Littoral: Gregg Bordowitz
For one year, every day, from August 2007 to June 2008, Gregg Bordowitz wrote questions, one line after the other. On May 2nd, the author will read aloud all the collected questions recently published by Printed Matter in a book titled Volition—
- Consisting entirely of questions, Volition is 142 pages of active, mind-bending engagement with the reader, who is led down paths of inquiry involving art, meaning, philosophy, choice, happiness, and identity. Bordowitz organizes his questions into lists, paragraphs, and stanzas, which are themselves organized into five chapters: Questions, Topics, Aesthetics, Beliefs, and Morals. The resulting text is something like a spiritual guide crossed with an epic poem crossed with a transcription of the meandering thoughts of a philosophic insomniac, kept awake by such questions as “How can I touch creation as a principle without reproach?” and “How does gratitude unfold from virtue?” *
Suspending any responsibility to answers, Volition presents all the ways questions approach their objects—seducing, beseeching, mocking, taking, giving, shining, withdrawing. Reading his questions aloud over the course of an afternoon, Bordowitz will exhaust the will to know through a kind of public liquidation.
Starting at 2PM and continuing (with breaks) until approximately 7PM, the performance will be segmented into four sections. Food, beer, wine and tea will be served.
2:00 PM Welcome
2:15PM—3:00PM
Book I: Questions
Book II: Topics
3:15PM—3:45PM
Book III: Aesthetics
4:00PM—4:30PM
Book IV: Beliefs
4:45PM—6:45PM
Book V: Morals
Appendix: On Why
* Volition is published and distributed by Printed Matter; description taken from catalog
http://printedmatter.org 195 10th Avenue New York, NY 10011 (212) 925-0325
Gregg Bordowitz (Born August 14, 1964, Brooklyn, N.Y.} is a writer, film and video maker and teacher. A collection of his essays, titled The AIDS Crisis Is Ridiculous and Other Writings 1986-2003, was published by MIT Press in the fall of 2004. For this collection, Bordowitz received the 2006 Frank Jewitt Mather Award from the College Art Association. Recently, his writings have appeared in Massachusetts Review, Fence, Casco, and Texte Zur Kunst. A long poem titled Admissions was included in the book Considering Forgiveness, edited by Aleksandra Wagner and Carin Cuoni (Vera List Center, 2009). His most recent book consisting entirely of questions, titled Volition, was published by Printed Matter (2009). His films, including Habit (2001), The Suicide (1996), A Cloud In Trousers (1995), and Fast Trip Long Drop (1993) have been widely shown in festivals, museums, movie theaters and broadcast internationally. In addition, he has received a Rockefeller Intercultural Arts Fellowship and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, among other grants and awards. Bordowitz is Chair of the Film, Video, and New Media Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and he is on the faculty of the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program.
Hans Grüsel’s Krankenkabinet + Occasional Detroit (O-D) The Best In ABSTRAKT ENT
Hans Grüsel’s Krankenkabinet
Hans Grüsel’s Krankenkabinet is an ever-changing woodgrain diorama of dark forest characters. Started in 1999 in San Francisco, California, by Hans Grüsel, the ensemble uses electronics, concrète recording, and acoustic instruments to explore the lost Teutonic rites of the past while stumbling into the failure of the future.
Hans Grusel’s “sound” might best be described as the sounds of a Bavarian music box designed by an artist who had been bonked on the head with a brass cuckoo clock chime and left in a dark room for three years with only the music of Scriabin, Wagner, and Prokofiev mixed with off-speed 1960s sci-fi soundtracks and folkloric anthems pumping through the slightly clogged vents. HGKK audio combines numerous divergent elements—rigid structures and sweeping washes of plucky improvisation; classic violin sounds twisting in a mobius strip of clashing yet beautiful sounds and tones; flitting marches and delicate traipsing at the bottom of the sea—to create dense and blissful audio rainstorms.
There are very few bands who truly baffle. Who confuse and confound, both musically and conceptually. Sure, plenty of bands are weird, or strange, or hard to describe, some might even be described as fucked up or damaged, but very very few truly baffle. Hans Grusel’s Krankenkabinet is most definitely one of those bafflingly confusional elite. . . Hans Grusel and his Krankenkabinet create a bizarre cacophony of sound, theatrical, dramatic, noisy for sure, but weirdly melodic and playful and more than anything, confounding.
