Parked in the Cour Carrée entrance of FIAC 2010, Darren Banks’ (UK) temporary horror cinema Palace Band-Wagon brings heyday of the videocassette back to life. This is the ‘mobile cinema’ version of The Palace Collection, an evolving installation that negotiates collective horror history, effects of new technology, modes of distribution, and ideas on the collection. Housed in a 1970 Cadillac Eldorado that comes equipped with a television and a VCR, the public can choose continuous screenings of horror video classics such as Evil Dead, Brain Damage, and The Hills Have Eyes from Bank’s personal collection. This video collection consists of films distributed by Britain’s infamous Palace Pictures in the 1980s and have been tirelessly procured by Banks from Ebay, boot fairs, and charity shops.

Darren Banks has given the overwhelming history of horror film a more approachable feel by focusing solely on Palace Pictures and their subsidiary companies of horror video (Palace also worked in comedy, thrillers, action, and music videos). Infamously, the Palace Picture Distribution and Production Company was a seminal distributor for cult cinema and international art films established by Stephen Woolley & Nik Powell in London (circa 1982). As part of the part of the decade’s legendary VHS and Betamax market boom, the innovative marketing strategies and schrewdness in securing film rights for Palace Video continue Palace Pictures’ legacy long after they declared bankruptcy in 1992.

With The Palace Collection Banks re-ignites the personal power of the audience and the fetishization of cult cinema. In the 1980s, videocassettes facilitated film’s literal movement out of the cinema and into private realms, bringing movies to the people. The invention of the VCR allowed for personal home viewing that ignited a functional shift in the industry and sparked debates, particularly in the United Kingdom, about censorship. Simultaneously in Ghana (West Africa), a mobile cinema project brought impromptu screenings to isolated communities. Running TVs and VCRs on power generators the movies were mostly B-movie or horror movies like Cujo, Evil Dead, and Eaten Alive. The accompanying hand-painted promotional posters were often commissioned without the artist seeing the film but fostered a creative interpretation often exceeding the film’s content. Inspired by this, Banks is hosting a poster-painting workshop at FIAC where viewers can create artworks based on the selected films and add to the video archive.

Palace Pictures’ downfall symbolizes the slow erasure of VHS and the perceived decline of the horror movie through excessive use of CGI and advanced technology. Treating his Palace videos as ephemera, Banks challenges the preciousness of the collection by placing it on public display as a useable resource. By provoking the audience to use outdated materials and to be selective in doing so, Darren Banks positions The Palace Collection and now Palace Band-Wagon as a readymade gesture urging the audience to remember the ‘just forgotten’ and the ‘recently redundant’.

Housed in Kenny Schachter Rove in Hoxton Square, itself a model of temporality, Jonathan Viner Gallery’s use of the space is a transfer of functionality. Here the work looks dirty, used, loved. Nothing in the exhibition is or seems fragile. The intention of Bed (2007-2010) is to be walked all over. Though made of glass, Wet Magic (2010) is statuesque and strong. Even the bent photographs Smoke 1 and Smoke 2 (both 2010) are mounted on sturdy aluminum. The strength of these objects has been re-enforced during the re-assembly of structure and meaning.

With an obvious interest in domesticity and interior design, Tuazon has weaved a personal history into the durability his artworks. They are intimate without being obviously so, their appeal lingering softly. For instanceBed, his literal bed, takes center stage. His mattress, removed from his Parisian apartment after being damaged from a fire in the flat below, is covered underneath a wooden platform (looking like a cross between a theatre stage and a skate-ramp) made to the exact dimensions of his former home. Personal enough, it was even more poignantly sentimental as his daughter ran and played over the work during the private view. It’s the photographs, though, that are the most romantic. Taken in the darkness, the treetop landscape is distorted and barely visible. They are photographs that cannot wholly be seen but their damaged exterior makes them completely desirable.

