Today, more than ever before, visual artists are drawn to the possibilities of film and video—forms that have migrated to all aspects of our networked culture. Curators Eric Crosby and Dean Otto shed light on ways that shifts in artistic disciplines have led to a new series of films and programs at the Walker addressing the status of the moving image in contemporary art.
In 2003, avant-garde filmmaker Anthony McCall composed a short reflection for the journal October on the distinct social spheres of art and cinema. It had been 30 years since he’d made his bestknown work, the 1973 solid light film Line Describing a Cone—years marked by increasingly expansive and hybrid work from other artists and filmmakers—and yet he lamented, “The dichotomy between avant-garde film- (and video-) makers, and artists ‘working in film/video,’ still seems to be with us. The two worlds sometimes seem like Crick and Watson’s double helix, spiraling closely around one another without ever quite meeting.”
That perceived separation between art and cinema may persist, but at the Walker we’re often discussing how to bring these disciplines together. In 1973, Walker director Martin Friedman placed curator and historian John G. Hanhardt at the helm of a brand new film/video department, one of the first of its kind, solidifying a commitment to film that had been an integral component of the Walker’s artistic program since the 1940s. The following year, Friedman and chief curator Dean Swanson organized Projected Images, a landmark exhibition exploring the fluidity between the twin roles of artist and filmmaker. The show featured film and video installations by six artists, among them Paul Sharits and Michael Snow. Their work at the time was more often seen in the screening room than the white cube gallery. In the 1970s, the Walker also began acquiring media works, a priority that has resulted, more than 35 years later, in a singular collection that runs from early performance videos to contemporary immersive installations by Tacita Dean, Bruce Nauman, and others.
Today, projected images are ubiquitous in the Walker’s galleries, reflecting a markedly different context for artists’ forays into film. Commercial galleries present and sell media works in limited editions. Art fairs and international biennials showcase artists’ films in special “black box” venues. New funding streams and inexpensive technologies have increased artists’ access to the means of production. Film festivals worldwide screen feature-length experiments by such prominent visual artists as Steve McQueen, Sam Taylor-Wood, and Shirin Neshat. In short, artists’ cinema appears to be everywhere.
This proliferation of moving images speaks to a pervasive interest among artists, curators, and critics as to what constitutes the contemporary cinematic experience. As films continue to migrate from the silver screen to a host of other, smaller screens, such as televisions, computers, and smartphones, a younger generation of artists raised on video art, YouTube, and the multiplex is exploring new modes of film production, distribution, and exhibition. In the process, they are reviving the cinema as a site of inquiry and experimentation: “The cinematic experience has not always been a fixed one,” notes artist Redmond Entwistle. “It’s been one that’s open to new possibilities of screening.”
With Artists’ Cinema, the Walker turns its attention to these possibilities. From artist talks and screenings to a rotating program of free films in the Lecture Room, the series highlights work by an international roster of artists who are reinvigorating the moving image with fresh approaches and forms. Conceptual artist Gillian Wearing introduces an area premiere of her recent feature film experiment, in which she explores notions of screen persona and subjectivity. Kerry Tribe, whose multimedia and film installations have been exhibited worldwide, comes to the Walker to discuss her work and the shifting sites of contemporary artists’ cinema. New York–based curator and critic Ed Halter reflects on new models for the presentation of time-based media. Other screenings pair the work of two artists to prompt discussions on appropriation, affect, role-play, cinematic artifice, and other themes central to contemporary practice. What ties together this varied group of artists and their wide-ranging work is their inquisitive, often critical stance in relation to past cinematic traditions. Recasting genres and reconfiguring the filmic apparatus, they all reference more than a century of cinema while forging new futures for the moving image—a gesture that signals the emergence of a distinctly new artists’ cinema embodying our contemporary moment.
—Eric Crosby, visual arts curatorial assistant, and Dean Otto, film/video associate curator
Visit blogs.walkerart.org/filmvideo to learn more about the Walker’s 1974 exhibition Projected Images.
