Still, Madame Tutli-Putli. Photo: Magnolia Pictures

I’ll admit I don’t have much interest in the Oscars, but since I do invest a fair bit of time in animation, I thought I should take a look at this year’s Animated Short nominees. For those interested in having informed opinions about more the awards this year, Magnolia Pictures and Shorts International bring the Oscar-nominated animated short films to theaters so you can.  The full piece can be read at The Reeler, but as always, you can read the teaser below.

A little like Sarah Jessica Parker’s proposed reality show pitting all artists against one another as if sculptors and painters had comparable skills, this year’s Oscar-animated shorts awards one prize for a group of work needing three. Considering the range of animation technique – puppets to broadcast design to painted animation – it’s hardly surprising the first question I had exiting the theater was why anyone would attempt to determine “the best” animated short when the skill sets and results are so entirely different.Puppet and computer animation constitutes the largest genre of animation represented this year, taking 60 percent of the entries. These films include Suzi Templeton andHugh Welchman’s collaboration Peter & The Wolf, retelling the legend of a boy, his animal friends and a wolf; Madame Tutli-Putli, Chris Lavis’s tale about a woman’s experiences on a hijacked train; and, from France, Even Pigeons Go To Heaven, Maciek Szczerbowski and Simon Vanesse’s short about a corrupt priest who tries to sell heaven to an old man. Coincidentally or not, each of these animated shorts address depraved human behavior.

The Arty Broadcast genre of animation was met by one nominee this year, Josh Raskin’s I Met The Walrus. This short provides a visualization for a guerilla style interview between John Lennon and 14 year old Jerry Levitan in Toronto in 1969. Representing the oil-painting-come-to-life category, Alexander Petrov’s My Love features the story of an annoying teenager and his two ill-fated crushes.

Aside from lacking a way to accurately compare the genres, this kind of decision-making inevitably privileges of one genre over another. Naturally, I can’t wait to see the scandal unfold this year if one of the puppet animations wins; will this signal an increased interest in puppets and computer animation? Is oil painting animation dead? What of arty broadcast design? Of course, if oil-painting animation was actually in question as a legitimate genre, nobody would look to My Love as evidence of life within it; I can’t remember the last time I involuntarily sighed so much through movie. With far too much visual noise and stylized paint handling/pastel drawing, the sentimental aesthetic choices matched those within the narrative of the film. Never has the stupidity of a teenage boy “in love” been so painful to watch.

To read the full piece click here.

Marla, Mark and Laura Olmstead in My Kid Could Paint That.

I’ve written a review on My Kid Could Paint That, a documentary that follows the career of painter Marla Olmstead a child of contested genius at The Reeler. The teaser below.

I know this sounds snotty, but the media phenomenon of Marla Olmstead, the then 4-year-old painter whose brightly colored abstract canvases sold for upwards of $20,000 dollars in 2005 represents my worst nightmare as an art critic. I say this not because I believe good fine art can only be made by adults, but because her status as a child prodigy is constructed upon popular myths I work to dispel on a daily basis: that artists have innate talent that cannot be taught; that virtually anyone working in the field of art has the knowledge and background to properly evaluate abstraction; that exacting skill and authorship necessarily correlates to artistic talent or the intrinsic worth of a painting.

These falsehoods permeate Amir Bar-Lev’s My Kid Could Paint That, a documentary young Marla’s rise and fall from art-world fame. As the story goes, Marla began her career as a painter at age 3; by the time she was 4 she had become a superstar, her work discussed in The New York Times, The Today Show and Good Morning America. But was Marla the sole author of these paintings? On an infamous 60 Minutes II episode featured in the film, Charlie Rose interviewed child psychologist and art prodigy expert Ellen Winner who cast serious doubts on their authorship. Sales soon dry up, and Bar-Lev himself begins to question the legitimacy of Marla’s work.

To read the full piece click here.

