Christian Marclay's CLOCK at LACMA

Christian Marclay's 24-hour video piece THE CLOCK was presented at LACMA (Wilshire Ave., Los Angeles) through the month of July of 2011, allowing viewers to watch a work which precisely charts the passing of time through thousands of shots of clocks and watches pulled from films and television programs, all laid out to be played synchronous to actual local time. Most days, museum goers were limited to viewing the part of this piece that is up during the museum's open hours. An 8 hour chunk of this thing must be a pretty exemplary part of it. The museum also offered 2 opening and closing events where THE CLOCK was run for its entire 24 hours. Due largely to the time constraints of parenting, I rushed out to see THE CLOCK on its final night in Los Angeles, Thursday, July 28. I believe the entire museum was open to the public for free that night, although only the Marclay piece, projected in the 600 seat Bing theater, was an all-night affair, starting at 7PM and ending at the same time on Friday. I don't know if Marclay made his CLOCK with a preferred starting point or is it intended to have no definitive beginning or end, up to the curator or viewer. En route to the Museum Row of Wilshire Boulevard around 9PM, I considered that "being there" for the midnight moment might be a highpoint of the piece and hurried to catch what I could leading up to that. Any time after midnight might be a bonus or like the cigarette after sex for some...

There was a line of about 75 people qued on the stairway leading up along the stepped fountain outside the theater building. It was exciting to see so many people interested in what is essentially video art; the theater is full inside and there are almost another hundred people waiting in line for insiders to depart. The staff did a great job of keeping track of the theater's capacity; I don't know how they decided to fill the hall, maybe allowing 550 people inside at any time. The room was full to capacity, viewers came and went, but it was orderly and civilized. People chose their moments to leave. There were no riots. I sat down at 10:09PM, checking my telephone--yup, 10:09--as I turned it off, and was swept into a 2-and-a-half hour tour, not of a clock but of every imaginable image of clocks, with thousands of tangential action, asides and punctuation shots to make the piece move and "work".

I think THE CLOCK is about the plurality of time, how we each have the story of time running across us, all checking our timepieces and connecting with the little meanings that time has for us in our individuated worlds. Nam Jun Paik may have shown a single clock, second hand running, for 24 hours and called it art (if he had done the piece), but Marclay has done what is only possible today in the world of huge portable hard drives, culling images of clocks from innumerable films to stitch together a quilt of film history grander than almost anything else rendered by a filmmaker. The meticulous nature of Marclay's Clock connects it to a history of duration-oriented film and performance, though with film long duration can be an hour or 45 minutes, as Michael Snow's WAVELENGTH or Hollis Frampton's ZORN'S LEMMA. In performance some connecting points might be Marina and Ulay's walking the Great Wall towards each other or Linda Montano's year-long performance/deprivation pieces. Although piecing together a huge video piece might seem very different, certainly not a BODY ART like those just mentioned, perhaps OUT OF BODY ART and symbolic of the time we live in, so much of our lives sucked into the ethercable. And Marclay is no minimalist; I'm sure I've heard the term MAXIMALISM bandied about over and under his name. (What is Maximalism? Well, if Minimalism relies on very limited materials to make its claims, Maximalism could be considered a kitchen sink genre, a field of art-making where "everything goes" and quite often at the same time. Mash up land.) Marclay's Clock also comes out of a long line of found footage filmmaking, the use of pre-existing footage to make new statements (see Bruce Conner's work and Jay Leyda's classic little film book FILM BEGETS FILM). A healthy tradition. I don't want to think about whether Marclay had to secure rights to any of the thousands of shots he used, some of them in brilliant HD video it seemed; the image quality was very good for this kind of work. Found footage collage films often suffer from low quality duplication OR they try to use that aspect as a new Quality (see Craig Baldwin) that implies the distance from an official source and permissions.

