Avant-Garde Film Diary

REVIEWS AVANT-GARDE FILM DIARY JANUARY 20, 2002 - SCRATCH AND TWITCH AT REMOTE It's quite common to see film and video shows in bars, but never before have I seen the bar itself become the show. Remote, the drinking establishment in question, sets a new benchmark for concept bars. The entire place is stuffed with banks of TV sets, usually linked to security cameras strategically placed all around the room. Patrons control the cameras with arcade-style controls, allowing them to observe their fellow imbibers clandestinely. Tonight, most of the cameras were turned off, and videos programmed by Sandra McLean, Charlene Rule, and Grahame Weinbren filled the bulk of the screens. The result was peculiar, but not without its charms. Not all tapes would benefit from this sort of presentation, or even survive it intact. The more visually complicated tapes and those with strong narrative elements often became quite confusing. The more minimal and repetitive tapes fared much better; in fact, some actually profited by the presentation. Blandly mechanical on a single screen, the grid of signaling flags in Lux's Semaphore easily bridged the gaps separating the monitors, fusing them into one great screen. I was quite taken with Keep Smiling, in which the artist Miho Suzuki bends over, touches her toes, and straightens up as rapidly as possible for 11 minutes, an increasingly strained rictus of a smile plastered across her face: Vito Acconci need no longer make an exer-video. Splashed across a bank of monitors, it looked just like something you might see at the chicest hi-tech gym for bulemics. JANUARY 26, 2002 - FALSE OCEAN AT JARAF VIDEO Over the course of the last few years, New York has spawned quite a few new avant-garde-friendly underground film venues. However, the same isn't quite true of video. Likely, it's a happy function of the sudden and rather unexpected ubiquity of video art in the hipper galleries. But most galleries have an aesthetic agenda that doesn't always square with what a lot of video artists actually do. The slicker and flashier the better, and minimalism is definitely out. Rebekah Rutkoff and Jasmine Moorhead of Jaraf Video set out to provide a forum for more formal video art. Judging by the healthy size of their audience, they're doing something right. Somehow they convinced well over a hundred people to cram themselves into the basement of the Bleecker Street Theater on a Saturday night to see ten rather minimal videos. In practice, Rutkoff and Moorhead interpret their own mandate rather loosely. It's probably for the best, as rigid formal criteria rarely lend themselves to sensitive programming. And yet, the most successful tapes in this program by far were those most conscious of the texture of video. Old-timer Jud Yalkut was up to his usual tricks in River Sequence 3, superimposing shots of psychedelically colored river-currents; still good fun, even if it's beginning to feel a little by-the-numbers. Younger artists tended to infuse their tapes with a bit of levity. Vincente Razo's A Superlative Achivement and O.K. - All Right added a dollop of Hollis Frampton's dry wit to Paik-esque magnet-TV images. I was particularly impressed by the Halflifers' Actions in Action. Something like an affectionate homage to Vito Acconci, the Halflifers actually do him better in both raw formal purity and sophomoric antics. In goofy goggled outfits they smear themselves with junkfood and get dragged behid a truck, the undercranked video making them look like hyperactive kids on 45. The only thing they're missing is Acconci's aggressive menace-they play the harmless neurotic foils to his psychotic monster. The only real turkey of the lot, Ursula Model's Past Life: The Fisherman's Woman, paired an overwrought narration with close-ups of a writhing woman, revisiting a genre I'd really hoped to have seen the last of. JANUARY 30, 2002: JOEL SCHLEMOWITZ AT ANTHOLOGY FILM ARCHIVE'S COURTHOUSE GALLERY It's always good to see an artist mount a serious gallery show using old-school film equipment, but it doesn't happen nearly as often as it ought to. …