit obsessive.  Then one night the loudspeaker announced that ‘the film is about to start downstairs.’  I wasn’t aware that the Cinematheque was located in the building because I was new to Toronto, so I went down to investigate.  The film was Pierrot le Fou by Jean-Luc Godard.  I had seen it on television before, but seeing it on the big screen for the first time, I immediately thought ‘this is a moving painting!’  That’s what it is.  It’s a perverse work of pop art.  Everything is painted in bold, primary colors, and watching it on the big screen in a beautiful 35mm print was a complete revelation, especially with my gaze sharpened from spending so much time looking at paintings. Then I saw Antonioni’s Red Desert, which for me crystallized the relationship between painting and film.  My passion continued from there, and obviously led me to the avant-garde, with real paint on celluloid…

That’s an amazing story, and it makes complete sense too in terms of how you approach your curatorial practice.

Yes, that’s when I first saw film as a real art form. With Red Desert especially, I was mesmerized by the painted sets, and how the shots visually rhymed with one another. It was both a startling and beautiful realization. The film became more sexy but also more menacing. I was caught in its grip. I still am…

]]> http://blogs.saic.edu/cate/catch-up-with-cate/feed/ 0 http://blogs.saic.edu/cate/april-18-twohhundredfiftysixcolors/ http://blogs.saic.edu/cate/april-18-twohhundredfiftysixcolors/#comments Fri, 12 Apr 2013 12:51:16 +0000 Raven Munsell http://blogs.saic.edu/cate/?p=4966 Thursday, April 18, 6 p.m. | Eric Fleischauer & Jason Lazarus in person!
World Premiere!

Still from twohundredfiftysixcolors (Eric Fleischauer & Jason Lazarus, 2013). Courtesy of the artists

Crafted from thousands of animated GIFs (the file format used to create simple, looping animations online) twohundredfiftysixcolors is an expansive and revealing portrait of what has become a zeitgeist medium. Once used primarily as an internet page signpost, the file type has evolved into a nimble and ubiquitous tool for pop-cultural memes, self-expression, and considered artistic gestures. Chicago-based artists Eric Fleischauer and Jason Lazarus chart the GIF’s evolution, its connections to early cinema, and its contemporary cultural and aesthetic possibilities, archiving this particular moment in the history of the motion picture and internet culture and reflecting on the future of both. 2013, Eric Fleischauer & Jason Lazarus, digital file, 97 min + discussion.

ERIC FLEISCHAUER (b. 1977, Buffalo, NY) is a Chicago–based artist, curator, and educator working in video, film, and digital mediums. Fleischauer utilizes conceptually–driven production strategies in order to examine the ramifications of technology’s expansive influence on both the individual and cultural sphere. His work has been exhibited at venues including The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, threewalls, Interstate Projects, Rooftop Films, Microscope Gallery, Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Kunstmuseum Bonn, and is included in the Midwest Photographer’s Project collection at the Museum of Contemporary Photography. Currently he teaches in the Department of Film, Video, New Media, and Animation at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

 JASON LAZARUS (1975, Kansas City, MO) is a Chicago-based artist, curator, educator, and writer. His practice includes photography, public archive projects, and the exploration of notions of impossibility as a medium. In 2012, cofounded Chicago Artist Writers (with Sofia Leiby), a new art criticism platform encouraging traditional and experimental art criticism by young studio artists. Lazarus’s work has been exhibited internationally and is in major collections including the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Milwaukee Museum of Art among others. He is the recipient of the John Guttman Photography Fellowship, a Richard H. Driehaus Foundation Award, and an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship. He is currently an Assistant Adjunct Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

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Still from Outwardly From the Earth’s Center (Rosa Barba, 2007). Courtesy of the artist and the Video Data Bank.

