#peoplesoup

whatever you want done is on the house, just tell me what you need

Turmoil

2000

17:41

‘The films of Paul Winkler, one of Australia’s most prolific experimentalists, contest prevailing images of landscape as a reflection of national and social cohesion, instead meditating on a disconnection between everyday perception and the Australian environment.’ Alex Gerbaz

‘In his films Winkler is meticulously transposing rules of architectural construction into the building of a visual artifice. These films are like ephemeral pyramids. They are like monuments that we are at time permitted to enter. What lies buried within the inner chamber of a Winkler film is the sarcophagus of Technique itself. For those entering there are innumerable pitfalls lying in wait for the unwary weaned on the warm milk of mainstream cinema.’ Dirk de Bruyn

Quintessa Matranga and Rafael Delacruz and Marc Matchak (US)

Lebenswirklichkeit

2017

26:26

Young artists produce a barely fictional representation of themselves, quoting mumblecore and aspirational dramedy simultaneously. Through the narrative and productive gesture alike a localised situation is created within New York City. Of possibly ambitious young Americans possibly examining their possible careers. The mildest nostalgia is indicated, perhaps to San Francisco pre-dot com or Seattle pre-G8. They look at each other and they look at themselves.

Katherine Botten (AU)

2017

Sunday/ Sexy Young Artist Dominic Will Do ANYTHING To Get Into NEW18: Curator Couch. 2017 Map the world on my world. Map my world on the world.

Starring: Oscar Miller and Dominic Sargent.

Stephen Dillemuth (DE)

Elbsandsteingebirge 1789-1848

1994

50:51

“South of Dresden, the bizarre landscape of the Elbsandsteingebirge served as a treasure trove for the motifs of almost all German romantics. Their paintings today shape our romantic vision of the time between the French Revolution and the March Revolution in Germany. In a journey through pictures, films and texts, to a trip in the Elbe Sandstone Mountains, we are confronted with our own projections: Was the romance political? Or was politics romantic? ”

Josef Strau: That you tried both, and ask if the exhibition is still related? Or has something new opened up?

Stephan Dillemuth: There was also a parallel, as here, for example, the time of the French Revolution and of the Vormarz (the period from 1815 to the March Revolution in 1848, the Red), one could certainly take any other historical section, but it is important That one then comes to different points, which can not be taken as a direct argument for the time, but which at least take up new points of view.

But what else, Schüttpelz has told us that many of the romantics are very young converts to Catholicism because they found this so medieval, and he compared it with the New German wave. It has played in a very funny and liberating way with totally respectable and bourgeois attitudes, but then immediately identified by the success, everything was already over again, and only a stock-conservative and boring story. So question: How can you keep a broken attitude, also against art? Not that the object or the action, for example, would be as it is meant, but if one believes in what results from it, the stability of one’s own attitude, etc., it becomes really serious. Romanticism is always at the beginning when it has something incredulous and playful, and it reacts like a medieval and Catholicism, but also in the sense of Arno Schmidt, to the surrounding chaos, from within me with outwardly protruding inwardness. Someone has also claimed that the aftermath of the French Revolution led to a revolution in art, which was later called Romanticism. But if you believe it again, you land at the Biedermeier.

Charlie Ahearn and Martin Wong (US)

Portrait of Martin Wong

1998

18:00

‘Martin painted the LES ghetto with the most enigmatic realism of bricks to be seen. In 1992 my friend Martin invited me up to his Ridge St apartment as he began his autobiographical Chinatown series reflecting his youth in San Francisco and later New York. After he was diagnosed with HIV he returned to SF where he later passed away in 1999.’ Charlie Ahearn

RIP Martin Wong

Alex Bag (US)

The Artist’s Mind

1996

30:01

‘This is living-dead art, a critical-hysterical acting out of the deodorized-bathroom neurotic, the suicidal biochemical-test subject and the terminal media addict we all recognize as ourselves.’ John Kelsey

