Visit to Walsall Gallery: Bob & Roberta Smith Exhibition

Bob & Roberta Smith & the Epstein Archive

Collage, woodwork, painting, pen marking, imagery, statements.

Clear signs, interesting take on art.

This youtube video says it all....

Visit to Walsall Gallery: Metropolis Exhibition

Metropolis Exhibition

This major international exhibition brings together a diverse group of artists whose work is concerned with the modern urban environment. Works have been acquired through Art Fund International, the Art Fund’s £5 million scheme which is helping to build outstanding collections of international contemporary art. The New Art Gallery Walsall, Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery and Ikon Gallery form one of the five consortiums taking part in the initiative. The exhibition represents an interim stage in the collecting process, with the scheme coming to an end in 2012.

website http://www.thenewartgallerywalsall.org.uk/whats-on/exhibition/metropolis

Dayanita Singh

Dream Villa Series 2008

India's high popularity, empty spaces, explore night time,

transforms over time, turns mundane landscapes into enigmatic and mysterious areas.

Artist reluctant to identify which cities filmed.

General observation

Projection Set Up: On triangular shelf, grey screens, LARGE projections, all equipment hidden high on back shelf.

In B Flat

http://www.inbflat.net/

I was introduced to this webpage, I love it's interaction!

Musical collaboration,

"n Bb 2.0 is a collaborative music and spoken word project conceived by Darren Solomon from Science for Girls, and developed with contributions from users.

The videos can be played simultaneously -- the soundtracks will work together, and the mix can be adjusted with the individual volume sliders."

Love it!

Disturbia

After reading into Hitchcock, I was introduced to the recreation of Rear Window, Disturbia. Starring the very lovely Shia LaBeouf. The film has the same concept as RWindow, however it is set with a modern day sinister twist. Set in a suburban American town, the star Kale is arrested for punching his Spanish teaching (the film begins in a very cheesey father/son scene which then is turned into a horrific car crash concluding in the fathers death). Instead of being sent to prison Kale is put under house arrest and so the plot begins. Drama! There's a serial killer within the area, and through observation Kale believes it is his neighbour. Sound familiar??

Very gripping film, great use of camera footage and the Kale is the prime perve (wathcing his new female neighbour undress)

Shia as always plays the role very well!

Vito Acconci

This week in my Performance & Performativity seminar we discussed the work of Vito Acconci. This work Theme Song struck me the most.

• Initially I felt there was an essence of humour in the work
• Drunken Act/Dazed/Confusion
• Recites lines from songs in a vulnerable yet perverse manner
• Fixed Gaze
• Issues of Power within the work
• "Come in Here"
• Physicality of the Body/Sculptural Element
• Foetal Positioning

How is the work read?

One performance is not universal with regard to Gender/Race/Setting

We were then introduced to Paul McCarthy & Mike Kelly's collaborate work Flesh Acconci

Boxes

Today I finished my boxes for projections. I decided to reconstruct minimalist apartment boxes to project into. Need to think how I'm going to project into them, efficiently and effectively as I would like to disguise the projectors, however health and safety is proving difficult as the projectors need SO much ventilation those hot little things.

White boxes painted with light reflecting white paint (the cheaper version of projection paint). Previously I tested projected into a dolls-house I bought. Testing is needed now to see where they need to be placed/hung. I was told sometimes the simplest way of disguising projectors is to not hide them at all. People will either engage with them or ignore them and focus on the films being projected.

This week is experimental week!

White boxes painted with light reflecting white paint (the cheaper version of projection paint). Previously I tested projected into a dolls-house I bought.

Steve McQueen (the artist)

http://www.balticmill.com/whatsOn/past/ExhibitionDetail.php?exhibID=108

Love it.