And now to discuss SOUND. Since Mr. Marclay started his visible "career" as a musician, playing turntables in the Lower East Side improvisation scene of the 1980's (see John Zorn) and has produced numerous records and CDs before turning his eye more recently to video. (Although he has used video along the way to document other aspects of his work and has always worked on images presentable to the gallery/museum world. Marclay is a talented art entrepreneur or else his level of productivity is so high that he does not stand still for long. He lives in Europe and New York, say no more.) SO, as a musician or SOUND ARTIST, you can be sure that the soundtrack to THE CLOCK is rife with as much audio mayhem and frisson as CM could summon from his thousands of selected shots. He may have added sound effects for punctuation or forced himself to a set of rules limiting himself to the materials at hand. The snatches of dialog heard (during my 2 hours and 35 minutes) never seemed random, but rather elements of some kind of larger crossword puzzle unfolding through film history. Quite often a shot showing 2 people would come up, a troubled look on one of their faces, then turning to the other and asking existentially: "What time is it?" to be replied most certainly by the other with something like: "It's 10:42." Much of the pleasure of "watching THE CLOCK" (besides spending some of your work day in daydream) is in dashed expectations like those; a build up of suspense is dropped in the pratfall of the everyday. And the audience loved it. The humor in all the little mis-associations and screwball juxtapositions rippled across the full theater. Single shots contained little visual and auditory puns and then were followed rapidly by 3 more going in different directions. Every actor you could think of was represented in the interval I sat through.

And MIDNIGHT was spectacular, as I'd hoped. The buildup, crescendo and release into a quieter, new sequence of meaning was quite an experience after waiting for it for almost 2 hours. I can only imagine other significant daily representations: 8AM, 12noon, 5PM: they all may have terrific little collage dramas encoded for them. Each moment of the day given its little moment on screen, a star for a few seconds. I've seen reviews of the piece range from "boring" to "masterpiece" and I'd put it somewhere in between with moments of both. I've only seen one-tenth of the thing, what do I know?

THE IDEA and audacity to create (a 24-hour clockpiece video collage) something so grandiose may be enough these days to make a successful art piece. There is great hunger for new, innovative work in the world. I wonder how THE CLOCK would play in a smaller gallery installation or on home video. Sold to 6 museums for $150,000 each I wonder if THE CLOCK will come down from its tower anytime soon. It's impossible to evaluate given the current conditions of its presentation.

Sincere thanks to the staff of LACMA for this unusually good art experience.

Bill White's Reviews for The Seattle Post Globe

My friend Bill has written thousands of reviews for the Seattle Post Intelligencer, and when the paper stopped printing about 2 years ago and he was laid off, he and some colleagues decided to continue what they do as the Seattle Post Globe. Bill continues to view and write about legions of films I will never see. He wrote a short remembrance of my Filmers Almanac project in his blurb for the youTube sponsored movie "Life in a Day".

http://seattlepostglobe.org/2011/05/21/siff-pick-of-the-day-for-saturday-may-21-tom-tykwers-3

Sunday, June 12, 2011

Screening today at the Cinerama at 6:00 pm

Life in a Day

When an an apparently fresh idea surfaces in the mainstream, it often has an antecedent in the distant obscurity of an earlier decade’s avant-garde. In the eighties, for instance, David Lynch plundered Kenneth Anger’s “Scorpio Rising” for the visual and sound motifs in his otherwise pedestrian detective thriller, ”Blue Velvet.” Now we have, as the gala closing film of SIFF 2011, “Life in A Day,” an assemblage of blips from filmers around the world, all shot on the same day. Three decades ago, an adventurous young film-maker from Boston accomplished something very similar. His “Filmers’ Almanac” covered one year, with each filmer choosing one day on which to shoot a three-minute roll of Super-8 film. Whereas the material for “Life in a Day” was instantaneously delivered through today’s internet technology, the rolls of film to comprise “Filmer’s Almanac” were acquired through detailed and extensive mail correspondences, by which O’Toole became acquainted with his 365 contributors. Rather than a festive screening at a film festival, “Filmer’s Almanac” was screened in a room on a college campus with some very hardcore cineastes in attendance for the multi-projections that continued for several wondrous hours. I am looking forward to seeing what kind of world-beat extravaganza the mainstream has assembled out of the 4,500 hours of footage submitted to Youtube by 80,000 people from 140 countries. The 95 minutes chosen from such a wealth of material is bound to be a reductionism of real life into the carefully selected imagery meant to represent a particular point of view towards all the peoples of the world. O’Toole showed his film unedited, and the activities of his 365 filmers reflected the unity of all peoples rather than a colorful array of cultural differences. One thing to remember when watching this movie: Thirty years ago, one guy without any money did the same thing and received nothing for his efforts except the satisfaction of accomplishing a crazy mission.

