RIGHT GRIER, RIGHT NOW

The amazing Pam Grier spent her onscreen career being treated appallingly, then getting revenge. In Fort Apache, The Bronx (1981) she has a brief but pivotal role as a drug addicted prostitute who, unable to take any more shit, goes on a killing spree. Spree makes it sound tres jolie: it isn't, and it doesn't do Pam any good, either, as she, in turn, is killed shortly afterwards, her body fly-tipped on one of the Bronx's numerous building sites.

In a few key scenes, Pam conveys the abject misery and hopelessness of life on the street, and the overload of mental anguish that has led her to murder. It seems obvious to say that her character deserves better, almost everybody in this rather depressing film does.

OPTICAL CARNIVAL

The Responsive Eye was an exhibition of optical art held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York from February to April 1965. Some of the artists represented included Josef Albers, Bridget Riley, Frank Stella, Victor Vasarely and the French collective Groupe de Recherche d'Art Visuele.

Curator William C. Seitz said "unlike most previous abstract painting, these works exist less as objects to be examined than of generators of perceptual response, of colours and relationships existing solely in vision; of forms, presences and variations often entirely different from the static stimuli by the artist'.

The first night audience, captured in a short film (one of the cameraman was Brian de Palma), is clearly drawn from the upper echelons of Manhattan society (the men are wearing black tie; the women evening gloves), and seem largely indifferent, being far more interested in themselves and each other. 

Some medical professionals are on hand to talk about the physiological effects the pictures and objects might be having on the viewer, and the curators and the artists work hard, talking about concavity and convexity, transience and translucence, perhaps trying to ensure people understand that this is ART, not a set of fairground mirrors. 

David Hockney says that he detests some of the work because it 'makes my eyes blink', a statement he thinks very clever indeed, but then he's always been an obnoxious little prick.

EMPIRE

 

 

In June 1965, Andy Warhol went to the 41st floor of the Time Life Building in New York, set up an Auricon camera and, over two consecutive nights, filmed the Empire State Building from the window. When projected in slow motion (16 frames per second, as specified by Warhol) the six and a half hours of footage runs for eight hours and five minutes.

An exercise in watching (and feeling) the passage of time, the film is, of course, pretty boring, despite the fact that there is, actually, quite a lot going on. Lights blink, the window mists, the picture blurs, the frame wobbles, stuff like that. 

The whole project embodies one of Warhol's key principles: 'when nothing happens, you have the chance to think about everything' (see my previous post for another embodiment of the maxim). It's a quote that has genuinely been one of my biggest influences in terms of both art and life, so if you ever find me staring blankly into space, I'm not inactive, I'm just thinking about everything. 

NEON DREAMS

Benjamin Marra is a hell of a talent, even though most of what he does is pure evil. Night Business is a relentlessly violent and extravagantly sexual cocktail of pulp fiction and porn, a comic strip rendition of the sort of films that Abel Ferrara and Brian De Palma spent much of the 70s and 80s making, although even those distinguished gentlemen would have baulked at having a topless female vigilante motorcyclist as a heroine. All that’s missing is the sound of synths.

SLEAZE CITY

Fear City, d. Abel Ferrara (1984)

What a sleazy, deadly place New York used to be, a neon coated sinkhole of sex and poppers and hot, hot pants. In Fear City, a naked Melanie Griffith gyrates wildly for a baying crowd of desperate men waving dirty money, and a deluded, pumped up karate killer stalks the filthy streets, roundhousing erotic dancers at his leisure. When they meet, it’s murder.

UP THERE, UPTOWN

It apparently took Francis Thompson twenty years to perfect the lenses needed to realise his kaleidoscopic vision of Manhattan, but the result, N.Y, N.Y (1956), shows it was time well spent. I was in New York in April, I can't wait to get back there.