German-Italian artist Rosa Barba’s work takes shape through artists’ books, sculptural film-based installations, and short films. Often set in monumental, even menacing landscapes, her films combine documentary, performance, and science fiction tropes to examine surreal confrontations between nature, humans, and their technologies. Her subjects include life in the “Red Zone” around Mount Vesuvius, military test sites in the Mojave Desert, and a fictional account of life on a Scandinavian island whose inhabitants attempt to stop seaward drift of their homes.

Presented in collaboration with SAIC’s Visiting Artists Program and the Video Data Bank.

ROSA BARBA (b. 1972, Agrigento, Italy) currently lives and works in Berlin. Her work has been exhibited in film festivals, art biennales, art museums, and galleries worldwide. Solo exhibitions include the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (2012) and Kunsthaus Zürich (2012), among others. In 2010, she curated the exhibition, A Curated Conference: On the Future of Collective Strength within an Archive at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid. In 2008, Dia Art Foundation commissioned Barba’s first web-based project. Barba has received several prizes, including the Nam June Paik Award (2010).

Still from Spin (Hannes Schüpbach, 2001). Courtesy of the artist

The films of renowned Swiss artist Hannes Schüpbach are lyrical, often transcendent portraits of people, spaces, and everyday life. A painter, performance artist, and expert on textile art, Schüpbach weaves together light, gesture, and a keen attentiveness to the material world into meticulously structured compositions. His films, notes curator Haden Guest, open onto “a multi-layered world, where superimpositions and reflections suggest the hidden depths of the places and people evoked within them.” For this program, he presents Spin/Verso/Contour (2001-2011), an affecting trilogy about his parents, and L’Atelier (2008), a portrait of an artist’s studio in Paris.

Organized with the support of SWISS FILMS–The Arts Council of Switzerland.

HANNES SCHÜPBACH (b. 1965, Winterthur, Switzerland) is a painter, performance artist, filmmaker and curator of artists’ films. Schüpbach is best known for his 16mm films, which have been shown at the Kunstmuseum Winterthur; the Centre Pompidou; the Biennale de l’image en mouvement, Geneva; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; the Tate Modern, London; and the Harvard Film Archive, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Still from I & I: An African Allegory (Ben Caldwell, 1979). Image courtesy of the artist and UCLA Film & Television Archive.

From the early 1970s through the late 1980s, a group of African and African American filmmakers emerged from UCLA’s film school with a body of provocative and visionary works.  Referred to now as the L.A. Rebellion, this group would have a radical impact on black cinematic practice and alternative filmmaking in the U.S.

Presented in association with UCLA Film & Television Archive and supported in part by grants from the Getty Foundation and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the L.A. Rebellion series is curated by Allyson Nadia Field, Jan-Christopher Horak, Shannon Kelley, and Jacqueline Stewart. This screening is generously supported by the Black Cinema House. Upcoming screenings will take place at the University of Chicago’s Logan Center and Northwestern University’s Block Museum.

Still from Water Ritual #1: An Urban Rite of Purification (Barbara McCullough, 1979).

In the 1970s and 80s, a group of young African and African American filmmakers emerged from UCLA’s School of Theater, Film and Television with a body of provocative and visionary works that would have a radical impact on black cinematic practice and alternative filmmaking in the U.S. Now referred to as the L.A. Rebellion, these artists took up urgent social and cultural dynamics of their time, including Black activism and militancy, everyday life, and spirituality to forge a cinema responsive to the lives and concerns of African American communities and the African diaspora. Introduced by co-curator Jacqueline Stewart, the program kicks off a multi-institutional series of screenings in Chicago exploring the L.A. Rebellion and features short films by Julie Dash, O.Funmilayo Makarah, Elyseo J. Taylor, including stunning new preservation prints of Ben Caldwell’s I & I: An African Allegory (1979) and Barbara McCullough’s seminal Water Ritual #1: An Urban Rite of Purification (1979).

Presented in association with UCLA Film & Television Archive and supported in part by grants from the Getty Foundation and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the L.A. Rebellion series is curated by Allyson Nadia Field, Jan-Christopher Horak, Shannon Kelley, and Jacqueline Stewart. This screening is generously supported by the Black Cinema House. Upcoming screenings will take place at the University of Chicago’s Logan Center and Northwestern University’s Block Museum.

