Rhizome | Blog Posts tagged "1970s"

FANTASY VISION MEDITATION (MEGAMIX) (2008) - Ivan Lozano

Ceci Moss | Mon Sep 21st, 2009 10:18 a.m.

FANTASY VISION MEDITATION (MEGAMIX) from Ivan Lozano on Vimeo.

Structured as a continuous mix of videos from a recent series investigating the parallel historical narratives of disco, gay liberation movements and AIDS. A phantasmagoric elegy for the fallen soldiers in the hidden cultural wars of the 70s and 80s by transforming two sources generally dismissed as vapid and disposable. The musical collaboration between disco singer Sylvester James (a victim of AIDS) and producer Patrick Cowley (who succumbed to AIDS less than three months after the disease was codified) and A Night At Halsted's by queer porn auteur Fred Halsted (who overdosed on sleeping pills after the death of his lover from AIDS) who helped in defining the culture of the era. A labor-intensive digital exegesis of the unconscious spiritual elements hidden in the originals.

-- FROM THE ARTIST'S STATEMENT

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Untitled (1974) - Mark Wilson

John Michael Boling | Wed Sep 9th, 2009 1 p.m.

Of course, there was certainly a long history of machines and technology inspiring 20th century artists. The path of geometry, technology, and art was in part formed by the late paintings of Kandinsky, Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie, and the machine aesthetic of artists like Charles Sheeler and Gerald Murphy. I was also influenced by the work of artists who were currently involved with imagery of machines and technology. For example, I loved the graphics of the London-based avant-garde architectural group, Archigram, and the Pop Art prints and paintings of the Scottish artist, Eduardo Paolozzi. There were also contemporary collaborative experiments like E.A.T—Experiments in Art and Technology—at MOMA, and Art and Technology, an exhibition of collaborations between artists and engineers, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

-- FROM AN INTERVIEW WITH THE ARTIST

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Sesame Street Highlights

Javier Morales | Fri Aug 28th, 2009 11 a.m.

First airing in 1969, Sesame Street was an innovation in educational television. In addition to producing its own live action sequences, the show reached into the worlds of film and animation and commissioned work from studios such as Jeff Hale's Imagination, Inc., John and Faith Hubley's Storyboard Films, and Jim Simon's Wantu Enterprises. The program also pioneered the use of early computer graphics from the Scanimate analog computer courtesy of Dolphin Productions in New York City. All of these elements combined to create some of the most adventurous and artistic children's programming ever shown on television. Here are some highlights:

by Imagination, Inc.

by John and Faith Hubley's Storyboard Films

by Steve Finkin with Joan La Barbara

by Steve Finkin

by Owe Gustafson

by Jim Henson

by Frank Oz

by Wantu Enterprises

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Interview with Hollis Frampton by Esther Harriott (1978)

Ceci Moss | Mon Aug 17th, 2009 12:20 p.m.

From the program "Conversations in the Arts" produced at the State University of New York at Buffalo. This video is a 2-part interview edited to one piece.

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Interview with Paul Sharits by Gerald O'Grady (1976)

Ceci Moss | Mon Aug 17th, 2009 10:03 a.m.

Paul Sharits Interviewed by Gerald O'Grady in 1976
From the series Film-Makers, WNED Buffalo.

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Fantasy (1976) - Vincent Collins

Ceci Moss | Wed Jul 29th, 2009 10:20 a.m.

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Required Reading

Ceci Moss | Tue Jul 28th, 2009 1 p.m.

Art Fag City started their artist essay series, IMG MGMT, again this week with "Zappos Selbstdarstellung" by Joel Holmberg. In this essay, Holmberg considers the corporate culture of the online shoe company Zappos, which encourages the individual expression of its employees through social media outlets, content it then uses to build their overall brand. Holmberg makes the observation that this communal bonding through self-expression is similar to the Selbstdarstellung performances acted out by members of Otto Muehl’s Action Analysis Commune. Here, members were to "reveal one's freest self" through "spontaneous acts of self-representation." What results is "joy-bordering-on-desperation," as members were pushed to test their own boundaries by the larger group. The Zappos example illustrates the contemporary corporate adaptation of psychological practices used in various social experiments from the 1960s and 1970s, a subject elaborated in greater detail by filmmaker Adam Curtis in The Century of the Self.

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Multiple Views

Carolyn Kane | Wed Jul 15th, 2009 12:04 p.m.

Artist Dan Graham (born 1942) has embraced a wide range of media and genres including film, video, performance, installation, architecture (he collaborated with Jeff Wall in 1989 to build Children’s Pavilion), women’s magazines (Figurative—made in 1965 and reproduced in Harper’s Bazaar in 1968), and rock music (where he has collaborated with musicians such as Glenn Branca and Sonic Youth). Graham is well known for his documentary Rock My Religion (1982-84), a fifty-two minute video that explores the religious and spiritual tendencies underlying the American obsession with rock music. In the exhibition catalog for Don’t Trust Anyone Over Thirty, Diedrich Diederichsen claims that this video is “one of the most important texts on the theory of rock music.” Rock My Religion, as well as many other of these interdisciplinary projects are included in Graham’s current solo show, Dan Graham: Beyond, at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City.

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Video Weavings (excerpt) (1976) - Stephen Beck

John Michael Boling | Tue Jul 7th, 2009 11 a.m.

My work is to make something beautiful with technology. I believe in spiritual technology. Video Weavings is a link between the modern (video) and the ancient (weaving) technologies. Video Weavings are based on poetic mathematical rhymes, or algorithms, visualized in real time on the warp and weft of video's horizontal and vertical scanning electron beams, color phosphors, plasma cells, and LCD pixels.

-- FROM THE ARTIST'S DESCRIPTION

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Required Reading

Ceci Moss | Wed Jun 17th, 2009 2:15 p.m.

Image: Unprojectable: Projection and Perspective (2008), performance documentation, Tate Modern, London

"DG: So just to clarify, you and John Cale took the side of contingency, materialism, and cultural and historical specificity, and La Monte Young and his supporters took the side of permanence, ‘the eternal’ and that which transcends culture and history.

TC: Right. Which led me to become engaged in a reflection on the intersection between idealism in Western philosophical thought and in Western cultural tradition on the one hand, and on the other hand power relations - since our controversy was largely lodged in the context of a legalistic formulation. What about our Greek roots? What about Pythagoras? What about theories of music that had to do with numerology? This ensnared me in a set of concerns around the text of history. To answer your question more directly, the substratum of my current interests, and those that have held my attention most over the last few decades, has to do with the way in which the historical record can become the narrative. On the sound side, this process was really rich, and it branched out. I began to tell myself odd things, like modern physics had been generated as a branch of music. The power conditions in the Western orchestra had their roots in the same conditions as modern state bureaucracies and military drill practices. This gives rise to an analysis of how power is transacted that is not inconsistent with Foucault’s theories, but culturally modulated in a different way."

-- EXCERPT FROM INTERVIEW IN FRIEZE MAGAZINE, JUNE/AUGUST 2009

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