Artists:  Taneesha Ahmed, Matt Bamber, Fran Blythe, Hannah Brown, Savinder Bual, Kevin Burns, Annie Carpenter, Mike Chavez Dawson & Len Horsey, Sophia Crilly, Nick Crowe & Ian Rawlinson, Daniel Fogarty, Dave Griffiths, Tony Hall, Ian Hartshorne, Hilary Jack, Mark Kennard, Ross McCarry, Jenny Steele, Liz West

Plus: Unravel – the longest hand painted film in Britain!

Part 1: December 2011: Private Galleries & Emergent Practice

Corridor8 moves from being an annual publication to a quarterly series of editions focussing on particular locations and facets of the visual art ecology. Over 2012, the four parts will accumulate into a final bound edition, visiting the cities of the North and creating a portrait of their visual arts culture at this particular moment.

Using the insights of long-time observers, and preserving snapshots of practice in the process of radical change, Corridor8 will traverse the North in a quick, slow dance; zooming from long shot to close-up. By employing the clarity of the traveller and the knowledge of the inhabitant, it will explore art in transition as it changes and adapts during a time of constraint and the movement of people and practice working in the creative ecology of the North.

The health of the sector can be judged by the manifest activities such as pop-up art shows, travelling exhibitions, emerging artist collectives and the growing numbers of private galleries despite the so-called interesting times. In this issue we look at arts practitioners’ resilience and adaptability, their increasing localisation, and the vitality with which they endure and thrive. This year’s annual has been split into four parts, each dealing with a different set of spaces; private galleries, artist-run spaces, fine art departments and entrepreneurial space.

Free stuff: Part 1 comes with a free print from Northern Art Prize nominee James Hugonin and a poster from poet and novelist Lavinia Greenlaw.

Articles: Matthew Hearn on Newcastle / Mark Doyle & Rebecca Morrill on commercial galleries / Iris Priest on Cerith Wyn Evans / Paul Usherwood on James Hugonin

Artists: Cerith Wyn Evans / Lavina Greenlaw / Dave Griffiths / James Hugonin / Marcus Coates / Matt Stokes / Héctor Arce-Espasas / Jen Liu / Andrew McDonald

Galleries: Bureau / Ceri Hand / The International 3 / Vane / Workplace

The Manchester Contemporary 2011

Bureau Gallery: with work for sale from Sophia Crilly, Daniel Fogarty, Dave Griffiths and Mit Senoj

Launched in 2009, The Manchester Contemporary, coordinated by International 3 is committed to encouraging and developing a market for critically engaged contemporary art in the region. It provides an opportunity for audiences to access high calibre contemporary art by internationally exhibiting artists alongside those that are new and emerging.

Curated by Katie Rutherford: “Enter a Small Room Arranged for this Purpose is a series of three exhibitions in Project Space Leeds’ version of Untitled Gallery, an intimate contemporary art space in Manchester. Enter a Small Room Arranged for this Purpose: Part Two presents laser- and solar-plate etchings by Mike Chavez-Dawson and Dave Griffiths, alongside a new performance written by Dawson with Len Horsey. Dave Griffiths will be talking about his practice during an event on Friday 18 November.  Part One featured prints and drawings by Rick Copsey and Lee Machell.

Untitled Gallery’s pop-up space is a part of Peering Sideways, an exhibition and events programme at PSL, bringing together artists’ groups from around the UK (London, Manchester and Wakefield).

Etching in E-Ink

Download from Amazon, price 86p!

Anna Frew, Dante Between the Realms

Organised by Dave Griffiths & Joe Duffy: “This show brings together 5 artists who share an archaeological urge, encompassing film, publishing, print, photography, sculpture and embroidery. The Lost Thread inhabits a passing place between analogue and digital worlds, reinventing old media and devices as future formats for reading the image. Joe Duffy’s slide-viewer installation explores authenticity, memory and trauma from appropriated eye-witness accounts of a famous death. Anna Frew investigates the Kindle’s intersection of traditional paper and E-Ink book-making. Dave Griffiths‘ microfiche plate offers the opportunity to reconstruct a model human from photographic remains, and Mary Stark creates tactile woven artefacts from abandoned celluloid film. Claire Thomas‘ handmade film installation provides an insight into personal recollection locked in a physical space, whilst also remarking on the recently bankrupt knitting factory in which this exhibition takes place.