‘This is a different time. Puppets and costumes seem funny, relevant. Club culture exists in the same temporal frame, not wedged between the covers of a coffee table book. Limelight is still open. Drugs are still fun/funny. The Internet is too slow for video.’ Rob Mckenzie

In commemoration of Damien Hirst’s 1995 Turner Prize, Bag made The Artist’s Mind, which takes the form of a PBS-style show chronicling a day in the life of a contemporary visual artist. In this episode, aspiring sculptor/painter “Damien Bag” demonstrates his creative process, which begins with eating breakfast, shopping at Wal-Mart and scouring the local highways in search of fresh road kill. Prompted to discuss his work, Damien says his pieces represent “a form of duality” and “a lot of metaphors.”

0rphan Drift (UK)

Bruises

1997

15:05

‘0rphan Drift is a collaborative media artist and avatar that emerged in London, 1994. The video, performances, installations and eponymous cyberpunk novel 0(rphan)d(rift>) addressed the future through the science -fictional, nascent technologies and related shifts in perception and matter-energy. 0D re-emerges in reconfigured form, again addressing the future as it speaks to us in this moment. Considering current narratives around climate change, bio-capital and related migratory patterns they re-imagine the urban as porous, interspecies and terraformed.’

Excerpts from a 30 minute video commissioned, with accompanying slide installation, by Beaconsfield Arts for screening at John Cage ‘Classic’ audiovisual event. Inaugural concert by (rout).

Here the re edit is set to a section of Cage’s album ‘Shock’, and produced on the 0rphan Drift analogue editing suite, complete with MX30 Panasonic mixing desk.

Hana Earles (AU)

$1070

2017

08:00

Working and making art, in the office and in your bedroom.

I could set the building on fire.

You shouldn’t smoke in your bed.

Carolee Schneemann (US)

Interior Scroll - The Cave, 1975 - 1995

1995

07:32

‘In the early ’60s, Schneemann’s “action” paintings, some embedded with images of nude female figures, literally moved from surface to environment, and her staging of work from static objects to interactive events. Along with her colleagues in the Judson Dance Theater, she pioneered crossovers from music, theater, and dance to art. Transferring the orgiastic qualities in her art from paint to the performance of “her own body,” Schneemann broke ground in charged Dionysian extravaganzas that yielded some of the most memorable and challenging images of the period: serpents writhing over her nude body (Eye Body: Thirty-six Transformative Actions, 1963); an erotic flesh fest of entangled bodies, chickens, sausages, and fish (Meat Joy, 1964); a lecture-performance in which she discussed her work and posed questions to an audience such as “Does a woman have intellectual authority?” as she dressed and undressed (Naked Action Lecture, 1968). In Interior Scroll, 1975, she unwound a scroll from her vagina and read a text about “vaginality.” For many, the problem with her exuberant, Reichian-influenced, utopian-tinged abandon, lies in her “performance” of her own body. We need only glance at the historical record for proof that prior to Schneemann, the female body in art was mute and functioned almost exclusively as a mirror of masculine desire. (Think of Yves Klein’s manipulation of nameless female models as voluptuous paintbrushes for the production of his “Anthropométries” series in the early ’60s.) We have done a terrible injustice to ourselves in continuing to marginalize Schneemann as an “angry woman” or “bad girl.” To pigeonhole her art as aberrant is to risk reducing her oeuvre to sensationalism. Schneemann’s blanket of protection from decades of neglect and misrepresentation has been her sheer exuberance and focused search for the real through uberphysicality. I’m not sure that we, the audience, have fared so well.’ Jan Avgikos

Lutz Mommartz and Sigmar Polke (DE)

Der schöne Sigmar

The Beautiful Sigmar

1971

22:44

New Year party with Sigmar Polke at the department of the Kohlhöfers in Düsseldorf / Germany.

