Friday 12 May 2006, 18.30–20.00
Saturday 13 May 2006, 10.00–18.30

The experience of viewing projected archival film or antiquated video footage can have a seductive, even spellbinding effect on the viewer. Its material and aesthetic qualities act as a trigger to memories, evoking a sense of time and nostalgia or conjuring up fantasies of history. This international symposium draws together a collection of voices and perspectives to examine the work of artists and filmmakers who have worked with these materials and dislocated them from their original purpose and intention, revealing new readings, meanings and questions. The speakers include George Barber, Neil Cummings and Alex Farquharson, Marysia Lewandowska, Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi, Patrick Keiller, Elizabeth McAlpine, Pat O'Neill and Benjamin Weil, Mark Nash, Marcel Odenbach, AL Rees, Heather Stewart and Akram Zaatari.

Screenings during the day include work by Martin Arnold, Joseph Cornell, Malcolm Le Grice and Wojciech Bruszewski.

Anticipating the Past: Artists : Archive : Film is funded by MI:LL (Moving Image: Legacy and Learning), an Arts Council England initiative to support projects and develop strategies that promote engagement with the arts through the moving image.

Tate Modern  Starr Auditorium
£20 (£15 concessions), booking recommended

    

Event Programme:

 

Friday 12 May 2006

18.30
Re:presentation: Artists' Found Footage Film

AL Rees introduces the imaginative re-cutting of found footage by film artists since the 1920s. Using short works and extracts, this talk reviews some of the ways in which 'films beget films' (Jay Leyda) in the avant-garde. Newsreel footage is re-edited to pack a political punch in Weimar Germany, Cold War Poland and Thatcher's Britain. Other artists, from Len Lye to Malcolm Le Grice, take a more lyrical approach to documentary and archive sources. And in contemporary Austria, US genre movies are wittily psychoanalysed by reprinting and processing to reveal their optical unconscious and to provoke new meanings.

AL Rees is Research Tutor in the Department of Communication Art and Design at the Royal College of Art, former head of Time Based Media at Maidstone College and ex-chair of Arts Council England’s Artists' Film and Video Panel. He writes and lectures about avant-garde film and digital media, and his book A History of Experimental Film and Video is published by the British Film Institute (1999).

20.00
Reception and book launch: Ghosting: The Role of the Archive within Contemporary Artists' Film and Video

A new publication exploring the moving image, archive and memory.  With essays by Eddie Chambers, Amna Malik, Uriel Orlow, Lucy Reynolds and Erika Tan. Illustrated case studies discuss works by international practitioners including The Atlas Group, Johan Grimonprez, Marcel Odenbach and Fiona Tan.
Published by Picture This. Supported by Arts Council England.

 

Saturday 13 May 2006

10.00
Welcome

10.15
Film screening: The Midnight Party, Joseph Cornell with Larry Jordan, (8 min, c1938)

One of about 30 short works filmed or assembled by one of the USA’s most gentle surrealists. Cornell responded to film images gathered from flea markets with the same mixture of reverence and quiet subversion that informs his more celebrated ‘box’ constructions.  

10.30
Introduction by Morgan Fisher

California-based filmmaker Morgan Fisher began his career as an editor in the commercial film industry before exploring the avant-garde. The combined experience has led Fisher to examine and deconstruct the narrative of film and the industry itself with wry humour, creating an entirely unique and intimate view of cinema and its physical presentation. Fisher's presentation will explore the notion of irony embedded within found and archival footage as well as a broader discussion of his works such as Standard Gauge and (). 

11.00–13.00
Interrogating Archives

What are archives other than passive repositories that catalogue the past following their own arcane criteria, and freeze it for posterity? In this session, artists and curators talk about their approaches to the ‘archive’, both as a concept and as an institution. How do or could archives work for them? The session is introduced and chaired by Heather Stewart, Head of Cultural Programming UK Wide at the British Film Institute, whose responsibilities include stewardship of the National Film and Television Archive (NFTVA).