Image courtesy of Swiss Dots

Today at The Reeler I discuss font aesthetics and the film Helvetica. For those who are interested, you’ll be reading the piece in Georgia.

Very little art receives unilateral recognition as a work of genius because it inevitably requires at least a few people put their predilections aside. I don’t happen to love mafia movies, for example, but I manage to get over this for indisputably great films like The Godfather, Raging Bull, and of course, My Cousin Vinny. Gary Hustwit’s new documentary Helvetica, named after its subject (and opening today at IFC Center), suggests the famous font is in a similar class despite suffering from overexposure in the 1970s, only a few decades after its invention. Not that Helvetica claims to be about proving or disproving the overall value of the font — the film seeks to articulate its character more than anything else — but the success in following a path that addresses the type’s feel, use and functionality comes in the articulation of its elegance of line and form. These aesthetic qualities prove so powerful that the font takes on almost chameleon-like characteristics.

To read the full piece click here.

The second feature I’ve written for the The Reeler this week posted this morning. This time discussing director Andrew Neel’s documentary on his grandmother Alice Neel, I get to the bottom of whether this film is worth seeing. The short answer is yes, but if you want the full explanation you’ll have to go to the site to read why. As always, I’ve posted the teaser below.

“I often go into a documentary because I know what I want to say about something,” director Andrew Neel recently told me during a chat in Williamsburg. Indeed, his new documentary Alice Neel (screening at Cinema Village through May 17) demonstrates no lack of focus, tackling copious art clichés while carefully constructing a sensitive portrait of the figurative painter who is its namesake. Inheriting the distinctive Neel voice, the film mimics the work of his grandmother (who passed away in 1984), presenting family and friends with a directness and honesty that probably annoys as much as it does pleases them. Like the paintings themselves, spats spurred by the unwillingness to discuss various subjects resolve themselves uneasily, often resulting in the bittersweet.

The film traces the artist’s life with a mix of historical footage and fresh interviews highlighting her lifelong guilt for making art rather than choosing a more practical profession. Neel revisits the effect the loss of Alice’s first child had on her mental health and work, following with her rise in status through the ’60s and ’70s to her position as a role model for the women’s movement during that time. At each point, the traditional biography becomes a means of showcasing the conflicted benevolence, intellect and individuality of the director’s subjects; in this case, Neel’s sons Hartley and Richard praise her as a wonderful mother and artist while damning her for professional and personal choices that scarred them emotionally. “First you have to be able to live, then you have to be able to paint,” Alice tells interviewer Terry Gross midway through the film, only to remark later: “I’d rather paint than anything.”

To read the full review click here.

Image from The Film Company

It’s interview city at AFC lately, a forum I’m sure you’ll all be sick of by the end of the week since we’re hosting yet another artist discussion this Friday. With Joy Garnett of NEWSgrist as our upcoming feature and my conversation with Guy Maddin at the Reeler this week though it’s hard to go wrong. Today, I talk to Maddin about his latest film Brand Upon the Brain!. I’ve included a slightly larger clip of the piece than usual so that you can get a sense of what the conversation and film is like, but you’ll need to click through to read the whole piece.

“The Past! The Past! The Past!” reads the repeating text in Guy Maddin’s latest film, Brand Upon the Brain!, which opens theatrically Wednesday at the Village East. The words imply the narrative structure of a semi-autobiographical work focusing on the tortured adult recollections of childhood experience: A grown man named Guy returns to the island where he was raised to paint a lighthouse at the request of his dying mother. As he does this, memories flood back forcing him to relive the iron-fisted rule of an orphanage below the lighthouse; his unrequited crush on young detective Wendy (who in turn falls in love with Guy’s sister); and Wendy’s subsequent disguising herself as her sleuth brother Chance in the hopes of seducing Sis. Chance soon discovers small wounds on the necks of the orphan children, and dark family secrets in the form of perverse sexual and emotional relationships come to light as the movie unfolds.