Rear Window Analysis

Hitchcock's fans and film scholars have taken particular interest in the way the relationship between Jeff and Lisa can be compared to the lives of the neighbors they are spying upon. The film invites speculation as to which of these paths Jeff and Lisa will follow. Many of these points are considered in Tania Modleski's feminist theory book, The Women Who Knew Too Much:^[11]

• Thorwald and his wife are a reversal of Jeff and Lisa—Thorwald looks after his invalid wife just as Lisa looks after the invalid Jeff. Also, Thorwald's hatred of his nagging wife mirrors Jeff's arguments with Lisa.
• The newlywed couple initially seem perfect for each other (they spend nearly the entire movie in their bedroom with the blinds drawn), but at the end we see their marriage deteriorate as the wife begins to nag the husband. Similarly, Jeff is afraid of being 'tied down' by marriage to Lisa.
• The middle-aged couple with the dog seem content living at home. They have the kind of uneventful lifestyle that horrifies Jeff.
• The Songwriter, a music composer, and Miss Lonelyhearts, a depressed spinster, lead frustrating lives, and at the end of the movie find comfort in each other: The composer's new tune draws Miss Lonelyhearts away from suicide, and the composer thus finds value in his work. There is a subtle hint in this tale that Lisa and Jeff are meant for each other, despite his stubbornness. The piece the composer creates is called "Lisa's Theme" in the credits.
• Miss Torso, a beautiful dancer, initially seems to live a carefree bohemian lifestyle and often has various men over at her apartment. In the end, however, it is revealed that she has been waiting for her sweetheart, a soldier, to return.

The characters themselves verbally point out a similarity between Lisa and Miss Torso (played by Georgine Darcy) — the scantily-clad ballet dancer who has all-male parties.

Other analyses, including that of Francois Truffaut in Cahiers du cinéma in 1954, center on the relationship between Jeff and the other side of the apartment block, seeing it as a symbolic relationship between spectator and screen. Film theorist Mary Ann Doane has made the argument^{[citation needed]} that Jeff, representing the audience, becomes obsessed with the screen, where a collection of storylines are played out. This line of analysis has often followed a feminist approach to interpreting the film. It is Doane who, using Freudian analysis to claim women spectators of a film become "masculinized", pays close attention to Jeff's rather passive attitude to romance with the elegant Lisa, that is, until she crosses over from the spectator side to the screen, seeking out the wedding ring of Thorwald's murdered wife. It is only then that Jeff shows real passion for Lisa. In the climax, when he is pushed through the window (the screen), he has been forced to become part of the show.

Other issues such as voyeurism and feminism are analyzed in John Belton's book Alfred Hitchcock's "Rear Window".

Rear Window is a voyeuristic film. As Stella (Thelma Ritter) tells Jeff, "We've become a race of Peeping Toms." This applies equally to the cinema as well as to real life. Stella invokes the specifically sexual pleasures of looking that is identified as exemplary of classical Hollywood. The majority of the film is seen through Jeff's visual point of view and his mental perspective. Stella's words sum up Hitchcock's broader project as film maker, namely, to implicate us as spectators. While Jeff is watching the rear window people, we too are being "peeping toms" as we watch him, and the people he watches as well. As a voyeuristic society, we take personal pleasure in watching what is going on around us.

Information taken from Wikipedia: Need to do further research but thought this was a good starting point!

Structuralist Film Theory

Structuralist film theory emphasizes how films convey meaning through the use of codes and conventions not dissimilar to the way languages are used to construct meaning in communication.

An example of this is understanding how the simple combination of shots can create an additional idea: the blank expression on a person's face, an appetising meal, and then back to the person's face. While nothing in this sequence literally expresses hunger—or desire—the juxtaposition of the images convey that meaning to the audience.

Unraveling this additional meaning can become quite complex. Lighting, angle, shot duration, juxtaposition, cultural context, and a wide array of other elements can actively reinforce or undermine a sequence's meaning.

Formalism, at its most general, considers the synthesis (or lack of synthesis) of the multiple elements of film production, and the effects, emotional and intellectual, of that synthesis and of the individual elements. For example, take the single element of editing. A formalist might study how standard Hollywood "continuity editing" creates a more comforting effect and non-continuity or jump-cut editing might become more disconcerting or volatile.

Or one might consider the synthesis of several elements, such as editing, shot composition, and music. The shoot-out that ends Sergio Leone's Spaghetti Western "Dollars" trilogy is a notable example of how these elements work together to produce an effect: The shot selection goes from very wide to very close and tense; the length of shots decreases as the sequence progresses towards its end; the music builds. All of these elements, in combination rather than individually, create tension.

Formalism is unique in that it embraces both ideological and auteurist branches of criticism. In both these cases, the common denominator for Formalist criticism is style.

Ideologues focus on how socio-economic pressures create a particular style, and auteurists on how auteurs put their own stamp on the material. Formalism is primarily concerned with style and how it communicates ideas, emotions, and themes (rather than, as critics of formalism point out, concentrating on the themes of a work itself).