SpaceUp San Diego February 12, 2011

On Saturday, February 12, I traveled to San Diego for the SpaceUp unConference, a gathering of people interested in space exploration. As I researched past and current space histories the past year and a half, SpaceUp stood out as a new and exciting nexus of information about citizen movements to get into space. This is a post-NASA world to some extent, although I think we as a society are struggling to balance public and private interests, we are in fact in something like a civil war over issues of the value and purpose of government and the place of corporations in our culture.

I found the video and photo documents of last year's (2010) SpaceUp to be quite intriguing and so had a strong interest to attend this year. I decided it would be a valuable forum to pitch my memoir-film concept about growing up under the space program, the child of a space writer. The rapid T-5 talks presented last year were a bit of a phenomenon, particularly Andy Cochrane's "Space is Boring" rant, which kicked some strong opinion and energy into the meetup. I expected a fairly friendly audience and an opportunity to get a document of me presenting my story pitch in public. While I only attended the afternoon and evening of Day 1, I had a great experience at SpaceUp and think it is a terrific annual forum for space enthusiasts from all walks of life.

The Price Student Union Loft at UCSD turned out to be an excellent venue, with 30-minute seminar sessions running in adjacent rooms, the center being a large bar-restaurant with a staging area. It was just the right size for the number of attendees, which was probably around 100, including organizers. Funny to enter the building and find SpaceUp across the hall from a student group rehearsing The Vagina Monologues. How diverse.

Pretty soon I was standing around a group discussing the topic "Making Space Sexy", which didn't draw me in initially but I observed from a distance and eventually took some part in. Many good ideas were shared, some questions like: why should celebrities and other millionaires have access to space before well-trained scientists? I expressed my concern that we are a schizophrenic culture: on the one hand rewarding hard work over time and on the other offering lotteries and get-rich-quick answers to the same questions. A woman from England told us how baffled she is at Americans' blase opinion of space. It dawned on me later that we are so caught up with cyberspace that we have largely lost our farsightedness, can longer peer into space (or is it the city lights that blot out our night vision?).

Another seminar session was titled Space Exploration and the Arts, in which a small group discussed everything from the literature that initially got them into space (Ray Bradbury and the recent Red/Blue/Green Mars series came up) to the most recent television depictions of space travel: Firefly and Defying Gravity. The same room then hosted a group discussion of how commercial projects could lead the way and finance continued scientific progress in space. There was talk of space as a manufacturing zone that can withstand pollution byproducts in ways the Earth's atmosphere no longer can.

A nice vegetarian buffet meal was offered, at least no one around me noticed any "space meat". I also had a pint of Stone IPA and a Racer 5. The mood was mildly festive and a lot of people seemed familiar with one another from last year's gathering. There were about 6 members of the SpaceX private spacecraft venture at the conference and quite a few other professionals. SpaceUp seemed a bit like a recruitment and job fair opportunity for some who were there; several young student enthusiasts were there to meet and greet representatives of companies they'd like to work for. I paced a bit and worked on my prepared text.

I spoke with a handful of people, met Chris Radcliff, organizer and liaison for the event. Talked with a photographer named Michael, who told me that there was also an air show going on that day celebrating 100 years of aeronautics in San Diego, that his wife and kids were stuck in related traffic. We also talked about the excellent PBS special ASTROSPIES we had both seen last year.

