For the first show in the project space Wilkinson will collaborate with New York gallery, Orchard, to present “On the Collective for Living Cinema”, a show based on a celebrated avant-garde film collective from the late 1970s.
In 1973 a group of film students from the Harpur College Cinema Department looking to create a contemporary and fertile context for their work found The Collective for Living Cinema, an artist-run cooperative that would serve both as an exhibition venue and a centre for production and discourse. Above the first program note was a miniature manifesto stating their intention to “overcome the economic, social and political burdens of an art in chains.”
Lasting for 19 years, The Collective came to embody the under-defined moment between the canonized generation of “the essential cinema” and the transfiguration of film as “new media” embraced by the institutional hierarchy of the art world and subject to the theoretical, critical and economic tidal forces therein.
Run as a multi-disciplinary venue, The Collective continuously engaged in a recovery of the recent past, championing the marginal and positing alternative film histories.
The screening room was seen as a workshop in which this culture became immersed in its own brand of cinematic delirium. Annette Michelson pointed out that The Collective "attempted to break down distinctions between industrial film and avant-garde film, between films that form part of a classical canon and those which are on the margins or periphery of canonical taste."
By "maintaining and constantly questioning an exploratory attitude rather than by embalming pre-digested classical canon", Michelson stated, The Collective emerged in the 1980's as the "liveliest" New York film venue of it's time.
The show will consist of films from the collective screened on 12 different monitors alongside new work which re-examines the Collective’s history and parallels it’s mission with in the current set of “economic, social, and political claims.”
The show will include works by the following artists:
Peggy Ahwesh,
Abigail Child,
Vivienne Dick,
Bob Fleischer and Mark Graff,
Su Friedrich,
Nicolas Guagnini and Jeff Preiss,
Bette Gordon,
Henry Hills,
Ken Jacobs,
George Kuchar,
Saul Levine,
Yvonne Rainer,
Stuart Sherman
Michael Smith
Orchard is a cooperatively organized exhibition and event space in New York's Lower East Side. The gallery is run by twelve partners of a for-profit limited liability corporation founded for the project. The partners include artists, filmmakers, critics, art historians, and curators, with several combining these activities in their practices. The partners of Orchard have been associated variously with New York experimental film and video scenes, institutional critique, 90s non-YBA practices in Britain, and political conceptualist traditions in North and South America. The partners do not have a univocal position in terms of their working methods or views on art. Instead, Orchard's cooperative framework is intended to put the diversity of its members' practices into discursive motion. The resulting exhibition program reflects these dialogs and the social, geographical and artistic conditions and contradictions of the positions taken within them. Orchard's program eschews solo exhibitions in favor of thematically, conceptually and politically driven group exhibitions and projects. It also represents a commitment to historically-based artistic criteria, as opposed to market criteria. This commitment is reflected in Orchard's trans-generational mixing of established artists with lesser known artists, and its re-examination of marginalized historical works in the context of contemporary issues and practices. Since opening in May 2005, Orchard has restaged or produced unrealized projects by Michael Asher, Andrea Fraser with Allan McCollum, Dan Graham, and Lawrence Weiner. Orchard has also presented historical works by Daniel Buren, Luis Camnitzer, Juan Downey, Hans Haacke, Roberto Jacoby, Adrian Piper, and Martha Rosler, as well as new works by Merlin Carpenter, Nicolás Guagnini, Jutta Koether, Lucy McKenzie, Blake Rayne, Stephan Pascher, Jeff Preiss, R.H. Quaytman, Karin Schneider, and Jason Simon, among others. Orchard is a three-year project and is scheduled to close in April 2008.
For further information please contact:
Christiane Boehmer info@wilkinsongallery.com +44
20 8980 2662
Dara Birnbaum
Friday 5 October 2007, 19.00
Tate Modern, Starr Auditorium
£5 (£4 concessions)
Dara Birnbaum will present the original programme of her works, as originally screened at New York’s The Collective for Living Cinema in 1980. By producing 16mm kinescopes of her early TV-formatted works, Birnbaum would directly affect a film-audience by taking on not only the dynamics and the difference in texture of what, during those years, were two nearly incompatible mediums: film and video. The screening will consist of the 16mm kinescope versions of Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman (1978/9) and Kiss The Girls: Make Them Cry (1979). In addition, (A) Drift of Politics: Laverne & Shirley (1978) will be presented. This work shows a direct one-on-one comparison between video and film, by utilising only the two-shots butt-edited, in video, from an episode of the television series ‘Laverne & Shirley’, screened simultaneously with a slow-motion film-version of the same images. Completing the evening’s program, Birnbaum will also show rarely viewed video works produced during the same time period. Experiments with image and sound, in the pre-MTV, pre-digital days of independents, which foreshadows the new ground between video and music that was to come. Included are: Remy/Grand Central: Trains and Boats and Planes (1980), New Music Shorts (1981) and Fire/Hendrix! (1982).
