Living at the Movies

This is a piece that I wrote for Critical Superbeast that didn't make it onto the blog. I wanted it to see the light of day, so here it is-- some of my thoughts around old media, and the proliferation of VHS movie nights in Hamilton as of late. Read on and use the comment section if you have thoughts to share or add.

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I dreamt up, and have been recycling, this line lately: “Vinyl records have been gentrified.” Indie, punk and fringe music kept vinyl manufacturing going when it was in doldrums at the dawn of the 1990s. For the last few years, news outlets have been claiming that vinyl is BACK, IF YOU CAN BELIEVE IT.  Now, the Beatles’ back catalogue and Adele records are being pressed on vinyl, causing a bottleneck in production out of what few record-pressing plants exist today. Small quantities equal lower priority and longer waits for small-scale releases to see the light of day. As a consumer, the landscape has changed too. Gone are the days of the dollar bin. 2016 is the year of the $40 reissue, not the $4 bargain.

What do such conditions mean for the weirdos whose life’s blood is to see oddball production, whether they created it or not, see the light of day? We don’t just exhume the media graveyard for fun; we do it out of neccessity. For many of us, the humble audio cassette has recently become a cultural lifebuoy.

Perhaps this same impulse has informed the proliferation of VHS film screening nights in Hamilton. At least three currently exist— one celebrates the trashy bowels of cinematic experience, mostly horror, while one is dedicated to punk rockers on celluloid. I went to one two nights ago, a private version which identified as a “secret film screening society of sorts” in an unassuming location on Rebecca Street. A motley group of seven, we sat in a room watching a curated pair of films selected with the theme “Trump’s America” in mind: The Stepford Wives (1974) and George A. Romero’s zombie prototype, The Crazies (1974). In The Stepford Wives, a feminist wife and mother tries to resist the local men’s association’s plot to turn all of the town’s women into baking, scrubbing, glossy-eyed, submissive cyborgs. In the lesser-known The Crazies, a biological warfare tool— a virus called Trixie— unleashes an epidemic of rage across swing state Pensylvannia as a small group of insurgents struggles to not succumb to one of two things: the sickness, or the trigger-happy army that is trying to keep citizens, whether stricken with madness or sane, in line. Sound familiar?

Why VHS? Tape hiss, packaging and charming tracking issues—aspects of VHS’ unique visual and aural vocabulary now only known through the twice-removed simulacra of Youtube— are all possibilities. It is tempting to question whether their slowness— the fact that we can’t surf, binge or replay a VHS with the ease of a Youtube video—adds to the formality and intensity of our reception of them. But I refuse to believe that it’s simply a matter of novelty, or an infatuation with the old or obsolete.

The late, great Jim Carroll’s first poetry collection was called Living at the Movies. I always imagined that Living at the Movies was Carroll’s metaphor for escapism. Some might suggest that the impulse to exhume and appropriate old technologies, and the media they contain, is a way to escape the dauntingly rapid change of contemporary technological change…either that, or it might be dismissed as knee-jerk nostalgia. In a world that often feels like a runaway train racing towards oblivion, it’s hard to deny the comfort I experience when I revisit the first media— cassettes, vinyl records and VHS tapes— I experienced as a child. But as with audio cassette tape being a safe haven in a gentrified media landscape,  perhaps old VHS tapes carrying weird and wonderful films from past decades might hint at another interpretation of what it might mean to live at the movies.

In the 1970s twilight of my cinematic dreamscape— the space of Rocky’s lonely night walks past flaming garbage cans or DiNiro’s night ride through Manhattan in his cologne and cigarette-stenched cab— the movies, like a bus station or a 24-hour diner, is a place where someone with nowhere else to go can spend the night and fade into the background, unnoticed. When we live with and embrace the media of the past, we carve out a space for our own imagination, presence, culture and difference. Through it, we live in a movie, or a eutopian space, that draws from the past to talk about the present. This eutopia is a place where misfit media can continue to be vessels for misfit stories-- perhaps a more political act than any humble secret film screening society in the name of good fun might guess.