::PROGRAM::
Water Ritual #1: An Urban Rite of Purification, Barbara McCullough (1979, USA, 35mm, B&W, 6 min)
Medea, Ben Caldwell (1973, USA, 16mm, Color, 7 min)
I & I: An African Allegory, Ben Caldwell (1977, USA, 16mm, Color, 32 min)
Four Women, Julie Dash (1975, 16mm, Color, 7 min)
Black Art, Black Artists, Elyseo J. Taylor (1971,USA, 16mm, Color, 16 min)
Define, O. Funmilayo Makarah (1988, USA, DV, Color, 5 min)
L.A. In My Mind, O. Funmilayo Makarah (2006, USA, DV, Color, 4 min)

Still from View From the Acropolis (Lonnie van Brummelen & Siebren de Haan, 2012). Courtesy of the artists and Motive Gallery.

Named for but also infinitely inspired by Michael Snow’s 1967 masterpiece, Wavelength, the Toronto International Film Festival’s avant-garde program presents films and videos that defy convention, suggest alternate ways of thinking, and sometimes re-emerge from a distant past in order to comment on the present. Curated by Andréa Picard, who has curated Wavelengths since 2006, this program is a Wavelengths compendium featuring a number of works from the 2012 line-up (including Nathaniel Dorsky’s August and After, Ernie Gehr’s Auto-Collider XV and Lonnie van Brummelen and Siebren de Haan’s View from the Acropolis which were all cited in the New York Times’ best films of the year wrap-up and screen as Chicago premieres) and highlights from previous editions, including a 35mm restored print from La Cinémathèque française of Henri Storck’s too-rarely seen 1929 Surrealist gem, Pour vos beaux yeux. Blinking is not encouraged!

ANDRÉA PICARD (b. 1977, Toronto, Canada) is a film curator and writer based in Toronto and Paris. For twelve years she was a member of the programming department at TIFF Cinematheque (née Cinematheque Ontario) and has been curating Wavelengths, the Toronto International Film Festival’s celebrated avant-garde series, since 2006. She also writes the “Film/Art” column for Cinema Scope magazine.

::PROGRAM::

349 (for Sol Lewitt), Chris Kennedy 
(2011, Canada, Video, Color, Silent, 1 min.)
349 (for Sol Lewitt) is a digitally animated version of Sol LeWitt’s Wall Drawing #349. A recreation of LeWitt’s geometric vocabulary and primary colour palette, 349 careens through emblazoned emblems, lifted from walls and transported into dialogue with the legendary artist’s lifelong exploration of spatial systems and human emotion. (Andréa Picard)

Pour vos beaux yeux, Henri Storck
(1929, Belgium, 35mm archival print, B&W, Silent, 8 mins.)
Long thought lost, Henri Storck’s scarcely seen 1929 Surrealist gem, Pour vos beaux yeux (made in collaboration with painter Félix Labisse) uses playful optical tricks in its tale of a young dandy who tries to send a glass eye through the post, to no avail. Shown here in a 35mm restored print courtesy of La Cinémathèque Française.(Andréa Picard)

Class Picture, Tito and Tito
(2011, Phillippines, 35mm, Color, Sound, 5 mins.)
Filipino artist collective and “photography film” aficionados Tito & Tito convert a single 16mm colour strip into washed-out 35mm; the sea, like history, swallows but also spawns.(Andréa Picard)

Garden/ing,  Eriko Sonoda
(2007, Japan, Video, B&W, Sound, 6 mins.)
Shot frame-by-frame and eschewing all digital effects, Garden/ing is a trompe l’oeil hall of mirrors that meticulously stymies a view from a window with enlarged photographs of its very vista. (Andréa Picard)

