The ICA
The Institute of Contemporary Art is (one of?) the place(s) in London where moving images are still recognized as delitescent generators of signifying praxis, instigators of creative dissent for the ‘elected’ few and are consequently chosen amongst the mutinously finest tangents of cinematic invention, documentation and cre-activity. The latest Arthouse retrospective described a tracking shot insinuating the funding backgrounds and fleshy anecdotes - remaining too often concealed behind the artistic simulacrum – agitating the most varied scenes of planet art. In some case, as for instance in Esther Robinson’s film, the documenting medium turned into ethereal inquisitor exploring the luminous loss of the subject defying the chrono-linear conventions of the documentary format. In facts and in images, A Walk Into the Sea entices a psycho-logistic survey wherein the filmic form comes to emblematize the emotional substance of the narrated object. Wharol’s lover and cinematographer Danny Williams captured (and eventually was captured by) the vacuous impalpability of the Factory’s spaces wherein creation witnessed a liminal participation transcending subjectivity to go break on through the realm of auratic objectification. Williams’ mysterious disappearance had already been superimposed on the existential beams of the self-propelled and lucent bodies that he filmed thus delivering their staged selves from the reinvention of daily vexations. The protagonists – returning the contrasting lights in an almost Brechtian resurgence – effaced Williams’ presence in the act of representation thus confining the cinematographer’s aesthetic consciousness to the biochemical evidence of his own reels. Nobody remembers him. “Was he ever there?” seems to be the nagging insinuation that the director masterfully orchestrates with this stupefying work of detecting awareness.
A more conventional yet convincing path is followed by Christina Clausen in her The Universe of Keith Haring feverishly capturing the faceless and desiring multitude that from Haring’s fervent imagination pouragained on the walls of NYC underground and eventually on the transnational canvas of the terrestrial creation. The desiring and mutating bodies, unflaggingly fractionalizing their constitutive parts into new and mobile compositions, originated within highly stylistic contexts and yet always functioned as a sort of syncretic intermediaries between different semiotic textures. Burdened by an almost ecumenical drive, Haring’s distinctive touch instantly found expanded recipients of participative exposition wherever his signs would threaten materialization and the documentary paves with its frames the artist’s galvanizing ride beyond artistic recognition towards bodily collectivization. Whilst constantly evading the embalmed decorum of the ‘art world’, Haring drew the carnival-esque contours of a human body craving for formal and lyrical cross-fertilization.
On a minor depressing key is tuned Aaron Rose’s Beautiful Losers which uneventfully illustrates the subdued parable of ‘autistic’ geeks enfranchising their passive selves from suburban and middle class alienation through the widening of their cold cells of solitude (90s grungy bedrooms) into art galleries. The ‘outsider’ perspectives of these ingrown artists did not even allow a different vision of the ingratiating empire besieging them into childish ghettos of inoffensive ‘creativity’. No wonder some of them evolved (?) from nerds to cool nerds and finally, to Sarah Palin’s immense joy, to god-fearing nerds subserviently guarding upon the tragic perversion of the American dream.
Plenty were the other films on display for the arty punters to indulge with and get an insight into what is often admired but seldom explored.
Celluloid Liberation Front
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