The narrative represents the most linear thread Maddin has put together in a while, especially compared to recent titles like Cowards Bend the Knee and The Saddest Music in the World (neither of which can be described as abstract). Such aspects are secondary, however, to the mounting buzz about the screenings’ live sound effects, onstage castrato and special guest narrators including Isabella Rosellini, Lou Reed, Laurie Anderson, Crispin Glover and TV on the Radio frontman Tunde Adebimpe. Not having experienced these elements in my press screening, though, I recently spoke with Maddin about the artistic decisions that shaped Brand Upon the Brain! — beginning with how he felt about his first filmmaking experience outside of his native Canada. “It felt kind of good,” he told me. “I felt like a real gun for hire — my first foreign film.”

The Reeler: I saw that on a trailer this morning — you talking about it being a foreign film. It seemed really awesome to think about a film made in America that way.

Maddin: Yeah, that was exciting, and I also welcomed the chance to step (away from) my regular collaborators in Winnipeg. You know, it felt like I was having an affair. We did end up using one Winnipeger though; John Gurdebeke is my regular editor. I work with him all the time. The task of editing in two different cities was just too modern for my sensibilities. It could have been done e-mailing the files back and forth; it’s just that you need to be close with your editor. I was going to say, the editor is the filmmaker almost. It’s really important, and it’s the one craft that’s least valued in the public. It’s just something that speeds by at Academy Award time, and I’m even convinced that peers can’t even judge the impact another editor brings to his or her own project.

Click here to read the complete piece.

A.L. Steiner + robbinschilds, Stills from C.L.U.E. (color location ultimate experience), Part 1, 2007, Digital video.

I feel a little like it’s feminism all day every day here lately, but since the subject doesn’t get enough coverage and there are a number of exhibitions up right now addressing the topic, it only seems appropriate to be covering a lot of it. This week at The Reeler I discuss the film program in Gallery LeLong’s exhibition Role Play: Feminist Art Revisited 1960-1980 at Gallery LeLong and A.L. Steiner + robbinschild’s C.L.U.E. (color location ultimate experience) at Taxter and Spengemann.   As always, I’ve provided a quote from the piece below, but you’ll need to click through to read the whole piece.

Call it pathological, but I can’t look at an exhibition of video and other wall-mounted works from the 1960s without thinking about the lineage of that genre and how it affects art making today. In the case of a movement like Pop Art, the results are fairly obvious as artists continue to make work inspired by mass culture iconography. But try pinning down feminism, and you’ll have a much more difficult time. Part of this stems from the fact that most contemporary artists resist being identified with a particular movement, but this is especially true for feminism, a label that tends to be a bit of liability, even if the same can be said for its more politically maligned counterpart chauvinism.

Role Play: Feminist Art Revisited 1960-1980 at Gallery LeLong and A.L. Steiner + robbinschild’s C.L.U.E. (color location ultimate experience) at Taxter and Spengemann inspired my most recent thinking on the subject; using these two exhibitions as a reference point, a viewer can find as many similarities as differences in feminist video art made yesterday and today. Comprising heavyweights Marina Abramovic, Lynda Benglis, Yoko Ono, Martha Rosler and Hannah Wilke, the film program at Gallery LeLong includes a major feminist work by each artist, with all but one video specifically addressing the body. Abramovic brushes her hair to the point of pain, repeating “art must be beautiful, artist must be beautiful”; a naked woman’s body slowly becomes covered with flies in Ono’s Fly; Benglis’s 12-minute video Female Sensibility features a close up of two women French kissing; and Through The Large Glass, by Wilke, documents the artist disrobing behind Marcel Duchamp’s sculpture The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, (also known as The Large Glass) at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

To read more click here.

Carlo Zanni, The Possible Ties Between Illness and Success. Film still. Photos EFA

Perhaps in loose keeping with the theme of memes, my article for The Reeler can be read on not one but two sites. Of course for the full version of the piece below, you’ll have to click through to his site, a worth while use of your reading time to be sure.