The Lost Thread also launches a new Kindle zine Etching in E-Ink, designed and edited by Anna Frew and published by Vapid Media. Featuring images and texts by the artists, it can be downloaded from Amazon, price 86p!

Claire Thomas, The Button Box

2 x 35mm filmloops, 2 x filmstrip projectors

Fragments of found advertising for 1970s cigarettes Players No 6.  Two men and a dog. Flatness expanded in Möbius strips. Testing the cinematic and sculptural dynamics of occupying and crossing a corner.

Part of Peering Sideways at Project Space Leeds, 10 September – 10 December 2011

In Sorry for the Inconvenience, five artists affiliated with Manchester’s Rogue Artists’ Studios come together to show sculpture, video and installation. Although not working to a group manifesto, their practices display intrinsic commonalities. These artists explore and exploit the synergy between them, through experiments with mass, temporality, movement, material, and narrative.

Paul Cordwell, Dave Griffiths, Jessica Longmore, Lee Machell, Dan Mort and Untitled Gallery

About Peering Sideways: “This ambitious project brings together three artists’ groups from London, Manchester and Wakefield in a new exhibition at PSL. The title suggests looking askance, or taking a fresh look, at something familiar. It hints at the artist-peers taking part in the show, which aims to examine the idea of artists’ groups – how and why artists come together to create work, share studio space, network and exhibit together. The project also aims to grow the networks of the participating artists and groups, sparking new relationships and collaborations. Some of the work will form a static exhibition, whilst some will develop in the space over the course of the project.”

Each group from Peering Sideways will be publishing a 12 page colour newspaper consecutively throughout the project, on sale at PSL for £3.

Featuring peers from the MA at Goldsmiths, Other People’s Problems brings together eight artists whose foundation for production is conceptual criticality and a shared concern for basing work within a socio-political field of enquiry. Art, here, is a tool with which to take responsibility, an idea that is perhaps often shied away from. Featuring Sophie Carapetian, Tom Crawford, Frauke Dannert, Ross Downes, Patrick Goddard, J L Murthaugh, Megan Rooney and Rehana Zaman.

Welcome To The Real World: these individuals have been united as part of a national network of people, through their commitment to the same principles laid out by the charitable organization Art House. Autonomous motivations and remote geographical locations are reflected in these practices, however through the physicality of the gallery space the works presented ultimately form associations as part of a network of ideas. Featuring Ben Cove, Gill Greenhough, Victoria Lucas, Marion Michell, Aidan Moesby and Lois Palframan.

Oriel Mwldan, Cardigan, 21 May – 2 July 2011

Curated by Michael Cousin (Outcasting): “The ability to understand and bestow importance to moving images is embedded in the cultural psyche. From cinema, television and the Internet there is an endless stream of content to view, one that we can never hope to keep up with. A hundred films to see before you die. A thousand. A hundred thousand. But the beauty of this is choosing your own hundred, your own thousand. You make your own list.

For this show Outcasting, the online moving image gallery is screening a hundred films from those that it has screened in three years of programming. The films come from a variety of genres and styles and hopefully reflect the full breadth of artists engagement with this medium. Over the course of the 43 days that the show will be running audiences will be able to see a truly international range of work with the 100 films being rotated throughout that time.”

