Frieze. Summer 07.

"Writers-turned-directors are a familiar breed, but [David] Lynch is rare in being a major filmmaker who began his career as a painter," writes Kristin M Jones, whose next sentence has a certain Lynchian zip: "Texture crossed with light and movement gets him going." Inland Empire is discussed, of course, but so, too, are Lynch's big plans for the future: an arts center in Lodz, Poland, for example. "Plans are also in the pipeline with architect and urban planner Rob Krier, who is involved in a larger urban redevelopment expected to include a museum addressing Lynch's film, art and ideas, post-production and sound recording facilities, a festival centre, contemporary art and technical museums and various cultural facilities." Then: "Interestingly, Lynch's transition to digital video coincides with that of certain revered filmmakers working in the avant-garde, an arena that not long ago saw adamant resistance to video. Who could have imagined visionary filmmakers would make it seem easy to leave film behind?"

To further catch up with the last couple of issues of Frieze: "Even if you believe that art takes on a life of its own in the realm of its reception, this in no way implies that biography and subjectivity are taboo subjects to explore," reads an argument in an unbylined piece. "Rather, it is often when this happens that the excitement starts: biography and subjectivity collide head-on with the indeterminacies of production, the formal questions of physical, technical and social process - all of which brings us back to [Mark Raidpere's video work] Shifting Focus."

"Given the languid pace and relentless atmosphere of angst, Là-bas at first seems painfully esoteric, but for those with patience there is, as promised, a pay-off," writes Joanna Kleinberg. "Rather than being self-centred or indulgent, [Chantal] Akerman's malaise is sophisticated, culturally minded and, to an extent, well founded."

"A sense of blissful isolation permeates [Robert] Beavers's jewel-like films, generally composed of precisely edited and exacting sequences of images and short scenes that rapaciously cap-ture the processes of filmmaking itself, Beavers's intense emotional and intellectual relationship with [Gregory] Markopoulos, and the vividly beautiful rural and urban landscapes encountered in their newly adopted European surroundings," writes Andrew Bonacina. "Structural and mechanical devices used to suture together the image sequence or to emphasize the 'objectness' of the depicted forms frequently interrupt these elegantly composed visual chains."

Emily King on Helvetica: "Desktop publishing technologies may have made us ready for a film that touches on spacing and kerning, but they haven't eradicated the need for a substantial amount of scene-setting.... For good or ill, Helvetica's geometric forms litter the urban environment so densely that most of us barely notice them. Over the course of the film they are likened, with differing degrees of affection, to air, gravity, fast food and perfume."

"My formative viewing experiences came from the many films and documentaries that my dad recorded from tele-vision throughout his video-owning life," writes Luke Fowler. "Although his timing was somewhat unreliable (films would often miss their beginning or run out of tape before their conclusion), his knowledge and appreciation of British and world cinema were flawless. I am indebted to him for this induction." An anecdote-enlivened list follows.

"At 82 minutes long [Eve] Sussman's [Rape of the Sabine Women] is a lush, strange spectacle: video art-cum-film that basks in the cinematic glow of its own complexity, adding sumptuous, almost frilly, layer on layer of art-historical, popular and filmic references," writes Jenni Sorkin. "It is easy to appreciate, even praise, Sussman's know-it-all approach, but it can only be called kitsch couture, a highbrow, unironic presentation of sheer excess."

"[Grace] Ndiritu's work has the most impact in the moments where it loads undetermined gestures with implied significance," writes Melissa Gronlund. "The photojournalist in Responsible Tourism is a recorded fact; Ndiritu's actions in Still Life are quite possibly the idle caresses of one whose mind is elsewhere - to read these as, respectively, a metonym for Western colonialism and cultural fetishization, and purposeful eroticized behaviour, arguably reflects the viewer's expectations of what the work of a young, black, female British artist might be about."

Also: Sam Thorne on the music and films of Phill Niblock (who once worked with Sun Ra), Brian Dillon on what two of Andy Warhol's Screen Tests suggest about Susan Sontag's then-evolving persona, Claire Gilman on the work of Yoshua Okon and Jan Verwoert on a soft left / hard left divide in the art world.

Posted by dwhudson at June 4, 2007 7:50 AM