Monthly Archives: September 2017

Gohar Dashti • Me, She and the Others

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“Me, She and the Others” documents women born in Iran after the Islamic Revolution. I have photographed these women in three distinct contexts: (from left to right) at work, at home, and out in society. Despite being obliged to adjust their appearance in certain environments, women remain an influential presence in Iran’s culture.

Gohar Dashti received her M.A. in Photography from the Fine Art University of Tehran in 2005. After studying photography in Iran, she has spent the last 12 years making the large scale of her practice concerning in social issues with particular references to history and culture through a convergence of interest in anthropology and sociology. She tries with her own means to express the world around her. Her starting point is always her surrounding, her memory, but with her very personal perception of things. She tries to trace her relationship to society and the world in it’s most sensitive way. Her practice continuously develops from life events and connection between the personal and the universal, the political and the fantasised.

She has participated in several art residencies and scholarships such as MacDowell Colony, Peterborough, NH, USA (2017), DAAD award, UdK Berlin, DE (2009-2011); Visiting Arts (1Mile2 Project), Bradford/London, UK (2009) and International Arts & Artists (Art Bridge), Washington DC, USA (2008). She has held various exhibitions around the world, being shown in many museums, festivals and biennales. Her works are in many collections including Victoria and Albert Museum, London (UK), Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (JP), Museum of Fine Arts (MFA), Boston (USA), Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City (USA), National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. (USA), Museum of Contemporary Photography (MoCP), Chicago (USA) and Kadist Art Foundation, Paris (FR).

http://gohardashti.com

Daisy Patton

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Forgetting is so long, 2016-2017
“Defacement is the confrontation with death and dislocation…”—Michael Taussig, Defacement

They say we die two deaths: the first is our actual passing; the second is when the last person who remembers us takes their final breath. Family photographs, vessels of memory, are integral to extending this quasi-life. They show a mother, a child, a past self, full of in-jokes and the mundane meaningful only to a select few. But divorced from their origins, these emotion-ridden images become unknowable and lost in translation, for they are intrinsically entwined with the intimate memories of someone. These images are timeless because photography can forever capture a moment—so much so that they have outlived their families and purpose, becoming orphans. As we drown in an overwhelming visual culture, what place does an old family photo have outside their original home?

In Forgetting is so long, I collect abandoned, anonymous family photographs, enlarge them past their familiar size, and paint over them. I paint to disrupt, to reimagine, to re-enliven these individuals until I can either no longer recognize them or their presence is too piercing to continue. Family photographs are sacred relics to their loved ones, but unmoored the images become hauntingly absent. Anthropologist Michael Taussig states that defacing these types of objects forces a “shock into being;” suddenly we perceive them as present, revered, and piercing. By mixing painting with photography, I lengthen Roland Barthes’ “moment of death” (the photograph) into some semblance of purgatory. Not alive but not quite dead, each person’s newly imagined and altered portrait straddles the lines between memory, identity, and death. They are monuments to the forgotten.

All works in this series are mixed media paintings (oil-painted photo prints), mounted on panel.

http://daisypatton.com

Graciela Iturbide

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Whether capturing Frida Kahlo’s house, wild dogs in India or the Seri people in Mexico’s Sonara desert, Graciela Iturbide presents the world in black in white – or as she describes it, as “an abstraction of the mind.”

Travelling with her camera every day and often living with her subjects for months, Iturbide says that her process is similar to that of a travel photographer, except that she only shoots “what surprises and provokes an emotion that I want to capture.”

Christian Boltanski at Grand Palais Paris

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Christian Boltanski (1944), a french born artist. His works focus the theme of death, the uniqueness of each human being, the transience of life and the absence. In opposition to the notion of individual identity, on the ways in which we strive to create and maintain it, the artist explores the loss of it as a collective experience in which we become numbers.

“What drives me as an artist is that I think everyone is unique, yet everyone disappears so quickly”
Christian Boltanski

One of the most recent works from the artist is called “Personnes” was made for Monumenta, in Paris. The artist has filled Paris’s Grand Palais with a 50-tonne mountain of clothes, and the sound of heartbeats. This work evoques the idea of hollow, in a space where life doesn’t exist there is only the absence of it and of the persons to whom those clothes might belong.

http://deadpassarita.blogspot.com

Władysław Starewicz

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The Mascot – Complete and Uncut
by Władysław Starewicz

Published 1933
Topics stop motion, animation, Wladyslaw, Starevich, Starevitch, Starewich, Starewitch, short film, Fétiche, Mascotte, Devil’s Ball

The best stop-motion film ever made, IMO. Actually, one of the best short films ever made!

There are two other versions of this film in the archive, but one is missing about 6 minutes and one is missing the soundtrack. I’ve fixed some editing mistakes and synch problems that have crept into the various editions over the years and posted the complete version of this amazing film.