Market Value

Last weekend, I was one of nine artists that participated in Market Value, an initiative of the Hamilton Arts Council and the Worker's Arts and Heritage Centre.  For Market Value, artists from a variety of disciplines were invited to make work in public at the (beautiful and light-drenched) Hamilton Farmer's Market for a seven hour shift.  There were paid for their day of "work" at the market with the help of the OAC funding the project received.  The project was part exhibition and part advocacy initiative that puts the hours of work that artists spend producing art in plain view.  My work was performed/made over one day, and five other projects took place over the course of the previous week-- participating artists included Jim Riley, Trevor Copp, (F)NOR (Andrea Carvalho, Svava Juliusson, Donna Akrey and Margaret Flood), Mary Dyja and Laura Bromwich.

I had a lofty idea for a new work to produce for this exhibition that didn't end up happening.  The reason for this is complicated, and though I am very tempted to unpack the saga here, I will not.  Luckily it was not that difficult to change my concept at the 11th hour because making work with food has been my bread and butter (*GONG*) for a number of years now, and dipping back into a older body of food-related work (though not ideal) would be a good fit for a day of performative art-making in the Farmer's Market.

Last summer, I continued my The End body of work by making an installation for Gallery 1313's window box gallery.  This installation, called The End (Seven Samurai) was irreparably damaged by the heat and sun over the course of the exhibition, so I've been meaning to make a framable 2D version of the installation for several months now.  I decided that Market Value was as good a time as any to take this on.  For my market day, I screened Seven Samurai on my laptop while I recreated the end title of the film in dried foods associated with Japanese cuisine-- black sesame seeds and white rice-- a portion of which was purchased at the market.  For those who don't know, Kurosawa's film is about a team of samurai protecting bandits from pillaging the annual harvest of a very poor village in feudal Japan.  I thought that the film and using food as material were both interesting ways to address the issue of food (in)security across history.

 Food for art-making and food for eating over the course of my shift.

 The product of five hours of work...!?!?

Photo: Jen Anisef!

It is always a pleasure to show my work, and I was happy to have the chance to exhibit my own work (after a flurry of curatorial activities and projects since moving to Hamilton) in a very public space, and for the first time in my new city.  Feedback is always so interesting and varied and it's a pleasure to learn how open people are to engaging with art and artists-- especially those who do unusual things with unusual materials.

For me, the most challenging part of participating in this exhibition was casting a critical eye on my own practice, and coming to realize that in having someone else advocate for my work, I maybe haven't been the best advocate for my own work.  I was recently a visiting speaker about my other life as an independent curator in a class at Sheridan College, where I emphasized to a cohort of students-- most of which were about 10 years younger than me-- the importance of being re-numerated for their work.  I remarked that in not being mindful of being compensated reasonably (or at all) for their work, they were not only jeopardizing their own economic health, but they would ultimately have a detrimental effect the livelihoods of their fellow artists.  Pretty ironic, as I haven't practiced as I preached for the vast majority of my art career.  The lesson to be learned here for all artists is to continually step away from your art and look at the big picture of a life in art that involves goals, negotiation, economic exchange and critical thinking, both for one's own sake as well as for the sake of other working artists.

I'd like to thank Stephanie Vegh of the Hamilton Arts Council, Andrew Lochhead of the WAHC and my volunteer Ariel Bader-Shamai for all their help on my market day, and through the entire process of developing and carrying out Market Value.  I'll wrap this post with this cartoon that speaks volumes!

For more on Market Value, look here and here and here.

The End (Seven Samurai)

My window installation at Gallery 1313 opened last night.  Thanks to director Phil Anderson for giving me access to the space (for my own work as well as for the windows I'll be programming for the next few months), and special thanks to Noa Bronstein for writing the following short essay to accompany the installation.

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Tara Bursey
The End (Seven Samurai)
Rice, black and white sesame seeds, adhesive
2013

A menacing term, the end is the semantic comrade of termination and expiration. The end, however, is also but a provocation to look to other beginnings. In her work The End (Seven Samurai), Tara Bursey uses the matter of beginning – seed, bean and grain – and stages it as an interloper into the rubric of finality. The End (Seven Samurai) is part of a larger series exhibited at the Gladstone Hotel in 2012 for the exhibition //THE ANNUAL//, in which Bursey has recreated the end credit from four black and white Hollywood films using various edible materials. The End performs Bursey’s concern with the insecurity of food production in the wake of mass environmental shifts and devastations. For this iteration, the end title of Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (1954), in which bandits pillage a rural, farming village, is faithfully realized.