Around 7PM the T Minus 5 talks began, starting with a discussion of the group from Michigan University who have succeeded in launching their own cubesat, a small satellite payload. For a full survey of the T-5 talks you can go to:

http://www.ustream.tv/channel/spaceup-sd-pod-one

And to view my particular presentation:

http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/12659844

I was sure at the time of giving the talk that I had botched it. I do not frequently speak to assembled audiences. The attendees seemed much more interested in current space-related activities than 30 or 40-year old stories. Fortunately, these video documents show that I WASN'T HALF BAD! I generally communicated my piece and did so with some humor, stumbling a few times.

I had a couple of great coversations after the T Minus 5 segments. I was talking with Andy Cochrane, who gave another lively talk called "Space Is F@@king Dangerous" to close the night's event, telling him how impressed I was with his Powerpoint expertise. Again, his "Space Is Boring" address last year helped enliven the whole conference, and this year he received a good ovation again. Andy is a young filmmaker living in Los Angeles and his approach to presenting is informative to me, as someone who wants to win over supporters and financers to make film. His talk this year was good, including several "slides" which contained video clips in them, so he worked in a few surprises beyond the static 15 slides up for 20 seconds each. Andy said he hadn't slept for several days, and his talk may have suffered for that a little because he seems to make a weird factoid error in saying that we've only explored to 380 miles, when he must mean we only have a quasi-permanent presence at that distance.

Anyhow, another conference attendee and part of the oragnizing committee, Dave Dressler, approached Andy and me as we talked, and I was certain he wanted to speak with Andy: star of last year's conference and he'd just closed out this day, but Dave turned to me, told me he'd appreciated what I'd said and we had a great talk. After a short while, Dave commented, "Yeah, I could see that you are kind of living in your father's shadow," which was a small revelation to me, just having it put that way. This project of telling my father's story, and my own alongside it, has become a consuming goal. It speaks to having grown up under extremely interesting circumstances, with a father whose involvement in the heavy activities of the period I did not appreciate or understand then. Having drifted apart since my parents' divorce, I didn't have an active or helpful paternal voice in my life. This project is a way to redress that.

More soon.

David Sherman's "Wasteland Utopias" at Echo Park Film Center

Wednesday, October 13, 2010

I have lived in Los Angeles almost 5 years and had not visited the EPFC until this night, and it was about time. Friends drag you out of your myopic auto-biopic. And what a pleasant surprise to find the film center such a refreshing and non-dysfunctional place. It's a small screening room, but really laid out nicely. David introduced me to Lisa Marr, a Canadiene and one of the center's founders, who introduced the show and talked about the film center's 9 years of history. It was great to see filmmaker Bill Daniel, just moved to LA the week before, and Ross Lipman, who works at UCLA's film preservation lab and has been in LA 9 years. We watched David's 90-minute video documentary on Wilhelm Reich, the Sonoran desert and developer Del Webb over a good Panasonic video projector mounted near the ceiling.