I have to admit I find the now-popular intellectual act of turning one’s nose up at the overly highbrow while championing mass culture a bottomless pit of good conversation. Three years ago, for example, it would have been hard to sell anyone on the idea that you could find more substance in Internet chain letters and memes than such life-changing intelligence as the kinkiest place you’ve had sex. Web geeks, however, would have told you well before then that the phenomenon held more significance. And while the idea of a meme as information exchange may not sound so radical today with the ubiquity of Internet use joining hacker culture to the mainstream, for this same reason Meme: Romanticism, an exhibition currently on view at the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, makes an especially timely appearance; even if you’re not familiar with the practice’s terminology and techniques you’ve probably experienced enough viral media by 2007 to have a basic understanding of the concept.

Now I know this seems like a bold statement to be issuing in mid-March, but I’ll be surprised if I see a better exhibition this year. Though not all the work in this show is Web-based – some works are purely video, others are photographic stills - the pieces share technological aesthetics that together represent a new school of contemporary filmmakers and artists whose art parallels the age of Romanticism. Similarly defined by a reaction to the trumpeting of reason — often by simply working against the objective and disinterested biases of technology — Meme: Romanticism not only stresses emotion as the source of aesthetic experience, but defines this experience as paradoxically continuous, contagious and fleeting.

To read more click here.

This week at the Reeler I discuss Jacco Olivier’s animated films at Marianne Boesky Gallery. I imagine the piece will, in particular, appeal to those interested in the field of painting, and those who think Boadwee’s ass to be a particularly low moment for artmaking.

At some point you have to ask what more an artist can do with the surface of a canvas. Over the last century, art makers invented fractured perspective as a means of depicting objects, gestural mark-making to represent emotion, created monochromatic, photorealist and commercially inspired works — the list goes on. It’s not too surprising that by the ’70s, the number of ways you could approach the medium seemed exhausted and that people were declaring the medium dead. Little did they know that we’d have to wait 20 more years for Keith Boadwee to shit enema bags of paint onto a canvas before we could hammer the final nail in that coffin.

I’m half joking of course — we’ve obviously seen good painting since Boadwee — but I bring the subject up because the field feels narrow, and only a few artists like Jacco Olivier, whose current painted films can be seen at Marianne Boesky Gallery, among them, have been able to find a working method that pushes the medium forward. Of course, fine art animation strikes no one as new, but Olivier’s fusion of painting and video, while coming out of a tradition best exemplified by William Kentridge’s charcoal drawing stop-motion films, separates itself from its predecessors by abandoning stop-animation for fluid cinematic techniques and being much more concerned with formalism than narrative.

To read the full piece click here.

There are a few loose ends I wanted to address visa vi Doug Aitken’s Sleepwalkers, most of which were brought up by Tom Moody last Friday. My original write up can be read here for a bit of background, and the Q & A begins below!

TM: If the piece is supposed to be about a day in the life of ordinary New Yorkers, isn’t that ruined by using celebrities such as Cat Power, Tilda Swindon, and Donald Sutherland, in the roles? If Aitken wants to flout the conventions of cinema, why use movie stars? Is Sutherland’s “dancing on top of a cab” something ordinary people do, or only Michael Jackson?

Sleepwalkers is more about the symbiotic relationship that the body has with the city (both being nervous systems of a sort) than it is a day in the life of an average New Yorker, though ordinary characters represent “the body”. I’m not going to take issue with the fact that he’s used celebrities to play these roles, as I can suspend my disbelief, but I am rather skeptical of his practice of employing stars in light of his professed interest in thwarting the conventions of cinema. He talks about distrusting the “safety of the screen”, but I remain unconvinced that his choices are risky. The work reminds me of the suburban raver phenomenon, or “alternative music” in the 90’s, in the sense that he flouts conventions conventionally.

