No Soul For Sale: A Festival Of Independents
14-16 May 2010, Free admission
London Tate Modern, Bankside, London, SE1 9TG
To celebrate Tate Modern's 10th anniversary, the gallery will host "No Soul For Sale – A Festival of Independents". For this free arts festival, Tate Modern is invited 70 of the world's most innovative independent art spaces to take over the Turbine Hall. The festival will fill the iconic space with an eclectic mix of cutting-edge arts events, performances, music and film on 14-16 May 2010.
As part of the festival, several screenings will be presented in the Starr Auditorium, programmed by Light Industry (Brooklyn), no.w.here (London), Kling and Bang (Reykjavík), 2nd Cannons Publications (Los Angeles), Filipa Oliveira + Miguel Amado (Lisbon), cneai= (Paris-Chatou), Intoart (London), Collective Parasol (Kyoto), The Royal Standard (Liverpool), Vox Populi (Philadelphia), and Green Papaya Art Projects (Manila).
No Soul For Sale is a festival that brings together the most exciting non-profit centres, alternative institutions, artists' collectives and underground enterprises from around the world. The participants are encouraged to show whatever they choose, be it art, performance, video, publications, or simply themselves. Neither a fair nor an exhibition, No Soul For Sale is a convention of individuals and groups who devote their energies to art they believe in, beyond the limits of the market and other logistical constraints – it is a celebration of the independent forces that animate contemporary art. The festival is an exercise in coexistence: organisations exhibit alongside one another without partitions or walls, creating a pop-up art village.
"No Soul For Sale – A Festival of Independents" is curated by Cecilia Alemani, Maurizio Cattelan and Massimiliano Gioni, and produced by Tate Modern. The first edition of No Soul For Sale took place in June 2009 at X Initiative in the former Dia Center for the Arts in New York.
Selected Film Screenings for "No Soul for Sale"
Light Industry will replicate three events presented at their space in Brooklyn within the last year:
Friday 14 May 2010, 14:00h
Mechanics Of The Brain
- Mechanics Of The Brain (V.I. Pudovkin, 1926, 16mm, 64 mins)
The year 1926 represents a privileged moment of the young Soviet film industry, with Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Kuleshov, Vertov, Barnet, Room, Kozintsev and Trauberg all represented by important work—and some, including Pudovkin, with more than one. But Mechanics Of The Brain, Pudovkin’s first film, was like no other. Interrupted on this project by work on The Mother, his extremely successful first major film narrative, Pudovkin returned later that year to complete his documentary on the theory and practice of Pavlovian reflexology. This film is of especial interest in a number of ways: first, as a clear indication of the importance of this filmmaker’s primarily scientific training and work experience, something we see in his texts on filmmaking and film acting which were to serve as a bible for successive generations of filmmakers, well beyond the borders of the USSR. Of more general importance is Mechanics’ role in the establishment of reflexology as the official base of psychology and psychiatry in the USSR, and its anti-psychoanalytic character. And of particular interest is the show-and-tell form of the demonstrations—compelling, and, in fact, disturbing. For the subjection of patients to Pavolvian technology and method generates images that recall, in their strangeness, certain aspects of Surrealist imagery—the work of Max Ernst in particular. This film that begins as a demonstration of scientific method develops in its appropriation of technology the aspect of a horror feature. (Annette Michelson)
Saturday 15 May 2010, 14:00h
Obedience
- Obedience (Stanley Milgram, 1962, 16mm, 45 min)
- Folie A Deux (National Film Board of Canada, 1952, 16mm, 15 mins)
- Motion Studies Application (ca. 1950, 16mm, 15 mins)
Obedience documents the infamous "Milgram experiment" conducted at Yale University in 1962, created to evaluate an everyday person's deference to authority within institutional structures. Psychologist Stanley Milgram designed a scenario in which individuals were made to think they were administering electric shocks to an unseen subject, with a researcher asking them to increase the voltage levels despite the loud cries of pain that seemed to come from the other room. Milgram saw his test, conducted mere months after Adolf Eichmann's trial in Jerusalem, as a way to understand the environments that made genocide possible.
For this screening, the artist Zoe Beloff has paired Obedience with two earlier works dealing with psycho-social control: Folie A Deux and Motion Studies Application. The former, one of a series of films on various psychological maladies produced by the National Film Board of Canada in the 1950s, presents an interview with a young woman and her immigrant mother afflicted by shared delusions that manifest when the two are together. The latter is an industrial film purporting to present ways to increase efficiency in the workplace: explaining, for instance, a means to fold cardboard boxes more quickly. In stark contrast to the nostalgic whimsy typically associated with old educational films, Folie à Deux and Motion Studies Application play as infernal dreams of systemic power and sources of surprising, unintended pathos.
