From: Bernard Roddy (email suppressed)
Date: Tue Sep 07 2010 - 19:11:13 PDT
Self-reflexive programming?
Light Industry lists Gatten (greater architecture to come, just four of a
planned nine, massive library of colonial gentleman, proper name of note, in
search of . . a lost world), then Ramos (exposing illusion, served time, refused
to enlist, taped the end of colonial rule, child of the happening).
I can't help but read the second event as a comment on the first.
Bernie
Secret History of the Dividing Line, A True Account in Nine Parts
177 Livingston Street, Brooklyn
Friday, September 10, 2010 at 7:30pm
Presented with Triple Canopy as part of the Brooklyn Book Festival.
Secret History of the Dividing Line, A True Account in Nine Parts
David Gatten, 16mm, 1999-2004, 97 mins
David Gatten's ambitious 16mm cycle Secret History of the Dividing Line attempts
a rare feat, an investigation of the borders between word and image influenced
equally by Stan Brakhage and Ludwig Wittgenstein (both veterans of related
pursuits). The results are formidable: Of a planned nine, Parts I through IV
currently run 97 minutes, yet indeed feel like the finely constructed beginnings
of a grander architecture still to come. Gatten draws from the massive library
of colonial Virginia gentleman William Byrd II, with occasional dips into his
daughter Evelyn's journals, producing artfully composed typographies that suss
out an invisible web of connections and epiphanies. But Gatten also expresses
the indigestible bulk of history's verbiage through a mobile concrete poetry.
Not all his quotes allow for reading; some words flutter past too quickly to
serve as more than compositional elements, while others appear in negative,
close-up and grainy, like luminous alphabetic windows. Attempting to glimpse a
lost world recorded through texts, Gatten offers the paper-thin screen between
past and present as just one of his project's ultimately ineffable dividing
lines.
Secret History of the Dividing Line
16mm, 24fps, 20 mins, 2002
The Great Art of Knowing
16mm, 24fps, 37 mins, 2004
Moxon’s Mechanick Exercises or The Doctrine of Handy-Works Applied to the Art of
Printing
16mm, 18fps, 26 mins, 1999
The Enjoyment of Reading
16mm, 18fps, 16 mins, 2001
Anthony Ramos: About Media
177 Livingston Street, Brooklyn
Tuesday, September 14, 2010 at 7:30pm
Presented with Electronic Arts Intermix
EAI is pleased to present a special screening and conversation with pioneering
media artist Anthony Ramos at Light Industry.
Ramos belonged to the first generation of artists who used video as a tool to
critique mass media, give voice to marginalized individuals and communities, and
produce radically new forms of cultural documentation, combining art and
activism in a series of potent but now rarely seen works.
His 1977 video About Media is an astute deconstruction of television news,
focusing on the media coverage of President Jimmy Carter's declaration of
amnesty for Vietnam War draft evaders as well as an interview conducted by New
York reporter Gabe Pressman about Ramos's own eighteen-month prison term for
conscientious objection. Through repetition and juxtaposition, he contrasts the
unedited interview footage—and patronizing comments of the news crew—with
Pressman's final televised report. In his ironic manipulation of the material,
Ramos exposes the illusion of "objective" television news.
“Ramos had been a teaching assistant to Allan Kaprow, an artist known for ‘the
happening,’ a spontaneous art event with no predetermined conclusion, which
encouraged audience participation—the polar opposite of the newscasts' tightly
scripted event,” EAI’s Rebecca Clemen writes. “If the newscast robbed Ramos of
his agency, in his own tape he put himself back in the picture, in ways that
playfully undermine the canned solemnity of television news and transform it
into a kind of happening."
Raised in Rhode Island, Ramos received an M.F.A. from the California Institute
of the Arts. In the 1970s, he was a video consultant for the United Nations and
traveled extensively throughout Africa, China, Europe, and the Middle East.
Ramos videotaped the end of Portugal's colonial rule in Cape Verde and
Guinea-Bissau, Tehran during the 1980 hostage crisis and Beijing just prior to
the Tiananmen Square massacre, continuing to explore the relationships between
mass cultural imagery and subaltern identity. In the 1980s he lived in Paris,
where he was a Professor at the American Center and oversaw the television
cabling of ten blocks of the city for the first time, and is now based in
southern France.
At Light Industry, Ramos will introduce About Media and a selection of excerpts
from his work in video. Following the screening, he will appear in conversation
with Rebecca Cleman.
About EAI
Founded in 1971, Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) is one of the world's leading
nonprofit resources for video art. A pioneering advocate for media art and
artists, EAI's core program is the distribution and preservation of a major
collection of over 3,500 new and historical media works by artists. EAI fosters
the creation, exhibition, distribution and preservation of video art and digital
art. EAI's activities include a preservation program, viewing access,
educational services, extensive online resources, and public programs such as
artists' talks, exhibitions and panels. The Online Catalogue is a comprehensive
resource on the artists and works in the EAI collection, and also features
extensive materials on exhibiting, collecting and preserving media art.
Tickets to all events - $7, available at door.
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