I had seen "Wasteland Utopias" previously on the dvd David sent me six months ago and liked the film then, even as presented on the 22-inch cathode TV at home. But seeing the piece on a large projection screen really brought it to life; the combination of ghostly video effects and found footage came alive in a kind of aesthetic battle on screen. David uses classic found footage assemblage techniques and then overlays that with a field of keyed video, itself a combination of home video and primitively telecined 16mm movie film. The resulting "lo-fi" quilt tells the story of a speculative meeting between real estate baron and developer Del Webb and visionary psychologist Wilhelm Reich in the Arizona desert sometime around 1955, after Webb had envisioned mega-retirement village Sun City and Reich was fleeing persecution for his radical approaches to body-energy-health on the East Coast (having been driven from early Nazi Germany in the 1930's). Webb believed he could turn desert into fertile suburban dream tracts while Reich was interested in "cloudbusting", using artillery canon-like tubes and wires grounded in water tanks to try to encourage the formation of rain clouds. Slightly similar in their messianic drives, Webb was an arch-conservative old school American war profiteer while Reich promoted liberation of and by the orgasm, and was hounded into hiding, in part for his Communist party past, and finally arrested for illegally selling Orgone Accumulators, the self-help "energy therapy" boxes he designed and promoted (made from "layers of organic and inorganic material"). He died in prison, but remains a lightning rod persona akin to Marcuse and Foucault, and his classic writings --The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933) and The Function of the Orgasm (1942) principle among them-- remain regular university reading. All of this history is very well covered in "Wasteland Utopias" and illustrated using found footage, often overlaid by a cataract of B-roll video material, perhaps representing layers of the filmmakers life as they intersect and diverge from the material being researched and depicted. The film is dense and in some ways difficult viewing: the lo-fi video treatment might seem at first a technical deficiency. The first viewing I didn't fully connect the layers of the filmmaking process. This second viewing on the larger screen allowed me to appreciate how well the applied aesthetic fit the story at hand. The ghostly video feedback-like overlay worked as a representation of the orgone accumulation process, from within "layers of organic (film) and inorganic (video) materials". There is also some history of electro-shock therapy brought into the story, in an aside very close to the filmmaker's life, which similarly relates to the filmmaking technique. It's rare to see a film whose aesthetic principles so elementally parallel the subjects they intend to depict. David described the piece as a cine-essay and also explained that rather than presenting a thesis and then setting out to prove it, he is presenting several possibilities any of which might fall through one's hands like water (my analogy). The found footage presented a series of strong narratives, particularly in the telling of Webb's company's building of Japanese-American internment camps. There was another beautiful sequence which presented a lyrical poster image for the entire film: a slow motion shot of a young boy rolling naked in negative process and seen through his keyed shadow areas is a kind of meta-found footage screen or wall or quilt, like the catalog of films we see through the entire piece. This film is certainly worth seeing for anyone interested in Wilhelm Reich; it's doubly interesting for students of film and video language.

Jalopy Hour West Coast Premiere and DVD Release

On Wednesday, July 28 JalopyHour had its West Coast premiere screening at the Historic Raleigh Studios in Hollywood. The event coincided with Frank Schneider's visit to Los Angeles to work on Jeff Plansker's "pocketradio" films, a set of shorts which might be considered JalopyHour2, depending on your birth weight. Frank played a pivotal role in JalopyHour, which was shot 12 years ago in New Orleans and was finally finished 2 years ago, and then production of the dvd took another long set of months: getting the whole package rendered correctly. It's a beautiful disc set, with booklet, which we are quite proud of and just beginning to seek out distribution and possible television screenings.

The July screening was in the small Mary Pickford screening room and was mostly for friends and acquaintances, people who had worked on JH or the current "pocketradio" pieces. A bottle of proper absinthe was on hand. The screening was hugely successful in the sense(s) that the film looked fantastic (it was a simple dvd projected using a Wolf Cinema projector which rendered the piece as clear as to approximate 35mm projection) and the audience appreciated it. Promotional copies of the dvd set were gifted to each attendee. We then sauntered into the Hollywood night and proceeded to close a few bars.

Please visit www.jalopyhour.com to order your own copy of this lost and found film.
Available now.

East/West: Stereo Views

While in Berkeley last week, my friend Fred Schnider told me about his recent attendance at a gathering of the SF Stereo Photography Society at the Exploratorium and how thought provoking it was. He reminded me of when I had been minorly obsessed with stereo images, around the time of the Berlin Wall's fall. I made a cheap stereo device out of two 110 cameras mounted on a piece of linoleum and carried it around Germany in 1991 trying to capture the twin Germanys as one was being absorbed by the other. I was also working on a super8 film about The Wall and American Nuclear Power containing images of protests at the Seabrook plant in New Hampshire and then sledgehammers dismantling the Wall in Berlin. All of this material remains somewhere in my archive to be unearthed, made sense of and possibly uploaded somewhere.

In researching the subject just now I came across the blog "cursive buildings" by poet/photographer Joshua Heineman, who has taken a series of antique stereo photocards from the NY Public Library and created 3D gifs from them, digital images which jump back and forth between the 2 frames of the stereo image and more or less successfully translate the 3D image into 2D media. I had seen some of this trick online in images by filmmaker Scott Stark and there is also similarity to Ken Jacobs' "nervous system" film performances.

