Yesterday I spent some time searching for possible course material – I am playing with ideas which continue with the experiments I did for A2, mixing found audio and visual footage taken from the internet (influenced by image recycler Joachim Schmidt along with Elizabeth Price who had such an impact on me, as well as Rachal Maclean who sources audio from the internet, TV and old films).
I came across quite a few films on the Archive site which I have used before and found myself drawn towards films about reproduction – some of which were quite difficult to watch – obviously, I am really keen to try and incorporate those into any work I might do, if possible. I thought it was interesting to simply note, for now, my surprise focus on reproduction and think about how it links to the other themes I’ve been exploring – systems, networks, Cassandra – i.e. the splitting of intuition from logic. A training film for obstetricians was very painful to watch, but for me, it was such a clear sign of the 20th-century view of birth. I’m thinking I need to relook at Mary Kelly’s work now.
I also came across Len Lye – not sure how this fits in. Nor do I know whether he is too established for appropriating but I was struck by some of the signs of old film stock transformed to video and seen via Youtube – which is something I explored in A2 too. When artists use old photographs in their work they are quite often from anonymous collections, lost and then found fragments of an unknown family history (although of course, the famous appropriation set in the 80s relied on very well-known work) and I suppose this is about power, status – it’s easier to deface someone else’s work if they are anonymous but why should that be?
It may be that I am simply influenced by Lye’s films although at this stage one never knows where it could end up. None of this might be remotely relevant! Even so, I feel I may be reaching a point where I can send Andrea some ideas for A4, if not the actual assignment itself – which needs to be a plan with sketches rather than a resolved project.
“Len Lye was one of the few filmmakers working in inter-war Britain to have established an international reputation in experimental filmmaking. Though his British oeuvre was by no means limited to the making of abstract films, this was the area that most interested Lye and he has sometimes been viewed as the only genuine avant-garde filmmaker of this period. This is undoubtedly an overstated case, but Lye earned his reputation through a sustained and idiosyncratic body of films that were often brilliantly inventive and technically accomplished.” (BFI.org, 2018) Find out more on the BFI site.
I then discovered a few more artists working in this way and I really like some of the text in the Oskar Fischinger video: