http://www.tate.org.uk/stives/eventseducation/late/24933.htm
Late at Tate St Ives
Tate Film: Exploring the Abstract
28 October 2011
Exploring the Abstract is a programme of historical and contemporary abstract film and video organised in response to the winter exhibition, The Indiscipline of Painting. This project is realised within the framework of Late at Tate, a series of events taking place the last Friday of each month. The screening features 12 British and international artists who experiment with manipulations of the celluloid – including scratch, burn and flicker – and employ unconventional techniques such as non-linear narrative, out-of-focus and rapid editing. The selected works address formal issues as well as different topics in society, therefore furthering the curatorial rationale of the winter exhibition, which balances between a medium-specific discussion and the bluring of boundaries between the abstract and the real. This project demonstrates the significance of abstraction in film and video and the interrelated trajectories of these media with painting and visual culture throughout the twentieth century up to today.
Part I of this programme comprises some early innovators of abstract filmmaking that worked within the context of the European avant-gardes. The section starts with the late 1920s mesmeric piece of French feminist Germaine Duluc; the ‘camera-less’, jazz-inspired compositions of New Zelander Len Lye from the 1930s; and the post-II World War free-form, hand-painted constructions of mystic Harry Smith. The section ends with two New Yorkers that contributed to the counter-cultural revolution of the 1960s: iconoclast Paul Sharits’s hallucinogenic colour-fields and activist Aldo Tambellini's monochromatic, sensual arrangement set to the sound of a heartbeat. These works share a poetic approach that draws attention to the pictorial, emphasising the painterly concerns of the practitioners, and places the beholder in a thoughtful relationship with the structural properties of film.
Part II and III of this programme consist of contemporary artists based in London and New York; traditional hubs of structuralist filmmaking. Nick Relph and Oliver Payne produce abstracted imagery of the urban environment to convey feelings of alienation, whilst Hannah Sawtell scrutinises the excess of information in the media landscape by employing found footage from the digital realm. Lisa Oppenheim gradually distorts the viewing experience through a repeated digital reproduction and Alex Hubbard playfully merges performance and the pictorial. Jennifer West’s surfing piece has been deliberately ‘aged’ and echoes nostalgically to Super-8 movies of the 1970s; Amy Granat lyrically addresses the sublime as an aesthetic condition; Ana Cardoso reinterprets the politics of the sign using unconventional materials. Although varying greatly in their concerns, these works owe a debt to the abstract modernist legacy yet depart from it to address the complexities of everyday life.
Tate Film: Exploring the Abstract
28 October 2011
Exploring the Abstract is a programme of historical and contemporary abstract film and video organised in response to the winter exhibition, The Indiscipline of Painting. This project is realised within the framework of Late at Tate, a series of events taking place the last Friday of each month. The screening features 12 British and international artists who experiment with manipulations of the celluloid – including scratch, burn and flicker – and employ unconventional techniques such as non-linear narrative, out-of-focus and rapid editing. The selected works address formal issues as well as different topics in society, therefore furthering the curatorial rationale of the winter exhibition, which balances between a medium-specific discussion and the bluring of boundaries between the abstract and the real. This project demonstrates the significance of abstraction in film and video and the interrelated trajectories of these media with painting and visual culture throughout the twentieth century up to today.
Part I of this programme comprises some early innovators of abstract filmmaking that worked within the context of the European avant-gardes. The section starts with the late 1920s mesmeric piece of French feminist Germaine Duluc; the ‘camera-less’, jazz-inspired compositions of New Zelander Len Lye from the 1930s; and the post-II World War free-form, hand-painted constructions of mystic Harry Smith. The section ends with two New Yorkers that contributed to the counter-cultural revolution of the 1960s: iconoclast Paul Sharits’s hallucinogenic colour-fields and activist Aldo Tambellini's monochromatic, sensual arrangement set to the sound of a heartbeat. These works share a poetic approach that draws attention to the pictorial, emphasising the painterly concerns of the practitioners, and places the beholder in a thoughtful relationship with the structural properties of film.
Part II and III of this programme consist of contemporary artists based in London and New York; traditional hubs of structuralist filmmaking. Nick Relph and Oliver Payne produce abstracted imagery of the urban environment to convey feelings of alienation, whilst Hannah Sawtell scrutinises the excess of information in the media landscape by employing found footage from the digital realm. Lisa Oppenheim gradually distorts the viewing experience through a repeated digital reproduction and Alex Hubbard playfully merges performance and the pictorial. Jennifer West’s surfing piece has been deliberately ‘aged’ and echoes nostalgically to Super-8 movies of the 1970s; Amy Granat lyrically addresses the sublime as an aesthetic condition; Ana Cardoso reinterprets the politics of the sign using unconventional materials. Although varying greatly in their concerns, these works owe a debt to the abstract modernist legacy yet depart from it to address the complexities of everyday life.
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