Unearthly delight
The Atmosphere series began at Inspace last night with the screening of Theremin: An Electronic Odyssey (1994), the definitive documentary upon the life and times of both instrument and inventor, Professor Léon Theremin. Having patented the device in 1928, the mix of mechanical idolatry and entirely human subjectivity resulted in a fitting testimony to a noise as ethereal and transitory as our passage on this Earth. It also focused heavily on enthralling figure and key contributor Clara Rockmore, muse and theremin virtuosa who could tease a concert from the air with her red-clawed fingernails.
A life of champagne and concerts at Carnegie hall challenged societal conventions with a race-defying marriage to an exotic dancer, whereupon Theremin was kidnapped by the KGB, smuggled back to Russia, imprisoned and forced to spend 25 years pursuing espionage technology during the Cold War. The closing scenes of a frail and bent Theremin being reunited with a sparky, sharp-as-a-tack Rockmore felt almost painfully intimate. Oh, and afterwards we all had a go on the real thing, courtesy of FOUND. This is one seriously beautiful film. Or am I just a soft touch? Guilty, m’lud!
Joana Vasconcelos
Joana Vasconcelos: 'Contamination' 2008 - 2010
An enforced stopover in Lisbon due to the volcanic death-cloud leering over Northern Europe resulted in a visit to the Berardo Museum, the Portuguese equivalent of the Saatchi Gallery. It was here I was fortunate to stumble across the best solo exhibition I think I’ve ever seen: a kaleidoscopic retrospective by local artist Joana Vasconcelos. Exploring the warren of rooms in this mammoth bunker of a building felt like tumbling vertically through a carnival train, accented by electric lights, vibrant pools of colour and the smash-ping-hum of madcap installations, both conceptual in origin but also beautiful and fun .
Joana Vasconcelos: 'Contamination' 2008 - 2010
Vasconcelos addresses the immediacy of the Ready-Made object and Pop-Art glamour, reinterpreting and subverting use as she dances between Duchamp and Warhol in her mass appropriation of the everyday. Streams of children and families led the way, prompting me to wonder if I was queuing for a giant ball pool instead of an exhibition, a clue to the contrary being in the huge chandelier formed of small tampons trailing a pubescent fringe of string (The Bride). Not at all crude but an elegant, bleached-bone centrepiece hinting at female objectification.
Joana Vasconcelos: 'The Bride' 2001 - 2005
The first of many jaw-dropping moments hit as I stood facing the rainbow-spew glory of Contamination. This tactile, patchwork sprawl of stitched fabric, knitting, crochet and appliqué adopts the seemingly benign form of a tentacular creature that stretches arms, legs and other sticky-out bits through entire rooms and the upper levels of the building. It is both inert and biologicial, reminiscent of coral and sea anemones, clad in fabric sample scales, dotted with jewelled insects, children’s toys, sequins, pom-poms, wrapped in grinning cartoon beach towels and sprouting stuffed stamens and stingers.
- Joana Vasconcelos: 'Spin' 2001
A riot of colour and texture, it was almost too much to absorb, the eye unable to grasp either beginning or end in a single glance. Quick to follow came further fantastical attractors, from a wind-tunnel hairdryer corona (Spin), plaited hair guide ropes (One Way) and a mannequin layered in blousy fabrics winched high and slam-dropped to the ground (Burka). Three giant, glittering jewels of edible colour and intricate patterns hang suspended within a velvet-lined room to the sound of traditional Portuguese Fado music, which on closer inspection are revealed to be made from melted and reshaped plastic cutlery (Red/Gold/Black Independent Heart).
Joana Vasconcelos: 'Red/Gold/Black Independent Heart' 2005, 2004, 2006
In Garden of Eden, patrons stumbled through a dark maze of kitsch, fibre optic flowers gathered en masse to form a labyrinth of illuminated kitsch, gently buzzing at a low frequency as if ink-blot bees hovered drunkenly within reach. But it was Meeting Point that had me grinning from ear to ear: classic design chair styles had been shorn of legs and attached to a roundabout that required riders to run alongside and jump aboard, then twirled in collaboration with other users. Joana Vasconcelos succeeds in creating a walk-in wardrobe of homespun delight.
