THE HANDSTAND

FEBRUARY/MARCH 2006

arts news:

Press Release Press Release Press Release Press Release Press Release

 

MOOT IV - “reel to digital : focus on film

The Butler Gallery in collaboration with Kilkenny County Council’s Arts Office and Darklight film festival is delighted to launch the fourth in the series of MOOT debates, discussions and seminars.

 

In the run up to the MOOT IV discussion “reel to digital : focus on film” a number of events showcasing film shorts and feature length films by Irish and International film makers will be screened. On February 23rd a selection of digital film shorts from the Darklight film festival 2005 and the Young Irish Film makers will be screened at the Arts Office No. 72 John Street at 8 pm.  This will be followed by an informal discussion hosted by Mike Kelly YIFM, Nicky Gogan  Darklight and Dog Media Productions.

On Tuesday February 28thLeisure Center’ a film short by the Desperate Optimists and Pavee Lackeen by Perry Ogden will be screened at the Kilkenny Cineplex at 8pm. ‘Leisure Center’ has its world premiere in Dublin on February 27th.  

It is filmed in the new, only partly opened, Leisure Centre situated on Main Street Ballymun. Shot in a day on 35mm film with a cast of local residents and using the cinematic device of the long take, Leisure Centre follows a young father through the rooms and down the corridors of the building where he works as he struggles to come to terms with his new role as a father.  It is his partner, the mother of his child, who helps him to open his eyes and imagine a better future for him and his young family.   

 The acclaimed feature length film Pavee Lackeen has received numerous awards including the Rainer Werner Fassbinder Prize of Mannheim-Heidelberg and Ecumenical Film Prize at 2005 Mannheim International Film Festival, Winner of the 10th Annual Satyajit Ray Award,  Winner at the 2005 London Film Festival , Winner of Best Film and BSE/IFB & NIFTC Breakthrough Talent Award – Perry Ogden at 2005 Irish Film & Television Awards and Winner of Audience Award for Best First Feature at 2005 Galway Film Fleadh.

Pavee Lackeen presents an unflinching portrait of a marginalised community often living in Third World poverty in a modern, prosperous Ireland. Filmed with a cast of mostly non-professionals, the film uses Travelling people playing characters near to their own, finding the core of the story in their own life experiences.

Pavee Lackeen tells the story of Winnie, a ten year old Irish Traveller girl, who lives with her mother and siblings in a dilapidated trailer on the side of the road in a desolate industrialised area of Dublin. The film follows Winnie through several weeks of her life as she struggles with her identity as a young Traveller girl in contemporary Ireland.

The MOOT IV  -“reel to digital : focus on film  panel discussion will take place on Thursday, March 2nd  in the Brewery Club Kilkenny at 8pm. The panel  will be hosted by Lelia Doolan – Chairperson, Nicky Gogan – Darklight Film Festival, Joe Comerford – Puddle Films, Jane Doolan – Mammoth Films/ Film Consultant Specialist to the Arts Council, Noemi Ferrer – Irish Film Board and Joe Lawlor and Christine Molloy – Desperate Optimists.

 Kilkenny city has a vibrant and active film industry. Numerous independent film makers and organisations such as the Young Irish Film makers, Cartoon Saloon and Glass Eye productions are based in Kilkenny City and County. MOOT IV will highlight the richness and creativity of Irish film and the challenges faced by organisations and individuals in terms of access to  funding and opportunities for film release nationally and internationally. MOOT  IV will also consider  the growth of the digital film industry and examine the increasingly blurred divisions between film makers and artists.

MOOT is a continuous creative process providing a forum for powerful, focused and inspirational debates and discussion on a variety of subject matters. These events will, potentially, transform expectations, citing shifts in attitudes, perceptions and beliefs.