Sex is full of angles, interiors verses exteriors, and framing; playing with what the audience sees, knows, and assumes. Tuazon questions what purpose can mean and emphasizes that contextualization, i.e. where the work is situated (home, studio, gallery), is the place for new meanings to emerge.

Published on The Modernist on 14/10/2010

The Hayward Gallery’s Move: Choreographing You delivers exactly what the title promises – the audience becomes the players, moving in, on, around, and through a myriad of (mostly) participatory artworks. The traditional relationship between the performers and the audience completely collapses as our hands-on experience not only takes center stage but also quite literally activates the work. Watching people maneuver the exhibition, a heightened energy buzzes through the Hayward’s building (one that, despite its Brutalist style, I’m always amazed at how uniquely each exhibition adapts to the space) because our interactions aren’t merely breaking down the physical boundaries of touching artworks – we are becoming the work.

Typically when confronted with interactive performative (and particularly dance) art, I tend to become a bit anti-authoritarian because I generally prefer to negotiate art on my own terms rather than be forced by someone else. Fortunately this exhibition is ‘Move’ and not ‘Push’. Still it’s surprising that Tania Bruguera’s installation Untitled (Kassel) (2002), one of the most demanding works of relinquished control, proved to be a provocative push right up my alley. Rather than spoil all the fun, I’ll just say that it involves walking single-file through an intensely lit and hot corridor where the audience is confronted with certain sounds and a temporary piercing darkness. It’s as intense and it is satisfying.

Move: Choreographing You also conflates history, bringing historical by pieces by pioneering performers into a contemporary context: Trisha Brown’s The Steam (1970), Simone Forti’s Huddle (1961) and Hangers (1961), and Dan Graham’s eerily relevant Present Continuous Past(s) (1974) are some of the examples. Christian Jankowski’s reflexive Rooftop Routine pays homage to Brown’s 1973 Roofpiece. It also reminded me that I can still hula-hoop. These works are now rendered dateless and Move shows how their relevance transcends a time period classification.

Probably the most important thing this exhibition calls attention to is that museum visitors are always navigating their way through art, physically or mentally, regardless of the medium. The direct, personal, shared experience is only way to grasp understanding and the Hayward has created a playground where the audience becomes aware of their body and the body’s of others within the confines of a fabulously fixed space. Go. Now.

Published on The Modernist on 23/09/2010

German artist Sinta Werner renders the purposeful functionality of architecture moot. Like predecessors Robert Smithson and Gordon Matta Clark, she uses buildings and landscapes as a material object to de-construct and, by doing so, re-constructs familiarity. She provides a post-modern reflection on contemporary environments providing a doubling and re-imagining of existing structures. Through her work we question the given and have a blast uncovering the line between the real and the imagined real.

Werner’s latest architectural intervention Along the Sight Lines at London’s Nettie Horn is a subtler re-envisioning of the white cube space than her 2008 Grey Areas in which three-dimensional structures were added inside the gallery to create a mirrored mirage. The devices used in Along the Sight Lines are at a bare minimum but still produce maximum affect; the illusion lies in her usage of perspective painting where shadowing techniques compose dual visions of the same place. No literal division of the space is at play, only a manipulation of what’s already there. Werner combines digital technology to map out the area (pillars, doorways, walls, and floor) with Renaissance painting’s obsession with perspective to create what is in essence a very theatrical experience. The surrounding walls act as the stage backdrops to our performative movements within the space as we attempt to line up the angles.

Her new photo-collages are also more streamlined with three black-and-white series (Milos I-V, Zwischen Lenggries und Schwarz I, II, IV, V, and Constructed Visibilities I-IV) that focus on the façades of mountainous terrain and skyscrapers. There is little distinction made between these landscapes and urban environments which reveals a bit about our contemporary relationship to both: our distance to nature is rectified through building while our proximity to architecture fuels desire for the landscape. Like her installations, Werner has a direct and personal involvement in the collages that collapses some of this distance between the viewer and the viewed. Werner has taken all of the photographs and her intricate cutting and application of additional elements enhance the visibility of the artist’s hand. While her installations multiply the existing three-dimensional space, her collages take the two-dimensional into the realm of 3-D. Here there is a literal and obvious division drawn between representation, the original, and the fictionalized place. The viewer is now on the outside looking in but our presence is integral in developing associations between what we see and the everyday.

