Three films

Annie Bradley, Cellulite Rose, Susie Thomas: Lending Looks To Other People
The Film Archive
17 October - 21 November 2009

I like the crazy ambiguities of this title. Is it about misspelt 'books', lending supportive glances, or the activity of borrowing or sharing? This confusion is not just me being a bit thick. It’s deliberate. It’s a little tricky figuring out who does what in this show. Even the writer of the accompanying text, Matthew Crookes, is not very sure for example, of what Cellulite Rose is going to contribute. He never really finds out.

What turns out to be her work, was I initially thought, a second part of Annie Bradley’s. And a soundtrack I imagined was Cellulite Rose’s, ends up being made by Susie Thomas. Yet in a perverse way all this scrambled muddle makes sense, for the show’s theme - if there is one – seems to be about slippery identity (Rose), false decoys (Thomas), and the reliably stable self (Bradley).

Rose, with her two tiny screens propped up in the centre of the floor, has a young woman (the artist?) addressing the camera about the nature of the self, causality and identity – pondering some of the issues an empiricist philosopher like David Hume raised three hundred years ago - and attacking viewer assumptions about any fixed essence behind her corporeal presence, and inanimate objects like light switches.

Bradley’s film, on the end wall, is about the attempted transmission of knowledge from a patient teacher to a pupil trying to learn to whistle, but who is getting nowhere. He can’t get the mechanics of manipulating his lips and cheeks correctly. The funny thing is that the coach, though long suffering, is no musical virtuoso. Technically she is quite clumsy. However she is also a rock of dependability, constantly encouraging and supportive.

Susie Thomas’s film seems to be a satire about claustrophobic reflexivity, a joke about art that obsesses over its own production processes as content. It is a long scrolling text about copyright and legal stipulations, with her own name appropriately inserted. Designed I think to make you irritated and groan, it has a sound track that in contrast is quite gorgeous, espousing the natural world outside the gallery through the recorded clicks and whirrs of what sounds to me like a flock of starlings.

Their chirruping voices sound electronic, even metallic, but they bring to mind the world of non-art, unless you are thinking of John Cage and his use of 'given' ambient sound. This densely textured birdsong seems to be the real point of Thomas’ project, and the moving legalese a droll excuse for some accompanying visual material needed to pull an audience. The film is the bait to which you will ‘lend a look’, but the solid work – the ‘art’ part which you are initially not aware of (and for which you need the headphones) - is the avian soundtrack.

This is a clever, subtle little show that these three artists have organised. Worth viewing on your way into ARTSPACE.

Educational animation

Jill Kennedy: New Educational Series
Film Archives, next to ARTSPACE
29 August -30 September, 2009

For this exhibition of three short films that use animated collage, Jill Kennedy has a cleverly ambiguous title. It can refer to the source material where she found her images. Or it could refer to political/historical or social readings from encoded narratives that you might see in the array of moving theatre-like sets and cut-out protagonists.

There is a tension here, between her obvious love for Surrealist collage artists like Max Ernst and Joseph Cornell, and the political readings or messages that can be found in images such as Hussars (Imperial militarist expansionism), microbes and virologists (influenza epidemics), or busy ants and housing subdivisions (community conformity, escalating consumerism).

Yet in some way’s Kennedy’s films follow the lead of the seductively silky, droning music composed by her collaborator John Payne. His sound has more emotional (and visceral) power than her visuals which though entertaining, funny and possibly semantically loaded, don’t bodily penetrate in the way that sound does. Her colour for example, is not saturated but tastefully pastel or slightly faded. You are not optically bombarded by chroma but you are manipulated by horizontal movement as the camera pans past things or objects float past it.

This kinetic sense seems to be Kennedy’s real interest, for she is a sort of suggestive, surrealist abstractionist - despite her interest in narrative. She likes clusters of entangled line and delicate spirograph formations as much as patterned formations of flying fishes, or swaying, nodding canaries. The horizontal movement (punctuated by a little vertical action) seems just as crucial to her as the evocative (or potentially didactic) image – if not more.

Reelin' in the years

Tessa Laird: The Rainbow Reels
The Film Archive, Karangahape Rd
6 December – 7 February 2009

I hate television with a vengeance. Haven’t had one in the house for years, simply because I’ve always felt so insulted by – in this country anyway – its consistent mediocrity. Some might call me a ‘snob’ but I think it is sensible to use your time wisely enjoying books, CDs, DVDs and Charlie Rose instead. Oddly, when checking out Tessa Laird’s Film Archive installation of seven spectrally arranged monitors, each with a selection of film based on a specific colour and positioned in a curved formation on the floor like a rainbow, I was startled to experience pangs of nostalgia for the seventies and eighties (their TV news items in particular did it), and got quite rattled. You know… horrible things like dewy eyes and lumps in the throat. She’s got a lot to answer for.

Seven screens for seven colours is a clever idea. Laird explores colour as a trope, as a word in spoken language, and as a physical sensation. The later is not as evident as you might suppose. It is not as immersive as the films of Len Lye or Nova Paul can be, so I was a little disappointed that my retinas were not bombarded with sweet chromatic sensations, though there were some. There was lots of documentary material, coloured and b/w, and many interviews (especially from Sweetwaters Festival), much of it inadvertently funny with its high moral tone (from politicians and police) when addressing the behaviour of youth.

As you’d expect from Laird, the show has a ‘green’ (ie. ecological) and anthropological flavour. It is consistent with the persona she creates with her writing and exhibited artworks. It’s serious and whimsical, with a big interest in social history – but nuanced in its organisation.

Because of the complexities of having seven channels to attend to, it needs at least a couple of visits to concentrate on some of the spoken content. An unusual project that probably hasn’t had the audience it deserves.