MOOT IV  - Screenings

Tickets for events on February 23rd at No. 72 John Street and on February 28th at Kilkenny Cineplex are available from The Arts Office, No 72 John Street. Phone: 056 7794135.  Cost €5. Places are limited tickets on sale from February 14th 2006

 

 MOOT IV - “reel to digital : focus on film

will take place The Brewery Club, Parliament Street, Kilkenny on Thursday 2nd March  commencing at 8 pm. 

Admission is free

 

Further details from: Niamh Finn, Arts Office on 056 7794135 niamh.finn@kilkennycoco.ie

or Louise Allen, Butler Gallery on 056 7761106 louise@butlergallery.com

The RTÉ Concert Orchestra and its acclaimed Principal Conductor Laurent Wagner visit Kilkenny with a concert of Golden Melodies from Opera & Operetta in St Canice’s Cathedral on Friday, 24 February at 8pm

Soprano Cara O’Sullivan and bass-baritone John Molloy will perform music that ranges from the beauty and passion of grand opera to the light-hearted gaiety of the world of operetta. This concert is for lovers of great music and great melodies, with something for all tastes from Carousel to ‘Casta Diva’.

 

The acclaimed Irish soprano Cara O’Sullivan, praised on her immensely successful US début for her ‘voice of steel and sparkle, [which] practically pulls you from your seat!’, is joined by the rising young tenor John Molloy for arias and songs by Verdi, Mozart, Gershwin, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Gilbert and Sullivan, Straus and more. Since his appointment as Principal Conductor of the RTÉ Concert Orchestra in autumn 2003, Laurent Wagner has appeared as guest conductor in opera houses and concert halls in France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy and the Netherlands, as well as Tokyo, Begin and São Paulo.  Laurent Wagner’s performances with the orchestra have attracted critical acclaim: ‘setting new standards in Dublin’ (The Irish Times); the orchestra ‘is jumping with energy’ (Sunday Business Post); and Wagner ‘drew superb playing’ (Sunday Tribune).

Since its formation as the Radio Éireann Light Orchestra in 1948, the RTÉ Concert Orchestra has grown from a small studio-based recording group to become an exceptionally active 45-strong orchestra with a unique and vitally important role in Irish musical life. It now gives over 90 performances annually all over Ireland, and broadcasts regularly to large audiences nationally and further afield on both RTÉ radio and television. Its international profile has been strengthened by four US tours, a performance at Expo 2000 in Hanover in the presence of President Mary McAleese, seven Eurovision Song Contests and various commercial recordings, including Riverdance. The orchestra is unique in its output, performing small-scale classical repertoire and opera whilst also generating enormously successful light entertainment and family concerts and continuing its schools concerts through the Music in the Classroom series in association with The Irish Times.

 

Golden Melodies from Opera & Operetta is promoted by Kilkenny County Council and tickets at €20 (€18 students and senior citizens) are available from the Arts Office, 72 John Street, Kilkenny (056 7794138 or niamh.finn@kilkennycoco.ie), the Watergate Theatre, Kilkenny, (056 7761674) and St. Canice’s Cathedral, Kilkenny (056 7764971).

Niamh Finn, (As above.)Tel: (056) 7794138

E-mail: niamh.finn@kilkennycoco.ie

 

 

Comhairle Chontae Chill Chainnigh

Kilkenny County Council

 
 

Grants and Bursaries 2006

 

Arts Act Grants 2006

 

Any organisation involved in activities, which promote, develop the knowledge, appreciation and practice of the arts is eligible for inclusion in the list of applicants to be considered for allocation from the available fund. 

 

The Arts includes:   Visual Arts, Music, Drama, Film (including video),

Artistic Craftsmanship, Literature, Dance and Photography.

 

The grant is available to those falling into three categories, these categories are:

 

1. Groups and Organisations promoting the Arts

Kilkenny County Council will consider applications from organisations involved in the promotion of arts in Kilkenny.

 

2. Equipment Purchasing Grant

Kilkenny County Council will consider applications from groups and organisations for grants for the purchase of equipment.

