<nettime-ann> THE ORDER OF THINGS film & video

THE ORDER OF THINGS

12, 19, 26 September 2008, Muhka_Media, Antwerp

Film program in the context of the exhibition with the same title at MuHKA, Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp (11th September 2008 > 4th January 2009). Curated by Stoffel Debuysere and María Palacios Cruz.

From September 11th until January 4th MuHKA presents 'The Order of Things', an exhibition about the uses of image archives and other manifestations of a classificatory or “encyclopaedic” impulse in contemporary art. Within this context, MuHKA_media will host six screening programs dealing with the recuperation and reconfiguration of “found” images in film and video. The makers of these works use bits and scraps from the media reality surrounding us as a basis for the construction of new meanings, in search of a poetry of movement, a syntax of fragmentation, bringing divergent elements together in a system of construction in which they belong: cinema. Based on a series of codes and axioms, cinema can be subject to multiple forms of ideological appropriation, both cinematographic and meta-cinematographic, as well as on a micro-level – each shot is itself a succession of frames. In these film and video works the meaning and the hierarchy of images become subordinated to a new logic, a subversive, narrative or totalizing order taken out of the ‘infinite cinema’, the world in/as images.

Thom Andersen & Malcolm Brodwick, Alan Berliner, Abigail Child, Lenka Clayton, Bruce Conner, William Farley, Morgan Fisher, Hollis Frampton, Christoph Girardet, Arthur Lipsett, Frank & Caroline Mouris, Norbert Pfaffenbichler, Simon Pummell, Chick Strand.

12.09.2008: THE ORDER OF THINGS 1

ABOUT TIME: Arthur Lipsett retrospective

Introduced by curator and filmmaker Brett Kashmere

Canadian filmmaker Arthur Lipsett (1936-1986) is a key figure in post-war avant-garde cinema. Through his kaleidoscopic collages of “found” images and sounds, he configures his reluctant vision of the ‘condition humaine’ - a view of the world scarred by the alienating effects of science and technology. The juxtaposition of divergent pieces of socio-political history and popular culture of the 20th century unfolds itself as a symbolic representation of the collective (sub) conscience of Western society.

20:00

Very Nice, Very Nice (1961, 16mm, b&w, sound, 7’)

A Trip Down Memory Lane (1965, 16mm, b&w, sound, 12’)

21-87 (1964, 16mm, b&w, sound, 10’)

Free Fall (1964, 16mm, b&w, sound, 9’)

Fluxes (1968, 16mm, b&w, sound, 24’)

22:30

N-Zone (1970, 16mm, b&w, sound, 43’)

Strange Codes (1972, 16mm, b&w, sound, 23’)

19.09.2008: THE ORDER OF THINGS 2

DE/CODING: Poetics of Collage

A series of films in which found footage - submitted to various realignments, interruptions and interpolations - has been reorganized in a poetical form. How can putting together fragments of the world create new meanings, new ways of thinking, looking and listening? For what purposes were these images originally created and constructed, and what new vitality, force and desire might erupt by deconstructing them? How to connect elements distant in time and space, in an attempt to take a grasp on the world we live in, dig below and behind the surface, in search of the unspoken, the suppressed, the innate?

20:00

Abigail Child: Surface Noise (2000, 16mm, colour, sound, 18’)

Alan Berliner: Everywhere at once (1985, 16mm, colour, sound, 10’)

Frank & Caroline Mouris: Frank Film (1973, 35mm, colour, sound, 9’)

Bruce Conner: A Movie (1958, 16mm, b&w, sound, 12’)

Chick Strand: Loose Ends (1979, 16mm, b&w, sound, 25’)

William Farley: Tribute (1986, 16mm, b&w, sound, 7’)

22:30

Simon Pummell: Bodysong (2003, 35mm, colour, sound, 83’)

26.09.2008: THE ORDER OF THINGS 3

DIS/ORDER: On Axioms and Images

A series of films that explore the conceptual space of “compilation films” at the same time that they question the conventional ordering principles of montage. How does meaning result from a linear organization of images? Is there such a thing as a logic of chance? Does every random succession of film bits imply a unity, an order within chaos, a secret route to the imagination? Is narrative, as Hollis Frampton suggested in his so-called “Brakhage’s theorem”, a fixed axiom in cinema? : “For any finite series of shots (’film’) whatsoever there exists in real time a rational narrative, such that every term in the series, together with its position, duration, partition and reference shall be perfectly and entirely accounted for”.

20:00

Thom Andersen & Malcolm Brodwick — ——- (1966-67, 16mm, colour, sound, 11’)

Morgan Fisher ( ) (2003, 16mm, colour/b&w, silent, 21’)

Norbert Pfaffenbichler: Mosaik Mécanique (2007, 35mm, b/w, sound, 9’30”)

Christoph Girardet: Random Cuts (1993, video, colour, sound, 3’20”)

Lenka Clayton: Qaeda Quality Question Quickly Quickly Quiet (2002, video, colour, sound, 20’)

22:30

Hollis Frampton: Zorns Lemma (1970, 16mm, colour, sound, 60’)

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