Slave Ship, T. Marie
(2010, USA, Video, Color, Silent, 7 mins.)
The apocalyptic sublime of J. M.W. Turner’s 1840 masterpiece The Slave Ship, with its fiery conflagration and strewn debris amid wild waters, is the source for T. Marie’s time-based pixel painting-film: a languorous, searing abstraction with a hot, translucent palette updates the classic scene in reference to today’s skewed social hierarchy and the sale of human life. (Andréa Picard)

Capitalism: Slavery, Ken Jacobs
(2007, USA, Video, Sepia, Silent, 3 mins.)
Transforming nineteenth century stereographic images of cotton-picking slaves into haunting, flickering worlds of depth and movement, Ken Jacobs re-awakens a frozen and shameful moment in history. (Andréa Picard)

View from the Acropolis, Lonnie van Brummelen and Siebren de Haan
(2012, The Netherlands, 35mm, B&W, Sound, 15 mins.)
Lonnie van Brummelen and Siebran de Haan’s glorious 35mm View from the Acropolis extends the Dutch artists’ interest in Europe’s shifting power dynamics by offering a monumental meditation on the original Turkish site of the Pergamon altar, now stowed in the famous Berlin museum which holds its name. (Andréa Picard)

Auto-Collider XV, Ernie Gehr
(2011, USA, Video, Color, Sound, 9 mins.)
Ernie Gehr’s Auto-Collider XV, from his ongoing series devoted to vehicular form and movement, is a no-holds-barred trip into painterly abstraction, where an Agnes Martin painting meets a rapid-fire back-and-forth Gerhard Richter squeegee and the world is swiftly rent asunder. (Andréa Picard)

August and After, Nathaniel Dorsky
(2012, 16mm, Color, Silent, 18fps, 19 mins.)
Nathaniel Dorsky’s August and After is dedicated to two recently departed friends, legendary filmmaker George Kuchar and actress Carla Liss. The film shows them vibrantly, resiliently alive shortly before their passing and then sets off in search of soothing beauty, yielding searing 16mm images awash in colours both belonging to and transcending our natural world. Well into the twilight years of 16mm filmmaking, Dorsky continues to present textures and hues that are indispensible to the art of cinema. We will be poorer without them. (Andréa Picard)

Still from Marie (Karen Yasinsky, 2009). Image courtesy of the artist.

Ali Aschman and Jeremy Bessoff in conversation with Karen Yasinsky on the occasion of the screening ‘Fire is a Fact: An Evening with Karen Yasinsky’, a program of short puppet and hand-drawn animations from 1999 to 2012.

Ali: When Jim Trainor introduced you last night at Conversations at the Edge, he described your work as being “private” and stemming from a “secret imagination”. The early puppet animations that have more of a narrative structure do seem to communicate emotions and experiences that seem very personal. Is there an element of revealing your own psyche in making these works?

Karen: I don’t see how it cannot, but it’s not literal. When I look back to when I was a painter, before I started animating, my paintings were very similar to the animations in that they were cartoony and had little figures that were pushing or pulling or touching. So when I started animating, it was about those little interactions and gestures. In developing characters throughout the narrative and the animation, I think I was going towards emotions, not necessarily from my own life, but ones that I was interested in. In grad school I had studied Freud and did a lot of reading about psychoanalysis and that definitely went into these early works.

Jeremy: When you’re thinking about theory and also making work, I sometimes find it hard to negotiate the two—how to represent that I understand the idea, and how it relates to my project, but then visually communicating that idea seems very difficult, and I’m wondering how you deal with that.

Karen: It’s a great question because this is all done retrospectively. I was reading Freud and then making these animations probably a year or two after that, so I see now that they were influencing, but I wasn’t setting out with these Freudian ideas when I was developing the characters. Even in my later work, these things that I read are influencing me but I’m not setting out to describe the ideas with animation—whenever I’ve tried to do that it doesn’t work, it falls flat.

Jeremy: So you’re kind of absorbing this stuff and it comes out unconsciously, it leaks out intuitively.

