Taste It

London based Daniel Brereton has directed the brilliant new music video for Daniel Avery's track Taste It off his EP Need Electric. Brereton says, "I don't want reveal how this is done before you watch it, so watch it first. It might be easy to tell but this was all done an an everyday scanner, I just had the idea to do a video full of scanned images. So i just got the girls to move scan by scan, like in stop-frame animation. They didn't really "get" what was going on at times, but that is cool as it creates mistakes, and i often asked them what they thought would look good."

Harmony Korine's Caput in Los Angeles

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LA-based duo Io Echo is playing tomorrow, August 9 at Dilettante - featuring a special screening of the new short film by Harmony Korine Caput. Caput is scored in part by Io Echo.  RSVP to io.echo.la@gmail.com, Dilettante 120 North Santa Fe Avenue, Los Angeles

David Lynch's Eraserhead Soundtrack to Be Released

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Sacred Bones Records is is set to release a deluxe vinyl reissue of David Lynch’s Eraserhead soundtrack on August 7, 2012. The soundtrack will be released in a limited edition of 1500 and will feature a 16-page booklet, three 11-inch prints, a digital download, and a 7-inch single of Peter Ivers’ β€œIn Heaven” with the previously unreleased β€œPete’s Boogie”.

Mauricio GuillΓ©n: Avenida Progreso

The work of the Mexican-born artist Mauricio GuillΓ©n (b. 1971) encompasses film, photography, text works and objects. GuillΓ©n combines personal experience with the conceptual strategies he uses to explore how images and language influence our understanding of culture and history. The chief focus of the exhibition at the MMK Zollamt will be GuillΓ©n’s most recent 16-mm black-and-white film "Avenida Progreso", for which he returned to Mexico City, where he spent his childhood and teenage years. The film story leads the viewer through the districts of Polanco, IrrigaciΓ³n and OceanΓ­a to the end of the Avenida Progreso. A professor of philosophy and aesthetics is the main protagonist in this anachronistic journey along streets of which many bear the names of such European philosophers and literary figures as Goethe, Byron, Marx, Tolstoi and Aristoteles. In this film, GuillΓ©n investigates social and cultural differences within a society that is undergoing a process of change but nevertheless still reflects the impact of the cultural import brought about by colonization. Questions about the emergence and distribution of knowledge and education in society are of key importance to the artist’s work. The film will be supplemented by photographs and text works.
 Opening Friday July 27 at the MMK Zollamt, Domstraße 10 60311 Frankfurt, Germany,Β 

[AUTRE TV] Vanishing Point by Augustin Doublet

Of his six-minute black-and-white short Vanishing Point, French director and writer Augustin Doublet says, β€œIt’s all about creating a maze of memories and fancies out of this endless labyrinth that you find in Brooklyn. I refer to the subway tracks, to the shades...I was trying to get behind the skin of the city, and to explore this kind of dynamic between dream and reality. So to do that, I thought that to make a portrait of an artist, a woman, was the right way to do it. I tend to like to tell stories about women. And so this kind of descent into her own broken relationships, her broken dreams, was dynamic. I think that was the concept behind it. And one could say that there is something about masochism, which has a very strong link with the practice of art... the practice of painting... I think we take inspiration from our scars. I was interested in the remains of the ink, the remains of internal scars, psychological scars... how the trauma manifests itself into shadows of ink."

Vanishing Point paints a darkly stunning portrait of an artist living in Brooklyn. The film is bleak, discordant, smacking with violent urgencyβ€”and yet there is, at the same time, a certain fragility, a delicate quietness underneath its rough exterior. Perhaps this is borne out of Doublet’s own experience living in the ever-growing and changing neighborhood of Bushwick, Brooklyn; watching the juxtaposition between the grittier, rougher β€œlow-life reality,” as he calls it, and the burgeoning artist’s community that has begun to emerge in past years.

Since his arrival in New York, Doublet has written, directed and produced several of his own short films. Initially fascinated by the β€œharshness, dirtiness, and loose eroticism” of the New Hollywood cinema of the 1970s, he says, β€œMy imagination and my desire are very related to the location and environment I’m in.” Originally from the Belleville area of Paris, Doublet has been living for three years in The Schoolhouse (the interior of which is shown in Vanishing Point), a unique three-story red brick building in Bushwick that has worn multiple hats since its establishment in 1883β€”it functioned as an elementary school until 1945, when it was sold and used as a manufacturing space; then it was abandoned and finally converted into artists’ living and working spaces in the 1990s. Now, each floor houses an array of creative individualsβ€”musicians, painters, poets, filmmakers and photographers who often collaborate together (Vanishing Point is set to the spoken words of Mariette Papic, a poet and fellow Schoolhouse resident who Doublet commissioned for the project). About New York, he says, β€œβ€¦if you’re able to project yourself, your energy and your ideas on the city and break through the glass, [it] gives you back so much…”

Text by Annabel Graham for Pas Un Autre

Love Is A State of Mind by Luci Schroder

Alongside the 2012 SHOWstudio Shop exhibition 'Selling Sex', SHOWstudio launches 'Fashion Fetish,' a series of fashion films, performances, multi-media pieces and accompanying essays by women in fashion - including Ruth Hogben, Daphne Guinness, Liberty Ross, Aimee Mullins, Asia Argento and Dasha Zhukova - that comment on the contentious and provocative fusion of fashion with fetish. SHOWstudio's newest installment is a film by Luci Schroder called Love Is A State of Mind.