‘The films of Lutz Mommartz are each based on a single idea; the effect then is more sustainable, says Lutz Mommartz. These ideas are often brilliant, sharp and provocative, but just as often they lose lot of their radicalism during the realization. Although Lutz Mommartz is a very conscious Filmmaker, his films convey ostensibly the image of a naive author. Lutz Mommartz manages to combine both features in his films. He knows about his enormous naive playfulness, but bringing it under rational control, he uses it consciously. Because he wants to achieve an effect with each film. Film should be a trigger that activates the audience. Although film currently could provide only general climate conditions or lead to climate improvements, but it could not lead to direct political action. The combination of aesthetics and politics rationale appears to him out of place; the commitment would get lost in the art. Lutz Mommartz believes in socialism, but (you should write that!): “Chemistry is the only chance for socialism!” Because 5 % conscious people would always face 95 % inconscious. For Lutz Mommartz there is no form of government that could counteract this. The relationship between these two groups is the only tragedy that there is today. In order to make the relationship bearable Lutz Mommartz sees only one solution: Drugs.’ H.P. Kochenrath

Pauline Senn and Juan Davila (AU)

50:48

‘Juan Davila is a writer, but first and foremost an artist. His controversial work still divides opinions.  Davila was born in 1956 in Santiago, Chile, and lives and works in Melbourne, Australia. At the time of the military coup in Chile, when Pinochet seized power from Allende, Davila was part of the art scene there. His paintings in response, some of which appear in the documentary, shocked both those of the political left and right.  In this documentary, Juan Davila talks about this period, and about modern art, censorship of expression and the oppression of the Mapuche Indians, the original inhabitants of Chile. He also talks about beauty and the shocking effect of painting it today.  Davila has grown reluctant to the idea of being interview, given the failure of the media to address the complexity of his work. For the first time on film he speaks about this in terms of his upbringing - both bourgeois and Indian. We accompany Juan Davila as he revisits his indigenous Mapuche nanny’s daughter, women who have greatly influenced his work. He takes us to the oldest church in Santiago where, as a young buoy, he saw paintings by 17th century Indian artists in the Western manner that would profoundly influence his future work.  And we see the artist at work, painting en plein air in a burnt forest at home in Australia.’

Jack Smith (US)

Flaming Creatures

1963

40:43

Sylvère Lotringer :Were you ever competitive? Did you ever believe in that?

Jack Smith: Yes, of course, when you’re young. It’s drilled into you, and you have to slowly find your way out of it, because you find it doesn’t work. Capitalism is terribly inefficient. The insane duplication, the insane waste, and the young only know what’s put in front of them… But then, by experience, things are happening to you and you find out that this doesn’t work. I mean this is not productive. It produces waste. I looked through your magazine and I was repelled by the title. It’s so dry, you just want to throw it in the wastebasket, which I did. Then I picked it out… Listen: Hatred of Capitalism is a good name for that magazine. It’s stunning. I’ll never admit that I thought of it.

SL: I doubt that by saying that directly you’ll change anything. Language is corrupt.

JS: Listen, you are a creature, artistic I can tell, that somehow got hung up on the issue of language. Forget it. It’s thinking. If you can think of a thought in a most pathetic language… Look at what I have to do in order to think of thoughts. I have to forget language. All I can do with no education, nothing, no advice, no common sense in my life, an insane mother I mean, no background, nothing, nothing, and I have to make art, but I know that under these conditions the one thing I had to find out was if I could think of a thought that has never been thought of before, then it could be in language that was never read before. If you can think of something, the language will fall into place

in the most fantastic way, but the thought is what’s going to do it. The language is shit, I mean it’s only there to support a thought. Look at Susan Sontag, that’s a phenomenon that will never occur, only in every hundred years. Anybody like that. She says things that you would never have thought of. And the language is automatically unique. Whatever new thoughts you can think of that the world needs will be automatically clothed in the most radiant language imaginable.

Bonny Poon (CA)

Beautiful Balance

2017

01:07:45

Of Bodies… Borders… Boredom…

A dazzling and debauched cast of zombies interpret the erotic story of heroes, Whitney and Taylor. The setting is Frankfurt am Main, Germany’s financial heart.

“We are very similar.” “A slave?”

Starring: