A Distant Echo
20th Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival
Friday 28 October, 5pm Dukla Edison cinema
Premiere of feature film A Distant Echo (Dir. George Clark, 2016, UK/USA, 82min) official selection at the 20th Jihlava IDFF as part of the Opus Bonum competition.
Trailer for A Distant Echo:
https://vimeo.com/gclark/adistantecho-trailer
60th BFI London Film Festival
Friday 14 October 2016 15:45, BFI Southbank, NFT3
Premiere of Sea of Clouds / 雲海 (2016) in programme The Past Is Present Too with works by Stina Wirfelt, Louis Henderson, and Filipa Cesar curated by Benjamin Cook.
“Shot in Taiwan and structured around an interview with the artist Chen Chieh-jen, Sea of Clouds focuses on the public film screenings that took place during Japan’s colonial rule over Taiwan, which were covertly used to hold political gatherings.” – BFI London Film Festival
Films in Place of Places
25 FPS International Experimental Film & Video Festival, Zagreb, Croatia
Friday 30 September, 16.00 KINO SC
This is the first presentation of ongoing project Untitled (Eyemo Rolls). For the screening newly printed 35mm film rolls were screened in dialogue with work by Chick Strand, Peter Hutton, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Mok Chiu-yu & Li Ching, and Joanna Margaret Paul and Tito & Tita.
Eyemo Rolls #1-3 (George Clark, 35mm, 3 min)
0116643225059 (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand, 1994, 16mm transferred to digital, 5 min)
Eyemo Rolls #23, #26-27 (George Clark, 35mm, 4 min)
Thorndon (Joanna Margaret Paul, New Zealand, 1975, 8mm transferred to digital, 5 min)
Eyemo Rolls #50, #54, (George Clark, 35mm, 4 min)
Letter to the Young Intellectuals of Hong Kong / 給香港的文藝青年 (Mok Chiu-yu & Li Ching, Hong Kong, 1978, 35mm transferred to digital, 20 min)
Eyemo Rolls #56, #74-76 (George Clark, 35mm, 3 min)
Guacamole (Chick Strand, USA / Mexico, 1976 , 16mm, 10 min)
Eyemo Rolls #56, #33-34 (George Clark, 35mm, 3 min)
Director’s Cat (Tito & Tita, Philippines, 2013, 16mm transferred to digital, 2 min)
Eyemo Rolls #78, #80-83 (George Clark, 35mm, 4 min)
Images of Asian Music (A Diary from Life 1973-74) (Peter Hutton, USA, 1974, 16mm, 29 min)
Phantom Topologies
CIRCUIT Artist Film and Video Aotearoa New Zealand, Wellington
7-10 September 2016
Symposium, screenings and exhibitions bringing together works from New Zealand, the Philippines, the UK, Hong Kong and Canada and including five new film commissions This is not film-making. Artists work for cinema by Gavin Hipkins, Juliet Carpenter, Daniel Malone, Louise Menzies and Nathan Gray curated by George Clark.
Blind Matter: On The Economy of Images
MUMA / Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne, Australia
7 August – 14 September 2016
Blind Matter draws together a diverse range of works in which filmmakers and artists have sought to explore the economies of images. From reflections on the potential of plastics – the trade of fossils, creation of images of desire – to new worlds mined within virtual spaces, these works complement Nicholas Mangan: Limits to Growth, and the way in which the exhibition reflects on the relationship of art and abstraction to processes of value creation. Taking its title from Victor Hugo’s statement ‘Man makes blind matter serve him’, the program seeks to reflect our relationship to matter in an age of globalisation and the increasingly mediated nature of our interactions with matter. Featuring works by Harun Farocki, Beatrice Gibson, Lucy Raven and Alain Resnais.
The programme was curated to accompany Nicholas Mangan’s exhibition Limits to Growth while I was participating in the Monash Art, Design & Architecture artist in residence program 2016.
Programme
The Power of the Market: The Pencil (Milton Friedman, USA, 1980, 2.30min)
‘Look at this lead pencil. There’s not a single person in the world who could make this pencil.’ – Milton Friedman
In his famous polemical parable of the pencil, the economist Milton Friedman, describes with awe the wonders and supposed inevitability of the free market as a means to both liberate people and eventually bring about world peace. This short speech, extracted from the 10 hour PBS documentary series Free to Choose, seen in the light of the recent financial crisis, displays the utopia thinking behind neo-liberalism. In regarding the simple pencil, Friedman describes the global labour and industry behind it, demonstrating that interconnected markets cooperated across language, religion and belief, enabled by the ‘magic’ of the market to create this simple product.