Featuring Edward Adam, Louise Adkins, Simon Aeppli, Beard & Ferguson, Beck & Calvo, Birkbeck & Duffy, Andrew Bucksbarg, Dana Cooley, Leandro Cordova, Anne-Marie Creamer, Herve Constant, Boldi Csernak, Gordon Culshaw, David Cushway, Ron Diorio, Sarah Doyle, Antonello Faretta, Kim Fielding, Hondartza Fraga, Rabab Ghazoul, Dave Griffiths, Henry Gwiazda, Anton Hecht, Tetsushi Higashino, Richard Higlett, Sam Holden, Stephanie Hough, Neale Howells, Ronee Hui, Olga Koroleva, Yaron Lapid, Derek Larson, Lemeh 42, Rebecca Lennon, Lauren Moffat, Patrizia Monzani, Kika Nicolela, Daniel & Marianna O’Reilly, Stephen Palmer, Robert Pearre, Guilherme Pedreiro, Yannick Puig, Nicolas Ramel, Giulia Ricci, Liz Rodda, Henrique Roscoe, Jennie Savage, Selina Shah, James Snazell, Lisa Stansbie, Alysse Stepanian, Jacki Storey, Jennie Thwing, Katri Walker, Kim Walker, Anders Weberg, Christopher Webster, Jessica Westbrook, Rachel Wilberforce, Tina Willgren and Dawn Woolley.

Bureau

Curated by Sophia Crilly: “We Are All In This Together is a celebration of both Bureau’s fifth birthday and the current contemporary scene across the UK. It appears prescient in the face of the recent arts cuts, as Bureau extends an invitation to UK based artists to exhibit work at their Manchester gallery. The exhibition aims to feature new and existing works by as many artists as possible, as in a challenging curatorial exercise, Bureau relinquishes control of their curated gallery programme and issues a call out to artists to provide the exhibition content.

We Are All In This Together pays tribute to preeminent curator Walter Hopps’ seminal 36 Hours project at MOTA (The Museum of Temporary Art), Washington, USA in 1978. The concept for 36 Hours was for any artist to take a single work to the gallery, without any chance of rejection or censorship, and Hopps would personally hang the works as they arrived. The show was inclusive, making no distinction between artists or selection of works, the only limitation being a size restriction. Bureau will adhere to this framework in an attempt to explore curatorial models and boundaries, and experiment with exhibition formats, extending the timeframe from 36 hours to 36 days.

Cornerhouse, Manchester, 14 May, 4pm, free

Organised by Kate Taylor as part of Future Everything 2011: “Bringing the visual arts community and Manchester’s thriving digital design sector together in a playful and informal setting, this event will  give you a taste of what’s happening inside the mind of some of the city’s leftfield innovators. Ten artists and designers will make lightning presentations about a current project, experiment or source of inspiration.  The event is in tribute to the city of Sendai in Japan, to highlight their creative energy and links with Manchester, as they begin to rebuild following the earthquake in March.

Dave Griffiths will present Babel Fiche first in a series of new web-based artworks commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella.

Also: Design By Day, John O’Shea, Brendan Dawes (Magnetic North), Jon Grant (Cahoona), Manchester Modernist Society, Hwa Young Jung (MadLab), WOW (Sendai), Elliot Woods.

Photos: MadLabUK

Cine Esquema Novo 2011. Programme selected by Madrid Experimental Film Week:

Dave Griffiths,

Edited by John Davidson: “The 21st installment of the JSF presents eight existential texts questioning what it means to be human. The works of this volume dissect this riddle through the use of narrative, archival footage, computer-manipulated images, video and the art of flexible film to show us a well-rounded mix of the many forms of human expression. Hypothesis, experiments and conclusions travel through the realms of musical abstractions, technological interfacing, human memory, and visual/physical pleasure. However most of the artists find that these existential mysteries remain enigmatic.”

Tara Samuel, Shun Yu Mo, Clint Enns, Kevin Van Scoder, Grace Carter + Holly Andres, Dave Griffiths, Adam Levine, Cathy Lee Crane

Babel Fiche launches 18 March 2011 at www.babelfiche.net, the first in a series of new web-based projects commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella.