Karen: Yeah, and I think for me it was just that I needed to narrow my subject, and the most narrow I could get was a scene from a film. It was very specific, and then within those confines I could just let my ideas go. So everything that these little things would suggest to me could become very important.

Still from I Choose Darkness (Karen Yasinsky, 2009). Image courtesy of the artist.

Ali: In No Place Like Home, Who’s Your True Love, Still Life with Cows and I Choose Darkness there seem to be power relationships at play, where one character is weak in some way and another dominant – whether that be through an absence of body parts such as torso or head or eyes, or an ability to stand up, or to protect themselves. With the exception of Still Life with Cows in which both characters are women, it seems like this power position is related to gender. Can you speak about that?

Karen: I often get the question at the end of a screening of my films if I have a problem with men. And the answer is no. But the movies are about struggles to connect and usually it is a heterosexual relationship between a man and a woman, ideas of fear, about giving yourself over, and connection, fear of the unknown. After finishing I Choose Darkness, I was really through with all of that because it was heavy, and it was part of, I think, every movie I did. The subject matter was these relationships, trying to find something in another, and then being thwarted in some way through one of the party’s fears or inabilities to connect.

Jeremy: And then your medium changed once your subject changed. Is that fair to say?

Karen: Well my medium changed for this subject reason, I thought if I start with puppets I have to deal with relationships, and I think I realized I’m making these melodramas. Music was a big part of it too, it was composed for the films, and I just felt like I want to do something else. This happened at a point when I saw this film, Heart of London by Jack Chambers, which has a strong, but at times really difficult, structure relating to his ideas. I also started thinking about the artist Bruce McClure, who does projection performances and creates these feelings that are totally detached from narrative that you have to interpret as emotions. Some people leave his performances feeling anxious, like they just had an assault upon them, because the light and sound is very intense. I think some people have a very negative experience, and I had an ecstatic experience. Some people really love it. So I really got interested in how to manufacture emotion through formal means—leaving it up to the individual to interpret.

Ali: Jim Trainor lent me a DVD of your work that had with it an artist’s book with still from Who’s Your True Love? along with writing from various contributors. Is that a medium you often use, and how else, if at all, does writing feature in your practice?

Karen: I loved making the book. It was a catalogue for a residency that I did at the American Academy in Berlin. But I love fiction. I read a lot, but I don’t write. But I do consider what I do in my head as I’m putting a movie together, be it animating or editing in the later work, a form of writing and connecting. I’m thinking about writing something for the new movie that I’ve started, but it’s something I’ve never done before so I’m a little reluctant.

Ali: It’s a different medium of storytelling.

Karen: With that book I was asked to do a catalogue of the work that I did in Berlin, but instead of focusing on me, I found the three fiction writers whose work I felt was very close to mine and I worked with them.

Jeremy: Who were they?

Karen: Lydia Davis, Miranda July and Lawrence Krauser.

Ali: Last night you mentioned the puppets rubbing themselves and each other as an autoeroticism you inserted because of the idea that films need with sex or violence. However the way they are touching seems much more awkward and sinister than it does sexy (which is not to say that sex cannot be awkward and sinister). Can you extrapolate on your use of those gestures, which are very powerful?

Karen: The characters are awkward with whatever they do, whether they are walking, or rubbing, or whatever; I think they get a little less awkward in I Choose Darkness because I had the puppets made for me. In all the early puppets, the hands, the way that I make them, appear bandaged and very ungraceful. It was as if I learned to make hands this way, this is just how I make them, and then they began to define the characters.  So all the characters have these mitts almost that are their way of dealing physically with the world and it makes it awkward. So that was part of this idea of the characters.

Jeremy: So your material almost dictated how they interacted with each other.

Karen: That’s right, and if I had a different brain, I wouldn’t have settled for those hands, I would have figured out how to make them thinner and more graceful. Because I teach my students how to make them like that, and nobody wants to work with hands like that!