 

3. Individual Artists – all art forms

Kilkenny County Council will consider applications from Professional Artists (all disciplines) living in Kilkenny for specific projects relevant to their art form. This year the areas will include Professional Development,

attending seminars and master classes etc relevant to your practice. 

 

Closing date for receipt of completed applications is no later than Friday 3rd March 2006 at 4pm

 

 

Individual arts practitioners - Research to exhibit Bursary 2006

 

Part 1

Researching exhibition opportunities and development of your exhibition proposal

 

This bursary has been devised in order to encourage and enable professional arts practitioners to secure an exhibition(s) outside of Kilkenny, nationally or internationally, by giving practical support in the researching and proposal phase of securing an exhibition.

 

Part 2

Assistance with the costs associated with staging your exhibition

 

If your application(s) to exhibit are successful you can apply for further assistance with the costs associated with staging the exhibition(s).

There is a separate application form for stage 2 which you will receive, at the appropriate time, if your initial application is successful.

 

Closing date for receipt of completed applications is no later than Thursday 16th March 2006 at 4pm

 

Tyrone Guthrie Centre Regional Bursary Scheme

 

Kilkenny County Council s Arts Office in partnership with the Tyrone Guthrie Centre is offering a two week residency at Annaghmakerrig to practitioners in all art forms born or domiciled in Kilkenny.

 

The practitioner will be selected based upon their previous achievements and the project they intend to undertake during their residency.  The selected Artist Residency should take place before the end of 2006.

 

The aim of the Residency is to assist and encourage both established and emerging practitioners.  To give them an opportunity to work intensively on a ‘project’ alongside others in a very unique environment.

 

Closing date for receipt of completed applications is no later than Friday 3rd March 2006 at 4pm

 

 

For further details and application forms regarding all of the above please contact:

The Arts Office,

County Hall

John Street

Kilkenny.

T: 056 779 4135

E: louise.allen@kilkennycoco.ie

E: niamh.finn@kilkennycoco.ie


Greenwich Degree Zero
Rod Dickinson and Tom McCarthy
Beaconsfield, 22 Newport Street, London, SE11 6AY
Tel: 020 7582 6465
www.beaconsfield.ltd.uk

A Beaconsfield Commission
22 February - 30 April 2006
Wednesday -  Sunday 12-6pm
Preview Tuesday 21 February from 6pm

Greenwich Degree Zero, the first collaboration between artist Rod Dickinson and artist/novelist Tom McCarthy, is an exhibition that interrogates the role of media and technology in the construction of public experience and memory.  Using the mechanisms of historical representation, Greenwich Degree Zero is a compelling mixture of fact and fiction.

The artists' starting point is a strange event that, while it received large amounts of publicity at the time, is now all but forgotten. On the afternoon of February 15th, 1894, a French anarchist named Martial Bourdin was killed when the bomb he was carrying detonated outside the Royal Observatory in London's Greenwich Park.  It was generally assumed that his intention had been to blow up this building, the place from which all time throughout the British Empire and the world was measured, and a prime symbol of science - ''the sacrosanct fetish of the day''1.

In Greenwich Degree Zero, Rod Dickinson and Tom McCarthy re-imagine Bourdin's act as a successful attack on the Observatory. They do so by infiltrating and twisting the media of Bourdin's time. The resulting archival installation reports an event that did not quite happen, relocating the genuine public outrage and hysteria about the threat of anarchist terror that prevailed in the 1890s in the ambiguous space of non-event.

Financially assisted by Arts Council England


Beaconsfield, 22 Newport Street, London, SE11 6AY
Tel: 020 7582 6465
www.beaconsfield.ltd.uk

Footnote:
1. Joseph Conrad¹s The Secret Agent (1907).




photo:Roman März, Berlin


Paik, pioneer of video art, has died in Miami.

[BBCworld news/excerpt]

  Nam June Paik, the Korean-born artist and composer regarded as the
inventor of video art, died Sunday of natural causes at his Miami
home. He was 74.