For this collaborative film, I invite members of the public during 2011 to gather and select a set of amateur video clips that describe contemporary, everyday life around the Earth. These movie fragments will be transformed into a set of colour microfiche films – a photographic medium capable of lasting 500 years and simply requiring light and a lens to expand its contents. This analogue throwback might even outlast our current reliance on fragile digital storage.

Babel Fiche is an imaginary media for future anthropologists. It asks which behaviours, objects, traditions and conflicts we want to communicate to a future world. Today’s human cultures, physique and technology will inevitably develop out of all recognition. So how might a future species translate our current times?  Babel Fiche will ponder the problem by animating and remixing the microfiche contents as a series of new short films. This production stage is driven through Wreckamovie, an online platform to help organise participatory movie projects.

The project thus surrenders authorial control in favour of a crowd-sourced, democratically produced artwork. Members of online communities will write, design and compose a series of animated shorts using the microfiche as a resource. You are welcome to participate by suggesting storyboards, scripts, or other experimental approaches to direct the animation. Speculate how a far-future researcher might re-interpret these fragments.

Process and conversation are given equal value to the eventual end product. The final results of this endeavour are as yet unknown. Babel Fiche wonders if it will be possible to resolve coherent films under these social conditions, and viewers and collaborators are invited to follow the progress of the project as it develops and changes.

Babel Fiche is a production residency commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella, with support from North West Film Archive at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Curated by Wago Krieder & Jessica Allee of Studio 27: “A program of avant-garde and underground works that reframe the uncanny, transgressive, and grotesque”.

Max Hattler, Tony Gault, Dave Griffiths, Jerstin Crosby, Jonathan Monaghan, Melissa Potter, Todd Herman, Actung Fittor, Ricardo Sleiman and Emilie Crewe

“Dave Griffiths presents his film and lightbox installation Seer’s Catalogue, a series of variations on a theme that, with deadpan earnestness, takes in primordial myth and post-nuclear apocalypse, accompanied with a melodramatic voiceover: “They penetrated my eyes … I needed to find an explanation … So I peered in their nests … That was my downfall …” The film is a flickering collage of naff B-movie sequences overlaid with a faded soundtrack. Images quiver as if stuck on the film reel or fixed in the distinctly paranoid protagonist’s memory. The whole thing would come across as an exercise in cult retro film cliches if it were not for the strangely compelling insistence of that narration: “From the start there were imperfections … variations … This one the size of Poland … This one a grain of sand.”  RC, Bureau, to 29 Jan.

Alpha 60: “Time is like a circle which is endlessly described. The declining arc is the past. The inclining arc is the future.” [i]

In The Remembered Film, Victor Burgin recounts the 1916 experimental drifts of André Breton and Jacques Vaché through a random sequence of Nantes movie houses.[ii] By visiting a rapid succession of ‘darkened rooms’, in subjective strikes designed to absorb audio-visual fragments, these artists both explored a performative research method for making new work, and echoed 19^th century cinema-going where the anarchic audience held sway over makeshift spaces and narrative interpretation. After enduring decades of fractured observation and remixing (in collage, cut-ups, sampling) now film images are somewhat embedded as open-source materials in contemporary art practice, along with the staple concerns of re-siting the cinema event and repurposing the audience’s function.

Cinema’s seductive constellation of illusion and ideology has consistently inspired and resourced generations of artists. The international practitioners featured in UnSpooling – Artists & Cinema continue this perennial obsession with the archive, and the lonesome/collective movie-going experience, to propose new possibilities of cinematic production, spectacle and storytelling. These works suggest narrative, sensual and deconstructed readings, but operate with or without the usual conventions of screen, celluloid, digital video, motion, and time. In straddling the frames of objecthood and immaterial image they perhaps occupy the position of Bellour’s ‘other cinema’,[iii] the recapturing of motion pictures as expanded artefacts and forms that question normal expectations about the production, display and experience of cinema. Incorporating painting, sculpture, drawing, performative actions, architecture, street interventions, film and video, the works featured in UnSpooling dissect physical constituents, collective memories, histories and theories of cinema. Particular iconic movies and key tropes of film language unravel as potent materials and strategy for artistic production.

