(L to R) Daniel Paul, Yto Barrada, Sara Cwynar, Zachary Epcar, Lucy Ives, Mathilde Walker-Billaud, and Courtney Stephens.
On Monday, November 18, 2019, Flaherty NYC screened Program 4 SEDUCTIVE SURFACES, of the SURFACE KNOWLEDGE series, programmed by Courtney Stephens and Mathilde Walker-Billaud. The screening took place at Anthology Film Archives and was co-presented with Organism for Poetic Research. The artists and scholars in person to discuss their work were Yto Barrada, Sara Cwynar, Zachary Epcar, and Daniel Paul, with Lucy Ives, novelist and critic, moderating the conversation. Words were largely second to image in the films on Monday night, and Ives quipped that it might be an awkward transition into language as she launched the discussion portion of the program. Program four felt like a fruition of many themes Stephens and Walker-Billaud had been building up to since opening night, leaning heavily into the broader theme of surfaces, and the many textural forms they can take, behaviors they can stimulate and ways they can manipulate. Abstract and complex in their forms the films’ streamlined images seduced the audience into a realm of pure impression, based less in emotions than in the physical senses.
Daniel Paul lecture.
Opening with a visual lecture by architectural historian Daniel Paul, the program introduced the audience to a timeline of events that chronologically and ideologically anchored the development of mirrored glass, post-modernist architecture. Paul presented mirrored glass buildings, such as the Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles, as an aesthetic created by the fusion of art world minimalism with the futuristic ambitions with high tech, viewed as a possible conduit to the ascension of mankind. As stated in the programming, the mirrored glass creates an effect of both absence and presence, in the form of massively reflective buildings meant to be viewed from a car (relevant considering this architectural trend is native to Southern California). The buildings create a distortion of perception as the reflective surface causes these buildings to almost camouflage themselves into their own surroundings. The images Paul used in his visual lecture capture people walking into these massive structures, dominated by the intensity of their reflectivity. Strangely, the “skins" of these buildings simultaneously seem to absorb the physical and project it back with total sterility: smooth, cold, and 100 percent artificial. Paul points to how these grid-like exteriors have become naturalized into our physical landscape, suggesting a flat, indifferent ecosystem for life to coexist in silence.
The first film of the night, by the 1970s Italian architectural collective SuperStudio, ATTI FONDAMENTALI VITA (SUPERSUPERFICIE), suggested an exaggerated form of this conceptual ideal, mapping out a way of life meant to be lived on the surface of a flat grid, free of personal belongings, and capitalist pleasures. Like the skins of the mirror glass superstructures, the speculative grid represented in the film transforms the surface of the earth into a place without limits or borders, an infinite space for creating a new society, meant to thrive in our own spirituality, philosophy and artistic endeavors. The hallucinatory state that is provoked by mirrored glass structures becomes physically actualized in this film, as it moves from art to tech to nature, evolving into a hybrid of all three, and suggesting, inadvertently, the internet that was yet to come.
Return to Forms (dir. Zachary Epcar 2016, 10 min, 16mm-to-digital)
When asked about his film, Return to Forms, Epcar uses the word manic. This is true in a pleasurable way — in the way a manic episode can feel unhinging, like water rushing through the body; or how ASMR can feel comforting like someone running their finger up your spine. Yes, Epcar’s work is manic, synesthetic, and wacky. The film opens with hands touching, feeling, and rubbing a leather chair. Although the audience has never seen or sat in this chair before, there is a wordy familiarity within the body that manifests through sound and image; we do in fact know this chair. Leslie Gore’s You’ve Come Back signals to a deeper truth imbedded in the text of the film’s title. Coming back, returning to the world we know through experience, a place where commodity leans on the senses in order to elevate its aims. The abstraction conveyed in the series of empty and in-between spaces photographed in Return To Forms is that space in between emotional feelings and physical feeling. Gore’s piercing ballad of a bitter sweet reunion played over a POV shot of feet running into the ocean feels like a completion or surrender to an overwhelming sadness, perhaps a sustained and growing distance from the physical, that it is easy to see oneself in. Then, the sensation of the water can be felt on the surface of your own skin as icy and cold. ““Oh! Happy day, you’ve come back…” It’s easy to become lost inside of Return to Forms especially when it feels as if there aren't words in the English language to define this in-between space or time (which includes mirror glass surfaces). Attempting to recall the film in its entirety is like trying to recall a dream upon waking up from one. Epcar describes shooting the film in his native San Francisco during a time of rapid transition, a kind of bookend to Superstudio's predictive prologue — the spaces and lifestyles the internet creates, which have an otherworldliness all their own. The film’s undefinable emotions lingered into the last two works by Sara Cwynar and Yto Barrada.