Two examples of ideological interpretations that are related to formalism:

The classical Hollywood cinema has a very distinct style, sometimes called the Institutional Mode of Representation: continuity editing, massive coverage, three-point lighting, "mood" music, dissolves, all designed to make the experience as pleasant as possible. The socio-economic ideological explanation for this is, quite crassly, that Hollywood wants to make as much money and appeal to as many ticket-buyers as possible.

Film noir, which was given its name by Nino Frank, is marked by lower production values, darker images, underlighting, location shooting, and general nihilism: this is because, we are told, during the war and post-war years filmmakers were generally more pessimistic (as well as filmgoers). Also, the German Expressionists (including Fritz Lang, who was not technically an expressionist as popularly believed) emigrated to America and brought their stylized lighting effects (and disillusionment due to the war) to American soil.

It can be argued that, by this approach, the style or 'language' of these films is directly affected not by the individuals responsible, but by social, economic, and political pressures, of which the filmmakers themselves may be aware or not. It is this branch of criticism that gives us such categories as the classical Hollywood cinema, the American independent movement, the New American independent movement, the new queer cinema, and the French, German, and Czech new waves.

Formalism in Autuer Theory

If the ideological approach is concerned with broad movements and the effects of the world around the filmmaker, then the auteur theory is diametrically opposed to it, celebrating the individual, usually in the person of the filmmaker, and how his personal decisions, thoughts, and style manifest themselves in the material.

This branch of criticism, begun by François Truffaut and the other young film critics writing for Cahiers du cinéma, was created for two reasons.

First, it was created to redeem the art of film itself. By arguing that films had auteurs, or authors, Truffaut sought to make films (and their directors) at least as important as the more widely-accepted art forms, such as literature, music, and painting. Each of these art forms, and the criticism thereof, is primarily concerned with a sole creative force: the author of a novel (not, for example, his editor or type-setter), the composer of a piece of music (though sometimes the performers are given credence, akin to actors in film today), or the painter of a fresco (not his assistants who mix the colours or often do some of the painting themselves). By elevating the director, and not the screenwriter, to the same importance as novelists, composers, or painters, it sought to free the cinema from its popular conception as a bastard art, somewhere between theater and literature.

Secondly, it sought to redeem many filmmakers who were looked down upon by mainstream film critics. It argued that genre filmmakers and low-budget B-movies were just as important, if not more, than the prestige pictures commonly given more press and legitimacy in France and the United States. According to Truffaut's theory, auteurs took material that was beneath their talents—a thriller, a pulpy action film, a romance—and, through their style, put their own personal stamp on it.

It is this auteur style that concerns formalism.

A perfect example of formalist criticism of auteur style would be the work of Alfred Hitchcock. Hitchcock primarily made thrillers, which, according to the Cahiers du cinema crowd, were popular with the public but were dismissed by the critics and the award ceremonies, although Hitchcock's Rebecca won the Oscar for Best Picture at the 1940 Academy Awards. Though he never won the Oscar for directing, he was nominated five times in the category. Truffaut and his colleagues argued that Hitchcock had a style as distinct as that of Flaubert or Van Gogh: the virtuoso editing, the lyrical camera movements, the droll humour. He also had "Hitchcockian" themes: the wrong man falsely accused, violence erupting at the times it was least expected, the cool blonde. Now, Hitchcock is more or less universally lauded, his films dissected shot-by-shot, his work celebrated as being that of a master. And the study of this style, his variations, and obsessions all fall quite neatly under the umbrella of formalist film theory.

Vermeer

"Johannes, Jan or Johan Vermeer (baptized in Delft on 31 October 1632 as Joannis, and buried in the same city under the name Jan on 15 December 1675) was a Dutch Baroque painter who specialized in exquisite, domestic interior scenes of middle class life. Vermeer was a moderately successful provincial genre painter in his lifetime. He seems never to have been particularly wealthy, leaving his wife and children in debt at his death, perhaps because he produced relatively few paintings.