Occasional Detroit
My NAME IS Towondo”Beyababa”Clayborn I am a part of the abstrakt hip-hop duo Occasional Detroit (O-D) THE BEST IN ABSTRAKT ENT..
We are an abstrakt hip-hop duo CONSISTING OF MYSELF Towondo’Beyababa’Clayborn”
AND DEMETRISA L. ANDERSON
we will kill it on may 1st the best in ABSTRAKT ENT.
It is not an understatement. We like too show what it feels like in our own words, on how it feels after recovering from taking a piss under scrutiny. So, that is A SYNOPSIS ON how we roll.
Come see us (O-D) THE BEST IN ABSTRAKT ENT..(LAWRENCE) LET US KNOW IF YOU NEED MORE INFO WE WILL PROUDLY SEND IT.
Climax Golden Twins with Sublime Frequencies Film Screening
MY FRIEND RAIN
Sublime Frequencies, 2007.
(36 minutes)
Filmed on various trips through Southeast Asia by Robert Millis and Alan Bishop from 2002 to 2007, My Friend Rain is an impressionistic collage of musical segments and tropical ambiance. Decay and rebirth through the endless Asian monsoon cycle. Locations include: Myanmar (Burma), Angkor Wat in Cambodia, Thailand, Laos, and Indonesia.
INDIA AT 78rpm
Excerpt from a work in progress, 2009
(19 minutes)
An excerpt from a project about 78rpm records and the intersection of folk and classical musical traditions in India. Mostly filmed in 2008 in the Southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, including processions, street musicians and an interview with a slightly nutty Indian 78 collector.
PHI TA KHON: GHOSTS OF ISAN
Sublime Frequencies, 2006
(47 minutes)
Phi Ta Khon: Ghosts of Isan documents a traditional Buddhist “ghost festival” held yearly in Thailand’s Isan province that features beautiful handmade masks, outrageous wooden phalluses, ceremony, ritual, dancing, and endless live Thai mo lam music. The film has almost no narration (some titles set the scene and provide a little background), the idea being to create a sense of trance and to throw the viewer into the middle of the celebrations to just enjoy the colors and sounds. Music is what led me to explore this festival and sound is one of its key elements: there were live bands, bells, loudspeakers and boom boxes co-mingling all over town, creating an amazing soundscape. The live bands progressed from traditional acoustic ensembles to overlapping electrified bands with hybrid Western instrumentation and back again. Phi Ta Khon appears at once to be deviant and holy, pagan and Buddhist, Thai and Lao; it is full of incongruent characters and situations. But the Thai are master assimilators: everything falls into place and works together for the participants, coming back to Buddhist merit-making for future lives and for a good harvest and monsoon season, while living in the moment with family and friends. This is a 45 minute edit of Phi Ta Khon: Ghosts of Isan. The DVD is 75 minutes but in reality there is no way to accurately present the full 3 day festival in all its ridiculous, drunken glory.
Intermission ambiance provided by DJ Victrola Favorites, playing scratchy old and mysterious music from the early days of recording, as well as field recordings and music from Asia and beyond.
Climax Golden Twins is a Seattle, WA based experimental collage outfit originally consisting of Rob Millis and Jeffery Taylor, then picking up Scott Colburn in 1996. The group’s earliest material was recorded in 1993 but wasn’t released until their 1996 album Imperial Household Orchestra. In 1994 they started Fire Breathing Turtle to distribute their work along with audio exotica, especially their ongoing “Victrola Favorites,” complations of rare 78s from around the world. With numerous tapes, CDRs, mini-CDs, singles, side and solo projects, audiophile records and other aural collectables, being a CGT fan is no simple, or inexpensive, task.
Early CGT albums Climax Golden Hiss (1995) and Imperial Houshold Orchestra (1996) offer a glimpse into their unique world of lo-fi collage — organic, acoustic instruments mix with found sounds, electronics, and clips of sampled exotica. Their fascination with bygone days of phonography begins here, and their quirky sense of humor is already present as well. Locations (1998) focuses on voice and found sound. Dream Cut Short In The Mysterious Clouds (Anomalous, 2000), is a studio album that returns to their earlier formula with random noise-punk interludes, dreamy scapes and acoustics mixed with field recordings.