Sigur RΓ³s Mystery Film Project

This haunting and beautiful short film, which is much more than a music video, is for the Sigur RΓ³s track FjΓΆgur PΓ­anΓ³ off their current album Valtari is directed by Alma Har'el and stars Shia LaBeouf and Denna Thomsen. The acclaimed Icelandic band Sigur RΓ³s recently asked a dozen filmmakers to each choose a song from its new album, Valtari, and shoot a video inspired by the music as part of their Mystery Film Project. All the directors received the same $10,000 budget and zero instructions from the band.

Richard Phillips: First Point

Premiering today as part of Art Unlimited at Art Basel 2012, pop artist Richard Phillips’ short film entitled First Point featuring Lindsay Lohan.Β Richard Phillips has been exploring the production of film and photographic media as a means of expanding beyond the appropriation strategies that have defined his work in the past by painting unique portraits from his own films which he stages and shoots himself.Β Β He completed his first two films,Β Lindsay LohanandΒ Sasha Grey, in the spring of 2011 for the Commercial Break film project presented concurrently to the Venice Biennale. First Point–Phillips' third filmβ€”is a collaboration between the artist, Lindsay Lohan, and the legendary surf filmmaker Taylor Steele. The film visits two locations: a private beach surf compound and Malibu's iconic Surfrider Beach, accessible to the public, which boasts some of California's most perfect waves.Β First PointΒ presents a postmodern take on the surf film genre through an abstract framework of imagery in which the actress engages in cinema performance tropes inspired by contemporary film noir. Presented by Gagosian Gallery, First Point will premier as part of Art Basel's Art Unlimited which will see its invitation only, VIP release today and a public opening on June 14 until June 17.

[AUTRE TV] Maria - Conception - Action by Hermann Nitsch

With the recent rise of purported "zombie attacks," its sort of like we're all living in the sick wet dream of Ed Gein. And after watching a recent live performance by the artist Bruce LaBruce at a gallery in New York – where actors portrayed some sort of rebel faction and then execute a hostage all in one of LaBruce's signature bloodbaths – I started thinking of shock and extreme violence in art as a baptism of our consciousness. In 1909, at the very birth of modernism, Italian writer Filipo Tommaso Marinetti's published in France's leading newspaper Le Figaro his seminal piece entitled The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism which declared that "Art can be nothing but violence, cruelty, and injustice." To Marinetti violence was not only as a means of producing an aesthetic effect, but was also inherent to life itself. There is certainly a palpable depravity underneath our gossamer thin surface – the dark, primitive recesses of our unconscious can sit only so long under the heat until it snaps. Since 1963, the Austrian artist Hermann Nitsch has created a series of live happenings, which combine cruelty, sexuality, defilement, and visual shock for "purposes of purification, and "ab-reaction" of sado-masochist impulses." In these performances we can see the amazing creative lineage between Nitsch and artists like Bruce LaBruce who don't necessarily make this type of art for the sake of shock alone, but to reawaken our unconscious from a permanent state embryonic paralysis and to exact revenge on our general sense of collective torpescence. This is a film record, entitled Maria - Conception - Action, of Nisch's most controversial creation: the crucifixion of a young woman, the disembowelling of a lamb carcass, and her defilement with it. Text by Oliver Maxwell Kupper. (warning: film is EXTREMELY graphic, if you are under the age of 18, at work, or squeamish about real blood do not watch).

CRUELLY, MADLY, DEEPLY

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Between 1969 and his death at age 37 in 1982, brilliant enfant terrible German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder made 30 films and numerous television productions, including the 15-hour mini-series BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ. Even as he averaged two to three films per year, his work maintained a meticulous, rigorous style, marked by stunning shot composition, laser-precision blocking and deep characterization ranging from bitterly crystal clear to hypnotically allusive. Fassbinder returned to the same themes and fixations again and again: money, sex, pride and cruelty. Postwar Germany is often his cinematic landscape - the place of drained, falsified dreams where his characters make the most of things and act with their own best interests in mind. Fassbinder himself was plain, drug-addicted and gay, and had much in common with the outsiders he created. He was notorious for the same cruel nature seen in his films, and behaved heartlessly toward those who loved and surrounded him. Still, over the course of his short, astonishing career, he collected a team of dazzling recurring players, including cinematographer Michael Ballhaus and actresses Hanna Schygulla, Margit Carstensen, Brigitte Mira and Irm Hermann. Whether the strain of working with the director was worth the staggering output is hard to say - Ballhaus β€œburned out” after The Marriage of Maria Braun and went to work with Martin Scorsese. But, as film critic and ardent fan Roger Ebert wrote, β€œFassbinder was a genius. That much everyone admitted.” On the 30th anniversary of his death, the American Cinematheque in Los Angeles unveils a 16-film retrospective of the work of Rainer Werner Fassbinder from May 31 to June 14.

Beauty Is Embarrassing

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Beauty Is Embarrassing is a funny, irreverent, joyful and inspiring documentary featuring the life and current times of one of America’s most important artists, Wayne White. Raised in the mountains of Tennessee, Wayne White started his career as a cartoonist in New York City. He quickly found success as one of the creators of the TV show, Pee-wee’s Playhouse, which led to more work designing some of the most arresting and iconic images in pop culture. Most recently, his word paintings, which feature pithy and often sarcastic text statements crafted onto vintage landscape paintings, have made him a darling of the fine art world. Beauty Is Embarrassingis currently screening is select cities.

Dollywood

As part of SHOWstudio's Fashion Fetish film season, Liberty Ross collaborates with photographer Polly Borland to create Dollywood, a subversively sinister view of eroticism. Liberty explains, 'I wanted to make a film that blurred the line of primitive sexual fetishism with naive and childlike play. To me the act of dressing up, tying up and fetishism has its primal urges in childhood.' Inspired by Borland's current artwork, the provocative work tackles the taboos surrounding fetish, questioning the extent to which sexual acts have their basic roots in youthful urges.