Monday 18 February 2019

EYE IN THE SKY


























A menacing presence in the sky that calls to mind the constant scrutiny of our CCTV monitored existence. It doesn't seem to bother us much, but then humans have always been surprisingly comfortable with the idea that someone in the sky watches everything we do and silently judges it. 

From  Tashio Matsumoto's disquieting 1975 experimental short Phantom.

Thursday 14 February 2019

SIGNIFICANT OTHER

And you, you can be mean
      And I, I’ll drink all the time
             Cause we’re lovers, and that is a fact
                      Yes, we’re lovers, and that is that.

Wednesday 13 February 2019

WRETCHED



I like to feel wretched. So much so, in fact, that I try not to feel wretched at all these days, lest I leap off a bridge, or embark on a self-destructive love affair, or inject speed into my eyeball. Wretchedness takes several drinks and night. It is not the same as recklessness, but rather the end result. 

Recklessness leads to wretchedness, and wretchedness leads to a dangerous state of self-loathing, an emotional crevasse where the only option is to dig further down. I have felt the euphoria of this glorious despair, on neon nights, pissing blood in an alleyway while people fuck and fight in the streets like it's the end of the world. I have been punched, and liked it, presenting my head for another shot as the first one didn't hurt enough. I have smoked enough cigarettes that my chest felt likely to cave in, the ventricles of my heart constricting like the trick walls in an Egyptian tomb. I have wanted to chew my own lips off. Scratch away every strata of skin. I have been transfixed by lust, paralysed by longing. I have altered my state and been transformed into a monster, a smooth werewolf carrying a gun filled with silver bullets. 

So I understand how Laura Branigan feels. She's a good person who comes alive in the presence of bad things. She can't help herself, she doesn't want to. Like Laura Palmer, she just knows she's going to get lost tonight. This might be the one she doesn't come back from. But she doesn't care, she likes feeling wretched too.

Monday 11 February 2019

A WOMAN IS A WEAPON


























Valie Export was once loosely aligned with the Viennese Actionists, a group of confrontational performance artists who sought to challenge the post-war complacency of Austrian society, particularly with regard to their conveniently forgotten / ignored complicity with the Nazi regime. Whereas many of the Actionists were macho and aggressive, Valie was an avowed feminist, and much more subtle, though no less thought provoking.

In Tap and Touch, she walked the streets of Vienna, a large box attached to her chest. Passing men were offered the opportunity to reach inside the box, where they would be able to fondle her bare breasts. Watch the film. For all their old world respectability, the Austrian men are eager to cop a feel, queuing up to intimately touch a stranger in a way that, if it happened to their wife, girlfriend, daughter or mother, they would be horrified. Naturally, the media blamed the breasts, not the fondlers, even going as far as to suggest that Valie was a witch who should be burned.

Action Pants: Genital Panic is not only the greatest title for any work of art ever, but it is also a brilliantly simple but incredibly clever concept. Valie, her hair wild and strange, is photographed holding a machine gun. Wearing crotchless trousers, her exposed genitals are obviously the focus of the piece, but it takes a while for the eye to register her exposure, which makes it about her, rather than us, the observer. She looks like a dangerous revolutionary, a precursor to the Red Army Faction, but she knows that her vagina is the source of her power, not the gun.

Thursday 7 February 2019

A TO Z


























The Alphabet, d. by David Lynch (1968)

This film, Lynch's second after Six Figures Getting Sick, cost $1,000, and was inspired by his wife Peggy's niece, who once recited the alphabet during a nightmare. A room was painted black and Peggy was painted white to provide a suitably unsettling visual effect. The soundtrack includes a montage of unsettling things like the wind, a siren and a baby crying, all captured on a broken tape recorder.