The speakers in this session are:

Benjamin Weil is the new executive director of Artists Space, New York. As media curator at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, he worked with artists such as Pipilotti Rist and Christian Marclay, and curated online work featured on the museum's web site. Weil will discuss the commissioning and collaboration process for Christian Marclay’s Video Quartet (2002) a 13-minute, four-channel video / music collage comprised of nearly 600 found film clips, projected onto a 40-foot-long screen. It was commissioned by Weil for SFMOMA and produced by Marclay using desktop editing software.

Neil Cummings and Marysia Lewandowska introduce extracts from Screen Tests 1/4 (2005) made for the British Art Show 6, using film material from public regional Film and Television Archives in each of the four cities on the exhibition tour. The new work has been released into the public sphere under a Creative Commons Public Domain Licence so others may use and re-use it as material for future creative exchange, ‘enriching rather than depleting the public domain’. This new work reflects their continuing interest in the relationship of art institutions to the social, economic and political spheres. Cummings and Lewandowska will be in conversation with curator and writer Alex Farquharson. His most recent curatorial projects are British Art Show 6, various venues Gateshead, Manchester, Nottingham and Bristol (2005–6); Le Voyage Interieur: Paris–London, Espace Electra, Paris (2005–6).

Neil Cummings and Marysia Lewandowska have been collaborating since 1995. Recent projects include Enthusiasm, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, KunstWerke, Berlin and the Tapies Foundation Barcelona (2005-6); Industrial Town Futurism, Kunstverein Wolfsburg, Germany (2005); and The Commons, Liverpool Biennial International(2004).

Patrick Keiller’s The City of the Future is an interdisciplinary project to explore the landscapes of early film, so as to investigate the ways in which the city has changed during the last century (see http://vads.ahds.ac.uk/collections/CF.html). Keiller's initial search of the UK National Film and Television Archive's catalogue yielded 2,200 titles, including many early street scenes and tram rides, some from the recently restored Mitchell & Kenyon collection (1900–13). The project has since produced a DVD in which over 50 films from 1896–1903 are arranged both spatially, on a landscape of maps, and as a fictional journey, in such a way that viewers can wander between the two. Keiller will be in conversation with Heather Stewart.

Patrick Keiller’s films include London (1994) and Robinson in Space (1997), a study of the UK's landscape later developed as a book. He is currently a Research Fellow at the Royal College of Art, London, where The City of the Future was realised with the support of the Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the co-operation of the British Film Institute.

13.00
Lunch

14.00
Film screening: Klascaczv (Applauder), Wojciech Bruszewski, (6 min, 1971)

Film as material, the editing process, and a wry comment on war and militaristic posturing by a leading member of the Lodz Workshop of Film Form.

14.10–16.15
History and Politics

Newsreel and documentary footage can be both reliable and false in its witness of important events. Here artists interrogate documentary images to reclaim some sense of humanity, or to pursue more fundamental truths, or to invent some missing pieces of a puzzle. Their subjects include the casualties of war, and the troubled and shattered histories of Europe and Lebanon. The session is introduced and chaired by Mark Nash, writer, co-curator of Documenta 11 (2002), and the third Berlin Biennial (2004).  He is currently Head of Department: Curating Contemporary Art, Royal College of Art.

The speakers in this session are:

Marcel Odenbach sensed early on that there was something creative and not just neurotic about collecting, that it is a fundamental part of artistic activity. Every artist collects something, even if it’s only images, materials and motifs. And collecting does not just mean retaining things – above all it involves recollecting. From the very start of his career as a video artist, he took the recording of moving pictures such as films and documentaries for granted. He states: ‘One can examine such material repeatedly, analyse the medium critically, and one can work on and use individual sequences. Every time a tape is re-recorded, however, something gets erased or discarded, in other words one has to take one’s leave of it’. His talk will include a discussion of his multimedia investigations of German cultural identity.

Marcel Odenbach was born in Cologne, 1953. A pioneer of the video medium, he is currently Professor for Media Arts, Kunsthochschule für Medien (MediaAcademy), Cologne. Recently, his work has been presented in solo exhibitions at Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin (2006) and Cornerhouse, Manchester (2005).

Akram Zaatari will discuss his video This Day (2003), a thoughtful, dreamlike montage that examines archival photos, from portraits of Bedouins in the desert to the bomb-rent sky over the Lebanese capital. The imagery moves from an idyllic rural past, when the central conflict was between camel and car, to the strife-ridden present of propaganda and urban alienation. Zaatari contemplates what truths are ultimately captured in these photographs.

