Soft Epic review on artforum.com
[ read this review on artforum.com ]
In his 2003 documentary, Los Angeles Plays Itself, filmmaker, Cal Arts professor, and Los Angeles native Thom Andersen criticizes Hollywood cinema’s misrepresentation of the metropolis. The City of Angels, he argues, is rarely captured on film as is. The industry either splices LA into unrecognizability, converting the city into an anonymous backdrop, or denigrates it directly, at times even forcing the already much-maligned urban center to play the villain.
Nadia Hironaka and Matthew Suib’s ambitious video installation The Soft Epic or: Savages of the Pacific West, 2008, commits all of the filmic infractions Andersen so despises. Happily, however, the work sins in the service of critique. The Philadelphia-based duo’s five-projection panorama immerses viewers in a fiery, dystopian downtown littered with rubble and populated by wild beasts run amok. Collaged from multiple moving images, the space depicted is entirely fictional: As one scans the vista, gleaming skyscrapers give way to the charred remains of a Gothic cathedral. And yet, centered amid the carnage is a sign marking the junction of Eighth and Hill streets, an intersection in Los Angeles’s business district. Squarely casting the oft-tortured city in the role of Boschian hellscape, Hironaka and Suib create an environment so excessively apocalyptic it reads only as spectacle. In this Disneyland gone haywire, a security guard with the head of an owl stands mute, an unwitting sentinel as a lion roars from the flames of a burning sedan, a leopard and a woman mechanically perform copulation, and a human-headed pig leaps gleefully into the fray. Crows flap their wings as the sky rains debris on a miniature pope calming one of his hysterical devotees with conciliatory hugs. What sounds like breaking glass, crying animals, and discharging lasers remains faint and untraceable.
The intentional roughness of the imagery renders Hironaka and Suib’s fragmented cityscape thoroughly incredible. The edges of The Soft Epic’s visual patchwork are ragged; the colors in each of its projections have not been cleanly calibrated. Disjunctions between the work’s video and audio tracks reinforce its status as cinematic construction. Andersen might be proud. Here lies the myth of Los Angeles, laid bare.
— Sarah Kessler
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Rhizome on Rachel Mayeri’s Primate Cinema
Quoted in its entirety from http://rhizome.org/editorial/fp/blog.php/855
Humans are capable of such funny contradictions. Take, for instance, our proclivity to forget that we, too, are animals, while nonetheless looking to other primates in an effort to further study ourselves. In a video series entitled “Primate Cinema,” Rachel Mayeri dives headfirst into this often comic dilemma. Three videos in this series are currently on view at Los Angeles’ TELIC Arts Exchange, and each takes the increasingly popular primate narrative genre as its starting point to build “an observation platform for viewing the social, sexual, and political behavior of human and nonhuman primates.” In Jane Goodall and the Wild Chimpanzees we see a live performance of a classic nature documentary, developed and taped as the result of a three-week workshop at TELIC. The piece explores the documentary medium and the work it does to dramatize scenarios, despite its presumed objectivity. How to Act like an Animal also unfolded from a workshop–in this case co-led by primatologist Deborah Forster and theater director Alyssa Ravenwood. The tasks rehearsed speak to common perceptions of the primitivity of non-human animals, with the close study and re-interpretation of a nature documentary leading to the act of “hunting, killing, and sharing the meat of a colobus monkey.” An earlier video in the series, Baboons as Friends, reaches beyond the model of pure consumption and survival to explore the emotional and social lives of primates. Shot with human actors in a film noir style, the piece explores the ways in which “lust, jealousy, sex, and violence transpir[e] simultaneously in human and nonhuman worlds.” While entertaining, the videos also taxonomize and observe the field of primate studies as a model of inquiry and a classic medium of scientific thought. If anything, Mayeri’s work takes a compelling look at the evolution of a field crafted to study our own evolution.
- Marisa Olson
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Gravity Art review in the LA Weekly
Quoted in its entirety from:
http://www.laweekly.com/art+books/art/art-around-town/18665/
The genesis of “Gravity Art,” the new show at Telic Arts Exchange, was curator Rene Daalder’s documentary-film project on Duch/Californian artist Bas Jan Ader. Before disappearing in 1975 while attempting to cross the Atlantic in a tiny sailboat, Ader created a body of work often dealing with human failings, weaknesses and vulnerabilities, and, with almost slapstick appeal, our susceptibility to gravity. With such inspiration, Daalder assembled (for Amsterdam’s de Appel Arts Centre) an exhibition of films and photographs by multiple artists interested in variously harnessing, defying and giving in to the force of gravity. Hoping to draw a closer correlation, and create more of a cacophony, Daalder tries again here, with an exhibition designed by architect Jens Hommert that allows visitors to hear the soundtracks of 30 films and video works simultaneously, and to watch any one of them with at least a handful more in the periphery. Such curatorial reaching often results in a reauthoring of artworks that is irritating, both in what seems a violation of the originals and in that the curator’s attempt to play artist is usually less interesting. Daalder and Hommert nonetheless succeed as artists, authoring a new work that brilliantly appropriates all the others. They also succeed as curator and designer, delivering an exhibition that, though muddling, crystallizes the spirit of included works by an impressive list of new-realist, actionist and postminimalist artists and their descendants. It’s also an engaging study of the gravitational heroics, humor and tragedy known to anyone who has ever gotten out of bed or fallen on the floor. Telic Arts Exchange, 975 Chung King Road, L.A.; Fri.-Sat., noon-6 p.m.; thru April 26. (213) 344-6137 or 2003-2008.telic.info.
- Christopher Miles
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Gravity Art installation images
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Above are a few installation images from the Gravity Art show on exhibit from March 1 - April 26. Also, David Pagel’s review of the show in the LA Times (reposted here for ease of reading):
“Gravity Art” is a great little show that presents video art at its very best: direct, accessible, unpretentious and user-friendly. Organized by guest curator René Daalder for Telic Arts Exchange, this whip-smart selection of 31 videos made around the world over the last 40 years is also a refreshing departure from the overproduced emptiness of so much contemporary video, which often exploits movie-size projection, pretends to be installation art and lasts way too long.
In contrast, “Gravity Art” is concise, compelling and stripped to the basics. In the center of the darkened gallery stands a set of metal shelves shaped like the letter X. Mid-size monitors play all the videos all the time. Most of these videos are short. Most are black-and-white. And most are so visually engaging that sound is an afterthought. It comes through as a collective hum and consists mostly of objects and bodies making contact. Dialogue is beside the point.
The atmosphere is charged and decidedly social. It’s hard not to blurt out to strangers, “Come see this!”
Nearly all the videos make you want to watch them more than once, particularly the six delightfully down-to-earth examples from the early 1970s by Bas Jan Ader (1942-75) and the loopy exercises in futility by Vito Acconci, Richard Serra, Gino de Dominicis and Liza May Post. Works by Monsieur Moo, Jacob Tonski and Marco Schuler mix slapstick and stoicism. And Pascual Sisto’s “No Strings Attached” uses simple special effects to transform a common chair into a sort of spastic Fred Astaire by way of the Marx Brothers.
The best thing about “Gravity Art” is that it lets its works play off one another — and invites viewers into the gregarious, every-which-way conversation. It’s not to be missed.
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The Public School open house
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The Public School opened at TELIC with an open house/ orientation and a Richtfest. There have been almost 80 classes proposed with more than 300 people signing up, which is partly due to an article in the LA Weekly, written by Holly Willis about the project last week.
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