Unless otherwise noted, all events are free and take place in the Walker Cinema. Free tickets will be available one hour before each event.
Refreshments are available in the Garden Café by D’Amico prior to each show.
A complete list of programs follows:
Screening: Ming Wong and Phil Collins
Thursday, May 5, 7:30 pm, Free
Notions of role-play, performance, and cinematic identity run through the video works of Wong and Collins, who both recast forms of melodrama across cultures. With a penchant for linguistic play, Singapore-born performance artist Wong restages moments in film history, adapting scenes from classic European art films and Hollywood weepies in order to skewer cinematic representations of race, gender, and sexuality. In his 2008 film Soy Mi Madre, Collins takes the viewer behind the scenes of the production of a telenovela, transforming the Latin American TV genre into a self-conscious and multilayered potboiler of betrayal and intrigue starring actors and non-actors alike. Program length: 90 minutes
Screening and Artist Talk: Gillian Wearing’s Self Made
Saturday, May 7, 7:30 pm
$8 ($6 Walker members and students with valid ID)
“If you were to play a part in a film, would you be yourself or a fictional character?” British conceptual artist Wearing, whose work frequently offers participants conflicted chances at fame, printed this provocative question in a newspaper advertisement. From hundreds of responses, she selected seven non-actors to take part in a 10-day method acting workshop with a London-based drama teacher. A series of cathartic exercises resurface explosive experiences for those involved. The resulting documentary and the artist’s first feature, Self Made, also reflects on the history of British film from the late 1950s to the present. 2010, film transferred to HD video, 83 minutes. Join the artist after the screening as she discusses her recent foray into filmmaking.
Screening: Rosalind Nashashibi
Thursday, May 12, 7:30
Nashashibi’s beguiling films observe the textures and rhythms of the world around us with a distant stare. At once aware of the artifice of the documentary image and critical of its conditions of production, she chronicles the rituals of everyday life, abstracting them visually, anthropologically, and sometimes theatrically. Her works address wide-ranging subjects—life on board a Mediterranean cargo ship, the behaviors of loitering NYPD cops, the comings and goings of a gay cruising spot in North London—but never directly. With images both strange and elusive, Nashashibi allows happenstance, intuition, and association to guide her patient observations into these social systems. Program length: 60 minutes.
Thursday, May 19
Screening and Artist Talk: Michael Robinson, 7 pm
Screening: Nicolas Provost, 8:30 pm
Robinson and Provost alter existing footage from all corners of our image-saturated culture to produce lush, poetic films about collective mediated experience. Drawing on our recent past, Robinson transforms discarded sequences from Sega Genesis games and popular sitcoms into seductive and hallucinatory dreamscapes. Provost reflects on the grammar of cinema, subjecting everyday life to the codes of narrative film and deconstructing genres into phantasmagoric visions. While paying homage to their disparate sources, both filmmakers are charting new trajectories for cinematic affect. Program length: 7 pm: 75 minutes; 8:30 pm: 55 minutes.
Projected Images Yesterday
Saturday, May 21, 3:30 pm
Marking the Walker’s commitment to artists’ cinema since the early 1970s, this program showcases works by early pioneers who sought to bridge the gap between contemporary artistic practice and avant-garde filmmaking, including Paul Sharits, Michael Snow, and James Byrne. Program length: 75 minutes.
Installation: Paul Sietsema’s Anticultural Positions
Tuesday, May 24–Saturday, June 4
Midway Contemporary Art, 527 Second Avenue SE, Minneapolis
Gallery hours: Tuesday through Saturday 11 am–5 pm
Sietsema, an artist known for his meticulous sculptures and drawings, brings the cinema into his studio to create 16mm films that interrogate histories, images, and accepted bodies of knowledge. His most recent film Anticultural Positions takes its title from a 1951 lecture by the French artist Jean Dubuffet. Weaving his own texts with those of the painter, Sietsema documents incidental marks made on the floor and surfaces of his studio, resulting in a fragmented cinematic discourse on painting as a cultural form. Presented in collaboration with Midway Contemporary Art, Sietsema’s film will run continuously as an installation in Midway’s gallery space.