Starewicz had become a master animator by 1933, incorporating techniques never used before and rarely since (such as moving the puppets during the actual exposure to create blurring for fast movement). His use of rear-screen projection is also surprisingly effective.

But more important than these technical details is the great humor of his writing and his sensitivity to character. Each of the dozens of puppets in this film is imbued with a convincing personality; none more so than the title character, known as Fétiche in France and Duffy in England and the U.S. I think the scene of him hanging in a car’s rear window is one of the funniest and most poignant scenes you’ll find in any film. The character was so successful Starewicz starred him in four more films.

We have CGI now, but all Starewicz had was an imagination that wouldn’t take “no” for an answer. Whatever he wanted to see on the screen, he created. And he wanted to see some truly bizarre stuff – every imaginable piece of scrap is called up for service: old shoes, chicken bones, utensils, broken glasses, dolls, monkeys, rats…nothing was off limits.

A sweet, funny, and also eerie film that should be seen by anyone with even a passing interest in animation. Or film, for that matter.

Producer Ladislas Starewicz
Audio/Visual Sound, B&W
Language English
Credits

Directed by
Wladyslaw Starewicz

Written by
Wladyslaw Starewicz

Original Music by
Edouard Flament

Cinematography by
Wladyslaw Starewicz

Art Direction by
Wladyslaw Starewicz

Parker Day

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Parker Day’s debut body of work, “ICONS,” is a series of one hundred portraits shot on 35mm film between July 2015 and November 2016. The works are 12″x18″ and 20″x30″ digital C-prints, each in an edition of 10, printed on metallic gloss paper.

“ICONS” has been presented in solo shows at Superchief Gallery in Los Angeles, CA and New York, NY and Screaming Sky Gallery in Portland, OR. The series has been featured in The New Yorker, Juxtapoz, Vogue Italia, and many other publications. The “ICONS” book, printed by NOT A CULT, is now in a second edition.

http://www.parkerdayphotography.com

Winsor McCay (c. 1871 – 1934)

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Little Nemo, 1911
Based upon the comic strip, “Little Nemo in Slumberland”, and featuring both Winsor McCay & comedian John Bunny.


The Sinking of the Lusitania, released in 1918 is an animated short film by American artist Winsor McCay. It features a short 12 minute explanation of the sinking of RMS Lusitania after it was struck by two torpedoes fired from a German U-boat. The film was one of many animated silent films published to create anti-German sentiment during World War I. McCay illustrated some 25,000 drawings for the production. The film is stylized as a documentary, informing viewers on details from the actual event, including a moment by moment recap, casualty list, and a list of prominent figures who were killed. (youtube)


The Flying House – Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend, 1921
Against the backdrop of the rapidly urbanizing United States of the 1910s and 1920s, one house from the artificial grid of modern, planned America takes flight in the dream of a woman who has feasted on Welsh rarebit. This cartoon is part of a Dream trilogy animated by Winsor McCay in 1921.

CBGB Silents

Winsor McCay: His Life and Art
Essay by Russell Merritt

By 1910, live-action short films and hand-colored magic lantern slides ruled the movie screen, but animation, maybe not so surprisingly, was in eclipse. Expensive and time-consuming, cartoon work was not terribly well suited to the hectic pace of the nickelodeon’s insatiable demand for product. Nevertheless, two extraordinary men stand out. One, in Paris, was Émile Cohl. The other, in New York, was Winsor McCay.

At the time, McCay was best known for his brilliant Little Nemo comic strip. In each fantastical episode, Nemo is caught in an escalating tangle of weirdness amid a psychedelic succession of ice caves, Italian palaces, and Art Nouveau gardens. The strip made McCay a celebrity, Nemo becoming so famous that Victor Herbert even composed a Broadway operetta about him. And so, in 1910, having conquered the Sunday comic page, McCay set his sights on drawing him for the screen.

McCay’s first idea was to take Nemo and his friends on the vaudeville stage where he animated them as part of a live act, introducing them on stage with quickly drawn “lightning” sketches and then speaking over hand-colored moving images. Within a year, he returned to the stage with a far stranger, delightfully gruesome insect-giant. This was a bloodthirsty New Jersey mosquito called the Jersey Skeeter, another veteran comic strip character who had appeared in several pre-Nemo series by McCay. As with Nemo, this film also had an elaborate live-action prologue, now lost. But it’s the animation of the blood-sucking mosquito that provided the revelation, putting McCay’s uncanny feel for weight and comic timing on display. As John Canemaker notes in his biography of McCay, this is an insect who thinks and considers solutions to problems. Just as remarkable, McCay gives him a certain amount of comic charm, as he hesitates and makes eye contact with us before gleefully quenching his thirst. Here, it can be argued, is the freakish origin of personality animation.

Within a year, however, the Jersey Skeeter was eclipsed by McCay’s masterpiece, the inimitable Gertie the Dinosaur, who was a sensation from the start. A genial dinosaur inspired by the skeleton on display at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, Gertie is unique in early animation for her charm and temper. Film historian Scott Bukatman calls her a loveable rogue —“prankish, unruly. Unruly rather than monstrous … Gertie the Dinosaur, not King Kong.”

