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Reflections, refractions, formal play deconstructs narrative and locates the sub-version.
Sex and class are refigured and exchanged: the princess becomes the maid; the maid becomes the queen. Mirror World is an extension of my original montage, borrowing from my earlier Mayhem in its wrenching of narrative causality, and discovering with digital printing ways to wreck havoc on our perceptions of the world. Hypnotic- you cannot turn away. – Abigail Child
In the early 1980s, the celebrity actress/activist Jane Fonda, who was by then notorious for her sharp anti-war statements and revolutionary idealism during the Vietnam War, produced a series of exercise videotapes, in which she starred. The videos became among the best selling videotapes of all time, and helped usher in a cultural transformation from the communal and political thinking of the 1960s and 70s to the me-decade of the 1980s. More Than Meets the Eye: Remaking Jane Fonda is a remake of one of her exercise videos, with myself as the performer, set in a variety of locations, both public and private, which underscore a sense of supposed embarrassment I as a man might feel by inhabiting what is essentially a feminine landscape. By overlaying the diligent exercise imagery with provocative and pointed quotations from Jane Fonda's activist days, as well as her thoughtful ruminations from her recent autobiography on war, political transformation, female anxiety, and the "need to be perfect," the remake gives voice to my own feelings about the criminality of contemporary war-making and our own complicity in a world that gives rise to a kind of cultural bulimia. In the process, the video becomes an indirect chronicle of the "remaking" of a celebrity activist and the cultural shifts that allowed it happen.
Here's my
letter to Jane. - Scott Stark
Most of the archival footage in the Dangerous Supplement comes from US military footage under the titles of “SUPPLEMENT TO ‘THIS IS KOREA,” “KOREA GUN CAMERA,” and “NATIVE LIFE” shot during the Korean War.
Dangerous Supplement originated from these questions: Is it possible to see the landscape of the past even though it was first seen by the other’s murderous gaze? Did the mountains and waters manage to escape it? Is there a space in-between? Dangerous Supplement is an incomplete index for memory, a substitute for a vision that is yet to exist - Soon-Mi Yoo
Dangerous Supplement looks at the cultural and perspective balance between aerial shots and everyday life on the ground, between blunt intent and incidental evidence and between past and present. - Mark McElhatten
Dangerous Supplement begins with a damaged landscape, an unseeable landscape. All the images/places in it are metaphorically flawed or incomplete, being lost as fast as you can see them.
They tip to heaven or they fall to earth.
- Mark LaPore
Learning to love again, with fear at its side, the film draws balance between the romantic and the horrid, shaping a simultaneously skeptical and indulgent experience of the beautiful. A Frank O'Hara monologue (from a play of the same title) attempts to undercut the sincerity of the landscape, but there are stronger forces at play. - Michael Robinson
Barbieri’s Sight Specific series has been realized as a series of panoramic photographic prints and as 35mm films.
I was a little bit tired of the idea of photography allowing you to see everything. After 9/11 the world had become a little bit blurred because things that seemed impossible happened. My desire was to look at the city again. - Olivo Barbieri
Olivo Barbieri plays tricks with scale and focus to achieve a sense of eerie irreality. Las Vegas and Rome are his targets here, toyscapes seen through the eyes of King Kong. One shot of Rome shows the ancient aqueduct clearly, but the mass of modern buildings it slices through are mostly in blurry soft focus; in another shot the vast open hulk of the Colosseum looms, scarily dwarfing the details of its surroundings. - Grace Glueck
Italian photographer Olivo Barbieri (b. 1954) has been questioning the representation of urban landscapes for the past thirty years. In 2003 he began working on the “Site Specific” project, an ongoing collection of aerial photographs of European, Asian, and North American cities. The photographs are taken from a helicopter using an optical bench that allows for the manipulation of the plane of focus. The resulting images (exhibited worldwide as large panoramic prints) are characterized by odd distortions of scale and peculiar blurring effects. When confronted with these uncanny photographs, the spectator is often disconcerted, unsure of what he sees. Barbieri’s images turn the cities portrayed into representations of themselves. They resemble miniature sets that evoke archaeological reconstructions of bypassed eras (the photographs of the Coliseum or the Pantheon in Rome) or fantastic urban projects destined to an undetermined future (the photographs taken in Las Vegas or Montreal).
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Aerial imagery seems to be the key element around which to articulate the different dimensions mentioned above. Aerial photographs are expected to provide coverage, detail and evidence; in short, they are meant to constitute descriptive documentary evidence. They have embodied the fantasy of global vision and control for many centuries and today they epitomize surveillance images. In the “Site Specific” project they are rendered inefficient. The cities documented become “avatars of themselves” to quote Barbieri. Could this constitute a counter-poetics of surveillance whose main strategy is the fictionalisation of the “urban real”? The artist’s visual instruments would be the blurring effect achieved by the tilt-shift lens and the manipulation of scale, illustrated by the miniaturisation of the “real” and the large panoramic format of the photographs exhibited.
What then begins as an apparently neutral and descriptive project – to photograph urban spaces from a helicopter – becomes a critical way of exploring the issue of urban surveillance and the entailing problem of the technologisation of (urban) vision. Barbieri’s “technological eye” doesn’t sees more or better. Being truly “sight specific”, it sees differently. - Teresa Castro excerpts from Blurring the City: Olivo Barbieri’s model cities.
A spider builds her web in the dark. She catches a
postcard we devour with our eyes. - Leslie Thornton
A little trip to Hollywood via North Africa, circa
1900. I hone an "aesthetics of uncertainty" to
question our understanding of the real. Sweet and
horrible, this honestly deceitful work stirs the
passions like a homemade stew. - Leslie Thornton
Viewed at its seams, a collection of National Geographic landscapes from the 1960s and 70’s conjures an obsolete romanticism currently peddled to propagate entitlement and individualism from sea to shining sea; the slideshow deforms into a bright white distress signal. – Michael Robinson
“ In those days the cinema was dying...”
Godard and Miéville begin Liberté et patrie with the surprise encounter of an Aircraft and a Tower on a bright September morning, then a swan dive into Charles Ferdinand Ramuz’s novel Aime Pache, Peinture Vaudois enlisting Beethoven, Bocklin, Wittgenstein, Eisenstein. Paradjanov, Maya Deren, Bunuel, Rene Clair and Serge Gainsborough in a consideration of artistic endeavor, borderlines and the transformative shock of chance meetings.
"Father can you disguise a message?”
“ Sure”
“What is the best way?”
“ Stick as close to the truth as possible.”
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Sat Oct 7: 12:30
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