La chant de la styrène / The Song of Styrene (Alain Resnais, France, 1959, 19 min)
This early essay film by Alain Resnais is a celebration of the potential of plastics. Shot in striking colour, the film is a paean to the abstract qualities and malleability of this new material. Providing a fascinating insight into the optimism behind plastics prior to realisation of the stark environmental damage their production causes, the film also anticipates the potential of the material only now being realised with the advent of 3D printing. Le chant du Styrène / The Song of Styrene was commissioned by French industrial group Pechiney to highlight the merits of plastics with a commentary by Raymond Queneau composed in Alexandrines, the film examines with futurist zeal the abstract potentials of an emergent age of plastic.
Ein Bild / An Image
Harun Farocki, Germany, 1983, 25 min
Four days spent in a studio working on a centrefold photo for Playboy magazine provided the subject matter for my film. The magazine itself deals with culture, cars, a certain lifestyle. Maybe all those trappings are only there to cover up the naked woman. Maybe it’s like with a paper-doll. The naked woman in the middle is a sun around which a system revolves: of culture, of business, of living! (It’s impossible to either look or film into the sun.) One can well imagine that the people creating such a picture, the gravity of which is supposed to hold all that, perform their task with as much care, seriousness, a responsibility as if they were splitting uranium. This film, An Image, is part of a series I’ve been working on since 1979. The television station that commissioned it assumes in these cases that I’m making a film that is critical of its subject matter, and the owner or manager of the thing that’s being filmed assumes that my film is an advertisement for them. I try to do neither. Nor do I want to do something in between, but beyond both.’ – Harun Farocki, 1988
The Deccan Trap (Lucy Raven, USA, 2015, sound by Paul Corley, 4:19 min)
‘The Deccan Trap is a sci-fi fable that goes back in space and time, from some of the newest 3D images being produced in India—at post-production studios in converting outsourced Hollywood films from 2D to 3D—to some of the oldest—bas-relief carvings in Ellora’s rock cut temples in Madhya Pradesh.’ – Lucy Raven
F for Fibonacci (Beatrice Gibson, UK, 2014, 16 min)
F for Fibonacci develops a particular episode from JR, in which a televised music lesson is scrambled with a maths class on derivatives inside the mind of its child protagonist. Musings on aleatory music become muddled with virtual stock pickings and a theory of ‘market noise’. Unfolding through the modular machine aesthetics of the video game Minecraft, text book geometries, graphic scores, images from physics experiments, and cartoon dreams, blend with images from wall street: stock market crashes, trading pits, algorithms and transparent glass. – Beatrice Gibson
Artists & Thinkers: Nicholas Mangan and George Clark
MUMA / Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne, Australia
2 August 2016
Nicholas Mangan and George Clark discuss Limits to Growth, the current survey exhibition of Mangan’s work at MUMA and specifically Mangan’s filmic works in relation to the ‘essay film’ as a mode of film practice. The talk took place while I was participating in the Monash Art, Design & Architecture artist in residence program 2016.
Image: Nicholas Mangan Limits to Growth, 2016 installation view (Bitcoin rig in the basement of Monash University Museum of Art).
Critical Curating: Artists Moving Image, Contemporary Art and the Museum
National Taiwan Museum of Fine Art, Taichung, Taiwan, 9 July 2016
The National Museum of Fine Arts has invited curators of international film festivals, art museums and artists to talk about the issues associated with the curatorial and creative aspects of film and video, especially the correlation between museums and the moving image.
“The presence of moving images within spaces of contemporary art is an established and much discussed condition of international art. But how do these spaces present and reflect the diverse histories, conditions and materials of cinema? Which cinema’s do they select to represent and how can spaces of contemporary art present new ways to think about and explore the diverse history of film and video? And finally how do these areas of practice change how art history is constructed?
This illustrated talk and screening will explore contemporary understandings film and video while arguing for a reconsideration of how they are approached within the contemporary gallery, modern art museum and film festival. I will reflect on my experience as a curator and artist, discussing my work at Tate Modern and various independent curatorial projects that have sought to manifest a critical approach to contemporary art through artists moving image work. I will explore this critical practice of film and video curation in relation to how art history is narrated in international contexts and how artists moving image presents an alternative to event culture, critical of spectacle both within cinema and contemporary art.”
