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Here is my brand new film… It was inspired by and created for the event At Home with the Ludskis #3 Winter Garden Edition on the 14th Jan 2012, where it was projected onto the side of the Rio Cinema building in Dalston. Now complete with a freshly scored soundtrack! I’m showing some work at the 3rd installation of “At Home with the Ludskis”, a late night experimental art extravaganza type event, taking place on Saturday 14th January at the Rio Cinema in Dalston, all part of London Short Film Festival 2012, which opens this Friday! Come, come! More info on the LSFF12 website. You have 9 days left to go see Pipilotti Rist ‘Eyeball Massage’ at the Hayward Gallery… I highly recommend it. Especially the bit where you lie down on soft stuffed human effigies and lose yourself to lots of luscious, disgusting, vibrant, fruity, flowery, animaly, moving images, floating around and warping as they glide across strips of seethrough material. I also really enjoyed this early work from her days at art school: Pipilotti Rist ‘Eyeball Massage’ Hayward Gallery, London, England For further information, visit the Hayward Gallery website Hoorah! Tickets for Underwire Festival are now on sale, you can find the full programme on the website – www.underwirefestival.com There is a superb selection of films showing, and some brilliant industry workshops happening over the weekend, including a session I have organised: The Feminist and the Flirt: Performance Video Art It’s going to be a wonderful festival, hope to see you there!
Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis was a good crash course in his world and his work, and I’m sure there are a few things in there that the seasoned Jack Smith fan would find revealing. I was put through the emotional paces as I admired his revolutionary, impassioned heroism to protect what he saw as artistic truth and integrity, his reluctance to engage in commercialisation, then found myself sad, angrily disappointed, that this tragically came hand in hand with his exploitation and rejection, his isolating and debilitating paranoia, his unforgiving existentialism, that ultimately destroyed him. Really sad to hear that George Kuchar has died. The Kuchar Brothers film collection “Color Me Lurid” on vhs was a delight to discover in the depths of my uni library all them years ago… Especially at a time when I felt starved of artistic input/output and craved to see some natural rebellion towards traditional filmmaking that at the same time pleasantly embraced what I think are the best bits of film. After watching the Color Me Lurid films with fellow student Claudia Sarkany, I splashed out at the time on Desperate Visions, which got me through a dusty summer of endless henna tattoo painting at Bournemouth Pier. Recently I met John Waters who signed this book for me after showing his assistant “we haven’t seen one of these for a while have we?!” (was he amused, horrified? there was no time to ask), and I had a dream of one day meeting George and Mike to complete the signature set. Alas. Hugely inspiring, comforting, tirelessly creating trashy masterpieces to the end, thank you George.
UnderWire has got the extraordinary Gemma Mitchell and Helen Jack at the helm and these seasoned event maestros don’t mess around, so its safe to say that you’re all very much in for a treat again this year. Plus we have some incredibly inspiring and talented Patrons and wonderful Media Partners supporting the festival. For those of you unfamiliar with the festival, UnderWire was launched in November 2010 with the belief that women working in the UK film industry needed more encouragement and a bigger platform for their work. The fact remains that women still make up a small proportion of film creatives, and UnderWire looks to recognise the best short work made by women across a range of crafts. With awards for Best Director, Best Producer, Best Writer, Best Editor, Best Cinematographer, Best Composer and Best Film Journalist, the festival hopes to move us towards a more gender balanced industry. There is also the XX Award which is open to both female and male directors whose films have interesting female characters at their centre. This, UnderWire believes, will benefit everyone by creating a diversity of perspectives, stories and experiences for audiences. The festival accepts work of different genres including drama, animation, documentary, music video and artist film and the submission deadline is 16 October 2011. The full guidelines can be found on the UnderWire site at www.underwirefestival.com. As months progress, UnderWire will be announcing news of events, screenings and interesting happenings so keep your eye on the site. I really can’t wait to see this. For those of you who have seen my work, it will come as no surprise that I rather like Cindy Sherman’s work. So it was with great excitement that I find out she has created some new portraits as a result of a new collaboration with MAC:
No stranger to fashion, Sherman collaborated with Balenciaga last year, producing a similarly bold and provocative collection of photos that appear to both mock and court the fashion world. A brave and comforting decision from both Balenciaga and MAC, afterall everyone loves to laugh at themselves, don’t we?
And MAC has a habit of picking out diverse muses from across the creative industries to help promote their collection – recently Nicky Minaj, Wonder Woman, Gareth Pugh, Barbie, Dame Edna Everage, Marcel Wanders, Lady Gaga, Disney, to name a few, and now of course Cindy Sherman. From reading press release extracts and if we were to crassly categorise this campaign as a big advert for MAC, the art/commerce exploitation condundrum that Fashion Popcorn seems unable to avoid in its salon discussions, rears its little head once more – “In the campaign we’ve longed forever to conceive, Cindy Sherman for MAC created three characters using three different colour stories. We’re living in a time when people of all persuasions have become bolder than ever about the ways they choose to express themselves: with a colourful palette of possibilities, You are the Artist, You are your own Subject, and no matter how fearfully you begin, you become fearless in the process.” So then who is the artist? - the creator, the promoter or the consumer? Where does the “artist” sit in the value chain for brands? Who is gaining what from who? Just where does art and commerce begin? Is the collaboration between brand and artist equal? If not, does that devalue the creativity of the artist? Despite these questions playing on me, I love the fact that MAC are engaging non-fashion industry fashion-orientated people and allowing those people to keep some artistic integrity (whatever that is…). Although this approach is not necessarily an innovative brand building tactic, their clever trust of Sherman shows they are willing to innovate their brand representation within an self-image savvy world AND playfully pay appropriate homage to their creative heritage as the makeup choice for professional makeup artists. Its not all about fashion y’know. |
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Copyright © 2012 Harriet Fleuriot - All Rights Reserved |
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