True, Gertie was, like Nemo’s friends and the Jersey Skeeter, originally part of yet another McCay vaudeville act. But as Donald Crafton and David Nathan have noticed, the film was conceived differently from McCay’s earlier cartoons. The earlier shorts are part of illustrated lectures; Gertie is part of a multimedia dramatic performance, with McCay playing the part of her trainer. They interact and indulge in back-chat: he talks to her, she responds like a mischievous pet. He cracks his whip; she cries. He tosses her a pumpkin (or apple); she gobbles it up.

Spatially, too, Crafton and Nathan note, Gertie was McCay’s most complex film to date. In Little Nemo, characters romp on black-and-white backgrounds; in The Story of a Mosquito (a.k.a. How a Mosquito Operates), the only background is the body of the sleeping victim. But in Gertie, his protagonist is anchored in a mountainous environment that resembles a theatrical stage set, rendered in depth and in some detail. Working with rice paper rather than transparent cels, McCay and his assistant were obliged to provide those backgrounds in each of the drawings, retracing them somewhere between 2,500 and 3,500 times.

McCay the workaholic insisted on animating the hard way, taking a minimal number of shortcuts. Yet his singular genius for design and timing sometimes obscures his pioneer work in creating standard techniques today, including the pose-to-pose system whereby sequences are divided into “extremes“ and “in-betweens“ (he called it the “split system”) for more clarity of movement. Nor was he immune from cycling movements (as when Gertie dances on her hind legs) or filming on “twos“ and “threes“ (shooting the same image twice or three times) when the occasion called for it.

Gertie became a star, and McCay not only took his act on the vaudeville circuit but also performed with her in banquet halls for large gatherings of newspaper colleagues and socialites. William Fox, the fledgling film distributor, was sufficiently taken with Gertie that he contracted with McCay to enlarge the film by adding a live-action framing narrative, more than doubling the running time of McCay’s original. This is the version that survives today, in which a live vaudeville audience is replaced by a cast of comic strip artists who attend a banquet and watch McCay take on a bet by fellow Hearst cartoonist George McManus. We then see McCay with his assistant (played by his son Robert) in what became a scene—later revered by Disney—showing the epic labor involved in creating a cartoon. It is this version that opened at the Wonderland Theater in Kansas City on Saturday, December 19, 1914, toured Kansas, and then spread across the country.

After the success of Gertie the Dinosaur, McCay continued to make handcrafted, highly individualized animated shorts built around cartoon characters. But his last great short marked a startling change, part of the direction his career as a newspaper cartoonist had taken at The American. By the time the First World War came to America, McCay not only dominated Hearst’s Sunday comic page, he had also become one of Hearst’s leading political cartoonists, satirizing slumlords, political bosses, and plutocrats. Most notably, though, even before the United States entered the war, he followed Hearst’s lead in making the eagle scream, attacking Germany and its allies. When he returned to animation, McCay was determined to dramatize what was considered the Kaiser’s most notorious atrocity to date—the sinking of the Lusitania by a German submarine.

He threw himself into his work, pouring his own money into the movie and taking two years to complete it. He also devised a new technique. Instead of rice paper for character drawings, which required backgrounds drawn on each sheet, McCay, for the first time, drew on celluloid, soon to be the preferred medium of commercial animators. Canemaker estimates that by the time McCay finished the film he had completed about 25,000 drawings (little more than ten times the amount, according to the most recent estimates, of what was required for Gertie). In the process, it is arguable that he became the first to use animation for political propaganda.

McCay’s work embodies the road rarely taken —that of the individual artist, working more or less by himself outside the studio system. The road American animation did take, of course, was chosen by the Hollywood studios, which treated it as an entertaining novelty made to precede the feature —so-called “Grouch Chasers,” populated mainly with comic strip characters like Maggie and Jiggs, the Katzenjammer Kids, Buster Brown, and folks from Fontaine Fox’s Toonerville Trolley. In retrospect, McCay occupies a unique position: America’s first animation auteur, the peerless draftsman who made manifest the artistry lurking behind comic and not-so-comic American cartoons.

http://www.silentfilm.org/archive/winsor-mccay-his-life-and-art

Picasso & Braque Go to the Movies

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Produced by Martin Scorsese and Robert Greenhut and directed by Arne Glimcher, PICASSO AND BRAQUE GO TO THE MOVIES is a cinematic tour through the effects of the technological revolution, specifically the invention of aviation, the creation of cinema and their interdependent influence on artists Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. With narration by Scorsese and interviews with art scholars and artists including Chuck Close, Julian Schnabel and Eric Fischl, the film looks at the collision between film and art at the turn of the 20th Century and helps us to realize cinema’s continuing influence on the art of our time.