Tag Archives: writing

Distortions: Moscow Conceptualists Working Today / Response to “Execution Love Chair” by Vadim Zakharov

Execution Love Chair – Vadim Zakharov

Assignment: Respond to this photo without any details.

This is Not How I Imagine It But How It Is
Lynne Sachs, July 15, 2023
This is not how I imagine it but how it is. I’m somewhere, probably in a place where I’ve spent all night with my head on a pillow, not mine, with closed eyes in a room where I’m not sure how far the walls are from the soft mattress, and there is a body next to me, but it’s so dark I don’t actually know if the body is on my left and if the wall is on my right. I’m scared, very scared that if I move, I might bang against the wall or the body, and I’ll forget to caress the body or I’ll knock my head thump against the wall, and so I become a hardened plank. My eyes see nothing. I remember the time I learned about the pupils in your eyes. But mine don’t open up in the darkness, or reduce to almost nothing in the sunlight. The little dark holes in my eyeballs don’t ever adapt, the way yours do. They’re set to an open that resembles the way that I drew my first self-portrait, just dark balls in a dirty pool of brown. It’s just a miracle that they see anything at all anymore on a normal day, a normal day. Is it part of growing old? To have this feeling of being in a bed with a wall and forgetting who is there with you. Even when you look, you only see a blue glow casting shadows on darkness from the LED lights of the cable, the clock, the modem, the things that remind you of what you could be, or do when, in reality, you’re happiest, when you are just overwhelmed. Then you scoot down the mattress, worried that you’ll scratch your face on the toenail that belongs to that person who is there with you. The clock reminds you it is 4 AM and you assume you have Covid. What else could it be? A cold, watery chill moves through your limbs and down your belly into your groin. At last you’re on the floor, with no idea how to find the door, your fingers creep along, leading you away from the now red light of the digital clock you found in the closet and thought might be helpful in your life, this time around. There you are on hands on knees, as they say, moving in a direction that might or might not be OUT and your nose tells you to go this way rather than that. Oh my, it’s a piece of furniture. You know it because your forehead smashes against it as soon as you push yourself a little further than you thought you would ever go. UP. It feels like the chair you bought at IKEA, or maybe the one you found in your mother’s attic, the one she didn’t want because it reminds her of your father or maybe it’s the high chair where you first slurped pumpkin through your lips past your gums into your throat, or maybe it’s the chair pulled from a game of musical chairs where you were almost out , but weren’t. You emerged with one chair in your grip. It’s that chair, the one in which you were declared a winner. There in the almost darkness you feel its sturdiness, plus something else you can’t quite detect. Of course, your pupils are still too small but your nose smells a flower. It’s a rose and you know better than to touch it. A rose has thorns. You remember that, at least. Better not touch. Just sit down and maybe you’ll feel different, or maybe better, maybe the same, but at least you’re off the floor now. You pull yourself up higher, feel all your weight, breathe as deeply as you can, like they taught you in that exercise class a few years ago. Then you rest in the chair. Feel the petals coming up through the seat, tickling your anus. Now at long last, you can rest, and then you feel a sensation, electricity, running through your fingers and into your organs and you wonder for just how long you can remain alive.

Distortions: Moscow Conceptualists Working Today
September 9 – October 28, 2023

https://www.205hudsongallery.org/calendar/2023/8/22/distortions-moscow-conceptualists-working-today

Hunter College Art Galleries: 205 Hudson Gallery 
205 Hudson Street
New York, NY 
Hours: Tuesday–Saturday, 12-6pm

Curated by Hunter College Professors Daniel Bozhkov and Joachim Pissarro with Dr. Olga Zaikina and Graduate Curatorial Fellow Victoria Borisova

Exhibition
Moscow Conceptualism began as an alternative underground art world in the late Soviet Union. Its unofficial status shaped its artistic methods and theoretical framework. The exhibition includes original objects, archival materials, and working models of original artworks, alongside new projects created by Moscow Conceptualists in collaboration with art and art history students and faculty at Hunter College. Thus, Distortions is an experiment in intergenerational and cross-cultural collaboration. It aims to transform the gallery into a two-month long forum exploring how existing artworks can be activated to create new living situations, and how documents can be used beyond the preservation of the past. 

Participating artists and art groups:
Yuri Albert (born 1959 in Moscow, lives and works in Cologne)
Collective Actions (active 1976-present)
Gnezdo (active 1974-79)
Sabine Hänsgen (born 1955 in Dusseldorf, lives and works in Bochum, Germany)
Andrei Monastyrski (born 1949 in Pechenga, Russia, lives and works in Moscow),
Victor Skersis (born 1956 in Moscow, lives and works in Bethlehem, PA)
Nadezhda Stolpovskaya (born 1959 in Moscow, lives and works in Cologne, Germany)
SZ Group (active 1980-84, 1989, 1990)
Vadim Zakharov (born 1959 in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, lives and works in Berlin, Germany).

