Film and Video

On the occasion of the International Dance Festival in Madrid, In Two Dimensions: Dance on the Screen is a series that features an international selection of film-video-dance dedicated to the auteur. The pieces included in the seven programmes in the series were made by renowned artists who present different ways to contemplate audiovisual creation, finding their partenaire in the choreographic arts. Choreographers and directors analyse, structure, observe and direct the viewer’s gaze through the body and the movement of performers who order/disorder ideas and feelings. Moreover, each is done in a personal way, paving often extremely divergent paths, where the relationship between the two resources materialises for very different reasons.

The series Of Blood, of Pleasure and of Death… presents a selection of experimental films with gay and lesbian themes designed to show some of the key pieces of avant-garde and underground film, putting them into context and in relation to the mass culture that generated them. The series title, in part inspired by the film trilogy by Gregory Markopoulos (Toledo, 1928 - Freiburg, 1992) Du sang, de la volupté et de la mort (1947-1948) acts as a metaphor for a series of films that, like the work by Markopoulos, see ‘blood, pleasure and death’ as an imaginary place where the desire, pain and the annihilation of the body are confronted and its being is oppressed by social norms and sexual taboos. The second part of the title, Some Films on ‘Sexual Disorientation’, in turn, relates to the confirmation of a fact: gay and lesbian film did ‘not’ exist before the 1970s or if it existed, it was limited to only two or three works. Given that the idea of a group or concept of gay and lesbian identity based on the term sexual ‘orientation’ did not exist (it emerged in the 1970s), this body of films cannot easily be described using those terms. This does not mean to say that there were no sexually ambiguous films suggesting ‘strange’ desires or ‘disoriented’ artists and filmmakers. Hundreds of films featured homosexual characters, but very few were made by homosexuals and even fewer had a gay or lesbian content.

This film and video series presents an overview of the film work of the North American artist Gordon Matta-Clark (New York, 1943-1978), an oeuvre that was largely forgotten for a long period of time. Beginning early in the 1970s until his death in 1978, Matta-Clark was one of the main driving forces on the New York SoHo art scene, characterised by his experiments aimed at breaking the limits that define an artwork, altering the structures established in the art world and exploding numerous means of artistic expression.

This series is dedicated to the film work of Yoko Ono (Tokyo, 1933), sixteen films made between 1966 and 1982 that fill a unique space in the history of independent film in the United States. Yoko Ono participated in a general assault on film conventions during an extraordinarily creative period in American culture, during which directors developed alternative forms of production, distribution and exhibition. Coming from the same complex set of interdisciplinary experiences that inspired performance art and objects during those years, Ono’s films are like her songs (with their characteristic abstract expressivity) and like her artworks and sculptures because they too focus on materials in such a way that they expose the very phenomenon of perception.

Elementary Triptych of Spain is the last film project by José Val del Omar. The idea arose in the last stages of his life and was aimed at creating a trilogy using his three ‘elemental pieces’: Aguaespejo granadino [Water-Mirror of Granada] (1955), Fuego en Castilla [Fire in Castille] (1960) and Acariño galaico [Galician Caress] (1961).

For the second year in a row, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía is dedicating an audiovisual programme to video dance, a genre that is validated by some of the most representative works in the field. Choreographic art, expressed through moving images, continues to generate unique works which are beautiful and intense, and in which audiovisual creation displays its wealth of formats, techniques and styles. Dance on camera occupies and attains unique spaces, reorganising ‘real’ time and championing their communicative capacity.

Once upon a Time…from Minimal Art to Cabaret: 1970s - 90s is a series dedicated to performance art made by women designed to introduce the works and approaches that have served as reference points for many of the latest creations in the visual arts. The pieces in this programme, which spans almost three decades, show the richness and dynamism of this means of expression and help to explain the development of performance art and its versatility.

Lights, Action, Sound and Movement…for the Camera is an anthology that describes the relationship between video and performance art over the last 25 years. Although it brings together some of the most representative pieces created by important figures in this field, the programme as a whole does not presume to present a definitive history of video performance. Rather, it is designed to show the evolution of this hybrid form, which is increasingly complex and developed, in four different programmes.