Red Film (dir. Sara Cwynar 2018, 13 min, digital)
The rebranding of something old as new is the circle that production and consumerism run in, and our participation in this cycle is what artists Cwynar and Barrada make us painfully aware of. In Cwynar’s film Red Film, the use of the color red can be thought of as a place holder for real emotion. Just looking at so many versions of something so visually striking can in fact artificially produce its own reaction void of any specific cause, while also sending us into a commercial space, as we can’t help connect specifically red to branding mechanisms used in consumer advertisements. The color red has been reinvented more than one cares to think about, and although we are as the spectator aware of this, we still crave the newness of its return. The layered elements of Red Film are intermittently “captioned” in the form of spoken word; philosophy, personal truisms and miss-remembered aphorisms bounce off each other in an echo chamber of thought, until the narrator finally pauses to announce that he/she (the voice is doubled) is “blue in the face from telling the story over and over again.” Filmed as if it were a commercial of some sort, a commercial about the commercialization of emotion perhaps, the film achieves the texture of a glossy stock photo or the top coat of a nail polish. It smells of AquaNet and other cosmetics aimed to stop gravity and time, and it feels like Nair, the bubbly pink bottle that convinced you to remove your body hair via chemical burn. All of this quite literally mutate the surface of one fluid or attractive texture into another. Cwynar ingeniously taps into an area of product feminization and fertilization and shows the toll that these “things” take on the body but also the internet-scrolling mind, through close up shots of Cwynar’s un-made-up face hanging upside down in obvious pain. Red Film picks apart the modes of production and display that sustain the very things that pick us apart.
False Start (dir. Yto Barrada 2010, 23 min)
In an almost opposite but related context, Yto Barrada’s False Start is a film ostensibly about the very old: fossils, but marries them to the ever-present present by revealing in gorgeous impression of contemporary artisanship, the world of fake fossil production in her native Morocco. Filmed on an expedition that was accompanied by actual paleontologists, the film shows laborers in rural outposts using dental tools and molds to carve, pick, and distill into perfect form, the “ancient” objects sought after by tourists in Morocco. It captures another version of “the old is always new,” and the market value of artifice over accumulated worth. The fake fossil is another objects that reflects the desiring gaze of the consumer, who is perhaps willing to overlook the giveaway perfection of the false, for the surface satisfaction it holds.
written by Krystalle Macqueen & photos by Abby Lord
PROGRAMME
Daniel Paul SMOOTH OPERATOR: Late-Modern Mirror Glass Architecture, 1970-1985. 2019, 20 min, audio-visual lecture
Superstudio GLI ATTI FONDAMENTALI: VITA (SUPERSUPERFICIE) 1972, 10 min, 16mm-to-digital
Zachary Epcar RETURN TO FORMS 2016, 10 min, 16mm-to-digital
Sara Cwynar RED FILM 2018, 13 min, digital
Yto Barrada FALSE START 2010, 23 min, digital
Join us, December 4, 7pm at Anthology Film Archives for Program 5 What The Greeks Call ——. Ellie Ga and Felipe Meres will be in person to discuss their work with moderator and Flaherty NYC co-programmer Mathilde Walker-Billaud. The evenings event is presented in partnership with Cultural Services of the French Embassy in New York and co-presented with Cabinet Magazine. We look forward to seeing you all there!