I’m so excited to announce The Art of Fear, a two-part artist film program I am curating at Nitehawk Cinema in Brooklyn. Featuring moving image works influenced by horror cinema, it is the first manifestation of my research on horror film and contemporary art presented in New York (look out for a major upcoming exhibition in Los Angeles) and I’mthrilled to be working with such truly incredible artists. Please come support artist film, cinema, and horror this October!
The two-part screening features works by Takeshi Murata, Darren Banks, Jaime Shovlin (October 5) and My Barbarian, Aida Ruilova, Marnie Weber (October 19).
I’ve been inspired lately by Henri Langlois and the Cinematheque Francaise. His approach to the cinema was flawed in some areas (I would argue for more curation) but was instrumental not only to the history of showing, archiving, and promoting film but how we continue to process film. Decades after his death, Langlois is challenging me – a contemporary art curator – to re-think and re-shape how I approach my programming. And to do so, always, with passion.
Never forget, you’re always programming for ten percent of the audience. Nothing matters as long as you’ve made those ten percent happy.
Haven’t you noticed people going through art museums? They come into a room, see a picture, walk over to read the label, discover who the pictures is by and what its title is, and then move on. They have read: they know. I don’t want that sort of thing in my museum. I want people to look at everything, really look, and if there are no labels then they have to try to figure out what the object of photograph is. That is the difference between and illustrated book with its captions and a museum: it’s not important that people should know exactly what still came from which film; the whole museum has been planned as an almost autonomous living history of the cinema.
Emphasizing the marginal and the forgotten, tackling racism, sex, and war Ed Kienholz (October 23, 1927 – June 10, 1994) approached his artwork much like a horror film director. His tableaus are annihilated spaces, post-apocolyptic scenes in which we, the audience, can peer into the deeps of what the “other” (still so much like us) feels. Loneliness is palpable as the uncanny figures mock us for not having the guts to be as dirty and as real as they are. These are shocking scenes, even for today, and they resonate deep within our sensibilities. He re-created the ugliness of the world in an environment to which we could safely relate.
Much of his work has an edge to it but one of his more provocative installations is being re-visited this month in Los Angeles. Kienholz’s infamous Five Car Stud (made somewhere between 1969 and 1972) that depicts a brutally violent racial attack will be seen for the first time in forty years at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art as part of the city-wide Pacific Standard Time event. From the Los Angeles Times:
It is a difficult piece on multiple levels. It is enormous, for one thing: a tableau installation involving nine life-sized figures, five automobiles, several trees and a truckload of dirt. More difficult still is what the piece depicts: a circle of white men, lighted only by the headlights of the circled automobiles, pinning and castrating a lone black man, while a child cowers in one of the cars and a woman — presumably the victim’s companion — huddles and vomits in another.
The white figures are all realistically cast, but for the grotesque rubber masks on each of the men. The black figure’s face is uncannily bifurcated: a clear plastic outer face is frozen in a scream while a darker one within it is “sadly resigned and quiet,” as Kienholz put it in a statement at the time. His torso is made from a rectangular tin filled with black water, in which float letters that spell out a racial slur.
Watch Nancy Reddin Kienholz (his wife and collaborator) install the work:
Performance, music, and art have deep roots in the unique creative landscape of Los Angeles. New experimental power trio (Marnie Weber, Dani Tull, & Doug Harvey) Faüxmish is sure to be a part of this legacy.
Faüxmish is celebrating the release of their debut LP & CD ‘F for Ache’ with their debut public performance at Human Resources in Los Angeles on September 2nd. More info here.
Faüxmish is a Los Angeles art-rock supergroup that came together over a shared engagement with American spiritual sects who remove themselves from established social norms and create their own culture as outsiders.
Taking as their motto “Simplicity Through Noise,” Faüxmish have developed a practice rooted in improvisational ensemble playing using electric guitars (played with rubber mallets and other extended as well as traditional techniques) and vintage synthesizers, in various combinations of three.
Initially conceived as a ‘wall of sound,’ the group’s music rapidly developed a complex and idiosyncratic audio vocabulary drawing on the members’ widely divergent individual musical backgrounds, which range from noise to prog, post-punk to film scores, and 90s alt-rock to improvisational audio collage. The results range from dreamy ambient soundscapes to theatrical rock songs.
I’m so excited to announce The Art of Fear, a two-part artist film program I am curating at Nitehawk Cinema in Brooklyn. Featuring moving image works influenced by horror cinema, it is the first manifestation of my research on horror film and contemporary art presented in New York (look out for a major upcoming exhibition in Los Angeles) and I’mthrilled to be working with such truly incredible artists. Please come support artist film, cinema, and horror this October!
THE GIRL WHO KNEW TOO MUCH 