Paik is thought to have coined the terms "information superhighway"
and "the future is now," as well as having global influence with his
work.

Paik's art combined the use of music, video images and sculptures in
a way that set the style for future video artists.

"Paik's work would have a profound and sustained impact on the media
culture of the late 20th century; his remarkable career witnessed and influenced the redefinition of broadcast television and transformation of video into an artist's medium," John Hanhardt, media arts curator at New York's Guggenheim Museum of Art, said in a statement.

"Through a vast array of installations, videotapes, global television productions, films, and performances, Paik has reshaped our perceptions of the temporal image in contemporary art," Hanhardt added.

http://www.cbc.ca/story/arts/national/2006/01/30/paik-obit.html

    

Nam June Paik, the artist, is famous for using non-traditional materials like a player piano and television monitors in his sculpture. He made Piano Piece to honor his friend, John Cage, who had died the previous year, 1992. Some of the videos show images of Paik’s hands and head, some show images of Cage, and some show other seemingly unrelated images, like babies. The player piano plays John Cage’s music all by itself! There is also a surveillance camera that shows the piano playing as you watch. If you put your hand on the keys, the camera would video your hands, which you would see on six of the televisions.




photo Tyler Merkel

By John Hanhardt, Guggenheim Museum

The Worlds of Nam June Paik is an appreciation of and reflection on the life and art of Nam June Paik. Paik's journey as an artist has been truly global, and his impact on the art of video and television has been profound.To foreground the creative process that is distinctive to Paik's artwork, it is necessary to sort through his mercurial movements, from Asia through Europe to the United States, and examine his shifting interests and the ways that individual artworks changed accordingly. It is my argument that Paik's prolific and complex career can be read as a process grounded in his early interests in composition and performance. These would strongly shape his ideas for mediabased art at a time when the electronic moving image and media technologies were increasingly present in our daily lives. In turn, Paik's work would have a profound and sustained impact on the media culture of the late twentieth century; his remarkable career witnessed and influenced the redefinition of broadcast television and transformation of video into an artist's medium.

In 1982, my longtime fascination with Paik's work resulted in a retrospective exhibition that I organized for the Whitney Museum of American Art in NewYork.1 Over the ensuing years, his success and renown have grown steadily.The wide presence of the media arts in contemporary culture is in no small measure due to the power of Paik's art and ideas.Through television projects, installations, performances, collaborations, development of new artists' tools, writing, and teaching, he has contributed to the creation of a media culture that has expanded the definitions and languages of art making. Paik's life in art grew out of the politics and anti-art movements of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. During this time of societal and cultural change, he pursued a determined quest to combine the expressive capacity and conceptual power of performance with the new technological possibilities associated with the moving image. I will argue that Paik realized the ambition of the cinematic imaginary in avant-garde and independent film by treating film and video as flexible and dynamic multitextual art forms. Using television, as well as the modalities of singlechannel videotape and sculptural/installation formats, he imbued the electronic moving image with new meanings. Paik's investigations into video and television and his key role in transforming the electronic moving image into an artist's medium are part of the history of the media arts. As we look back at the twentieth century, the concept of the moving image, as it has been employed to express representational and abstract imagery through recorded and virtual technologies, constitutes a powerful discourse maintained across different media.The concept of the moving, temporal image is a key modality through which artists have articulated new strategies and forms of image making; to understand them, we need to fashion historiographic models and theoretical interpretations that locate the moving image as central in our visual culture.

Paik's latest creative deployment of new media is through laser technology. He has called his most recent installation a "post-video project," which continues the articulation of the kinetic image through the use of laser energy projected onto scrims, cascading water, and smoke-filled sculptures. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Paik's work shows us that the cinema and video are fusing with electronic and digital media into new image technologies and forms of expression. The end of video and television as we know them signals a transformation of our visual culture.