TM: Isn’t a “non-linear narrative” the ultimate art world cliche at this point? What does this piece do to surmount that?

Nothing.

TM: How do the moving images on sides of buildings differ from the corporate displays a few blocks over in Times Square?

Sleepwalkers is put together better than the average ad, but it never surmounts the connotations associated with being a projection on the side of a building. Were it projected on the apple istore, the piece would be indistinguishable from a mac ad. As it stands now the video is a promotional piece for Douglas Aitken’s thoughts on what video art should be, and while his thoughts on the subject may be more complicated than the piece, he really presents a limited vision at best of what video art can be.

Göring gifts a painting to Hitler
Image courtesy The Jewish Museum

Upon the recommendation of Tyler Green earlier this month on Modern Art Notes, I attended the premiere screening of The Rape of Europa last week at the Jewish Museum. My review of the documentary now finds a place over at The Reeler, but I’ve included the first two opening paragraphs here to give you a taste of what you will be reading.

Given the huge number of World War II films in constant rotation in theaters, on DVD and the History Channel — a glut of titles retelling the heroic acts of men in the midst of tragedy — I’m almost surprised when I discover features that bring something totally new to the table. Take The Rape of Europa, a documentary about the systematic plunder of art by the Nazis during World War II and Allied efforts during and after the war to minimize the damage. Having had its premiere last week at the New York Jewish Film Festival (and screening several times in the upcoming months, most notably on March 4 at The National Gallery of Art in Washington before reaching PBS this fall), the film feels especially current as the Iraq War continues and countless priceless treasures are lost.

One obvious advantage to making a documentary on a war that ended more than 60 years ago lies in the fact that we know more about the invasion plans than we do about those of the present war. This is a key point in Europa, which cites numerous examples of art pillaged by the Nazis that remains disputed or missing, eventually establishing the connections between the Nazis’ interest in fine art and their conquest strategies; directors Bonni Cohen, Richard Berge and Nicole Newnham note the strategic invasion of the museums of Florence and Rome, the merciless destruction of Polish architecture and other art believed to be “degenerate” and the pillaging of invaluable treasures from the State Hermitage in Russia. Once the magnitude of Nazi plundering is established, the film discusses the role of Allies like the Monuments Officers — Americans assigned the responsibility of finding and returning art hidden by the Germans — and Rose Valland, a French art historian who worked at the Jeu de Paume Museum, a central German art storage depot where she secretly recorded from where and to whom stolen art work came and went.

To read the full review click here.

To read more click here.

Additional screening information:

Brent Green will present Paulina Hollers tonight at 7:30 at IFC Center, followed by a conversation with Filmmaker Magazine editor Scott Macaulay. Green’s work will be featured at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival; a Jan. 23 screening at The Knitting Factory features live musical accompaniment by the Magik Markers and Brendan Canty from Fugazi.

The worst of the web, and about five million other lists will be published here over the course of the week, but before we get into all of that, over at The Reeler I’ve written a review of Stan Douglas’s exhibition, Inconsolable Memories. The work I discuss is currently on display at the Studio Museum of Harlem, which will overlap the opening for his latest film, Klatsassin at David Zwirner, on January 10th.

It took me three days to figure out what Stan Douglas’s exhibition at the Studio Museum of Harlem, Inconsolable Memories, is about, which places it in the same company as David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive. I harbored some initial reluctance to let that bit of information out of the bag — of course, you always want to sound as though you are so cultured no reference goes by you — but it wasn’t long before I came to the conclusion that even with my hard-earned understanding of the piece, I wasn’t going to fool anyone into believing that this came so easily. There may be some audience members who didn’t have to immediately run home, rent the movie the exhibition is based on, Google about 500 key terms and then discuss the show with three of their closest friends before forming any kind of cogent thoughts on the work, but I’m not one of them.