Distortions: Moscow Conceptualists Working Today was developed through a two-semester graduate curatorial seminar at Hunter College led by professors Daniel Bozhkov and Joachim Pissarro with Dr. Olga Zaikina. It included studio art students: Lauren Cline, Tucker Claxton, LeLe Dai, Paula De Martino, Alicia Ehni, Stevie Knauss, Milly Skelington, Johnny Sagan; and art history students: Caitlin Anklam, Victoria Borisova, Jay Bravo, Andrea Dauhajre, Curtis Eckley, Daniel Kuzinez, Jake Robinson. Visiting scholar: Virginia Marano, PhD Candidate, University of Zürich, Switzerland. 

Takahiko Iimura In Memoriam / Millennium Film Journal

MFJ / WORLDS / FALL 2022

In Memoriam: Takahiko Iimura (1937 – 2022)

by Lynne Sachs

for Millennium Film Journal Vol. 76 “Worlds” Fall 2022

From 1967 to 2017, Japanese film artist Takahiko limura lived with his wife Akiko in New York City. At the same time, he also lived in Tokyo. Both places he called home. When he was in town, he was an avid member of the local media art community. He premiered new work and energetically attended screenings in venues that celebrated the avant-garde. Taka, as everyone called him, devoured all the art that he experienced in New York, eventually writing a robust New York Art Diary which covered the first two decades of his time in his life. At every turn, he approached the making of an image or the recording of a sound from a distinctly Japanese perspective, always aware of the difficulty of translating words and ideas from his language and culture co ours. His material preoccupations originated with the apparatus-both the camera and the projector– acknowledging everything from aesthetics to psychology to semiotics.

In 2010, I visited Taka’s studio in Tokyo with my husband, filmmaker Mark Street, witnessing his expansive workspace, filled with film, video, and other media detritus. We drank beer, ate local snacks, and talked about the NYC underground film community. A few years later, I attended one of his expanded cinema events at the Microscope Gallery in Brooklyn. Usually when we anticipate a film screening, we assume that we will sit in a chair in a row of other chairs, all facing in the same direction toward an illuminated screen. A Taka limura program would be a spectacle of an entirely different kind. 

Taka never accepted any of the rules for making or watching a movie. To experience one of his cinematic events always took you beyond seeing and hearing. Committed to exploring the ontology of cinema, he wanted you to think about audience, the frame, language, the body, light and shadow, the difference between the Western and the Asian psyche, and time.

When I walked into the small storage-like room, it felt as if I were in a miniature version of Taka’s Tokyo studio. There was such a quality of intimacy in this quasi-domestic space. The audience of about seven sat in folding chairs surrounding a card cable where Taka was busy, moving tiny white cubes across the surface, using a cell phone to project their presence onto a screen. He had a sense of nervous performance anxiety; the stakes, even in this modest environment, were high. When lights went out, we seeded into our chairs to watch him move and caress hi collection of three-dimensional objects. Just as he had done for so many decades before, Takahiko limura became performer, artist and audience, witnessing with us the transformation of the tangible, the ephemeral and, at least for me, the unforgettable.

“I am revealing myself to you and becoming one of the audience.” – Takahiko limura 

LYNNE SACHS

Critics Page: “The Thing is No More” by Lynne Sachs in The Brooklyn Rail

 FLUX TIME: Moving-Image Art and the Ends of Cinema

To address the relationship between contemporary contexts of art and cinema, we asked 17 artists, curators, programmers, and critics to respond to a simple question: what and where is artists’ cinema today, and what and where is its future?

http://brooklynrail.org/2014/07/criticspage/the-thing-is-no-more

“The Thing is No More” by Lynne Sachs

I like making things. Objects that are distinct, take up space, have weight and texture, can be given as gifts, are occasionally sold, contain the very story of their making in the material of their being. And so it is with a stubborn adolescent fury that I refuse to believe that the work I do as a filmmaker is being pushed so quickly and definitively from the three dimensional into the digital and ultimately to the virtual world.  In the face of time’s uncontrollable whimsy, I am a guileless Peter Pan, a cantankerous Rip Van Winkle, and a naïve Cinderella all rolled into one. Clearly I am not alone in my resistance to this technological transformation of the way that human beings witness, record, and preserve images and sounds. Are we watching the “stuff” of cinema disappear before our very eyes?

