Briefly: What'll it be like?
A poetic multi-screen performance about "the inadequacy of the arbitrary passing moment and the impossibility of permanence". About time and change.
In more detail:
Who are these people?Here's a good quote to start: "I had no desire to make films for the cinema - even Godard looked old hat compared to what I understood as radical art - Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Ornette Coleman, John Cage. I started to make films in the same way I approached painting or had approached improvisational music." Malcolm Le Grice is one of the UK's great experimental filmmakers, who through the 60's and 70's created films and performances that reshaped the material properties of film (light, time, process) to create an anti-narrative, non-symbolist art form. Maybe you think that sounds overly dry; it's not. Think about how immediate, challenging and enjoyable the works of those 4 artists he quotes above are.
There's a bit about Keith Rowe in the Saturday performance section of this site, check that out so that I don't have to repeat myself here. To surmise, he's great, he is very influential, I particularly like the ease and consideration he brings to collaborating and to performing, right here, in a room, with you in it. It's not just thrown together, he's really thought about it, his instrument, the room, you, the interconnectedness of these things.
What's going on here?This performance restages and transforms Malcolm's 1973 work "After Leonardo". A black and white close up of the Mona Lisa, which Malcolm had purloined from a magazine and which had become cracked and torn, is filmed, re-filmed, re-filmed and re-filmed (both in advance and live) until the cracks and tears become symbols of the passage of time and the re-filming and multiple re-projecting situates these images again in time and space.
Why's it interesting?Here's the thing: how about we pay attention to two of Le Grice's main artistic challenges: to the significance of cinema/ photography as a retrospective process and; to the prevalent commodity based nature of art1. This performance asks (amongst others) two interesting questions, which make the performance all the more enjoyable:
Here's the first one: how can you explore time and, to quote Malcolm directly, "the exploration of the continuing puzzle about the passage of time – the inadequacy of the arbitrary passing moment and the impossibility of permanence"
And here's the second: what's does authenticity/ authorship really mean, and what is it worth? A good quote here from Hollis Frampton fleshes things out: "If it is impossible to own the Mona Lisa (in fact, it is inadvisable to, since presumably the responsibility is much too large, whether you like the thing or not), nevertheless it is possible to have for free, if you are willing to dispense with its unique aura (he uses the word "aura"), with the specific fact of that specific mass of pigment on that particular panel guided by the fine Italian hand of that particular aura-ridden artist—if you are able to dispense with that, if you can give it up, then you can have something like the Mona Lisa. You can have it, so to speak, for nothing, or next to nothing. Its cost is low. You don't have to have a palace to house it in; then you don't have to heat the palace; then you don't have to hire armed guards to defend it. And we can ask ourselves whether it's worth it or not to dispense with that aura in the interest of the likeness."
1. Which I think any decent minded person would recognise is an extremely narrow way of looking at human creativity, and thoroughly boring.