"The concept of 'motion studies' is central to cinema itself. Without the desire to analyze human motion, there would be no cinematic apparatus. But the history of motion studies is freighted with ideology. Its inventor Etienne-Jules Marey was paid by the French Government to figure out the most efficient method for soldiers to march, while his protege Albert Londe analyzed the gait of hysterical patients. From the beginning, the productive body promoted by Taylorism was always shadowed by its double, the body riven by psychic breakdown. We see this in Motion Studies Application and especially Folie A Deux, where unproductive patients, confined to the asylum, understand with paranoid lucidity that the institution is everywhere, monitoring them always. Obedience stands as a conscious critique of these earlier industrial films, co-opting their form only to subvert them and reveal their fascist underpinnings." (Zoe Beloff)
Sunday 16 May 2010, 14:00h
Bijou
- Bijou (Wakefield Poole, 1972, 16mm, 77 mins)
"I love this movie both because I do love gay male porn, and movies (duh) and also love the 70s and remember it, but Bijou simply smashes the mold to bits in terms of genre. It swerves from a near-documentary, realist mode suddenly into a kind of Russian constructivist passage, to an action car chase, a little grainy Warhol and falling we find ourselves in a Frank Wedekind play. Poole’s consciousness is massively absorbent. It’s hard to watch Bijou and not think that David Lynch is a Wakefield Poole fan, especially in Mulholland Drive. Sex is a such a rabbit hole in this film and we get treated to such a phantasmagoria of groping and grouping and kaleidoscopic rendering of sex. Plus there’s just footage of a New York that even those who were there have long forgotten. You’ll never want to wear underwear again once you’ve seen Bijou. I know this to be true. I watched it this week with a bunch of unconvinced art colonists of a wide variety of sexualities and art practices and everyone was transformed and no we actually didn’t have an orgy but underwear sales in this particular demographic have been totally altered and changed forever. Wakefield Poole is a genius and a sensualist and an artist of surprising complexity and passion. And levity. Come see this screening. You’ll feel so good." (Eileen Myles)
In conjunction with the screenings, Light Industry will exhibit a small publication of texts of the guest introductions done at each of these original shows, along with three new silk-screened movie posters commissioned specially for No Soul For Sale London by Annette Michelson with Amy Sillman, Zoe Beloff with Dash Shaw, and Eileen Myles with Paul Chan.
no.w.here will present a series on "
Film Without Film", arguing that ‘cinema’ is not what is presented to us on the screen, but what we present to the imaginary. Following Sergei Eisenstein’s definition of montage as that which is choreographed in front of the camera, "
Film without Film" presents cinematic montage as a (political) viewpoint, rather than an editing skill. The programme is curated by
www.no-w-here.org.uk in collaboration with Maxa Zoller.
Sunday 16 May 2010, at 11am
Film Without Film
- Drawing Wavelength (Rachel Moore, 2010, live performance, 20 mins)
The performance Drawing Wavelength by American academic Rachel Moore is a re-enactment of one of the most celebrated of avant-garde films, Michael Snow’s Wavelength (1967). Tracking the arc of the film on a blackboard Moore will create a chalk drawing of the spatial and temporal possibilities of the film as they develop over time according to her memory of the work.
- Blind Light (Sarah Pucill, 2009, 16mm, 22 mins)
Blind Light by the British filmmaker Sarah Pucill is a 22min work that (like Snow’s Wavelength) blurs the boundaries between representation and introspection. Pucill’s contemplative work explores the relationship between the window frame and the human eye where the window blind becomes the camera aperture/eye lid. For Pucill the cinematic is inscribed in our organic vision machine, the eye. The eye sits in the skull, which like a kind of ‘Ur-cinema’ becomes the black box from which we view the world, visually, emotionally, and intellectually.
- Large Perspex (Jemima Stehli, 2010, DVD, 11 mins)
Large Perspex is an 11 minute video performance in which the British artist Jemima Stehli directs a young man with a large rectangular sheet of clear perspex which he carries, manipulates and bends in a white studio space as the Spanish punk band 'If Lucy fell' play live. These two simultaneous performances form a dialogue with the unfolding reflections/refractions in the perspex acting as a membrane between three-dimensional physical space and the act of seeing this space. The modernist formalism of the perspex ‘frame’ and the physical exhaustion of the performers and band’s hardcore sounds turn montage as an intense bodily act.