My DVD of Decasia arrived today. I’m watching it tonight with the sound off (I haven’t bothered repatching since the Bryston went back). Very nice, although the print has quite a few transfer artifacts, which is a little ironic. I had forgotten that I still had my active subwoofer connected, which adds a certain something a few minutes after the nuns…
I first saw Rybczynski’s Tango, I Can’t Stop and some of Orchestra on the ABC’s Sunday Spectrum strand on TV back in the 80s in Tasmania (the original Sunday Spectrum doesn’t even rate a mention on the ABC website, but it was really important at the time. I seem to remember the work of Rybczynski, Michael Snow and Ed Emshwiller all being shown within the same month. Revelations.) I’ve been hunting The Fourth Dimension since Tokyo. Tim saw it at (I may be wrong) Image Forum, and made it sound a thing worth tracking down. That was probably 13 years …
Me. Think I need to write something which spiders that into a desktop slideshow.
A selection of Zbig Rybczynski’s early films and his HDTV work from the 80s is now available on DVD. Shame it isn’t HD-DVD. And shame I don’t have an HD-DVD player. Oh well. Really wish I could find this stuff on Japanese HD laserdisc (and that I had one of those ancient MUSE HI-Vision decks to play them on…)Oh and Happy New Year. I’ve been very busy with work and thinking, and this is the first thing I’ve seen this year that I’ve wanted to post. More to come soon…
John Gage recounts the story told by the painter William Williams in 1787 about an entomological illustrator who, “living in a remote country, unacquainted with artists, or any rational system of colours, with a patience that would have surmounted any difficulties, had collected a multiplicity of shells of colour, of every various tint that could be discerned in the wing of that beautiful insect [the butterfly]; for he had no idea that out of two he could make a third, by this method he had collected two large hampers full of shells, which he placed on each side of him, …
Yesterday, Tsai Ming-liang’s short The Skywalk is Gone and feature Goodbye Dragon Inn at the London Film Festival. I’ve seen his The Hole before, and wasn’t impressed, but these, yesterday, were something special. There are plenty of reviews of them around, pointing out the influences of Tati, Antonioni and the rest. But to me, the spirit of both films was more in the vein of Chris Morris: the long, weird scene with the smoking man at the row of urinals, the sinuous, nut-crunching girl, and much else in the feature, and the dénouement (if you could call it that) of …
I’ve been reading James Elkins’ (yes him again) What Painting Is. The book is about painting as the act of doing things with paint: the work towards the Work, as it were. Not about Art or Representation, or even stories about painters: the book tackles the viscous, tactile, impossible task of making something sublime through actions with oil, water, stone, pigment. There aren’t, he argues, art-critical ways of talking about painting at this level, and the book draws broadly from the language and practice of alchemy to navigate its way around these unspeakable things. Elkins’ face-to-the-canvas discussion of the physical …
I’ve been reading The Object Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing, by James Elkins. It’s worth a read — he covers a lot of phenomenological territory, in pursuit of what seems a very personal understanding of what seeing (as contrasted with vision or sight) is about. Seeing, as he sees it, is a complex ‘metamorphosis, not mechanism’. Unexpected insights in familiar places (he is an art historian by trade, and much of the book deals with how we exploit seeing in our representations of its effects). This from a riff on Picasso’s Women of Avignon: When a whole crowd …
Sitting outside at The Approach with a pint of Prospect ale, enjoying the lingering Indian summer. Just visited the Wilkinson Gallery, which is exhibiting David Batchelor’s The Found Monochromes Of London 1-80 (1999-2003): …the culmination of four years’ work during which time Batchelor photographed over 100 simple white rectangles found in the streets. Presented as a slideshow, it’s very cool. The found rectangles form the centre of each picture, with a background of urban London spilling around the edges of this blank focus. The series has a lingering Entrances To Hell kind of effect after leaving the gallery, changing the …