Through chemical reactions, personal archives, bodily gestures and spoken-word, these artists deploy a diverse array of methods to prompt reflection on past, present and potential forms of cinema. John Kelsey stated in 2008 that “cinema is not only moving images, it is a system of productive relations and a chance to intervene in the specific rhythms and distances that determine these from without and within”.[iv] So how do these productions, these sequences, sit within the spatial confines of the gallery and wider frame of the parent institution? Cornerhouse’s dual histories, of exhibiting critical contemporary art and independent world cinema, have only occasionally found common discursive ground to galvanize its two spheres. Perhaps this is symptomatic of the separate distribution cycles, audiences and rhythms that drive them.

From the outset we approached the Cornerhouse galleries and exterior site as a fourth cinema space in which to review the relationship and twin concerns of art and film. Alongside loaning recent work we also utilised the institution as narrative trigger and spatial apparatus for artists to produce new work. Juhana Moisander explored Cornerhouse folklore and swirling Manchester streetlife in uncanny ghostly video interventions across the site. In a new commission Mario Rossi has produced Thief of Baghdad, a melancholic restaurant canopy on the exterior of Cinema 1, whose vacant facade proposes a potential narrative site. In a new live spoken-word and drawing event, Wayne Lloyd re-told Val Guest’s cult 1960 noir Hell is a City, replacing the Manchester-set film with his own stage presence, diagrams, and remembered, imaginary re-description.

Harald Smykla adds to his Movie Protocol series, a live durational drawing in which he rapidly sketched every shot as an evolving scroll on OHP acetate. By rendering Nicolas Roeg’s Insignificance in glyph-like forms, Smykla delves into Cornerhouse’s infancy (its first ever film screening in 1985) and develops a personal shorthand with which to undertake filmic analysis. Along the outside wall of Cinema 1 Stefan Zeyen’s new flyposter frieze, Weekend, has reworked Godard’s infamous long take as a static spatial rendering of screen time at one of Manchester’s most traffic-laden junctions. Based over the river Irwell, at the independent creative community of Salford’s Islington Mill, Alex Pearl has made one low-fi video per day, evoking the DIY anarchy of the early English film industry.

In spite of our including room-based video installation, an early intention was to establish a critique of this ubiquitous display convention. Gallery exhibition of moving images, to remix one of Robert Bresson’s Notes, tends to rely on the “terrible habit of artist’s film and video”.[v] The black-box/white-cube ideal, in which bite-sized video is commonly framed, assumes a mentally and physically itinerant spectator, superior to the supposed collective passivity in the conventional movie auditorium. This duality sits uneasily in artist’s film and video discourse. Indeed, the basic problem of durational observation and unscrambling lies at the heart of all moving image consumption. Through narrative themes and display strategies in UnSpooling we play with issues of mobility, anxiety and instability of the observer. In Michaël Borremans’ The German and related drawings, a room of ambulatory spectators is confronted by a didactic, gesturing figure. As they circulate, the focus of their attention within the black box is uncertain. In David Claerbout’s Bordeaux Piece, even the most ‘active’ spectators would be pushed to their limit consuming all 13 hours 40 minutes of sequential repetition.

Several works feature subversive interpellation of iconic scenes that illustrate the continuing project of contemporary artists to critically recycle and re-present cinema language and history. Mario Rossi displays The End/Untitled, a canvas depicting the final shot from Psycho where Marion’s Ford Custom is dredged from the Bates Motel swamp; a frame that embodies our voyeuristic guilt and terrifying memory of the heroine’s dying gestures. Watercolours from Rossi’s series Thief of Baghdad adapt web-sourced images of movie-themed hotels and watering holes that typify our collective willingness to blur cinematic fantasy into everyday life. In other narrative re-enactments Wayne Lloyd presents half-remembered arthouse classics as pared-down comic strips and Ming Wong’s Life and Death in Venice positions us between the gazes of a dying composer and his young object of desire. Filmed without permission on location at the 2009 Biennale, his DIY world cinema ducks and dives in a guerilla-style dialectic with the national pavilions.

