Ed Halter

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  previews May 2013

  Ericka Beckman

  In her Super 8 sound films of the 1970s and ’80s, American artist Ericka Beckman created sharp-edged concatenations of lo-fi visual effects, dance-like performances, and No Wave audio compositions, always pointing toward the concept of play and its aesthetic and psychological implications. Beckman’s survey at the Kunsthalle Bern this summer will feature some of the best of these seminal works—including We Imitate; We Break Up, 1978; The Broken Rule, 1979; and Out of Hand, 1980—as well as a selection of photos, drawings, and later films such as Switch Center,

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  previews January 2013

  “Portrait of Michel Auder”

  “Michel Auder edits his intimate video diaries out of more than five thousand hours of footage shot since the late 1960s.”

  Michel Auder edits his intimate video diaries out of more than five thousand hours of footage shot since the late 1960s. Ranging in length from ultrabrief to a few minutes to epic, Auder’s videos collectively constitute a dispersed autobiography—with a voyeur’s stratagem of picturing the self through others—chronicling demimonde adventures, rocky marriages to Viva and Cindy Sherman, as well as his own heroin addiction. Culturgest presents a generous selection from this ample oeuvre, including screenings of Chelsea Girls with Andy Warhol (1971–76/1994),

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  print September 2012

  CLOSE-UP: HELL IS FOR CHILDREN

  TWO AMERICAN CHILDREN, a girl and a boy, play inside a house crammed with the technological clutter of the twentieth century. Tangles of electric cable form a synthetic underbrush, while cathode-ray monitors perch here and there, transmitting nature programs amid a jumble of cardboard boxes, incandescent lightbulbs, and tabletops loaded with piles of tools, food, and junk. The girl wears the flowered dress of a Dust-Bowl waif; the boy appears in a smart white suit jacket, worn New Wave style over a T-shirt emblazoned with an ironed-on Superman logo. Set loose in this anarchic environment, the

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  passages February 2012

  George Kuchar

  LAST SUMMER, when it became clear that cancer would inevitably take his life, George Kuchar entered a hospice in San Francisco. He brought his video equipment with him, shooting and editing footage inside what would serve as his final residence. At age sixty-nine, the underground film legend was reportedly the youngest person in the hospice at that moment—appropriate for a guy who began his career as a teenage director and always retained the energy of a gum-snapping adolescent. Even at the end, he could play the kid with the camera.

  This was not the first time Kuchar had recorded such a bleak

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  print December 2011

  Ed Halter

  1 Inkblot films (Luther Price) Produced by scraping the emulsion from old footage, recutting it, and coloring it with inks and Sharpies, Price’s 16-mm and Super 8 inkblot films—a selection of which he screened in person in Milwaukee and Chicago this year—have nothing of the stained-glass delicacy characteristic of handpainted work; rather, they struggle through the projector with an unsettlingly existential corporeality.

  2 Two Years at Sea (Ben Rivers) In this feature-length visit with a woodlands hermit in Scotland, Rivers disjoints documentary images from any clear place and time,

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  film April 24, 2011

  The Practice of Everyday Life

  KEVIN JEROME EVERSON’S two-minute film Something Else (2007) begins with a bit of worn color 16 mm—evidently shot for a local television-news station, perhaps sometime around 1970—depicting an interview with Miss Black Roanoke, Virginia, a young woman in a scoop-necked russet gown, with a sparkling tiara perched atop her Afro. The footage seems battered by time. The sound drops out, more than once, and split-second bits of dialogue repeat, as if two prints had been badly spliced together. Following some initial questions, the awkward white male reporter asks the beauty queen whether she’d prefer

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  interviews February 21, 2011

  Harun Farocki

  Through March 3, the Centre for Contemporary Arts in Glasgow is presenting an exhibition devoted to the work of filmmaker Harun Farocki. The show includes workshops, seminars, screenings, discussions, and three of Farocki’s two-channel video installations, I Thought I Was Seeing Convicts, 2000, Comparison via a Third, 2007, and Immersion, 2009, as well as a selection of thirteen other works spanning his career. Here, the artist discusses Immersion and In Comparison, 2009, his most recent film and a companion piece to Comparison via a Third, employing overlapping themes and footage.

  BOTH IMMERSION

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  film November 2010

  “Radical Light”

  In 1968, the New York–based critic P. Adams Sitney—already a preeminent advocate for American avant-garde cinema but not yet the author of the canonical study Visionary Film—published a five-column article in the Village Voice titled “Underground Movies Are Alive Along the Pacific,” detailing a recent trip with Stan Brakhage to see new work in San Francisco. “There we discovered at least half a dozen good and relatively new film-makers and two old masters, both of whom seldom, if ever, show their work in New York,” Sitney reported.

  Lenny Lipton was one of those mentioned; he was also a board

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  film October 08, 2010

  Splash of Red

  SPANISH FILMMAKER SEGUNDO DE CHOMÓN began working in the medium less than half a decade after its invention, first as a renowned colorist in the days of labor-intensive frame-by-frame tinting, then as a pioneering special-effects designer. His career unfolded during the historical phase scholar Tom Gunning has dubbed the “cinema of attractions”—before narrative took hold as the dominant mode, when fairground-style spectacle and legerdemain remained the eye-baffling norm. One of Chomón’s earliest films, The King of Dollars (1905), makes the link to stage magic clear. It shows a disembodied hand

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  film May 11, 2010

  Spin Cycle

  THOUGH HE COMPLETED his five-film “Cremaster” cycle less than a decade ago, then topped off the whole project in 2003 with a museum-spanning exhibition of sculptures and installations at the Guggenheim, Matthew Barney has quickly become a figure from a seemingly distant, more ostentatious age—the art-world equivalent of a stretch Humvee. The cycle’s theatrical revival this year will hardly undermine his status as the epitome of a certain kind of celebrity-artist, a value lesson in what happens when the manufacture of fame in the service of increasing the monetary value of artificially rare

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  print May 2010

  THE PRACTICE OF EVERYDAY LIFE: THE FILMS OF KEVIN JEROME EVERSON

  KEVIN JEROME EVERSON’S two-minute film Something Else (2007) begins with a bit of worn color 16 mm—evidently shot for a local television-news station, perhaps sometime around 1970—depicting an interview with Miss Black Roanoke, Virginia, a young woman in a scoop-necked russet gown, with a sparkling tiara perched atop her Afro. The footage seems battered by time. The sound drops out, more than once, and split-second bits of dialogue repeat, as if two prints had been badly spliced together. Following some initial questions, the awkward white male reporter asks the beauty queen whether

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  film March 05, 2010

  Life or Something like It

  GRITTY BUT ELEGANT CHRONICLES of a rapidly transforming society, Jia Zhangke’s films depict street-level life in contemporary China with a hyperreal, science-fictional gloss. The scripted characters of The World (2004) are performers and staff at an actual Bejing theme park filled with miniature replicas of international tourist sites like the Eiffel Tower, the pyramids, and Lower Manhattan. In a dystopian twist worthy of Baudrillard, the sprawling attraction displays the tagline SEE THE WORLD WITHOUT EVER LEAVING BEIJING. Still Life (2006) takes place in a city being destroyed and rebuilt to