March 1st, 8pm: Molly Nesbit and Paul Chan on Duchamp

Molly Nesbit teaches and writes on twentieth century art, film and photography and is currently faculty at Vassar college. Her two books, Atget's Seven Albums (1992) and Their Common Sense (2000) summarize a part of this work; it also involves a stream of essays on contemporary art. She is a contributing editor of Artforum, has taught at the University of California, Berkeley and Barnard College, Columbia University, and has received many awards, notably from the Guggenheim Foundation and the J. Paul Getty Trust.

Transcript from a lecture at Moscow Biennniale 2007, Symposium on Philosophy

Paul Chan lives and works in New York.

On Chan’s website, under the section ‘Free Baghdad’ snapshots, video clips and diary entries can be found. Visitors can also download Free MP3 files, while Chan can also be heard reading 16-hours’-worth of quotations from writers, artists and filmmakers.




New York Times Article on "Waiting for Godot"

Antek Walczak - February 22

LINKS:
Real Fine Arts
EAI
Bernadette Corporation
House of Gaga
Mexico City

Writes Walczak: "At some point during the writing of this EAI bio, Antek Walczak imagined grouping all his nouvelle-vague-grammar-crust videos under the title Old Life of a Sad Film Student. While other film students in 1990s New York were directing music videos for Pavement, starting youtube-before-youtube underground film fests, or going to real film festivals like Cannes with their real films, Walczak was working at his desk in the Bowery offices of a radical offshoot of downtown fashion called Bernadette Corporation. After several years devoted to reconsidering collective avant-garde legacies in terms of the contemporary media environment, change came in the form of an internal power struggle that ended the B-Corp fashion label and split up the collective into irreconcilable factions, leaving behind a pile of tapes from unfinished fashion spots that became material for Antek's solo video debut. It was during this hiatus of 1998-9, between incarnations of Bernadette Corporation, that Walczak developed the post-Godardian narrated essay style that bridges works as divergent as The BC Corporate Story and Get Rid of Yourself.

For fun, here are titles from the various fashion model segments of the aborted 1997 BC video shoot that would become 1998?s Dynasty: Animals in Your Neighborhood; Fresh Brats' Worst; The Robots are Ready; We never loved your body; Lady in a Jam. This is to point out the language that came out of the completely isolated self-authenticated context of early Bernadette Corporation and as well how Walczak's 'failed film school re-appropriation of an alternative cinema could only tenuously exist in a version of the downtown 90s scene that doesn't appear in any forgotten histories. Wanting nothing to do with whatever remained of East Village punk, no wave, or grunge subculture, it was an aesthetic that also happened outside of single-channel video art, operating under an illusion of a post-cinema that thought it was still possible to sit in darkened movie theaters instead of filling up the white empty spaces of galleries. It's worth noting that, in pursuit of such nostalgic resistance, Antek even went as far as moving to Paris to make films, write film criticism, and grow a beard at the start of the 00 decade. The Sad Film Student works fall under the early stages of what would became a full-blown condition at the start of the 21st century -- a passion for dead fictional substances and authentic forms, a haunted authorial voice speaking across grids of nonlinear layers, tracks, clips and timelines."

Antek Walczak was born in Grand Forks, North Dakota in 1968 and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He received a BFA at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. His work has been shown at Cinematexas in Austin, the Pompidou Center, Fri-Art in Fribourg, Switzerland and the Museum Ludwig in Cologne. He is a core member of Bernadette Corporation since 1994. He has written for magazines/zines like Purple, Pacemaker, Pazmaker, Zehar, and Made in USA.

From 1995 to 1997, Bernadette Corporation constituted itself as an underground fashion label based in New York, complete with a head designer and four well-received runway shows. Drawing on the vernacular of local subcultures, from recent immigrant communities to the downtown fashion scene itself, the label's collections can be seen as a self-consciously critical examination of social codes and their expression through industrial nexuses of power and money. The shows themselves, which are documented on this video as "a condensed history of anti-fashion," send up the spectacular nature of the fashion industry, incorporating such trappings as bear-costumed mascots, troupes of high-school dancers, and jets of fire.