Our digitally enabled ability to slow, freeze and pore over the image is reflected by artists working in the vast field of appropriated-footage works, with their forensic dissections and stuttering collage; a tendency exemplified by Elizabeth McAlpine’s Hyena Stomp. Extracting frames of shut-eyed actors, her C-print reworks Frank Stella’s iconic painting to explore the probing spectator’s gaze and its seductive encounter with screen objects and film’s materiality. Similarly, Sheena Macrae’s Odyssey remixes Stanley Kubrick’s 2001, reconfiguring the entire epic as abstracted slit-scans installed in a mirrored infinity chamber. Odyssey engages the spectator firmly in a tactile experience which toys with the film’s original musing on infinity and eternity, and the photographic methods of its famous Star Gate sequence.

Other works refer to the mechanics, perceptual tricks and inherent physical insecurity of celluloid media. Gebhard Sengmüller exposes the central paradox of film; an atomised strip of stills, afloat on a sea of dark energy, which somehow creates the illusion of life. Slide Movie is an infernal, clattering installation of 12 carousels showing a sequence from Sam Peckinpah’s Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia through individual static frames, revealing the indeterminate status of film through an absurd model of projection. In Stefan Zeyen’s short film Farewell, which originated on 35mm, a woman returns our gaze from the passenger seat of a convertible heading towards a vanishing point. Her image is digitally scaled up in counter-movement, causing the picture quality to corrode and drawing its viewers through the emulsion into the very fabric of celluloid — truly a film adrift in the cosmos. In Roots, a glowing, primeval brew of iron salts and platinum, Roman Kirschner sculpts fragile, short-lived crystal structures that grow and fizzle in a cyclical, dream-like reminder of visual and aural pleasures in the cinema of attractions.

The cinematic apparatus is very much present before the spectator in a four-hour live event, Kinematic – UnSpooling Projectors, featuring leading exponents of expanded and improvised cinema. Ben Gwilliam & Matt Wand’s new 16mm and Foley piece, I Married a Foley Footstep! refers to both the aural illusion inherent in film production, and the theatrical early years of silent film with live musical accompaniment. From their darkrooms Sally Golding and Kerry Laitala both bring hand-made loops using archive images, contact printing and DIY photochemistry. Golding portrays an obsession with horror using mirrors, lighting and her own body, whilst Laitala foregrounds the operator’s magical role in disseminating cinematic illusion and managing the audience. Cipher Screen, performed by Greg Pope with Lee Patterson, visually and aurally unifies the projector, film material, screen and darkened space by exploiting celluloid abrasions that are sonically manipulated. Cartune Xprez takes the audience back to the future of variety-show antics, with a video cabaret performance featuring international low-fi animation.

The idea of the boundless apparatus is further explored in other essays contained in this catalogue. Andrew Bracey adopts the investigative persona of Jonathan Gates, fictional film-historian hero of Theodore Roszak’s 1995 novel Flicker, who uncovers new subversive celluloid technologies with the unrealised potential to revolutionise the viral power of the medium. Conversely, Steve Hawley deconstructs the dogma of perfection surrounding HD video present and future, and its questionable value in forging truly paradigmatic shifts in moving image aesthetics. Janet Harbord discusses the inherited cinematic archive as both a historical burden and a means of adaptation to contemporary circumstances. By cutting and re-modelling it in multiple ways we at the same time violate its authority, and force it ‘to speak again, unexpectedly’.

To celebrate 25 years of Manchester’s Cornerhouse it seemed apt to survey current artistic engagement with cinema’s canon and methodologies, and the productive function of the institution. These models of cinema, which are a mere sample of international practice in this field, establish a staging post in the future acceleration and mutation of form — Cinema 4.0 perhaps. Such formal junctures, however temporary, are novel convergences of the technical lineage (photographic film, sound and digital), along with an infinitely variable range of materials, sites and social production strategies, and a memory of the deep archaeological time of media. In UnSpooling, pre-cinematic traces emerge of kinetic devices, magic lanterns and vaudeville. Senses of arrival and departure pervade the work, along with an understated simplicity that belies insecurity about the unknown forward trajectory.