Akram Zaatari is a video artist and curator who lives and works in Beirut. He is author of more than 30 videos and two video installations. He is co-founder of the Fondation Arabe pour l’Image, Beirut, through which he has developed his research-based work on the photographic history of the Middle East, resulting in a series of exhibitions.

Working with the Trento History Museum and the Italian History Museum of War of Rovereto, using footage from 1914–1921, Angela Ricci Lucchi and Yervant Gianikian have been researching the subjective experience of battle and its aftermath; ‘emblems of totalitarianism, individual physical suffering... an anatomical inventory of the damaged body... the consequences of the conflict on children’. They will illustrate their approach using footage from the latest part of their First World War trilogy the feature-length Oh, Man (Oh, Uomo) (2004).

Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi work with archival film. Their interventions consist of discovering and painstakingly rearticulating the fragments they have found, and their techniques involve slowing down, tinting and adding a musical score. From the Pole to the Equator (1986) comprises footage shot by Italian documentary filmmaker Luca Comerio from the first period of newsreel documentary in the early 20th century. Like the scene of the crime in Antonioni’s Blow Up (1966), reality is investigated for what it reveals of social history and catastrophe. Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi recently had a retrospective exhibition at Jeu de Paume, Paris.

16.15
Tea

16.30
Film screening: Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy, Martin Arnold (15 min, 1998)

‘The cinema of Hollywood is a cinema of exclusion, reduction and denial, a cinema of repression. There is always something behind that which is being represented, which was not represented. And it is exactly that that is most interesting to consider.’
– Martin Arnold

16.45–18.15
Remaking Hollywood

Many artists have shared Martin Arnold’s interest in the subtexts – both humorous and disturbing – beneath the polished surface of popular cinema. Others have simply plundered Hollywood imagery as a source of graphic forms, or in the process of constructing conceptual games. This session brings together three generations of practitioners, each associated with moving-image collage but exhibiting very different methods and objectives. The session is led by George Barber, who will introduce and illustrate some common themes through reference to his own involvement with Scratch video (the moving-image’s Pop Art moment) in the early 1980s. Once described by Steven Bode in Art Monthly as ‘the Henry Ford of independent video’, Barber continues to make witty and poignant video works.

Elizabeth McAlpine’s video work uses found footage in an attempt to reveal and de-mystify cinematic structures. A geologist and grammatologist of film, McAlpine plays havoc with the perceived narrative of mainstream cinema. Here, the artist will discuss recent video and photographic work, her interest in cinema and her method of production.

Elizabeth McAlpine is based in London and studied at the Slade and Goldsmiths.

Recent exhibitions include Full Moon Rising at K3 Gallery, Zurich; and A Certain Tendency in Representation at Thomas Dane, London. McAlpine has a second solo show at Laura Bartlett, London in September.

Pat O'Neill is a filmmaker and multimedia artist best known for his work with composite imagery, both static and time-based. From the mid 1960s he has been crafting films that optically combine original footage, found imagery and animation to explore perception, memory and time and space. He will talk about his image-gathering methods and his approach to collage, as seen in works such as The Decay of Fiction (2002), a film that overlays a motion – time-lapse study of Hollywood’s empty Ambassador Hotel with a series of narrative episodes loosely based on noir scripts from the 1940s and 1950s, the Ambassador's heyday. The film represents an extension of O'Neill's concern with the re-use of fragments of past cinema, but departs from the practice by using a cast of real actors. It also continues an interest in the reframing of regional history evident in Water and Power (1989) and Trouble in the Image (1996).

Pat O’Neill has been making films since the mid 1960s. His feature-length project The Decay of Fiction (2002) was shown in a retrospective exhibition of his work in film and other media at Cornerhouse, Manchester, 2005.

18.30–20.00
Closing reception

Installation: Berlin Horse, Malcolm Le Grice (9 min, 1970), two-screen loop on DVD

Combining amateur footage and a short sequence from early cinema, Le Grice’s classic film simultaneously explores film material, film time versus ‘real’ time, and his own enjoyment of rhythm and colour.

This schedule may be subject to change.