Joana Vasconcelos ‘Netless / Sem Rede’ is at the Berardo Museum inside Lisbon’s Belem Cultural Centre until 18th May 2010.
Rinse and repeat
Destination Earth (1956)
Although the central theme for this year’s AV Festival across Newcastle, Middlesbrough and Sunderland was Energy, it was the adhesive suture of Recycled Film that held the programme together and made a powerful case for shedding notions of ownership by allowing others to revisit and sculpt anew. Rick Prelinger of the Prelinger Archives and Library delivered a keynote speech that fizzed and popped with genuine truisms on the current conflict between archives and potential users, including the following:
Archives are like children; they are largely conceived to fulfill the agenda of their parents.
It takes more energy to repress information and material than it does to release.
The opportunity to physically touch archive content, rather than access the ‘born digital’ alone, has the ability to engage the user in a profound manner and should not be underestimated.
Man On The Land (1951)
Prior to a day-long symposium was an evening screening curated by Rick of shorts from the Prelinger Archive: A is for Atom, a 90-minute journey through vintage animated shorts on the topic of energy, power and perceived progress, from nuclear fusion to capitalist ideologies. All are available online, from the confident cleft-chins and rooster chests of Man on the Land (UPA, 1951) to the infant capitalist propaganda of Destination Earth (American Petroleum Insitute, 1956). The naïve yard-sale of nature’s resources never looked so good: imagine if UKIP hired The Powerpuff Girls to battle blue Venusians with no visas and the political arena would be transformed.
- Trying Things Out (2007) by Vicki Bennett People Like Us
What became referred to as The C-Word, in every sense, loomed large despite repeat attempts by panelists and filmmakers to avoid an issue with no simple answer. Vicki Bennett of People Like Us, a Boudicea amongst artists working within archive-footage, stood firm and resolute. “It would cost me £200,000 to clear copyright within the clip of the film you are about to see,” she explained, before a musical-that-shall-not-be-named burst upon the screen in a mash-up of high notes and helicopter gunships. Both Vicki and Rick were of the opinion that popular film is part of our collective palette, a memory shared by many, and as such belongs to no one person or agency but to all.
- Scorpio Rising (1964) Kenneth Anger
Of the multitude of radio hits including Elvis Presley that feature with such apparently subversive intent within Kenneth Anger’s experimental opus Scorpio Rising (1964), all were – astonishingly - rights-cleared and paid-up. But of Ich Will! (2008), his latest collage film featuring sourced footage of The Hitler Youth, his response to permissions was unique to say the least. “Don't need 'em. War booty”, he chuckled.
- Crossroads (1976) Bruce Conner
Elsewhere the exhibitions programme tapped into a similar vein of repurposed work: Bruce Conner’s Crossroads (1976) seemed a much more crafted, personalised exercise in adapting existing material to create something new (footage of the atomic bomb tests at Bikini Atoll in 1946), in contrast to Anger’s Ich Will!, which feels shallow, pedestrian and empty of any additional authored intention when shown alongside his much earlier but more outrageous works.
- Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead
Over at the Baltic, Jordan Baseman mixed and mounted spoken-word reminiscence with the skill of a Victorian butterfly collector. An elderly female Botanist recalls seeing a donkey being eaten alive by maggots, while a cocksure London gangster boasts of his sexual magnetism… the first lacking images but for a few final seconds, the second underscored by footage of women slowly undulating at a retro disco, sourced at the North West Film Archive at Manchester Metropolitan University.
Even Jenny Holzer was busy adapting seemingly old-fashioned LED signage by using it to reveal censored text, piling tables with human bones and magnifying the obscured handprints of detainees, sifting traces of human ephemera to grant silenced voices a means of resurrection made all the more unnerving by her explicitly mechanical processes. Similar to the opening of the Ark of the Covenant in Raiders of the Lost Ark, what at first seems like streams of disassociated data begins to form grinning skulls and howling souls.
Homework: check out the wealth of the copyright-free Prelinger Archives. Because you really should.