Streaming for the first time, Camille Henrot’s GROSSE FATIGUE—which won the Silver Lion at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013—is now on view as part of the Virtual Views: Video Lives program at the Museum of Modern Art.
Henrot uses the familiar setting of a computer desktop to narrate the origins of the universe. The video draws on the artist’s experience during a Smithsonian Artist ResearchFellowship, for which Henrot was granted access to film the collections of the SmithsonianArchives of American Art, the National Museum of Natural History, and the National Airand Space Museum in Washington, DC. Set to a spoken-word poem written by Henrot in collaboration with the poet Jacob Bromberg, and scored by Joakim Bouaziz, GROSSEFATIGUE draws from scientific theories, religious creation stories, and oral traditions. The text is voiced by multimedia artist Akwetey Orraca Tetteh...
The work features a rapid-fire choreography of pop-up windows with images drawn from a potentially limitless field of references. The swiftly proliferating imagery signals both the speed and lightness of the digital world and, conversely, the exhaustion provoked by overwhelming streams of data. Henrot has explained that the work attempts to confront “the desire to universalize knowledge [that] is accompanied by the conscience I have of this act. As soon as you think you have laid out and circumscribed the entirety of your universe within a single, selfsame landscape, isn’t the only question of any worth, and which relentlessly nags and torments the mind, But what is there beyond thelimit?”*
This week, Adam Pendleton and Performa present an online screening of the artist’s work JUST BACK FROM LOS ANGELES—A PORTRAIT OF YVONNE RAINER as well as a conversation with Pendleton and Performa founder RoseLee Goldberg. See links below for details.
They’re beginning to see what they used to only look at…
I remember the breathlessness of the lifting section
I remember your Martha Graham story and your voice rising, and I got worried you were going to talk about whether she ate cock or not and Steve starting to read on the other mic and changing the atmosphere.
I remember the opening bars of the Chambers Brothers and doing Trio A slow, very slow, and Steve joining me and then fast, with and against Steve’s tempo.
I remember… you grinning at the pleasure we had.
Oh, and the wings.
I remember watching the pillow solo and then during Trio A the wings would sometimes flap in my face.
I remember talking to you in the hotel, before “stoned,” and you said I was always wanting to get someplace and that I should just be where I was…
and only there… and that was what happened in the performance.
I remember standing around waiting to start the run-thru, and you were talking and then you turned and said, “What are you waiting for?”
and Doug saying what I had been doing, which was waiting for you!
I remember the pleasure of huddling in the rolls and Steve coming down on me with his self-conscious silly grin.
And I remember being out of it thru Becky’s solo, then toward the end seeing her so totally there with that changed and changing body of hers…
I remember the box improvisation with David.
The specter of crisis was also bolstered by the cops’ simple inability to stop killing black people. Just prior to Brown’s murder, forty-six-year-old Eric Garner of State Island, New York, unarmed and minding his own business, was approached by police and then choked to death as he gasped eleven times, “I can’t breathe.” Two days after Brown was killed, Los Angeles Police department officers shot and killed another young black man, Ezell Ford. Months later, autopsy reports would confirm that Ford was shot multiple times, including once in the back, while he lay on the ground. In a suburb of Dayton, Ohio, police shot to death John Crawford III, twenty-two years old and African American, while he was talking on his cell phone and holding an air gun on sale in the aisle of a Walmart. And as the nation waited to hear whether a grand jury would indict officer Darren Wilson for Brown’s death, Cleveland police killed thirty-seven-year-old, African American Tanisha Anderson when they slammed her to the ground, remaining on top of her until her body went limp. The following week, police in Cleveland struck again, murdering a twelve year old boy, Tamir Rice, less than two seconds after arriving at the playground where Rice was playing alone. Making maters worse, the two Cleveland police stood by idly, refusing aid, while Tamir bled to death. When his fourteen-year-old sister attempted to help him, police wrestled her to the ground.
I remember the breathlessness of the lifting section
I remember the opening bars of the Chambers Brothers
I remember… you grinning at the pleasure we had.
I remember watching the pillow solo and then during Trio A the wings would sometimes flap in my face.
I remember talking to you in the hotel, before “stoned,”
I remember standing around waiting to start the run-thru, and you were talking and then you turned and said, “What are you waiting for?”
I remember the pleasure of huddling in the rolls and Steve coming down on me with his self-conscious silly grin.
I remember the box improvisation with David.
Whenever one writes about a problem in the United States, especially concerning the racial atmosphere, the problem written about is usually black people, that they are either extremist, irresponsible, or ideologically naïve.
What we want to do here is to talk about white society, and the liberal segment of white society, because we want to prove the pitfalls of liberalism, that is, the pitfalls of liberals in their political thinking.
Whenever articles are written, whenever political speeches are given, or whenever analyses are made about a situation, it is assumed that certain people of one group, either the left or the right, the rich or the poor, the whites or the blacks are causing polarization.
The fact is that conditions cause polarization, and that certain people can act as catalysts to speed up the polarization; for example, Rap Brown or Huey Newton can be a catalyst speeding up the polarization of blacks against whites in the Untied States, but the conditions are already there. George Wallace can speed up the polarization of whites against blacks in America, but again, the conditions are already there.
Many people want to know why, out of the entire white segment of society, we want to criticize the liberals. We have to criticize them because they represent the liaison between both groups, between the oppressed and the oppressor. The liberal tries to become an arbitrator, but he is incapable of solving the problems. He promises the oppressor that he can keep the oppressed under control; that he will stop them from becoming illegal (in this case illegal means violent). At the same time, he promises the oppressed that he will be able to alleviate their suffering—in due time. Historically, of course, we know this is impossible, and our era will not escape history.
A line is the distance between.