The future of cinematography belongs to a new race of young solitaries who will shoot films by putting their last penny into it and not let themselves be taken in by the material routines of the trade. [vi]

[ii] The Remembered Film (London: Reaktion Books, 2004) p. 7

[iii] ‘D’un autre cinema’, Trafic, no. 34, Summer 2000, pp. 5-21

[iv] ‘Moving Images Moving Images’, in Art and the Moving Image ed, by Tanya Leighton (London: Afterall/Tate, 2008) p. 402

[v] Notes on the Cinematographer, trans. by Jonathan Griffin (London: Quartet Books, 1986) p. 5. Bresson originally wrote “The terrible habit of theatre”.

[vi] Bresson, Notes, p. 111

Roxy Bar & Screen, 128-132 Borough High St SE1, 13 January 2011, 8pm

An event during London Short Film Festival

Curated by Kate Taylor: An evening of recent artists’ films using moving image archives, featuring the London premiere of the Gleaners project, commissioned by Abandon Normal Devices. Experimental filmmakers Jenna Collins and Sam Meech present two new kaleidoscopic short films, made during residencies in the North West Film Archive at Manchester Metropolitan University. Diving into the amateur fiction footage, Jenna Collins arrives at a new film that focuses on accent, atmosphere and what might be just over the North West horizon. Meanwhile, building up a classic narrative with a dream-inflected twist, Sam Meech’s epic collage will be narrated live by poet Nathan Jones of the Mercy Collective, with a score by Carl Brown of Wave Machines.

An accompanying programme of short films will expand on the spectrum of artistic approaches to mixing found footage with electric results, including films from Jordan Baseman, Sarah Wood and Dave Griffiths.

“When the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm declared cinema the pre-eminent art form of the 20th century, thereby relegating painting to the 19th, one wouldn’t have expected visual artists to agree quite so readily. Even with those whose practices generally steer clear of video or film, there has been a willingness to engage with the perceptual conditions that accompany the medium. The art gallery seems to have been renovated into another type of cinematic space, transforming the white cube into a black box. And in the exhibition Unspooling: Artists & Cinema, one finds concerns more familiar to the film theorist than the art critic: the voyeuristic gaze of the spectator, the disruption of narrative, and an abiding interest in a certain kind of cinema (namely, arthouse, independent and foreign-language).

While the oeuvre of Jean-Luc Godard inspires reverence in many a film buff, there is hardly a flood of directors following in his footsteps. However, in this exhibition alone, there are three separate works that directly refer to Godard’s films (and I can think of several others not included here). Sheena Macrae’s Alphaville, 2008, shares both its name and content with the 1965 original, juxtaposing a snippet of the film with the negative image of the same footage. The protagonists, engaged in an elusive, typically Godardian, conversation in a lift, appear doomed to remain in limbo, endlessly circulating from screen to screen without agreement or resolution. Like Stefan Zeyen’s outdoor posters, lining the road outside the adjacent cinemas and echoing the traffic jam in Godard’s 1967 film Weekend, Macrae’s appropriation of a specific sequence from the film emphasises the inherent open-endedness of the director’s practice and his refusal to conform to conventional narrative structures: ‘A story should have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order.’ David Claerbout’s Bordeaux Piece, 2004, takes this approach to its illogical conclusion. In this film, a brief scene based on Godard’s Le Mépris (Contempt) portrays a man, his son and a woman seemingly caught between the two. Claerbout, though, films and replays this encounter repeatedly, at different times of the day, so that the ambient light of the setting subtly alters within each recurrence. There is still a narrative at work here though; Bordeaux Piece runs throughout the day, allowing the ‘real’ time of the filming process to overtake the ‘fictional’ time of the scenario and thereby rendering the structure of the process visible. One sees an accrual of unsatisfactory takes and an endless rehearsal of the characters’ complex, irresolvable differences.