Catelogue & Museum exhibition:

The first chapter of this catalogue, "The Seoul of Fluxus,"3 is a consideration of Paik's position as a Korean-born artist whose interest in art began with composition and performance. "The Cinematic Avant-Garde," a survey of independent film practices in the 1960s and 1970s, is offered as a backdrop to his engagement with various artistic milieus in NewYork and his preliminary explorations of the electronic moving image, through video, in the mid-1960s. Performance and film are integrally linked to Paik's transformation of the institutional context of television and video. "TheTriumph of Nam June Paik" documents and reflects on his heroic effort to support and articulate the expressive and compositional capacities of the electronic moving image. Paik put the video image into a vast array of formal configurations, and thus added an entirely new dimension to the form of sculpture and the parameters of installation art. He transformed the very instrumentality of the video medium through a process that expressed his deep insights into electronic technology and his understanding of how to reconceive television, to "turn it inside out" and render something entirely new. Paik's imagery has not been predetermined or limited by the technologies of video or the system of television. Rather, he altered the materiality and composition of the electronic image and its placement within a space and on television and, in the process, defined a new form of creative expression. Paik's understanding of the power of the moving image began as an intuitive perception of an emerging technology, which he seized upon and transformed. In addition to collaborating with a number of technicians such as Shuya Abe, Norman Ballard, and Horst Bauman to make new tools to rework the electronic image, Paik also incorporated sophisticated computer and digital technologies into his art to continue to refashion its content, visual vocabulary, and plastic forms.

This catalogue offers a set of exploratory observations. By clustering Paik's seminal artworks around key concepts and issues that define Paik's career and achievements, I hope to suggest the depth and complexity of his aesthetic project as he has sustained it.4 In addition, I have placed selections of Paik's writings throughout the catalogue to help illustrate these observations. The design of the catalogue, by J. Abbott Miller, offers a fresh view of Paik's art and career, much as the design of the exhibition within Frank Lloyd Wright's Modernist container sets new terms for looking at and engaging in the full range of Paik's art.Two site-specific laser-projection pieces dramatically transform the Guggenheim's rotunda: one laser projects a constantly moving display of shapes and forms onto the oculus of the skylight, while a second laser moves through a cascade of water falling from the top ramp to the rotunda floor, creating a dynamic visual display through the drops of falling water.These arresting laser installations can be viewed from multiple perspectives as the spectator walks along the ramp.The projections give expression to the dynamic dialogue between art and technology that is at the heart of Paik's contribution to art and culture.

On the rotunda floor, the artist has arranged one hundred television sets and monitors to distribute a pulsing display of his video imagery on multiple channels. Complementing these changing images are large screens installed on the sides of the rotunda, which visually link the monitors' glowing images on the ground floor to the laser projections on the oculus.

Along the ramps of the rotunda are Paik's seminal video installations including the large-scale pieces TV Garden (1974), Moon Is the Oldest TV (1965), and Video Fish (1975), which have been reconfigured by Paik to suit the unique exhibition spaces they occupy. Smaller-scale video sculptures are also installed on the ramps, including TV Chair (1968), Real Fish/Live Fish (1982), Video Buddha (1976), Swiss Clock (1988), Candle TV (1975), TV Crown (1965), and selections from Family of Robot (1986). One tower gallery will highlig tpieces from the 1950s and 1960s, which have been rediscovered and restored; early interactive video pieces including Magnet TV (1965), Participation TV (1963), and Footswitch TV (1988), accompanied by videotape and photographic documentation of original installations of this work; the Paik-Abe Video Synthesizer (1969) and documentation of video productions made with this early image processor; Fluxus objects, scores, posters, and videotape documentation of Fluxus performances that highlight this important aspect of Paik's career; and a tribute to Charlotte Moorman with her TV Cello (1971), as well as photographic and videotape documentation of her legendary performances.

