Category Archives: Video

ELLEN FULLMAN AND THE LONG STRING INSTRUMENT

Artist/Composer Ellen Fullman has been working with her Long String Instrument since she developed it in 1981.  The Long String Instrument, an installation of dozens of wires 50 feet or more in length is tuned in Just Intonation and “bowed” with rosin-coated fingers, producing a chorus of minimal organ-like overtones. The instrument combines Fullman’s artistic expressions of everyday activities, such as walking, with a unique performance art sensibility. Fullman has developed a specialized notation system to choreograph the performer’s movements, exploring sonic events that occur at specific nodal point locations along the string-length of the instrument. She has recorded extensively with this unusual instrument and has collaborated with such other luminary figures as composer Pauline Oliveros, choreographer Deborah Hay, the Kronos Quartet and Keiji Haino.

This video features Ellen Fullman and the Long String Instrument in performance at MOCAD (The Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit) on March 9, 2013. With area musicians Abby Alwin (cello) and James Cornish (trumpet), and visiting musician Theresa Wong (cello).

Chet Baker :: Let’s Get Lost

A jazz standard, written by Jimmy McHugh and lyrics by Frank Loesser.The song was first performed in 1943 by Mary Martin and was included in the 1943 film Happy Go Lucky.

Let’s Get Lost used as the title for Bruce Weber’s  1988 academy award – nominated documentary about the life of Chet Baker.   Beautifully photographed by later-acclaimed director/cinematographer Jeff Preiss, Let’s Get Lost is a beautiful and poignant portrait of Chet Baker;

“Let’s Get Lost begins near the end of Baker’s life, on the beaches of Santa Monica, and ends at the Cannes Film Festival. Weber uses these moments in the present as bookends to the historic footage contained in the bulk of the film. The documentation ranges from vintage photographs by William Claxton in 1953 to appearances on The Steve Allen Show and kitschy, low budget Italian films Baker did for quick money.

A group of Baker fans, ranging from ex-associates to ex-wives and children, talk about the man. Weber’s film traces the man’s career from the 1950s, playing with jazz greats like Charlie Parker, Gerry Mulligan, and Russ Freeman, to the 1980s, when his heroin addiction and domestic indifference kept him in Europe. By juxtaposing these two decades, Weber presents a sharp contrast between the younger, handsome Baker — the statuesque idol who resembled a mix of James Dean and Jack Kerouac — to what he became, “a seamy looking drugstore cowboy-cum-derelict”, as J. Hoberman put it in his Village Voice review.” -wikipedia, let’s get lost (film)

The Making of an Underground Film: CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite, December 31, 1965 (w/Andy Warhol, Jonas Mekas, the Velvet Underground & Edie Sedgwick)

The Making of an Underground Film from CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite, broadcasted on 31st December 1965. Featuring Jonas Mekas, Piero Heliczer with Velvet Underground, Stan Brakhage, Willard Van Dyke, Andy Warhol and Edie Sedgwick

Wadada Leo Smith :: “Martin Luther King, Jr.”, from the album Ten Freedom Summers

On May 5, 2012, Jazz trumpeter and visionary composer Wadada Leo Smith released Ten Freedom Summers, a large-scale work 34 years in the making, comprising a four-disc box set.  The monumental 5-hour work is Smith’s meditation on the civil-rights movement and other related topics and is organized as 19 fully developed suites for various music ensemble configurations. Continue reading Wadada Leo Smith :: “Martin Luther King, Jr.”, from the album Ten Freedom Summers

THE REALITY OF KAREL APPEL, 1962, 15 minutes

“As an artist you have to fight and survive the wilderness to keep your creative freedom. Creativity is very fragile. It’s like a leaf in the fall; it hangs and when it drops you don’t know where it’s drifting.” –Karel Appel

Karel Appel, (Christiaan Karel Appel April 1921 – 3 May 2006) was a Dutch painter, sculptor, and poet. He started painting at the age of fourteen and studied at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam in the 1940s. He was one of the founders of the avant-garde movement Cobra in 1948.
Continue reading THE REALITY OF KAREL APPEL, 1962, 15 minutes

RICHARD KERN :: SUBMIT TO ME, 1985

SUBMIT TO ME is underground filmmaker Richard Kern’s third film, from 1985. Featuring Lydia Lunch, Cruella DeVille, Phil Forrest, Audrey Rose, Lung Leg, Brian Moran, Margie, Margo Day, Chris, Clint Ruin, Tom Turner, Amy Turner and
Richard Kern.  Music by the Butthole Surfers.

“He (Kern) first came to underground prominence as part of the underground cultural explosion in the East Village of New York City in the 1980s, with erotic and experimental films like The Right Side of My Brain and Fingered, which featured underground personalities of the time such as Lydia LunchDavid WojnarowiczSonic YouthKembra PfahlerKaren Finley and Henry Rollins. Like many of the musicians around him, Kern had a deep interest in the aesthetics of extreme sex, violence and perversion and was one of the leading lights of the movement called Cinema of Transgression, a term coined by Nick Zedd.” – wikipedia

 

 

CHRIS BURDEN :: BEAM DROP

In 1985, the late Chris Burden created a piece entitled Beam Drop for Art Park in New York.  The piece, involving a ‘performance’ of sorts while ultimately producing an art object as well, signals Burden’s transition to sculpture.

“Sixty enormous steel L-beams fall a dizzying 100 to 120 feet from a crane into a foundation of wet cement. They stick up like awkward, hostile pillars, clanging as they crowd together in a bulky clump. “Using chance as an integral element in art-making has historical precedence in the works of such renowned artists as Jackson Pollock, Marcel Duchamp, and John Cage,” wrote Burden in a statement on the piece. “However, most artists of monumental steel sculpture have not embraced randomness as the essential component of their work.”-Interview Magazine Continue reading CHRIS BURDEN :: BEAM DROP

AN INTRODUCTION TO SEMIOTICS & STRUCTURALISM, a lecture by Paul Fry, Yale University

In this lecture, Professor Paul Fry explores the semiotics movement through the work of its founding theorist, Ferdinand de Saussure. The relationship of semiotics to hermeneutics, New Criticism, and Russian formalism is considered. Key semiotic binaries–such as langue and parole, signifier and signified, and synchrony and diachrony–are explored. Considerable time is spent applying semiotics theory to the example of a “red light” in a variety of semiotic contexts. Continue reading AN INTRODUCTION TO SEMIOTICS & STRUCTURALISM, a lecture by Paul Fry, Yale University