Vermeer worked slowly and with great care, using bright colours and sometimes expensive pigments, with a preference forcornflower blue and yellow. He is particularly renowned for his masterly treatment and use of light in his work. "

When looking at the Hitchcock Scenes a connection to realism was created through use of lighting and colour. The use of domestic setting is also key in Hithcock's Rear Window, as when looking at the scene of Thorwald you can identify the apartment settings. He's a regular guy which makes the situation even scarier! My first viewing of the film I had no idea if Jeff's assumptions were true or not, but for a while I felt that the 'sinister' actions are everyday. Relating to both the actions of Thorwald and Jeff you are immersed into the film and the interesting and unique scene settings create an impact. Use of domestic and recognisable setting should be integral in my work.

Introduced to the work of Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller, through research I realised I'd seen one of their installation on a art trip to Barcelona. Displayed into Barcelona's Modern Art Museum you were invited into a room, asked to place headphones on and sit in a chair. In front of you a minature opera house in which a projection of a female Opera sing who begins to sing appears. Combining drama, tension and mystery the work plays the sound of an auditorium with a women whispering your ear. As the singer continues, the whispering increases and a counting from 1-10 begins.

This work grabbed me instantly, it's intense atmosphere causes the viewer to enter into the world but feel uncomfortable doing so. Ideas of building tension are of interest to me and I hope to continue my work in a similar way. Creating a space perhaps to cause the viewer to react in an uncomfortable way and feel a change in surrounding when experiencing the work.

First Tutorial

Through guidance of my Tutor, Clio Padovani I was given a long list of artists and theorists that would be great inspiration for my work. Introducing Clio to my previous work and the footage I've been working on my practice she felt it best to start this intial research in a creative and free manner. Experimenting with material, installation, footage, High & Low Tech and how the viewer could perhaps interact with the work.

I also visited the exhibition of Haroon Mirza's The Last Tape a film installation based on Krapp's Last Tape a one-act play written by Samuel Beckett and the exploration of post-punk pioneers Joy Division. Entering the room I initially engaged with large hanging projection of a middle aged man, sat underneath a hanging light bulb. Using a tape recorded the man is frustrated and this is emphasised by the interference of a 'fly' buzzing around the light, to which the man reacts by spraying with fly killer.

The acting is simple but effective and the contrasting colours of the black background and the flesh tones work really well. The filming is sharp and the colour balance is really effective. Opposite the screen sits a turn table type box, fitted with a strobe light behind an image of Ian Curtis reflecting Curtis's iconic epilepsy dance.

Luckily I was able to speak to the film's Cinematographer Conor O'Grady about the work.

Fantastic exhibition in a great space.

Photographs & text taken from Vivid's website.

Last Tape, featuring actor and musician Richard ‘Kid’ Strange, is a reinterpretation of Beckett’s play in which its protagonist, Krapp, looks back at the events of his life as recorded onto tape each birthday. Using previously unrecorded lyrics written by Joy Division frontman Ian Curtis, the film depicts Strange enacting the lyrics onto magnetic tape. Strange engages with both the lyrical content and the audible sounds created by the accompanying sculptural works, which includes furniture, turntable, radio, and LCD screen stripped of its backlight and casing, in a performative manner. An awkwardly balanced strobe intermittently illuminates the screen, indirectly referencing Curtis’ epilepsy.

Initial Ideas

Hitchcock 'Master of Suspense!' takes the viewer through the film through the perspective of Jeff, peering into the apartment.

Collecting all this imagery I hope to create a narrative. So let the editing begin!

Deconstructing Jeff's voyeurisitic tendencies allows the audience to collate the imagery through Jeff's ideas forming their own opinion. Like in the film, the true personality of Thorwald will be revealed. However viewers familiar with the film may look at the work in slighting different manner.

Begginings

Introduced to Rear Window I was instantly hooked with the idea of deconstructing the idea of the voyeur.

Basic Plot:

After breaking his leg, professional photographer L.B Jeffries "Jeff" is confined to a wheelchair in his apartment. Overlooking a courtyard of several other properties Jeff becomes aware of his suspicious neighbour Thorwald. Through constant observation Jeff believes that Thorwald has murdered his invalid wife, carry her belongings (or body) out of the apartment in trunk loads. Throughout the film there is no indication if Jeff is correct, but Thorwald continues to appear guilty. The end of the film shows Jeff's girlfriend Liza (Grace Kelly) enter the apartment to investigate, unfortunately interrupted by Thorwald's return. In fury Thorwald attacks Liza but Jeff witnessing this event calls for the police. The end of the film reveals Thorwald as the suspected murder.