For the two remaining readers dying to do this much homework for the sake of understanding an art piece, I have good news: It’s worth your trouble. Douglas’s two-part exhibition of photographs and video uses Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s 1968 film Memories of Underdevelopment as a starting point to explore the socio-political history of Cuba, while employing his mastery of technology to investigate the role memory plays not only in the construction of timelines, but the medium itself. The result is a surprisingly complex portrait of sexual relationships, race and national identity. Intermittently narrated by the psychologically stunted but erudite protagonist Sergio Corrieri, Alea’s original film relates a lack of social awareness on an individual level to that of the culture as a whole. Sergio loses his job as a journalist and eventually has his apartments confiscated in the middle of the Cuban Missile Crisis; while he occasionally seems to have the awareness that he should leave Cuba, he irrationally remains unwilling to do so. His relationships fall apart, and he likens the failures he sees in the women he partners with to those of the country.

To read more follow this link.

I’m beginning to wonder if in time, there will be more written about Matthew Barney than art he’s produced. It’s a tough call of course — you’re pitting an army of whimpy art writers against a varsity athlete and hoping they can keep up — but it’s not an altogether outlandish concept either. Consider the fact that the search terms “art fag city” and “Matthew Barney”, bring back ten plus pages of google results, even though we write about the artist fairly infrequently. Chances are, we will become one of countless people who attempt to either interpret or record the man’s work. However, unlike a blog post, which tends to have a shelf life equal to that of a Bansky, Alison Chernick’s No Restraint, a documentary on the making of Matthew Barney’s latest movie Drawing Restraint 9, will probably not be forgotten. My full write up on the film can be read at The Reeler, but I invite you to pass judgment on first two paragraphs here before I send you clicking. Not that my clearly bias statements means anything here, but I happen to think the link is worth following.

After watching Alison Chernick’s No Restraint, a film exploring the making of artist Matthew Barney’s Drawing Restraint 9, I spent the following week trying to figure out what makes a good art documentary. It’s more difficult than I expected; only a few days ago I would have told you there isn’t much point in making a traditional documentary about an artist if you’re not going to focus on his best work. I also would have said I was skeptical about any film that investigates only a few aspects of an artist’s creative process — especially when that artist’s cosmology has been described by The New York Times’s head art critic Michael Kimmelman as more complex than the Kabbalah.

Given these doubts, you can likely imagine my surprise when I found myself in the position of having to throw all of them away: After years of art world professionals and laypeople alike complaining about the incomprehensibility of Barney’s work, No Restraint (opening Wednesday at IFC Center) neither finds the meaning of his work obscure nor simplifies it to the point of becoming art pablum. Chernick uses a simple format, following Barney aboard the Nisshin Maru — a Japanese whaling ship and the set of his 135-minute, virtually dialogue-free (and weakest movie to date) Drawing Restraint 9. It highlights the Japanese crewmen’s introduction to and interpretation of his art, the working relationship between Barney and his wife Björk (who also co-”starred” in DR9) and features Kimmelman, gallerist Barbara Gladstone and other experts who chronicle the rise of the star.

To continue reading click here.

Adrian Paci, still from PilgrIMAGE, 2005. Film on DVD. (Photo: Galleria Francesca Kaufman)

Covering the fairs in Basel this week has left me with little time to write my regular feature on The Reeler. Graciously, my good friend and video artist Wayne Hodge, agreed to lend a hand, and has written a report on Smack Mellon’s third installment in the cineplex series Legal Aliens. What I like about Hodge’s take on the show, is that while he takes into account the difficulties of viewing several videos playing in one space at the time, he doesn’t allow it to dominate his experience of the work. The Hodge low down here:

Legal Aliens is the title of the third part of Smack Mellon’s cineplex–styled film and video screening series Multiplex. This time around, a guest curatorial team of Ofri Cnaani and Rotem Ruff showcase artists who work within contemporary debates on immigration. The artists gathered here all use media (and in one case even installation) to address a myriad number of positions and concerns; global in its approach, yet local in its impact, the curatorial bent of the show is decidedly about negotiating spaces between categories.