Also in 2000 was the album known as “TheRock Album” (Fire Breathing Turtle), a critically acclaimed tongue and cheek foray into the rock mindset, with a nod to prog rock and the math rockers who loved it.
Session 9 arrived in 2001 and is one of CGT’s many music for film projects, a weird, haunted mix of non-objective soundscaping. Lovely (Anomalous, 2002) reworked older material. Highly Bred and Sweetly Tempered appeared in 2004 and contains a collection of samples from eerie 78s, found speech, excellent Godspeed You Black Emperor style apocalyptic post-rock and shimmery guitar tracks. Member Rob Millis put out Leaf Music Drunks Distant Drums – Recordings from Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, and Myanmar also in 2004. Scott Colburn owns and engineers at Seattle’s Gravelvoice Studios and Jeffery Taylor owns and runs Seattle’s Wall of Sound record store. The band shares a special kinship with one of the city’s most famous cult bands — The Sun City Girls and have worked since their inception to support the American experimental music underground.
Tony Oursler’s “Synesthesia”
DARMSTADT “Classics of the Avant Garde” begins its month-long Institute at ISSUE Project Room with a special edit of Tony Oursler’s video project, Synesthesia, with editor in attendance to discuss the work.
Tony Oursler’s Synesthesia project is an oral history of New York’s downtown music, performance and art scenes. For the DARMSTADT music series, Oursler’s editor creates a special version, focusing on experimental composers. Interviewees include Genesis P-Orridge, Glenn Branca, Laurie Anderson, Tony Conrad, David Byrne, and Arto Lindsay. These works were originally included as one element of Ourslerand Mike Kelley’s multimedia installation The Poetics Project. These conversations reveal fascinating insights and anecdotes from some of the most influential figures in the experimental rock and art underground of the 1970s and ’80s, from pre-punk innovators to post-punk icons, from industrial and avant-garde music to noise bands and “no wave.”
This program is made possible by the Experimental Television Center (supported by the New York State Council on the Arts)
Mary Jordan Presents “Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis”
JACK SMITH & THE DESTRUCTION OF ATLANTIS
“…an extraordinary job…”
Variety
“A real triumph…something of an aesthetic manifesto”
Filmmaker Magazine
“Superb…a fascinating portrait…a glorious visual achievement”
TIMEOUT London
“Irresistible…”
Time Magazine
For Jack Smith (1932-1989), Atlantis was both the idea of a fantastical utopia and the reality of the Lower East Side apartment in which this prophetic artist staged baroque, improvisational multi-hour one-man theatrical productions, often with a cast of stuffed animals and dolls. An avant-garde photographer, filmmaker, actor, performance artist, and all around “flaming creature,” Smith has been credited as a major influence by Fellini, Godard and Jarmusch. In Mary Jordan’s mesmerizing portrait, he fairly jumps off the screen: a combination mystic, comedian and madman, a protean artist whose vast energy and creativity were undermined (or perversely fed?) by the poverty of his day-to-day life and his paranoid misgivings about just about everything. If there is a heaven for the wonderfully bizarre, Jack Smith resides there, accompanied by his patron saint, Maria Montez.
myspace.com/destructionofatlantis
Mary Jordan – Director/Producer
Mary Jordan grew up traveling between Toronto and the Bronx. She began working in production at the age of 16, after attending the Norman Jewison
film school. By the age of 20, she was producing for Canada¹s top new directors, such as Steve Chase, Marco Brambilla, and Curtis Wehrfritz, and
for leading production companies like Revolver, The Partners, Alliance, and Nitrate Films. During this time, she traveled across North Africa to shoot
her first documentaries and short pieces on female circumcision rituals and the cultural modernization of women in the area, which would later be
acquired by the BBC.
After extensive travels, Jordan settled in Sydney, Australia where she continued her documentary work on projects such as ABC¹s Tribal Music of
Tonga and was awarded by ABC News for her bravery while documenting refugee camp conditions on the Thai-Burmese border for Médecins Sans Frontières. While in Sydney, Mary worked as a talent scout as well as founded, and later sold, the production Indigo Blue within which she produced and directed commercials and music videos.
In 2005, Mary Jordan was featured as one of Filmmaker Magazine¹s 25 New Faces. Shortly thereafter, she premiered her first feature length
documentary entitled Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis which has garnished many awards. In addition to her work in film, Mary is also involved in photography, performance art, and music.