Adjacent to this gallery is a single-channel screening room featuring Paik's videotapes and key collaborative works for global broadcast television, including the recently restored 9/23/69 Experiment with DavidAtwood (1969), Global Groove (1973), Good Morning, Mr. Orwell (1984), and Living with the Living Theatre (1989). In preparation for the exhibition, Stephen Vitiello of Electronic Arts Intermix was given access to the artist's personal video archive. In collaboration with Vidipax, Vitiello was able to restore a number of video and audiotapes which, until this exhibition, had been lost to public awareness. The High Gallery will feature Paik's latest laser sculptures developed in collaboration with Norman Ballard. Each of the three sculptures features a distinctive deployment of laser to evoke virtual spaces of moving light.

As the frontispiece for this introduction, I have chosen to reproduce a work from 1973 called A New Design for TV Chair. In it, Paik appropriated an image from a 1940s popular-science magazine that depicts the home viewer of the future watching television. Television had already become a monopolistic industry that was a conduit for advertising, a "communication" industry that operated on a one-way street of information. But in A New Design for TV Chair, Paik posited his own questions to project an alternative future for television:

DO YOU KNOW...?

How soonTV-chair will be available in most museums? How soon artists will have their ownTV channels? How soon wall-to-wallTV for video art will be installed in most homes?
Paik envisioned a different television, a "global groove" of artists' expressions seen as part of an "electronic superhighway" that would be open and free to everyone.The multiple forms of video that Paik developed can be interpreted as an expression of an open medium able to flourish and grow through the imagination and participation of communities and individuals from around the world. Paik, along with many artists working as individuals and within collectives through the 1960s 14 and 1970s to create work for television as well as for alternative spaces, challenged the idea of television as a medium and domain exclusively controlled by a monopoly of broadcasters.

This introduction concludes with a photograph documenting Paik's Robot K-456 (1964) in an "accident" staged in front of the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1982. Paik removed his remote-controlled robot from his retrospective exhibition at the Whitney and guided it up the sidewalk along Madison Avenue. As the robot crossed the avenue, it was struck by a car and fell to the ground. Paik declared this to represent a "catastrophe of technology in the twentieth century," stating that the lesson to be gained from these tentative technological steps is that "we are learning to cope with it." Paik's staged event drew attention to the fragility of humankind and of technology itself.Twenty years after his first experiments with the television set, this street performance was made for television: after the performance, he was interviewed by television news reports; Paik took this playful moment as an opportunity to recall the need to understand technology and make sure that it does not control us. Paik's staged event with his manmade robot was a humanist expression of a technology that subverted the dominant postinstitutions. Paik, who remade the television into an artist's instrument, reminded us that we must recall the avant-garde movements of the 1960s and learn from their conceptual foundation, which expressed. the need to create alternative forms of expression out of the very technologies that impact our lives. Robot K-456 is a statement of liberation, demonstrating that the potential for innovation and new possibilities must not be lost, but must be continually reimagined and remade by the artist. It is my wish that The Worlds of Nam June Paik will offer a new look at Paik's career and inspire a new generation of artists to recognize his relevance to late-twentieth-century art and his impact on the future of an expanding media culture.5 His everchanging images offer themselves as the fleeting memories of history and as an empowering example of the struggle to proclaim the liberating and renewing possibilities of the future.

Video art imitates nature, not in its appearance or mass, but in its intimate "time-structure" . . . which is the process of AGING (a certain kind of irreversibility). Norbert Wiener, in his design of the Radar system (a micro two-way enveloping-time analysis), did the most profound thinking about Newtonian Time (reversible) and BergsonianTime (irreversible). Edmund Husserl, in his lecture on "The Phenomenology of Inner Time-consciousness" (1928), quotes St. Augustine (the best aesthetician of music in the Medieval age) who said "What is TIME?? If no one asks me, I know ... if some one asks me, 'I know not.' "This paradox in a twentieth-century modulation connects us to the Sartrian paradox "I am always not what I am and I am always what I am not."6 -Paik, 1976

http://www.paikstudios.com/essay.html



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