Upcoming Screenings Online/Week of June 21st

Top Picks for Art Online Week of June 21st

DAMELO TODO (Give Me Everything) (2010-2011) by Wu Tsang

Whitney Museum of American Art/Whitney Screens

June 26, 2020@7pm/Free
"This screening will present the film in its entirety. The live-stream will remain on Vimeo until Sunday, June 28 at 10 pm EDT."

I do not know much about the work of 2018 MacArthur Award Winner Wu Tsang but, anyone that collaborates with the force that is Fred Moten (who Ja'Tovia Gary quoted in a recent Q&A as saying "upward mobility means getting closer to the people who want to kill you") is worth learning more about. The Whitney continues it's Friday online screening with Tsang's DAMELO TODO (Give Me Everything). It isn't entirely clear to me the way the project will be presented as it seems the piece is intended to be screened in an installation setting-- a remake of a space similar to the Silver Platter a Latinx queer bar in L.A. where much of the film takes place, the film displayed on the tv behind the counter. The film itself lives in the hybrid space of doc and narrative mixing together interviews with "Alexis Giraldo, a transgender woman who was incarcerated in an all-male facility" with a short story penned by Raquel Gutierrez about a Salvadoran civil war refugee who discovers a renewed sense of life and justice on the stage of the Californian bar. Stage lights shine bright with belonging, a sense of self emerges. The fact that Tsang comes from the activist world and not the film world is of note as it seems like her work inhabits a sense of intimacy and immediacy, the body politic as it naturally springs forth from simply living. Excited to see this one! 

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Love Is The Message, The Message Is Death (2016) by Arthur Jafa
Screening Online for 48hrs
Multiple Museum Venues Online 
Starts on June 26, 2020@2pm
Two round table panel discussions will take place June 27&28@2pm

I have been wanting to see Love Is the Message forever after seeing a bootleg of the film's installation on youtube and having the film's soundtrack (Kanye's Ultralight Beam) glide into my playlists with reverence reminiscent of an exhausted modern prayer. Jafa began his work as a photographer most notably working as DP on Julie Dash's seminal film Daughters of the Dust (1991). He has since gone on to become a force in the art film world (Winner of the Golden Lion) and music video world (Solange, Cranes In The Sky) crafting a signature montage of black American moving image. This particular film uses a series of archival materials, youtube clips and other images shot by Jafa, a comment on the making of black identity through media. Every cut Jafa makes resonates with meaning, his work as an editor spearheading new, lyrical semiotics. The revolution is being televised, how will these histories be remembered? Do. Not. Miss. This. Film.

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Black Celebration (A Rebellion Against the Commodity) (1988) by Tony Cokes

Hammer Museum & the Dia Arts Foundation

June 25@9am-June 28@6pm/Free
(I added this after the initial post because I just watched it and it blew my mind.)

The piece alternates text and images, words from Marxists to Pop Musicians (Guy Debord, Barbara Kruger, Martin Gore, and Morrissey), images from newsreels, and documentary footage of riots in Boston, New York, Los Angeles and Newark NJ in the 1960s. The soundtrack is by Skinny Puppy. The look of the film is a black & white VHS texture, interlacing jumbled, the use of slow-motion is jagged and arresting. The anti-capitalist creeds scream against a stark black background laying bare the root of all acts of rioting, pointing out the ways in which people are continually subjugated by the dollar and rebel accordingly. Watch this film loudly in all of its gritty punk beauty and class critique truth bombing. I love this piece. 

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LOOKING FOR MUSHROOMS (1959–67/1996) by Bruce Conner
Paula Cooper Gallery & Camden Art Centre, Online
June 22-29, 2020/Free

Bruce Conner, another artist whose work I am not familiar with, will have his piece LOOKING FOR MUSHROOMS screen online via Paula Cooper Gallery. Conner's career seems to span genre and medium everything from intricate, obsessive drawings , crude collages/assemblages (notes of Rauschenberg) and experimental films often stitched together from archival materials like newsreels. Conner is also credited with using pop music in his films, predating the music video. This particular film lies outside of all of these genres, it is more of an experimental meditation/documentary filmed on 16mm by the artist while in Mexico. Reflections, shapes and colors layer atop one another, blurry movements become their own objects. It is sculptural filmmaking (he was friends with Stan Brakhage) made whole by the palpitations of jazz minimalist Terry Riley. Watch this on a large screen with good speakers.

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Redoubt (2019) by Matthew Barney
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Film Screening
Rentable in the US via Grasshopper Film for 24hrs
June 25, 2020@7pm/$12
(50% of the Revenue will support Guggenheim programming initiatives)

The thing that Björk's ex does best is elevating the mundane to the mythic and demoting the mythic to the mundane. His work often makes me uncomfortable and that was before I knew of his history as a high school footballer. And as a model. And almost a plastic surgeon. I don't know much about his new film other than it looks like a hunt through a snowy white landscape dotted with the bloodstains of the fallen. Creation and destruction balance precariously, steeped in tradition while survival and expression engage in a dance of wills. The characters play in deliberate movement, the gestalt in every step is choreographed intention. Barney's work is generally hit or miss for me but his conceptual visions tend to be unique regardless of whether I become sickened by vaseline heaps or sleepy from the meditative wake of boats against the placid sea. His work is also often hard to physically access so it is worth noting when there is a possibility for the art inclined (aka privileged) masses to behold his strange, creepy markings. Reviews mention this is one of his more watchable films...but keep in mind that that is relative.

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Please send recs for upcoming weeks to: donnak3[at]gmail[dot]com