Six Tuesdays After Film as a Critical Practice
This series of events, organised for LUX’s temporary project space LUX28, was partly inspired by White’s participation in the seminar ‘Film as a Critical Practice’, organised by Marta Kuzma at the Office for Contemporary Art in Oslo in 2007.
Characteristically, however, White extended some of the ideas of ‘critical practice’ into a more self-reflexive investigation of the format of the talks and screenings themselves. That included everything from a screening of Alexander Kluge’s legendary TV intervention Reformzirkus (1970) in which the audience were invited to make hand-written annotations onto the screen, to White staging a conversation with artist Cerith Wyn Evans whilst (in a nod to White’s own performance work IBIZA) Tony Conrad’s film The Flicker was projected on top of them.
“Six Tuesdays After Film as a Critical Practice is a series of ‘talks’ that further explores the same proposition from international and intergenerational perspectives and extends the idea of ‘critical practice’ to incorporate the structure of the event itself. It includes a continued enquiry into the work of three artists whose films and videos were also shown in Oslo: Emily Wardill interviews Peter Gidal and Emily Roysdon [now Every Ocean Hughes] presents a specially conceived performative work. Rosa Barba‘s two-projector sculpture/sound work Western Round Table 2027 is shown alongside a selection of original recordings from the 1949 Western Round Table on Modern Art featuring contributions from Marcel Duchamp, Frank Lloyd Wright and Arnold Schoenburg. There is an interactive presentation of the German television programme Reformzirkus (1970) in which the celebrated German filmmaker, writer and thinker Alexander Kluge intervenes to expose not only the construction of the programme itself but also cultural and social prejudice and radical, revolutionary ideas about the function of the medium that assault the established order. Artist Cerith Wyn Evans makes a special live event and the series begins with writer and academic Tom Holert‘s presentation of his recent video Ricostruzione: Dissertori/Libera (Towards a Historical Fable about Modernist Architecture and Psychology) (2007, co-authored with Claudia Honecke, commissioned by Manifesta 7). He discusses the relation between the critical practices of writing and art making, or working as a critic and as an artist making critical video, the coexistence and the navigation of these things.” – I.W., e-flux announcement
Programme details
3 February: Tom Holert, ‘Critical Practice’
Screening followed by talk
Ricostruzione: Dissertori/Libera (Towards a Historical Fable about Modernist Architecture and Psychology), Tom Holert with Claudia Honecker, 2007, 20’, video essay and various display elements
10 February: Cerith Wyn Evans
Conversation between Cerith Wyn Evans and Ian White
17 February: Rosa Barba, Western Round Table 2027
One-night exhibition
Western Round Table 2027, Rosa Barba, 2007, 2 x 16mm film, 2 x projector, 2 x loop, optical sound
3 March: Every Ocean Hughes (f.k.a. Emily Roysdon)
Specially conceived performative lecture
10 March: Alexander Kluge, Reformzirkus
Interactive screening
Reformzirkus, Alexander Kluge, West Germany 1970, 127’
24 March: Emily Wardill interviews Peter Gidal
Conversation and screening
No Night No Day, Peter Gidal. UK 1997, silent, 16mm, 15'
The Diamond (Descartes' Daughter), Emily Wardill, UK 2008, 15'
Further material
Listen to audio extract of Ian White introducing Cerith Wyn Evans event
LUX28, London
3 February - 24 March 2009