This approach is most evident in the conversation that happens between the works in the space. At first, I was a bit turned off by the installation as a whole; it brought to mind the conventional cineplex stereotype suggesting that if you go to see a character drama, you can hear the action flick in the next theater (or, if you are in New York, the action flick and the subway). But the act of sorting out the sounds associated with each work projected in the space provoked many exciting connections between image and sound; as I huddled up to a speaker, I couldn’t help but feel a certain intimacy with each piece as it played in an enormous space that was still not quite large enough to encapsulate and isolate each individual work. In fact, the first work one encounters in the space is not media-based at all — rather, Esperanza Mayobre’s Virgin of Esperanza, Mother of Immigrants is a wall of candles emblazoned with a self-portrait of the artist as a saint. While the image of the saint carries contemporary effects (including a passport and a green card), the candle is a reminder of pre-film forms of media. One thinks of the flame of the candle in opposition to the space filled with projectors and plasma screens; the ephemeral nature of the candle in the context of so much media technology.

To continue reading click here

It looks like this week is going to be MoMA week at AFC. Today at The Reeler, I review Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s new film The Wind, which is currently playing in the Media Theatre on the second floor of the MoMA, later on in the day I will discuss their Brice Marden retrospective, and finally, further into the week I will be publishing some thoughts on their greatly under reviewed exhibition, Eye On Europe.

So let’s start with a little MoMA primer shall we? An excerpt from today’s feature at The Reeler below:

There is something very strange about a narration of madness that remains lucid enough to sound vaguely reasonable. Much like Sylvia Plath’s novel The Bell Jar or The Yellow Wall Paper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the protagonist in Finnish video artist and photographer Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s short three-screen film installation The Wind maintains a sympathetic relationship with the audience because her strange behavior is situated as both having evolved from a place of rationality and as a reaction to culturally imposed pressures we are all familiar with. “[I make] moving images of stories that have already happened” Ahtila said last month, aptly describing her work to The New York Times.

The statement speaks to the nature of storytelling itself as well as the artist’s research, which involves funneling the experiences of women she has interviewed into her videos. After having seen Javier Téllez’s 2004 film La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc, which features laborious monologues by 12 female psychiatric patients, I’m quite certain the process is more tedious than it is illuminating. But what separates The Wind from such films exploring female psychology and the cultural expectations that women be meek, body-conscious and sexually submissive, is not that it tells us something we don’t already know, but rather that it sensitizes us to those expectations’ profound effects. In doing so, the artist creates a surprisingly complex portrait of female identity and the fractured psychology of the disturbed.

To read more click here.

Angry green monster in Christian Jankowski’s Angels of Revenge.
Photo: AFC

Sometimes you like an artist’s work so much that it takes a while to get enough critical distance from it to be able to gage how good it is. Having spent the last two weeks wrestling with Christian Jankowski’s latest exhibition at The Kitchen, I feel safe in saying that he is one such artist. I did however, manage to come up with a few thoughts on the subject, which you can read below, but as always, go to The Reeler for the full report.

Some art just doesn’t age well. Who’s to say what lasts and what doesn’t; it’s impossible to predict cultural interest seven days from now, much less seven years, but this doesn’t mean you don’t notice when that thing you thought was totally awesome doesn’t seem all that great any more. Knowing that video artist Christian Jankowski’s new works in the exhibition Us and Them are up at The Kitchen, I’d recently been questioning whether his work suffered from this problem; after all, the artist’s proclivity for involving non-artists in his practice seemed a lot more unconventional to me previously than it does now. Was Jankowski’s Telemistica — simply featuring him asking fortune tellers questions like “What will people think of my work?” for the 1999 Venice Biennial — too easy? Could we say the same of The Holy Artwork, his 2001 performance piece made in which he played dead on the stage of televanglist pastor Peter Spencer, who creepily preached to his congregation about how God is the bridge between art, religion and television?