The series Retrospective: German Video Art presents a retrospective of German video art from the 1980s to the present day. Axel Wirths, the curator, has organised the programme (a total of 34 pieces) into five blocks of works grouped according to their thematic dichotomies: Body and Soul, Politics and Daily Life, Nature and Technology, Music and Language and Irony and Fate.

The intensity with which Australians possess and use consumer electronics is famous. Indeed, by using videos and computers, Australian artists have managed to avoid what has been called ‘the tyranny of distance’. For artists like John McCormack (Melbourne, 1964), the computer has become a way to escape the limitations of the physical world. An Eccentric Orbit: Video Art in Australia presents a selective look at a varied and abundant field: contemporary electronic artworks produced in Australia between 1980 and 1995. The programme is divided into three thematic sections. The programme entitled The Body Electric contains works that contemplate falling into a physical and psychological trap, proposing a release through dreams, technology and the imagination. The second block, entitled Any Resemblance to Reality is Purely Deliberate, deals with the magic of construction and deconstruction in or by the computer culture, while the works included in the section Reduced Paradise reflect on place and the lack of location. The themes in each programme represent what could be considered the three concerns of contemporary Australian culture condensed into the work of video artists and directors. Obviously each of these themes refers to the gestalt of a culture immersed in the post-industrialist dualisms found in all western civilisation: the active construction of the ‘perceived’ polarities between nature and culture, nature and technology and human beings and technology. However, without openly resorting to an ‘Australian’ iconography, most of the artists in these three programmes present a curiously idiosyncratic approach to electronic culture, resulting in a reflection on video and computer storage devices, the most easily transportable media available to artists. These same media are also extremely useful for citizens living in a country that can only be reached by an almost daylong flight from Europe and even longer from the East Coast of the United States.

In 1990, the Cinemadart festival in Barcelona brought together a dozen prestigious Spanish specialists to reflect on different questions related to the conjunction of surrealists, surrealism and film. The Surrealist Gaze is a film and video series that compiles the criteria of the retrospective put together by Julio Pérez Perucha to illustrate those debates.

Video Signals: Aspects of Spanish Video Creation in Recent Years is an audiovisual series that features 40 works by more than 35 artists made between 1988 and 1995, designed to offer a view/review of recent Spanish video. The exhibition was not conceived as a ‘who’s who’ of video in Spain - i.e., the artists with the longest careers and biggest reputations - but rather as a type of critical anthology, to borrow from the world of literature. The selection is neither indiscriminate nor whimsical, the range neither wide nor narrow, but spacious enough to include some new contributions and ones that might have passed unnoticed on other circuits. However, no attempt has been made to cover specific genres or subgenres - such as the standard music video clip, video dance, art documentary and the occasional television productions with an experimental touch - even though the selection does include some pieces linked or contiguous with them. In any case, the selection is admittedly partial in every sense of the word.

Wanderers: Reflections on Exile is a video programme that ‘upsets’ the relationship maintained with Spain and the identity of individuals in society, looking at the margins to take stock of the occasional pleasures and evils that result from different types of exile: physical exile, made up of political exiles, refugees, self-declared ex-pats, immigrants and ‘perpetual travellers’ and mental exile, made up of insane, alienated, depressed, marginalised, unconscious and creative people.

This series features a selection of pieces from the World Wide Video Festival ’95 that highlight the diversity and limits of video art today. Video has never been a ‘pure’ medium, since it can be combined with and complemented by film, photography, performance art and, increasingly, computer techniques. The range of aesthetic and formal focus points, from an almost pictorial poetic narrative to abstract explorations of electronic chaos, is very wide. Free from the restrictions imposed by television and film advertising, video artists enjoy complete freedom to choose their own formats. Beyond the documentary genre, many concentrate substance and content into short but powerful audiovisual declarations.

With a view to providing a multi-disciplinary overview of Eugènia Balcells’ (Barcelona, 1942) career as an artist and as a complement to the exhibition being shown on the third floor of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, her experimental films from the 1970s are being screened. In addition, two sessions of the performance piece Imágenes para sonidos will be staged with the collaboration of musicians Peter van Riper and Llorenç Barber.