Last weekend, Berlin’s institute for film and video art Arsenal and the theatre Hebbel am Ufer held the festival "LIVE FILM! JACK SMITH! Five Flaming Days in a Rented World" in celebration of the acclaimed, yet largely obscure filmmaker and pioneer of underground cinema Jack Smith.

Often referred to as the founding father of American performance art, Smith's aesthetics have influenced a generation of theater companies - from Robert Wilson, Richard Foreman, and Charles Ludlam to the Living Theater and the Wooster Group. With his campy, no-budget visual language, Smith can also be credited for influencing the cinematic work of contemporaries such as John Waters and Andy Warhol while also serving as an inspiration and star of Warhol’s Factory. Before long, a younger generation of artists became aware of Smith’s unique style and exploration of the body and gender, spawning countless references by artists such as Laurie Anderson, Cindy Sherman, Mike Kelley, Nan Goldin and Matthew Barney, as well as the musicians John Zorn, Lou Reed.

Smith’s most famous production is doubtlessly Flaming Creatures (1962), a stunning travesty on Hollywood b-movies, exoticism and eroticized gender play that helped to shape drag culture as we know it today. At the time of its release, 'F.C.' was branded as pornography and incited one of the most sensational scandals in the history of American film. The work is still banned in the United States to this day. Most of Smith’s oeuvre following the scandal was conceived as “Live Film” performances, a collection of edited and reedited film material, sound excerpts, slides, text, and music. Smith died in 1989 as a result of AIDS.

The Berlin festival not only offers the rare chance to view all of Smith’s films, it also attempts to recapture the essence of his genre-defying concept of film art while providing it with a framework beyond that of gender-bending, queer performance. Festival curators Susanne Sachsse, Marc Siegel, and Stefanie Schulte Strathaus invited an illustrious host of lecturers, musicians, film makers and scholars to join the event’s program, including critics Diedrich Diedrichsen, Douglas Crimp, as well as former Warhol superstar Penny Arcade, and the legendary drag performer Mario Montez (making his first public appearance in thirty years).

Particularly true to the original spirit of Smith’s Live Films was the four and a half hour musical performance “Impacted Crustacean Jack Smithian Delirium” created by Tony Conrad and Gordon W. and featuring performances from the Berlin art collective BASSO. Thankfully, the event featured a continuous admission.

Tony Conrad, creator of the original music for Smith’s Flaming Creatures, is exhibiting his piece “Re-Framing Creatures” at the Daniel Buchholz Gallery. On view are five 16-mm loops created between 1963 and 2009, showcasing out-takes from the original film. Clearly, Conrad has a talent for turning film refuse into art. His piece Pickled Eastman Kodak 7302 (2006), a series of cut-up film in jars, was dubbed  “London’s most expensive pickles” at Frieze Art Fair after it sold to San Francisco collectors Norah and Norman Stone for around €5,000 two weeks ago.

In the text accompanying the show, Conrad explains how Re-Framing Creatures came about:

“1963… in my apartment Jack Smith is editing his comedy Flaming Creatures with a splicer and a tiny film viewer. I had never seen this before. What are those pieces on the floor, I ask. “O, uh. Those are out-takes,” Jack replied. I saw him throwing them away. Then I said could I have them, maybe I might want to make a movie myself one day, and he gave them to me to do that. “

Initially, Conrad created an entirely different film using the out-takes, only to put the handful of shots back into the original order of the four scenes Smith had originally planned for them. Ultimately, the show offers curious Smith fans the rare chance to see “every last remaining scrap of stolen Perutz Tropical Film that Jack shot for F.C.”

--Hili Perlson

(Images top-bottom: Diedrich Diedrichsen; Tony Conrad, Gordon W. and Maria;  Photos #1-2 taken by Denise Palma Ferrante.  Image #3: Tony Conrad,  Re-Framing Creatures, 16-mm, 1962-2009. Courtesy of Galerie Daniel Buchholz.)

