Friday 2 May 2008

Artprojx presents

DRAWING FILM

Friday 2 May 2008

Artprojx at Late at Tate Britain

Doors Open 6pm

2 Screenings from 8pm

Tickets are FREE (on a first come basis)

Tate Britain, Millbank, London SW1

www.tate.org.uk

An Artprojx and Parasol unit presentation ...

Artprojx at Late at Tate Britain

An Artprojx and Parasol unit presention ...

DRAWING FILM (34mins) ‘Politics and Philosophy’ & 'Poetry and Fantasy’

an artist film compilation featuring the following artists:
Susanne Jirkuff, Arthur de Pins, George Schwizgebel, Robert Breer, Paul Bush/Lisa Milroy, Takashi Ishida, Michael Dudok de Wit, Brent Green.

still from Susanne Jirkuff, Feel It, 2004

Artprojx at Late at Tate Britain

Friday 2 May 2008
Screenings from 8pm

These films featured in the Momentary Momentum: Animated Drawings exhibition at Parasol unit foundation for contemporary art, London in 2007, curated by Laurence Dreyfus and Ziba de Weck.

Film Details
Programme A: Politics and Philosophy

Susanne Jirkuff
Feel It, 2004
5 min 40 sec
Music: Feel it by Timbaland and Magoo, Album: Welcome to Our World, 1997
Courtesy Galerie Amer Abbas, Vienna

Feel It is a boldly political work. Set in the Oval Office at the White House, it brings together G. W. Bush, C. Rice and C. Powell. The discussion between these guardians of the world order is presented in the form of a rap song. Bush dances and does his verbal thing: “I got my man Big D Big Rodney / In case somebody want to rob me / We going to Military Circle / Virginia’s tight that’s why they gotta keep a curfew” and urges us to follow his programme with a subliminal message: “I hope you buy our tape / Please don’t hesitate, don’t hesitate.” With humour, daring and derision, Susanne Jirkuff presents current events in the form of a music video, in what is just as much a parody of the music scene as it is of the powers that be, here reduced to stereotypes.

Robert Breer
Un Miracle, 1954
Film 16mm, Kodachrome, Silent
21 sec
Courtesy gb agency, Paris and the artist

Robert Breer drew on the first Neoplastic paintings he made in the entourage of the Russian Constructivists and on structuralist formulae used by the Bauhaus to make kinetic objects and mutosocopes – primitive cinematographic tools. His experiments and the discovery of the abstract films of Hans Richter, Viking Eggeling and Emile Cohl led him to specialise in animation as of 1959. He works image by image, producing a rhythmic succession that does not seek to create realist illusions but to make palpable the movement of the animation itself: as he puts it, “still images following each other in quick succession and merge in movement – that is cinema.” In around 1960 he began making a series of minimalist, non-figurative films, 66, 69 and 70, using drawings on small white pieces of cardboard that he filmed image by image. 69 is a succession of rotating volumes. The beauty of the film lies in its energetic rhythms which, coupled with the shakiness of the projection, creates a phenomenon of retinal persistence in the eye of the spectator, who in turns becomes aware of the way the film breaks down and recomposes images, thus going back to the origins of the animation.

Arthur de Pins
La Révolution des Crabes, 2004
5 min 3 sec
Music by Gerard Calvi
Courtesy Metronomic, Paris, France

The short black-and-white film La Révolution des Crabes offers an irresistible and very personal, vision of Darwin’s theory of the evolution of species. Inspired by philosophy, this revolution of crabs cannot withstand determinism: ‘Born in the mud, Pachygrapsus Marmoratus, you will remain a useless link in the chain of evolution’. Such is the moral of the story told by an anti-conformist crab: it is impossible to transcend one’s destiny. Far from adopting the fatalist tone that would suit such a conclusion, Arthur de Pins draws on fables and pamphlets, using fiction, humour, cynicism and profundity to describe the sad destiny of a creature whose desire for emancipation is stifled. Served by the lively, simple graphic style and a rhythmic, playful sound track evoking the Shadoks, La Révolution des Crabes conveys, not without dark humour, a politically charged message.