Oedipal dramas also surface in Mario Rossi’s The End (Untitled), 1999, a painting of the closing frame of Hitchcock’s Psycho. Although part of a larger series, the selection of this particular work is paramount. Hitchcock recognised the potential of title sequences in his frequent collaboration with Saul Bass (who also designed the typography for Vertigo and North by Northwest) and, in Psycho, the director even pre-empts ‘the end’ by abruptly dispatching the lead character prior to the halfway mark of the film. One is jolted by this occurrence, suddenly made aware that the storyline being followed is merely a preamble to another, unexpected narrative. (This disruption of the viewer’s expectations recurs in Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s 2007 film Grindhouse, where they employed B-movie genre characteristics such as fake movie previews and a double bill of two separate stories. The conceit failed, with audiences confusedly leaving after the first feature, and the film was eventually re-released in two parts.)

There is a Brechtian quality to this urge to dispel illusionism, to fracture narrative in order to reveal the mechanics and tactics that make film ‘work’. Such an approach also seeks to puncture the hermetic space of the cinema itself. Michaël Borreman’s The German, 2004-07, presents a diorama of a movie theatre, with miniature figures gazing at the close-up image of a man performing a sleight-ofhand trick. The (gallery) viewer is granted access to the recesses of the auditorium and the figures peering upwards, to see the screen within the screen. At the same time, they are implicated. The arrangement recalls Roland Barthes’s recognition of the dual ‘fascinations’ of the cinema, the way that the spectator’s submission to the film’s narrative is echoed in the self-conscious awareness of their position, ‘ready to fetishize not the image but precisely what exceeds it: the texture of the sound, the hall, the darkness, the obscure mass of the other bodies’. One suspends disbelief while, simultaneously, realising the necessity of this suspension in order to ‘enjoy’ the film.

In stripping back the curtain to reveal the artifice of the medium, there is only a series of further illusions, other fictions. In place of some unattainable reality, one finds mediated representations. This might explain why so many works here function as a sort of homage to certain genres, techniques and scenes or the artist’s formative experiences as a cinematic viewer. In the visual transcriptions of specific films by Wayne Lloyd and Harald Smykla, there is a sense of the artist-as-intermediary, relaying the picture’s narrative through language, painting and drawing, while the ephemeral figures in Juhana Moisander’s projections refer back to both the technological origins of cinema – magic lanterns, zoetropes, stroboscopes – and the particular anecdotal history of its location, which is based on the artist’s collection of rumours and stories from gallery staff. However, it is Ming Wong who most radically intervenes in his source material. His three-screen installation Life and Death in Venice, 2010, puts the artist in the place of the central characters in Visconti’s film of the (almost) same name. In the guise of the much older Gustav von Aschenbach, the artist longingly stares across the gallery at himself, as Tadzio, the young object of his affection. A separate monitor shows Ming clumsily performing Mahler’s Symphony no. 5, the composition that scores the original film. Yet this is a very different Venice, filmed during the artist’s involvement in the 53rd Biennale as the Singaporean representative. The main characters wander through galleries and installations, against a backdrop of works by John Baldessari and Tom of Finland (appropriate, given the story’s homosexual themes), even dropping in on Ragnar Kjartansson’s durational performance in the Icelandic pavilion. In this film, Venice is a globalised hub of activity, and it is the loss of geographical and cultural specificity that informs Ming’s wider practice, where Hollywood and Hong Kong, Fassbinder and Douglas Sirk, intermingle and amalgamate. As he once stated, in reference to the colonial history and the assimilation of immigrants in contemporary Singapore: ‘I don’t even know what a Singaporean is.’ For Wong, cinema is a possible answer to this dilemma; not simply a form of entertainment but a medium that is able to make up the very fabric of the viewer’s identity.”

Chris Clarke is a critic and curator of education and collections at Lewis Glucksman Gallery, University College Cork, Ireland.