The answer to these questions is an uncertain “No,” because like so much art, with age it becomes much more about the preservation of cultural concerns than it is about some joke that initially inspired the piece. But viewing Us and Them, Jankowski’s exhibition focusing on the theme of horror, made me wonder anyhow because he employs similar methods (namely collaboration) with results not nearly as interesting as they were years ago.

Read the full article here.

This week at The Reeler I discuss, Who the #$&% is Jackson Pollock? a movie that opens tomorrow at the IFC Center, which I encourage you all to see. Despite the obnoxious marketing of this film, it does address the fact that there seems to be mounting scientific evidence that the piece Teri Horton purchased at a thrift store 14 years ago, is a real Pollock. If you’re truly fascinated by the processes of authentication, you can visit the site of forensic scientist, Peter Paul Biro, who has published the fastidious research for this case online. I will be posting additional conversation and commentary on the film here later on in the day, because, quite frankly, I find the film and the case itself endlessly interesting. The lead to The 50 Million Dollar Question below:

How many times do I have to read about the fact that Teri Horton, the owner of a Jackson Pollock painting with disputed authenticity, only has an eighth grade education? She may not have finished school, but there’s no way you would know that if director Harry Moses hadn’t chosen to emphasize this bit of biographical information in his new documentary Who the #$&% is Jackson Pollock? (opening Wednesday at the IFC Center), a film about a retired truck driver who has dedicated the last 14 years of her life trying to get the presumed Jackson Pollock painting she bought for five dollars authenticated. It doesn’t help that virtually every writer in the country (barring dealer and blogger Edward Winkleman) is dutifully repeating the information as though it is of great relevance to a story that actually has less to do with class in America than it does with perhaps the biggest unwitting thrift store find in history.

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As early as last January AFC was anticipating the arrival of the touring exhibition Masters of American Comics at The Jewish Museum. Given the reputation comic book geeks have for being insanely obsessive, I doubt there is any way I can spin my interest into connoisseurship, but I can say that when I heard Ron Mann, the director of the seminal documentary Comic Book Confidential, was going to be speaking after a screening of his film, I jumped at the opportunity to attend. Even for those with a passing interest in comics, this talk was a must see. The clip below from The Reeler contains a few choice quotes from filmmaker but as always, follow the link to his site, to read my full report.

“There was a history of underground comic books, and there was a history of mainstream comic books — but they didn’t merge together,” said Mann, who thanked the well-known writer and artist Lynda Barry for helping him understand that the scene was larger than any book or movie had recognized at the time. But the self-described cultural historian likely would have arrived at this conclusion with or without Barry’s input: his filming methods can only be described as obsessive. He recalled interviewing virtually anyone who had even a nominal interest in the medium, acknowledging in disbelief to the crowd 20 years after the fact, “I interviewed Frank Zappa for this movie!” (Inexplicably, footage of the musician never made it into the film, and Mann rattled off about a half-dozen more artists he had spoken to who wound up as casualties of the running time — among them being Scrooge McDuck creator Carl Barks, All American Comics editor Julie Schwartz and the legendary creator of the first all-woman comic book It Ain’t Me Babe, Trina Robbins.)

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After reading about how Cliff Evans’ The Road to Mount Weather, mimics web banners and other fine Internet ephemera on ArtCal, we were of course intrigued. As such, this week I discuss the fruits of Evans’ websurfing activities at The Reeler, which as it turns out have a lot more to do with shit, piss, and semen, than you might think.

An excerpt to whet your appetite below:

Evans has culled images from the Internet to create often stunningly beautiful collages that move in vertical and horizontal directions across the screen.

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….It’s unclear if the artist penned these words as an imitation of text you might find online or if it is just appropriated, but either way, these are the sorts of search results you learn to filter out for a reason.

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