Still from Audition (Karen Yasinsky, 2012). Image courtesy of the artist.

Ali: Do you see yourself going forward focusing on the more abstract modes of filmmaking that your last few films have seemed to address? Where it’s taking more of a focus on the structure and the surface of the medium of filmmaking?

Karen: Yes, but I still love stories. I think as you go on, your practice changes because of things that you learn and get interested in, but the stuff that it started with never gets lost, never leaves. So the new piece that I’m working on right now, after finishing these two films that were probably the most abstract in terms of structure, I want to get back with a little storytelling, but present it as an element instead of as a structure. So there will be a little story told, I’m not sure how, but within the bigger film. And I do know that it will be language, it will be told with a voice. I’ve rarely used voices in my work, so it’s a new challenge.

Jeremy: So you’re able to tell a story without language, through pantomime, even though it’s awkward as it is translating it through these puppets.

Karen: Well I love silent film. I watch a lot of silent film and I think the best silent film is some of the best film ever made. And it is so evocative but also I think without the use of dialogue, there’s an unreality to it and a kind of surreality that I’m interested in, and it’s also related to this reconstruction, like we’re always reconstructing things. So why try and make something seem really natural when that itself is a construction? So you have a choice of how do you want to reconstruct this thing we’re living through? And just as a matter of choice for me, it’s like silent film. I’ve seen some new silent films, but I’m really attracted to the way gestures were over-determined. Facial expressions, even though my faces don’t move, but that sort of over-determination of gesture and movement in lieu of having language, or as another kind of language.

Jeremy: I was introduced to your work about 13 or 14 years ago and I didn’t even know it, and it actually had a profound impact on my practice so this is why I’m very excited about meeting you. How did you get hooked up with that Joanie 4 Jackie tape project?

Karen: I met Miranda July who started it. She started this video compilation program, where anybody could send in a video and she would make a compilation of ten and send it back to those ten people—so you’re getting your work plus nine other movies. So it was a way of connecting this strange grade of people that were making movies in their bedrooms that nobody else would ever see, and maybe their family and friends wouldn’t understand. I met her at a film festival and we became friends. Astria, who put it together, saw my work at a gallery in New York and asked me to be part of one she was curating. That compilation later went to a festival and that’s where I met Miranda. That’s also why I included her story in that book. Sometimes you meet people and you just want to tell them to ‘get out there’, I think it’s really important to get your work shown. For a lot of people that animate, myself included, it’s a struggle sometimes to get out; I just want to stay home and work, but going to festivals, having screenings, or creating screenings if there’s none going on, with your friends and inviting people, is really good because people show up from other disciplines that you realize that you have this big connection with. Some people that you meet are better at getting work out there so sometimes they’ll just take you along, which is nice. I think that’s the hardest part, when you want to just make things, but you also have to do the work of getting it out there.

Ali: That film compilation is such a great idea. I have a printmaking background, and print portfolios work that way, and I’ve never heard of anyone doing that in another medium.

Karen: It’s still alive, though I think Miranda didn’t have the time to do it anymore, so Bard College now owns the archive and I don’t know if they’re still creating it.

Jeremy: That process almost seems like it should be obsolete, because we have the internet, but on the other hand it’s a lot more intimate. You’re getting your own personal copy, I don’t know if they’re still doing it on VHS… there’s something more special about that than there is in ‘click this link and look at it on the internet’.

Ali: And not everybody wants to put their work on the internet. You only have a selection.

Karen: I have a lot that is password-protected, so I just send it out to people. But also people knew Miranda’s performance work, and she wasn’t famous, and it was sort of underground. A lot of young people knew of her and found out about this, so that little common interest point around her work connected these other people. When I go to film festivals now, it’s like summer camp, because the kinds of film festivals that show my work are filled with kinds of people that all love similar things, and that’s a great thing.

Ali Aschman is an MFA candidate in Printmedia at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Jeremy Bessoff is an MFA candidate in Film, Video, New Media and Animation at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.