Sinta Werner works within constructs, reacting to and using interior spaces to manipulate understanding of place. Her site-specific installations and accompanying photo-collages force us to define our location within the surrounding environment, highlighting our tenuous relationship to seeing and knowing. Werner’s ‘insitu’ installations exist in an in between state, hovering between visual illusion and physical reality. Confronted with this acknowledged fiction within an actual space, it’s up to the viewer to sort out where each begins and ends. This moment of limbo is where the fun starts as our eyes open up to the possibilities of rendering ourselves within space in a new way.

Sinta Werner was born in 1977 in Germany. She currently lives and works in Berlin.
Along the Sight Lines (3 September – 17 October 2010) at Nettie Horn

Be sure to read: SPACES OF DISILLUSION – Sinta Werner talks to Paul Carey-Kent

Images (top to bottom)
All images Courtesy of the artist and NETTIE HORN

Along the Sight Lines, 2010

Zwischen Lenggries und Schwarz II, 2010
Photo collage
106 x 49 cm

Constructed Visibilities I, 2010
Photo collage
37 X 28.5 cm

An interview with artist Darren Banks for Lux online where we discuss the relationship between horror film history and his installations. Published on 17 June 2010.

UK artist Darren Banks incorporates found and made film footage into sculpture and installation to explore his ideas about horror, the domestic, science fiction, defunct technologies, creation, and the unknown. He conflates high and low culture exploring his own perception of sculpture and its relation to film and memory.

By appropriating iconic images of sculpture through the history of film and re-presenting them as his own work, Banks’ restructures filmic images and adds to his existing sculptural language. He establishes a dialogical relationship with these previous films through appropriation and montage. His folding of the past into the present is a strong example of how some contemporary artists are building upon the legacy of horror and creating new artistic narratives with the genre…READ THE REST OF THE INTERVIEW HERE

Image: Darren Banks, Where Everything Is (2010), installation view
Courtesy Sierra Metro, Photography: Chris Park

Heather Cantrell’s international project, A Study in Portraiture asks: exactly who constitutes the art world and how can the roles and identity of this motley crew of artists, curators, dealers, writers and collectors be defined through an engagement with performative portraiture?

When Heather Cantrell began taking Polaroid portraits of her art world friends in the summer of 2008 at her home studio she initiated A Study in Portraiture, a pivotal project that instantly formed a definition of her conceptual, and often complicated, artistic practice. By incorporating the devices of theatricality that subvert identity explored in her previous bodies of work, she marks the distinct difference with this series by revealing what was previously concealed: the process. And for Cantrell the process is all about the performance enacted by the roles played out both by herself, as the artist and director, and the sitter, as the actor who is complicit in (re)constructing his/her identity. What A Study in Portraiture does is put this complex interaction between artist and subject on display, successfully informing and involving the audience on the story behind each portrait.

HISTORICIZING PORTRAITS

Cantrell utilizes the historical legacy of portraiture and photography while simultaneously being a part of it. Critic and curator Christopher Miles says, “What has made Heather Cantrell such an interesting photographer over the last few years has been her ability to interrogate the underpinnings, conventions and functions of photography and its particular genres while nonetheless extending, and even honoring, the very traditions she problematizes.”[1] So, from West-African photographers Seydou Keita and Malick Sidibe in the 1960s, whose portraits often involved staging devices such as motorcycles, typewriters, and costumes to imply greater success, urbanity, or wealth, she gleans rich patterns, stylized poses, and a heightened identity as can be seen in the portraits of Laura Howe (2008) and Ana Luiza Teixeira de Freitas (2009). We can note in Edwin Metternich and Fly (2009), George Young (2009), and Ruby Osorio (2009), her usage of lush, vibrant, and inter-changeable hand-painted backdrops to create illusion and depth similar to 18^th century British society portrait painter, Thomas Gainsborough. And from the 20^th century photographer of London’s ‘Bright Young Things’ Cecil Beaton, she theatrically employs fancy dress and the documentation of the ‘cool’ kids of an international social scene in the photographs of Hannah Greely, Elana Scherr, Sky Burchard and Steven Schkolne (2009) and Christina Mack (2009).