Stereo photography is of particular relevance today as James Cameron's REAL 3D Avatar empire prepares to take over the moving image world, a far cry from the novelty photography of the Victorian era and the enthusiasm of photo club collectors and stereo camera buffs. It's great to see the development of cheap and easy to use solutions for producing decent 3D imagery that can be shared freely on the web.

The fall of the Berlin Wall seems a remote memory, but I think the ideological divisions remain as entrenched and misunderstood as they were then. A "post-communist" world hangs itself out to dry in the belief that economic growth is limitless and every day that climate change policy is forestalled takes us closer to the edge. The stereo view was always to me the "blend" (a word Obama has used) of capitalist and socialist modalities. We might never get to see this balanced view come to pass, so avid are the hardcore capitalists (tea baggers and 2nd coming-ists), but at least we can watch the Titanic go down (again) in REAL 3D.

DUMBO Arts Jalopy Hour Premiere

On Saturday, September 26th, 2009, Jalopy Hour was premiered in a Brooklyn bookstore exhibition space (Powerhouse Arena). It was a beautiful weekend in New York, with entirely mixed weather. I measured 3 celebrity sightings in my crossings of Manhattan: Willem Defoe, who I often see around Houston Street, the Clintons at a restaurant north of Greenwich Village, and Elisabeth Moss of Madmen on the Upper West Side. Jalopy Hour was shown thanks to the kindness of Caspar Stracke, of Brooklyn or Berlin or Mexico City, who has curated VideoDumbo the last several years. It is a video festival that keeps expanding in scope and Caspar, with wife Gabriela Monroy together a VJ duo called Mostra, almost single-handedly mounts a festival which would take 10 people to produce anywhere else. Caspar can be seen carrying the video projector from one venue to another just in time for the next scheduled screening, an absolutely personal approach to festival coordination.

Anyhow. The screening went well, in spite some classic snafus. The dvds which were to be ready and for sale were not, due to unforeseen difficulties arisen with the printer-manufacturer. (We have since pulled the job and moved it to another company, a process currently underway...) We had also hoped to screen a blu-ray master of the film, which we had with us, and I picked up a blu-ray player in Manhattan especially for the screening, but for some gosh darn reason, the player would not recognize the disc. So we played an SD disc from Caspar's laptop which sufficed in the heat of the moment. The small audience of about 50 really played a big part in the film's playing, they seemed to truly understand the film, laughing at every appropriate moment. It was very encouraging that a film so delayed in its public life could have such a warm first reception.

Here are Caspar's film notes for the event:

Jalopy Hour is the result of a decade-long collaboration between commercial director/filmmaker Jeff Plansker and the experimental filmmaker/sound artist Owen O'Toole. It was originally conceived as an imaginary TV series shot in different American cities, exploring their respective cultural histories by the use of an absurdist lexicon borrowed from Ernie Kovacs, Lord Buckley, and Buster Keaton.

The project soon grew into some sort of Rousselian monster, a grotesquerie whose governing logic was perversely withheld from the viewer. British and French elements are carefully blended with absinthe and decadence, transporting us back through the early 19th century, as America's identity crisis was played out under the shadow of Old Europe.

Plansker and O'Toole eventually locked their project onto the one city whose vibrant historical nexus reflected the exuberance of a transplanted European colonial culture mutating into something altogether new: they describe New Orleans as "the only city where Jalopy Hour could be filmed, being the only American locale possessing the sense of stepping into another time, of preserved antiquity and colonial decay, of conflict resolution reached through the mouth of a bottle."

Jalopy Hour was filmed over 12 sweltering days in June, 1998; initially intended as a half-hour "pilot" program, it now lives as a short film. After several years on hold, Plansker and O'Toole eventually continued their collaboration and edited several versions from the raw material; the result was a long-form edit and a series of short vignettes. Both edits of Jalopy Hour are included on the DVD, along with several scenes that didn't make the final cut. This collection of puzzle pieces itself encourages the viewer to assemble them into a personal composition; only with a careful reading between the electronic scan lines can the complexity of this collaborative tour-de-force be fully revealed.

http://www.videodumbo.org