Galerie Barbara Weiss is pleased to present our fourth solo exhibition by Monika Baer. The title of the show, o – to – i, refers to a specific dynamic between heterogeneous motifs and elements of Baer’s paintings. The mental and emotional space that opens up within each picture and also between the various pictures cannot be separated from the material motifs and styles of painting the artist employs. Breast and seam, wall and hole, hole and eye, web and frame, mortar and segments of oil paint pressed straight from the tube all interlink both literally and metaphorically. Figure and background, the literal and the symbolic, form and allusion are thereby all interwoven in a myriad of ways. These diverse processes of exchange overlap each other to produce complex pictorial constellations within the exhibition, as the act of perception is always included in the process of constituting the painterly objects.

Since her early years at the Düsseldorf Art Academy, Baer has avoided following specific traditions of painting. She seems, however, to have been influenced by the minimalist, conceptual, and performative approaches that formed the essential points of reference at the Academy at the time. The performative factor has found expression in one pole of her artistic approach that one might define as ‘stage-like’. In these works – from the series of the “huts” and the so called “Mozart paintings” to the “hunter”- and “vampire” series –, props, sceneries, and masks appear as key starting points for entering into an unusual exploration of painting as a discipline of art that stages its possibilities. The other pole of Baer’s work could be viewed, against a minimalist-conceptual background, as the very ‘object’ of painting, revealing itself, since her cut pictures of the late nineties if not earlier, in the seams of her breast paintings and, especially in her recent web paintings, in the form of visible framework, carrier surface, and, sometimes, even mounting. Object and stage may well represent opposite poles, but there is an increasing interplay happening between them, which thematizes the object-like side of the stage and the stage-like side of the object. The individual themes develop in the area of tension in between. They may appear both literal and linked, trivial and thought-through at the same time. Some paintings seem almost emptied and meaningless, while others leave the impression of being loaded with collectively experienced, emotional, and psycho-sexual moments of meaning. On the one hand, the object may turn into a motif, as can be seen in the jeans-like seams of Bear’s breast paintings; on the other hand, the motifs, such as the breasts, become objects – not only in a sexual sense (both as passive objects to be looked at or desired and as active ‘subjects’ that drip and squirt), but also in a literal sense, since they end up serving as a carrier surface for the paintings. Along these lines, her seemingly realistic bills, which seem almost within reach, can also be read as abstract surfaces that vanish into the pictorial space. The webs, in turn, are based on actual spider webs; here, the motif becomes virtually identical with the object of the painting, while the monochrome coloration ranging from pink to peach alludes to other levels of reference altogether. It is in this kind of exchange, the process of veiling and unveiling, that Monika Baer’s artistic agenda becomes evident. Her paintings accentuate the ambivalence between perception and recognition, between the technique and production of a piece of work, and generally between the content, expression, and medial conditionality of painting in ways that make them appear paradoxical.

(Images: Monika Baer, Ohne Titel, 2009; Ohne Titel, 2007-2009, oil on canvas, 98 x 74 cm; Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Barbara Weiss)

Neil Gallʼs art is constantly moving and changing. The London artist transfers his ideas from one artistic medium to another. Neil Gall uses commonplace items such as plasticine, thread, cardboard, tape or rags to create fantastic objects and landscapes that, once photographed, become paintings, collages and drawings.

The transfer breathes life into the representatives of the world of non-living objects, lends them a new unity and essentiality. The artist takes advantage of the human propensity to discover faces and anthropomorphic forms in everything observed. In addition, his use of starkly modeled shadows and hard shadows results in a highly convincing spatial illusion. Most of all, however, Neil Gall achieves a synesthetic effect in a technically perfect rendition of the materialsʼ surface texture, which seems to transfer the modelʼs haptic experience into drawing or painting and thus intensifies the aesthetic effect of the chosen objects.

This reality-based or rather hyperreal execution stands in contrast to the seemingly absurd and fantastic mixture of objects and fragmented combination of multiple perspectives. The outcome is both desirably beautiful and eeriely repulsive. Mysterious hybrid creatures emerge from strange, surreal landscapes, which mimetically depict the banality of everyday life.

Neil Gall (*1967, Aberdeen) studied at the Slade School of Art in London. He lives and works in London. In 2007 the monograph Shelf Life was published and in 2008 followed the book Collage: Assembling Contemporary Art; both appeared with Black Dog Publishing.

(Images: Neil Gall, We Know What You've Seen, 2009, graphite on paper, 32.1 x 38 cm; More than Human, 2009 Oil on linen 66 x 56 cm; Courtesy of the artist and Aurel Scheibler)