In contemporary terms, she is placed within the context of photographers such as Cindy Sherman, Phil Collins, Gillian Wearing, Jemima Stehli, and Wolfgang Tillmans, whose exploration of identity in their work is the result of performative acts. With these artists, as with Cantrell, the artist’s hand in creating the photographic image is explicit and two, Collins and Stehli, even directly involve art world members as active subjects. It cannot be ignored that in the midst of the current social phenomenon of social networking, portraiture has become a dominant and immediate way in which to define one’s self. Cantrell’s photographs can be therefore seen as a product of their time in that they are subsequently often used for such sites, however it is obvious that the aesthetic and conceptual strategies she layers in her work clearly remain above being reduction to only one such usage. Most importantly, from all of these examples, Cantrell situates herself within the tradition of enhancing status and stylizing reality in portraiture while documenting and defining a generation.

‘ACTS’ AND VOLTA NY

A Study in Portraiture transforms the gallery space into a stage, a theatre set consisting of an in-house photography studio with rotating hand-painted back-drops, framed portraits from previous sessions, and a bevy of costumes and props ranging from highly decorated fabric to stuffed flamingoes to toy rifles. This site is specifically constructed for participation of those within the local art community in which the ‘Act’ takes place; embracing the ‘theater of the portrait’ she establishes each exhibition as a city-specific act in a play, hence the titling of ‘Act I’ for Los Angeles at Kinkead Contemporary and ‘Act II’ for London at MOT International. The focus on using art world figures as her subjects is central to Cantrell’s work. From John Baldessari to Mary Kelly to Mindy Shapero, she has always looked within her own tribe of artists, curators, and musicians in her exploration of community and subculture. Thus, exclusivity is inherently embedded in A Study in Portraiture as it embraces and reflects the insular nature of the art world.

As expected, her ethnographic exploration of art scenes in these ‘Acts’ has produced unique information about the city’s artistic character. For instance, the majority of portraits in Los Angeles featured artists (who were the most willing to ‘go there’) and mirrored LA’s image consciousness whereas in London curators took center stage showing Londoners capacity for self-evasive humour. Armed with this knowledge as her investigation continues within the environment of an international art fair, Cantrell aptly approaches Volta NY with a focus towards the artist/patron relationship. Poignantly, Volta NY is not termed as an ‘Act’ as this has come to be defined in regards to a specific city. The international scope of the art fair removes it from being pinned down to a single location and, rather, frees it to operate as a ‘non-space’; a temporal place where the art ‘world’ congregates and merges into one.

During Volta NY the boundary between the subject and the artist is pushed further and the lines between the two blur as Cantrell inserts herself into the photographic image through the usage of filmic mirror effects. She enhances the aspect of theatre play of ‘the tribe’ by utilizing masks of paper-mache animal heads and foliage that she will use to become her own character in the scene. With this she historicizes Diego Velázquez’s painting Las Meninias (1656), a complex composition in which reality and illusion are confused and where the artist establishes himself within the pictorial landscape amongst members of King Philip IV of Spain’s court. At Volta, she is now not only exposing her practice during a public performative act, but is overtly exposing the ‘reality’ of her directorial involvement in the portrait image construction. Exploring the artist/patron relationship at an art fair (a space developed for commerce, marketing, and discussion), she collapses the historical division of the two by making the patron work for the artist and, thus, places both on the same level.