Peter Hutton – At Sea
9th July 2016 19:00 – 21:00
Art Anew gallery, Taichung, Taiwan
Organiser: The Other Cinema Collective & George Clark
“Cinema tends to be this additive thing, it gets more complicated technologically… I wanted to do it alone, keep it personal and private. Almost like making sketchbooks. The more I kept it simple the more I could work… It’s not about the pyrotechnics, it’s about something else—being inventive with limitations.” – Peter Hutton, 2012
Peter Hutton’s film At Sea (2007, 16mm, 60mins) depicts the life cycle of a container ship – from its construction in a Korean shipyard, an epic winter journey across the Atlantic and its final resting place on the shores of Bangladesh where teams of ship breakers manually take apart the vast vessel for recycling. Voted the best avant-garde film of the past decade in a 2011 Film Comment poll, At Sea is a wordless critique of the endless transportation of goods and an elegiac study of the passing of time. American filmmaker Peter Hutton (1944 – 2016) spent nearly 40 years crafting his intimate depictions of the world, he travelled extensively to create his beautifully composed studies of landscapes, cities and the largely unseen territory of the oceans. Subtle critiques of global commerce and the inadequacy of images to depict the enormity and complexity of the world, his films chart the slow passing of the industrial age and the increasing invisibility of labour. Marked by formative experiences as a merchant seaman he supported his art education and early films by working aboard container ships, making films works in South East Asia, the cityscapes of Eastern Europe and industrial landscapes of the Hudson valley and his home town of Detroit. Working independently throughout his life, Peter Hutton’s body of work stands as a model for a different conception of cinema, a cinema built on attention and observation. Striving to film people and places with dignity, his films offer different images of the world, what Werner Herzog called ‘adequate images’, images by which to better live in and know the world. “The films aren’t about perfection, they’re about trying to get a hold of something and giving it some credibility and quality.”
This screening will be introduced by artist and curator George Clark, who worked alongside Peter Hutton in 2012 on Luke Fowler’s film ‘The Poor Stockinger, the Luddite Cropper and the Deluded Followers of Joanna Southcott.’
Screening follows talk ‘Critical Curating: Artists Moving Image, Contemporary Art and the Museum’ by George Clark 14.00 – 16.30 at National Taiwan Museum of Fine Art, Taichung https://www.ntmofa.gov.tw/chinese/ProjectLecture_1.aspx?SN=4834&n=10049
A Planter’s Art / 種植者的藝術
Soulangh Cultural Park, Tainan City, Taiwan (R.O.C.)
18 June – 31 July 2016
The exhibition features new film work and installation that draws on outtakes from a government educational film, photographs from a Taiwanese historical wax museum and together with new 35mm footage shot in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Los Angeles. The films will be presented within an installation with a special garden grown from seed during the period of my residency in Tainan.
Exhibition trailer:
https://vimeo.com/gclark/georgeclarkexhibitiontrailer
Workshop of Termite Art: Towards a History of the Essay film
[蟻蛀藝術：朝向一種隨筆電影的歷史] 工作坊
14-15 June 2016, Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts, Taipei National University of Arts & Taipei National University of the Arts
The two day workshop ‘Termite Art: Towards a History of the Essay film’ will approach at the essay film as a critical category that draws on different languages and disciplines from cinema, visual arts and curatorial practice. The term “Termite Art,” taken from the critic Manny Faber, is used here to argue for the importance of the essay film as the critical meeting place between cinema and contemporary art. French filmmaker Jean-Pierre Goran proposed the term for the essay film in the retrospective The Way of the Termite. The Essay in Cinema 1909-2004 he organised for Vienna Film Museum. Faber defines ‘Termite Art’ as follows: “The most inclusive description of the art is that, termite-like, it feels its way through walls of particularization with no sign that the artist has any object in mind other than eating away the immediate boundaries of his art, and turning these boundaries into conditions of the next achievement.”
The workshop aims to propose a distinct approach of the essay film as a critical practice that devours and cannibalises other art forms, blurring the boundary between visual art and cinema, between documentary, experimental film, artists cinema, etc to create a distant critical art that eats away at fixed histories and definitions. The workshop will explore the meeting place between cinema and art with reference to the diverse work of Chris Marker, Camille Henrot, Luis Ospina, Kidlat Tahimik, Duncan Campbell, Hito Steyerl, Trinh T Minh Ha, Raul Ruiz, Morgan Fisher and others. With this in mind I’ll present a selection of screenings to reflect the concept of ‘Termite Art’ , focusing on works that eat away at each other and categorizations around art and how this idea relates to contemporary artists working across media and disciplines and connects debates within curatorial and art practice from Hito Steyerl’s idea of ‘poor image’ to debates around cultural appropriation. (Text by George Clark)
Workshop led by George Clark (Artist and curator) with Austin Ming-Han Hsu (Chief editor of Film Appreciation quarterly magazine) and Hongjohn Lin (Chair of Fine Arts Department, Taipei National University of the Arts)
The workshop was presented in English with Chinese translation by Fang-Tze Hsu. The workshop was developed and delivered as while I was participating in the 2016 Kuandu Residency programme from 2016.05.20-06.17.
Session One / 第一場
Termite Art as History: Essay film and the meeting of Contemporary Art and Cinema
作為歷史的「蟻蛀藝術」
從「隨筆電影」談論當代藝術與電影的遭遇點
Session Two / 第二場
Termite Art as Practice: Images of the world in Curatorial and Artistic Practice
作為實踐的「蟻蛀藝術」：
從「隨筆電影」談論策展與藝術創作中的影像世界
【講座介紹】
本工作坊旨在探討隨筆電影作為一種批判文類，此文類來自
藉此，本工作坊將戮力探索隨筆電影在觀念上與作法上的明