Georges Schwizgebel
Jeu, 2006
35 mm
3 min 50 sec
Composer Serge Prokofiev and musicians of l’Orchestre de la Suisse Romande
Courtesy the artist

The style of Georges Schwizgebel, which has great virtuosity and formal elegance, is characterised by brushstrokes that are the marks of both a painter and an animator. His touch becomes part of an animation whose rhythm is dictated by energetic musical structures. Thus Jeu draws on the Scherzo of Prokofiev’s Second Piano Concerto. In a succession of bright colours, these animated paintings undergo zooms, metamorphoses, reflections and other visual games. Effects of light and reflection create convincingly illusionist three-dimensional spaces that sometimes recall the geometric spaces of Giorgio de Chirico. The show begins and ends with an exhibition room, and takes us through a garden full of silhouettes and people playing ball, as if to evoke the bustle of the modern world.

Programme B: Poetry, Fantasy and Beauty

Paul Bush, Lisa Milroy
Geisha Grooming, 2003
3 min 30 sec
Music by Andy Cowton
Courtesy the artists

Geisha Grooming, is the first of a series of drawings animated in a collaboration between artist Lisa Milroy and filmmaker Paul Bush. The drawings are based on Milroy’s paintings on the theme of Geisha. Geisha Grooming shows a modern Geisha preparing herself for a night in town. Tuned with a Japanese air, the Geisha carries out her toilet rituals. Milroy and Bush transform a mundane domestic episode into a beautiful, light-hearted animation.

Michaël Dudok de Wit
Father and Daughter, 2000
8 min 30 sec
Original music by Normand Roger with the collaboration of Denis Chartrand
Produced by Claire Jennings and Willem Thijssen
Courtesy the artist

Father and Daughter was awarded the prize for best animated short film in 2001. In this moving tale a father cycles along the seafront with his young daughter, says goodbye to her and rows out to sea in a boat, but doesn’t return. Throughout the passing seasons and years, the daughter often cycles back and stares out to sea in the hope of seeing him again. In all weathers and moods, she comes alone, with friends, her own family, and finally as an old woman when both the sea and her own life have receded. Only then are father and daughter poignantly reunited.

Brent Green
Dancing Scene, 2006
Colour film and sharpie on glass
Looped, 55 sec
Sound by Jim Becker
Courtesy of the artist and Bellwether, New York, USA

Dancing Scene, roughly a one-minute film of animated drawings, emanates a chilling sense of the macabre. Overhead, a chandelier jiggles about on the ceiling, shaking as if there’s an earthquake. As the camera pans across the room, we see the jerky antics of a bouncing gramophone which may or may not be the source of the peculiar tune we hear. A wire-like couple, reminiscent of Alexander Calder’s wire figures, appear and dance jerkily across the room in time with the tune. The supposedly male figure has an animal head. The mood is rather grim; could this be a dance macabre?

Takashi Ishida
EMA/EMAKI 2, 2006
16 mm, drawing animation with sound
6 min 30 sec
Composer Masashi Ishida, Musician (Piano) Masashi Ishida
Courtesy of the artist

Storytelling has no place in EMA/EMAKI 2, because like most animations made by Takashi Ishida, it explores abstractions, such as our sense of time and space. As Ishida’s animated film unreels, to music composed by Masashi Ishida, elegant and decorative black lines scroll upward in a manner that seems to create an abstract arena for our thoughts. This not only provides us with a visual manifestation of the music, but also leads us on a voyage into infinite space and time. Ishida’s work focuses on the pure meaning of animation which is a sequence of images moving in time.

Still from Robert Breer

NOTES ON THE CURATORS

Laurence Dreyfus
Laurence Dreyfus is an independent curator specialisiing in animation. She was educated in
Paris at the Ecole du Louve and at La Sorbonne. She has co-curated exhibitions in the field
of animation internationally, most recently Histoires Animées, Le Fresnoy, France (2006), Version Animée, Centre pour l'image contemporain, Geneva, Switzerland (2006), Histoires
Animées, Caixa Forum, Barcelona and Sala Recalde, Bilbao, Spain (2006) and NANO: PRAGUE
BIENNALE, National Gallery, Czech Republic (2003). She is also consultant to the Honart
Museum, Iran, Head of Multimedia for the French Ministry of Culture, Curator for Maison
Rouge Central Station Collection Harald Fackenberg and Programmer for Multimedia at the
Palais de Tokyo, Paris. She lives and works in Paris. www.laurencedreyfus.com

Ziba de Weck
Ziba de Weck is a curator and founder of Parasol Unit Foundation for Contemporary Art, London. She gained an MA in Art History from Columbia University, New York, worked at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and was the first director of the City's Swiss Institute. Parasol Unit Foundation for Contemporary Art was founded in December 2004 as a non-profit art space.