by Emily Colucci on November 3, 2016
It’s quite a surprise that a film titled Pinochet Porn depicts a tender portrait of friendship. Granted, Ellen Cantor’s final film buries that theme under a shocking mélange of spank-heavy sex scenes, depressed clowns, descriptions of rape and torture over vintage Pepsi ads and disturbing archival footage of the Pinochet dictatorship, Hitler and September 11th. But looking beyond its violent and erotic imagery, the film is a celebration of a close-knit avant-garde community.
This became clear at the film’s premiere at MoMA on Monday night, part of the museum’s Modern Mondays film program. Playing to a sold-out theater, the screening also featured a post-film discussion between the Museum’s Chief Curator of Media and Performance Art Stuart Comer, Participant Inc.’s founding director Lia Gangitano, who appears in the film, and filmmaker John Brattin, who acted as Director of Photography. While this is common with MoMA’s screenings, it seemed particularly important on Monday. Firsthand accounts of the film’s production and posthumous completion, provided here by Gangitano and Brattin, seem irrevocably intertwined with any analysis or enjoyment of the film itself.
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by Emily Colucci on October 28, 2016
Geometric abstractions, makeshift shacks and a copious amount of sand transforms Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Art into a hippie playground for Hélio Oiticica’s retrospective To Organize Delirium (which comes to the Whitney next year). The exhibition presents a chronological look at the Brazilian artist’s short but feverishly prolific career. (He died suddenly in 1980 at 43-years old). In one gallery, a cluster of orange boards hangs from the ceiling while a cage of live parrots sits in a corner. Colorful macramé hammocks and projected images of Jimi Hendrix covered in cocaine fills another room. And the Museum’s grand Hall of Sculpture looks like a tent city on a beach.
While well-regarded in his native country, the artist remains relatively overlooked in the United States. But past the institutional visibility, To Organize Delirium doesn’t do much to rectify this. The show’s curators provide such little context for the work, which didn’t seem to age well in the first place, that I felt uncertain as to why his art had any currency at the time.
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