Recently, I traveled to the Encuentros del Otros Cine Festival International in Quito, Ecuador to screen my own work, give a lecture on my practice as an experimental documentary maker, and present a program of short films by New York City filmmakers including Ken Jacobs, M.M. Serra, Mark Street, and Jem Cohen, along with five other younger artists on the scene (Sean Hanley, Amanda Katz, Josh Lewis, Miao Jiaxin, Georg Anthony Svatek). My intention for this program entitled Scenic Ruptures was to present a radical, distinctly unshiny picture of life in the Big Apple. Throughout my career as an artist, I have worked to promote the films and videos of my peers, locally, nationally, and internationally. So when I was instructed to send all of our weightless media files over the Internet rather than using an exorbitantly expensive and often unreliable shipping service, I was ecstatic. It wasn’t so long ago that we were facing the seemingly insurmountable obstacle of screening a U.S.-made N.T.S.C. standard video in the P.A.L. universe of Europe or South America, or when a brazen film about sexuality was stopped full throttle in the customs office at J.F.K.

Over the last two years, I’ve discovered that one of the most exciting and affirming places to see my own work projected is not necessarily in a traditional film viewing space. Strangely enough, this new-found awareness just might fall in line with my attempt to climb my way out of the melancholy I am feeling about the disappearing movie thing. In 2012 and 2013, my own filmmaking process became more performative. I hauled projectors, screens, and stage props all over New York City in order to present a live version of my hybrid documentary Your Day is My Night. In both versions of the piece, immigrant residents of a “shift-bed” apartment in the heart of Chinatown share their stories of personal and political upheaval. As the bed transforms into a stage, we try to reveal the collective history of the Chinese in the United States through autobiographical monologues, movement pieces, and projected images. In this more theatrical and certainly more unpredictable setting, an astonishing chemistry erupted between the projected documentary elements of the media and the performers’ dances and songs. The film itself was transformed by the spontaneity of the performers and the performers’ presence on the stage took on a new dimension as a result of the moving image. During our shows, it seemed that the projector functioned as an activator, a full participant in the resurrection and cultivation of complex, sometimes paradoxical memories. I am just realizing now how much this performative documentary mode of working might very well have changed the way I make movies.

And so it is with trepidation and optimism that I begin to let go of the thingness of cinema, still embracing my camera like a painter’s brush or a writer’s pen, but knowing that the light as it hits the screen is nothing more than an illusion.

Department of the Interior / Cinematograph Vol. 3

Department of the Interior 

Lynne Sachs, Cinematograph Journal of Film and Media Art, 1988

“There is a shadow cast across Nina Fonoroff’s Department of the Interior. It is the shadow of the Founding Fathers, those luminous figures to whom we give credit for creating our laws, our language and our rational mode of thinking. Much to their possible chagrin, however, this office of the Executive Branch (which is given the responsibility of maintaining public land) is no longer completely intact. Instead, the irrationality of the Mother and the child has begun to take control.

Whether a relic of the state or the family, Fonoroff’s white wood panel suburban house leaves us with no more than a skeleton of a way of life.Through the apparatus of the camera lens, this sign of stability, propriety and happiness is read but never understood, visited but never entered. Time after time, I-as-a-spectator-am-brought-to-the-front-door-of-this-house. Yet I am excluded (as a woman?)from the very place I was told was mine to shape and to manage.I am left outside with my memories and my dreams.

•••

The hysteric, whose body is transformed into a theater for forgotten scenes, relives the past, bearing witness to a lost childhood that survives in suffering. (from The Newly Born Woman by Helen Cixous and Catherine Clement) 

The various codes contained within the film tell us how to read practically every element involved in its construction as a text. The exchange between the music (Gian Carlo Minotti’s Amahl and the Night Visitors) and the domestic banging around, for example, establishes a tension between those sounds created by culture and those that are natural expressions of human unrest. Eventually, the opera is destroyed – cut to pieces by ringing bells, furniture thrown to the floor, knocking.

There is a compelling, almost consuming quality to the overall tone of Department of the Interior. Perhaps it is the enigma of these particulars. Fonoroff deposits a curious array of clues into the floating, evolving box we call a film. Then we (as spectators or researchers) are left with the intriguing task of compiling these facts and creating a narrative, our own “theater of forgotten scenes’.’ 

Lynne Sachs is a filmmaker living in San Francisco. She is currently working on an experimental documentary based on the life of a minister from Memphis, Tennessee who made his own films in the 1930s and ’40s.”