LUX Evening Course: Opening Up The Archive: Further Themes and Forms

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LUX Evening Course: Opening Up The Archive: Further Themes and Forms
Tuesday March 6th to Tuesday April 10th, 19-21h
LUX, 18 Shacklewell Lane, London E8 2EZ

This short course offers another opportunity to explore the richness and diversity of the LUX collection, with a further selection of films and videos from its archive. Over six weeks this March and April, a thematic selection of artists’ moving image, from its pioneers to its most contemporary practitioners, bring to light works rarely seen alongside the legendary, tracing the contexts and concerns that shaped them. From the experience of place, whether faraway or in the diaspora, from film essay and film poem, to the art of the joke and the appropriation of the film archive itself, this course considers the myriad and ingenious ways in which artists continue to engage with the moving image.

It is not necessary for participants to have attended the previous Archive courses, and no previous knowledge is required, just a curiosity to see and find out more about this fascinating area of art practice. Led by the film writer and curator Lucy Reynolds, and held in the screening room at LUX, the course will present new examples of the rarely seen films and videos from the LUX collection in an introduction to, and an insight into, the thriving culture of artists’ filmmaking. Each class will be supported with weekly hand-outs of key texts and further information on the artists and work under discussion.

Cost £85/ £65 (student/unemployed). To book a place contact [email protected]

 

Week 1: March 6th
Nine Jokes and Rat Life and Diet in North America
The provocative playful antics of Dada not only informed the first artist filmmakers, but also have remained an inspiration to countless others since. Artists have made use of humour in film and video to overturn propriety, poke fun at the establishment, and in the process raise more serious questions about the state of their society: from the satire of Joyce Weiland’s Rat Life and Diet in North America, Ian Breakwell’s eye for the slapstick surrealism of everyday occurrence in Nine Jokes, to the black and subversive humour of artists such as Paul Rooney, and Laure Prouvost.

Week 2: March 13th
Frank Stein, Wonder Woman and the Absence of Satan
Hollywood and mainstream media has often been seen as the adversary to experimental filmmakers. However, as we discuss, as many artists find it a source of fascination, and fertile material for filmmakers to re-write, re-mix and re-play cinema’s narrative conventions, diverting its original messages to more subversive meanings: from Ivan Vulueta’s 3 minute homage to Frankenstein to David Blandy’s paen to Bruce Lee.

Week 3: March 20th
Language Lessons
Whilst artist’s moving image often dispenses with the use of script or dialogue familiar from more conventional forms of cinema, language remains an important dimension of artists’ filmmaking. Whether through words as graphic form in Takahiko Limura’s White Calligraphy(1967) and Matthew Noel Todd’s flow of philosophical phrase in Jetzt im Kino(2003) or the nonsense of George Barber’s Gibberish(2009) the word, spoken and written, is shown as a potent force of communication in its widest sense.

Week 4: March 27th
Measures of Distance
This class considers how artists films have reflected the cultural displacements and conflicted identities of the diaspora community. It explores the rich and complex expressions of those generations of artists who have made their home in the UK, through choice or necessity, yet are rooted in the cultures of other nations. From Mona Hatoum’s displaced remembrance of family in Beirut in Measures of Distance(1988) and Tanya Syed’s portrait of London’s Cypriot community in Salamander(1994) to Campbell’s exploration of the trauma of slavery.

Week 5: April 3rd
The Visitor
The portable 16mm camera, and later its video and digital versions, have enabled filmmakers to record their experiences of other cultures, ranging across decades and continents. Framed from a predominantly Western perspective, these experimental travelogues nonetheless reflect the artist filmmaker’s attempt to go beyond the position of foreigner and coloniser to engage more profoundly with the complexities, political and social, of the places they visit. From the psychedelic subjectivities of David Larcher’s travels east in the days of the hippie trail, and Bruce Baillie’s sympathetic portrait of a Mexican community in Valentin de Las Sierras to Karen Mizra and Brad Butler’s representation of the complexities of current day Pakistan.

Week 6: April 10th
A Radical Spectatorship?
This final class explores the perception of the viewer in artists moving image. From the visceral eye slit of Bunuel and Dali’s Un Chien Andalou, to Stan Brakhage’s ‘inner eye’ perception, artists have long shown their intent to challenge the viewing experience of mainstream cinema. We discuss the pain thresholds for viewers of the visceral experiences of Paul Sharits and Tony Conrad’s flicker films, or the extended durations of Michael Snow and Peter Gidal. And what of the viewing space itself? We explore the recent move of moving image into the open spaces and mobile spectatorship of the gallery, and ask if the cinema space can still provide a potent space for viewing film and video.

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