They circled the seafood restaurant singing “We shall not be moved.” — Adam Pendleton, Just back from Los Angeles: A Portrait of Yvonne Rainer, 2016–2017
Murari Jha’s performative video THE LONGEST MARCH: STRETCHED BODIES “offers a unique psychological view touching on certain traumatic experiences that stretch the body far beyond its limits of bearability, sanity, and cohesion, to the point where pain becomes unindividuated and the body gets transfigured into a universal affect, similar to a landscape.”*
Presented by abr, “an alliance of cultural practitioners—Anne Couillaud, Adwait Singh, Priyanshi Saxena, and Shaunak Mahbubani—coming together over shared vulnerabilities, to create a circle of care, communality, and conviviality in these uncertain and difficult times,” THELONGEST MARCH is streaming now.
To make use of the rupture and increased connectivity afforded by this universal moment of crisis for encouraging new convergences and incipient growths that are governed by the ideals of sustainability and equity. To corral our individual isolation into a moment of collective reflection on our present condition as well as our imminent futures, possibly establishing precedents for what sustainable, equitable, and meaningful collaborations can be like in a post-Covid world.
To facilitate the circulation of resources within the arts ecology, by commissioning meaningful digital art, videos, performances, and other performative works from artists for our social media pages by mobilizing small sums of money as honorariums. To set up mechanisms so that young artists in need can be reached via members and partners, or can reach out to us via open calls for inclusion in our networks of support and collaboration.
To mobilize our privileges through the pooling of time, energy, funds, and networks, as much as possible, in an attempt to move towards a more level playing field. We extoll the principles of self-help, DIY cultures, gift-economies, creative commoning and time-pooling to go hand-in-hand with an embrace of the rudimentary/ improvisational aesthetic to foreground practices that are situated and marginal to mainstream commercial circuits.
To actively strive for an affirmative diversity of gender, caste, class, religion, race, location, language, ability, and sexual orientation in our inclusion of participants and partners.
To harness the potentials of the digital to foster real-time connections and meaningful discourse as much as possible. To temper its competitiveness, toxicity, celerity, and solipsism with attentiveness, tenderness, sensitivity and care, and to imbue our newly embraced digital spaces with the communal, serendipitous and ludic aspects of the art world that we love and miss.
To strongly favor community over viewership, content over numbers.
To actively question the chrononormative regimes and capital-based models of productivity that regiment our bodies, while moving forward in ways that allow for slow sustained cultivation and support for each other’s needs to rewire and reset.
To initiate a gesture of empowerment and attempt to understand what makes art resilient to the vicissitudes of time. To witness and manifest its strength, its aliveness, its resourcefulness as well as its capacity for regeneration in adversity.
To participate in, and proactively strengthen the nexus of solidarity amongst independent, para-institutional concerns in the arts by formulating opportunities for sensitive collaborations.
A founder of the French New Wave who became an international art-house icon, Agnès Varda was a fiercely independent, restlessly curious visionary whose work was at once personal and passionately committed to the world around her. In an abundant career in which she never stopped expanding the notion of what a movie can be, Varda forged a unique cinematic vocabulary that frequently blurs the boundaries between narrative and documentary, and entwines loving portraits of her friends, her family, and her own inner world with a social consciousness that was closely attuned to the 1960s counterculture, the women’s liberation movement, the plight of the poor and socially marginalized, and the ecology of our planet. This comprehensive collection places Varda’s filmography in the context of her parallel work as a photographer and multimedia artist—all of it a testament to the radical vision, boundless imagination, and radiant spirit of a true original for whom every act of creation was a vital expression of her very being. — The Criterion Collection
The new box set THE COMPLETE FILMS OF AGNÈS VARDA features digital restorations of thirty-nine films as well as the television productions Agnès de ci de là Varda, Nausicaa (1970), Quelques veuves de Noirmoutier, and Varda’s segments from Une minute pour une image.
Also included: rare archival footage, tributes and interviews, segments from unfinished works, and a 200-page book with contributions by Amy Taubin, Michael Koresky, GinetteVincendeau, So Mayer, Alexandra Hidalgo, and Rebecca Bengal, as well as a selection of Varda’s photography and images of her installation art.
The feature films are divided into fifteen programs:
Agnès Forever — Varda by Agnès (2019), Les 3 boutons (2015).
Early Varda — La Pointe Courte (1955), Ô saisons, ô châteaux (1958), Du côté de la côte(1958).
Around Paris — Cléo de 5 à 7 (1962), Les fiancés du pont Macdonald (1962), L’opéra-mouffe (1958), Les dites cariatides (1984), T’as de beaux escaliers, tu sais (1986).
Rue Daguerre — Daguerréotypes (1975), Le lion volatil (2003).
Married Life — Le bonheur (1965), Les créatures (1966), Elsa la Rose (1966).
In California — Uncle Yanco (1968), Black Panthers (1970), Lions Love (. . . and Lies) (1969), MurMurs (1981), Documenteur (1981).
Her Body, Herself — One Sings, the Other Doesn’t (1977), Réponse de femmes (1975), Plaisird’amour en Iran(1977).
No Shelter — Vagabond (1985), 7 p., cuis., s. de b. . . . (à saisir) (1985).
Jane B. — Jane B. par Agnès V.(1988), Kung-Fu Master!(1988).
Jacques Demy — Jacquot de Nantes (1991), The Young Girls Turn 25 (1993), The World of Jacques Demy (1995).
Simon Cinéma — One Hundred and One Nights (1995).
La glaneuse — The Gleaners and I(2000), The Gleaners and I: Two Years Later (2002).
Visual Artist — Visages Villages, codirected with JR (2017), Salut les cubains (1964), Ulysse (1982), Ydessa, les ours et etc. . . . (2004).
We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. If you continue to use this site we will assume that you are happy with it.Ok
