expanded cinema/deborah k

yes i wish i could bring valie export too. recently she was invited to london to give a talk on her work (she lives in germany and austria) and she said she couldnt make it (at the last minute) due to the flying thing. she doesnt want to fly in aeroplanes. the transcript from that talk that she didnt give (but she sent the text anyway) is at sensesofcinema journal which is at www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/03/28/contents.html
(but the site seems to be playing up at the mo, i cant make it work. hmm)
she writes really clearly about expanded cinema and its pervasive connexion to the rest of her work.
 
i hear ya about art about art. i must admit to having been a nerd about some of that conceptual art stuff (in the past, in the past!) which irritates the shit out of me now.
expanded cinema however is messy, its people getting together in small rooms and showing each other stuff and talking about it, its a bit like the sydney moving image coalitions super 8 nights. its about doing stuff with very little resources, and it was very much about the london filmmakers co-operative, a unique organisation which controlled the production, collection, and distribution of its work. i am very keen to see the project happen in sydney, partly because of the dire state of the film scene there (and the video installation "scene" if you can call it that). the film scene, well, squatspace has been ranting about that for a few years, the tropfest business and the fox studios hollywood production sweatshop. the video scene, because for some godforsaken reason it seems fascinated by the idea of "immersion" and "virtual reality" yet seems to do these things so badly. i even went to the zkm organisation in germany (the home of video-immersion-virtualreality) to see if i was wrong, but i dont think i am. its a resource-heavy parade of gimmickry. this is the kind of thing that expanded cinema artists were (and still are) against, yet theirs is a forgotten history. so its partly a historical-reconstruction project. i want to remind sydney artists that you dont need huge resources to make interesting moving image work.
 
yah, i wouldnt worry too much about the collectible thing. a few posters sold to a gallery certainly wont qualify you for a rush at the next madrid art fair.
 
but seriously, im keen for the project to explore "collectability/collectivity etc" in its many senses. so if you work with "collectives" often, that may be an interesting angle to explore for this one.
 
also, problems with collection are to be explored i reckon. mickie has complained about a similar issue, that his small disobedience kits are collected and put on the mantlepiece by "politically minded" but not "politically active" friends and colleagues, which for him kills the piece entirely. the project should bring out those issues.
 
for me, you are a prime candidate, even if you sell them posters to the gallery. i hope you do. we all need the cash.
 
50 most uncollectable is meant to be humourous and by necessity it cant become self-important. that is what we are working away from, the self-important cross-referencing of "credible" sources who "say" that an artist is collectible and are therefore slavishly followed by the market (who knows if this really works anyway, but it makes for some ghastly magazine filler).
 
ruark of course has his own motivations, and there is something to be said for his proactive attempt to insert the work into the collections of major galleries. strategic historymaking or something.
 
alla best
lucas

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