Lecture: Ed Halter
Wednesday, May 25, 7:30 pm
$8 ($6 Walker members and students with valid ID)
For the past two decades, critic and curator Halter has been forging new models for the presentation of time-based media from the New York Underground Film Festival (1995–2005) to Light Industry (2008–present), a Brooklyn-based venue for film and electronic art. He is currently a visiting professor at Bard College and his writings have appeared in Artforum, The Village Voice, Millennium Film Journal, as well as countless other publications. In his lecture, Halter visits the Walker to reflect on his curatorial work and offer much needed critical context to recent developments at the intersection of contemporary art and experimental media.
Thursday, May 26, Free
Screening: Ben Rivers’ Slow Action, 7 pm
Screening: Redmond Entwistle’s Monuments, 8 pm
Straddling fact and fiction, Rivers’ new widescreen work explores four utopian island civilizations in an approach that references documentary and ethnographic genres. Investigating these strange lost worlds, he reflects on each with anthropological observations that are at once poetic and profound. “Slow Action provokes an imaginative leap of perception on the part of the viewer, inviting them to read futuristic patterns into images that are clearly earthbound and contemporary, however remote” (Artforum). 2010, 16mm transferred to video, 45 minutes.
At the intersection of art history, fiction filmmaking and social critique, Redmond Entwistle’s dryly humorous take on the late 1960s revives artists Gordon Matta-Clark and Robert Smithson as they join a youthful Dan Graham on a tour of New Jersey. In what Entwistle calls “a graphic novel rendering of the narrative subtext of their work,” the artist’s deadpan stand-ins dissect society and a landscape beset by commercial development while also musing on their sculptural works. 2010, 16mm, 30 minutes. The digital version of this piece plays in the Lecture Room May 3-29.
Artist Talk: Kerry Tribe
Thursday, June 2, 7:30 pm, Free
Tribe’s installation work in film and video investigates memory, subjectivity, and doubt with structurally rigorous forms that play on cinema’s unique properties and histories. Often inviting actors, crew members, and technical specialists to participate in the production of her work, the Los Angeles–based artist’s subjects have ranged from the famous amnesiac “Patient H. M.” and the history of Soviet space travel to Vladimir Nabokov’s obsession with butterflies and the artist’s own faulty memories. In her presentation, Tribe will screen some of her recent films and discuss shifting production and exhibition models for her work. Program length: 90 minutes.
Lecture Room Screenings
Redmond Entwistle’s Monuments
May 3-29
Runs continuously from 12 noon Free
At the intersection of art history, fiction filmmaking and social critique, Redmond Entwistle’s dryly humorous take on the late 1960s revives artists Gordon Matta-Clark and Robert Smithson as they join a youthful Dan Graham on a tour of New Jersey. In what Entwistle calls “a graphic novel rendering of the narrative subtext of their work,” the artist’s deadpan stand-ins dissect society and a landscape beset by commercial development while also musing on their sculptural works. 2010, 16mm, 30 minutes. The 16mm print of this piece plays in the cinema on Thursday, May 26 at 8 pm.
Deimantas Narkevicius’ Into the Unknown
May 31-June 26
Runs continuously from 12 noon Free
In a dreamy mediation on historical memory, Lithuanian sculptor and filmmaker Narkevicius investigates everyday life and work under the East German communist regime during the two decades prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Drawing from archival images from propaganda films made to promote a socialist way of life, he depicts workers and students, whose lives have been regimented by strict social structures, in the process of poetically deconstructing their archetypal images. Excerpted from the political context of that era, these films images retain an oddly utopian aura that prompts us to consider cinema’s ideological effects. 2009, film transferred to BluRay, 20 minutes.
Artist’s Cinema is made possible by generous support from Elizabeth Redleaf.