Matthew Brannon - Thursday Feb 17

LINKS:

Friedrich Petzel

David Kordansky

2008 Whitney Biennial

Wikipedia

NYT

Matthew Brannon’s work turns on the opposition—and ever-mounting imbrication—of art and design. After an early stint as a painter, he began to draw his inspiration from those printed materials that mediate everyday life in late-capitalist, early twentyfirst- century America, from posters and advertisements to promotional flyers and take-out menus. But if Brannon’s iconography conjures mass-produced, throwaway sources, his methods are laboriously handcrafted, even old-fashioned: screenprint, letterpress, and lithograph works, often executed in a limited palette and consistent in their graphic rigor. His art seems on first glance disarmingly direct. But as one turns to the text paired with his images for explication or illumination, disorder intervenes. An early series recalls the conventions of posters for horror films: in Sick Decisions (2004), the driveway leading to a stately house is cloaked by shadows cast by bare, looming trees. In place of what look to be credits in the lower part of the work, however, is a string of pithy non sequiturs: this film is “A Desperate Appeal Release,” starring, among others, “Abuse of Education” and “Misplaced Trust,” with a screenplay by “101 Unanswered Phone Calls.”

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Matthew Brannon is known for his use of fine art and commercial printmaking alongside a classic sense of graphic design as a means of camouflaging his unpleasant and/or absurd content. This strategy is less a gimmick than an acceptance of the psychoanalytic model which believes that content is filtered before it is exposed. The balance of text and image in the letterpress prints provides the clearest example of this approach. One finds in them a word play dealing with career anxiety, alcoholism, insecurity, guilt, humiliation, sexual misadventure and so on, paired with bedside still-life images of lamps and statuettes. The consistent theme of success and failure here advances to a more literary like form both supporting and opposing the idea of the autobiographical. What Brannon began as mimicking the model of a film poster now operates on it's own visual terms with each print acting simultaneously as chapter and setting.

February 8th: Amy Granat

Whitney

The Kitchen

Nicole Klagsbrun

Amy Granat: Born 1976 in Saint Louis, Missouri; lives in New York, New York.

Ms. Granat received a B.A. in 1998 from Bard College, where she studied film and painting. After moving to New York City, she founded Cinema Zero, a nomadic film and performance series, and collaborated with artists such as Steven Parrino, Jutta Koether, and Richard Aldrich, among many others. Her 16mm films and photographs have been included in exhibitions at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Ullens Center in Beijing, the Shirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt, PS1, SculptureCenter, and the 2008 Whitney Biennial in New York City, and had one-person exhibitions at The Kitchen and the New Museum in New York in 2010. She has been teaching at NYU’s Steinhardt School of Education since 2007. Ms. Granat was appointed critic in painting/printmaking at Yale in 2010.

She is best known for her experimental film installations featuring celluloid that has been manipulated by scratching, cutting, or chemical alteration. Her practice though, is wide-ranging, and also includes video, sound, and photography. Granat’s photograms, in which objects are laid on top of film and then exposed to light, are related to her films in terms of her physical approach to image-making. Both of these aspects of her work reveal a fascination with transparency and opacity, and positive and negative space. If Granat’s experimentations with the photogram—a method that emphasizes the intrinsic quality of film, allowing her to “draw” with light—conjures the work of Man Ray in the 1930s, her direct manipulation of film stock is an homage to avant-garde filmmakers such as Stan Brakhage. Non-narrative, Brakhage’s films are abstract compositions with affinities to postwar Abstract Expressionist painting. Granat’s work also recalls that of avant-garde filmmakers such as Hans Richter or Viking Eggeling, both of whom made some of the first light and film experiments in the early part of the twentieth century.