THE LARGER PICTURE

A Study in Portraiture is an organic project, one that considers and adapts to its environment and the subsequent desires and needs of each participant. Nothing is contrived. It is playful yet rigorous, an evolving performance occurring in parts that add up to a larger portrait of our tribe, our subculture, of the art world. As the project assumes more ‘Acts’, the culmination of portraits (featuring thus far amongst many others: curators Hans Ulrich Obrist, Andrew Renton, Iwona Blazwick; artists Clunie Reid, Mark Titchner, Micol Hebron; and dealers John Kinkead, Anthony Wilkinson, Chris Hammond; and patrons such as Anita Zabludowicz) will provide the art world with what Obrist calls ‘A Protest Against Forgetting’. Through A Study in Portraiture, Heather Cantrell provides the art community with the present, an eventual past, and, hopefully, an insight to our future.

Horror rarely gets the credit it deserves, especially within the film industry. Take the 2010 Academy Awards where a confused horror montage omitted classics like The Haunting and Black Cat but included Leprechaun twice? Although that night also saw [Roger] Corman receive the Governor’s Award, an equivalent to a lifetime Oscar, the montage pandered to sensationalism, reducing horror to the arena of a young boys club rather than honoring the stunning conceptual and aesthetic advancements it has achieved in cinema.

Read the rest of the entry here.

Image: still from Ben Rivers’ Terror!, 2006, video, 24 min

I first came into contact with this book nearly a decade ago while researching supplemental material for an Ed Ruscha retrospective at the MCA in Chicago. What I remember most was that it was damn hard to find. In fact, getting the book proved so difficult I believe we ultimately wound up borrowing it from Ruscha’s own personal library. Fortunately with its re-issue in 2008 this is no longer the case. Now I am able to conduct my own inspection – with the turn of each page my nose nearly touches the paper as I examine Frank’s careful consideration in image selection, cropping, order, the vibrant contrast of the whites, black, and grays. And I realize how this experience – with the book acting as object – is so much more intimate and personal than standing in a gallery room full of drifters.

Originally published in 1958, “The Americans” features photographs taken by Robert Frank circa 1954-55 during his travels throughout the United States as part of the prestegious Guggenheim Fellowship. In this act, Frank is quintessentially American. This need to explore and be free manifested in the “road trip” seems to be part of the genetic make-up of most Americans; from the first explorers centuries ago to the rush to the west in the late 1800s to rebellious kids of today. Frank embraces this and its perhaps why we, as Americans, can relate to it so thoroughly. Certainly the images are from an era many of us didn’t experience first hand and yet they are defining universal moments – funerals, the loneliness of the road, isolation amongst others, political events, social change, every day life. They are a part of our communal history.

While these pictures are photo-journalistic in their execution, Frank’s ability as an artist to assemble imagery into an almost narrative dialogue is subtley sharp. For instance, there is a string of five brilliant photographs (in the book images are on the right page, text only on the left page) dealing with car travel. It begins with the close detail of two men driving in “U.S 91 leaving Blackfoot, Idaho” that then leads us to consider the contrasting staticness of older folks and fast-pace of younger life surrounding them in “St. Petersburg, Florida.” Frank now delivers the most power image succession in the book (see images at the top of the post). “Covered car – Long Beach, California” depicts a large car, covered with a tarp, as palm trees and a stoic concrete building hold strong in the background. Turn the page to “Car accident – U.S. 66, between Winslow and Flagstaff, Arizona” where four onlookers stand over a covered dead body. In both, the covering acts as a protective shield of both the killer and its victim. Ending with an image of the open road at nighttime in “U.S. 285, New Mexico” we are again reminded that we are alone, traveling through life with a sense of adventure.

As with other similar conceptual arrangements within “The American,” the images taken are from different cities in entirely different circumstances and yet they are steadfastly universal in their experience. Perhaps this is what we can best take away from “The Americans,” whether viewed as photographic prints or as a catalogue collection, that we are not all that different after all.

Robert Frank The Americans exhibition schedule: National Gallery of Art, January 18–April 26, 2009; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, May 16–August 23, 2009; Metropolitan Museum of Art, September 22–December 27, 2009