The End points to a liminality of time and space. Re-purposing easily accessible food stocks, at least in the context in which the works are created, through meticulous processes, challenges our relationship to production and consumption. The labour of harvesting these staples, whether by hand or machine, is recast through the labour of the artist and consumed only metaphysically, rendering field and fork as partial actors. The End further points to a cultural lament for the passage of time and the need to compartmentalize the contemporary and the historic, the past and the present. Inspired by what Bursey has called the illusionary space of film, the titles evoke a lost age of and nostalgia for the belle epoque of cinema and great moments of chimera, echoing that this nostalgia might soon be turned towards our ecologies. Returning for a moment to Kurosawa’s bandits, these antagonists are not merely a metaphor for food insecurity. The bandits are perhaps a reminder of Roland Barthes’ pronouncement that “myth is always a language-robbery.”1  The appropriation of The End is a kind of language-robbery, through which we can mythologize cinema, nature and time.

The end credit can be seen as a signifier for the moment of fertilization, whereby the filmic narrative is transferred from auteur to the subconscious of the viewer. Seeds are a codex for living matter, as films are a codex for narrative, giving form to ideation. The matter of seed is both beginning and end, in the same way that the end credit of a film is only the beginning of our relationship to it.

Noa Bronstein
Director of Exhibitions & Cultural Promotions
Gladstone Hotel

1  Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), 131. 

The End (Seven Samurai) at Gallery 1313

Lots going on these days.  This is one thing-- a window installation at Gallery 1313 that opens Thursday, June 27th, from 7-10 pm.  Come check it out!

Tara Bursey
THE END (SEVEN SAMURAI)
Gallery 1313 Window Box
July 2013

The End uses film title imagery to address global warming and the effect that it will inevitably (continue to) have on food production.  It also explores our collective inclination to mark epochs and define the time we live in.  If the mid 20th century and its golden age of cinema could be considered an age of illusion and suspended belief, perhaps our current era can be characterized by a general loss of illusions.  

Simultaneously a celebration of mid-century design and a meditation on loss, The End points to our tendency to repeatedly mark historical periods as a series of ends while pondering the precariousness of our environment in the present.  The End (Seven Samurai), the latest incarnation of this series, references a classic film about bandits threatening a farm’s harvest.

Tara Bursey is an artist and emerging curator whose interests include sculpture, installation, performance, social practice, textile art and culture, food, contemporary craft practices, collaboration and publishing. 

This exhibition will be accompanied by an essay by Noa Bronstein, Director of Exhibitions, Gladstone Hotel.

Gallery 1313
1313 Queen Street West
Toronto, ON. M6K 1L8
Hours: Wed – Sun, 1:00 pm – 6:00 pm
Phone: 416-536-6778

"Other Research Activity"

Right now, I'm in the middle of my final thesis project at school.  Things are starting to shape up, but I have to admit, I am such an f'ing procrastinator when it comes to research.  I am a bad (slow) reader, and have trouble retaining things I read-- I even admitted this in my thesis proposal in so many words.  One of my favourite things to do to procrastinate/weasel my way out of reading is watch movies/video under the guise of research.  Here is a short run-down of the films/video works I've been immersing myself in lately while working towards my major project.

7 UP/21 UP, (1963/1977).  Dir: Michael Apted.  Grenada Television, UK.

     “Give me a boy at seven, and I will give you the man” is the Jesuit motto at the heart of the Up Series, the renowned documentary series that examines the lives of twelve individuals over several decades as an interrogation of the British class system.  Originally focusing on twelve seven year olds, these individuals were subsequently interviewed every seven years in an attempt to determine if it was possible for them to break out of the class divisions they were born into.  What started as an examination of social stratification in England eventually became a compelling portrait of not just twelve individuals, but of post-war cultural and society in Britain.  

     Of particular interest to me is the ethics of representation at play in 21 UP, the series’ third instalment.  In the segment devoted to Tony, an aspiring cab driver from East London, the director 
accompanies him driving through some of London’s more crime-ridden neighbourhoods.  Apted later admitted to filming such scenes intentionally because he predicted Tony would become a criminal and end up imprisoned before the next installment of the series.  Apted later acknowledged in interviews the ethical problems with making these sorts of assumptions about his subjects.

sum of the parts: what can be named (2010).  Deanna Bowen.  V-Tape, Toronto, Canada

     sum of the parts: what can be named is an oral history of Bowen’s family performed on video.  Bowen traces her family history back several generations, from the earliest history she could find of enslaved relatives in Georgia to the family’s subsequent migration to western Canada in the early 20th century.  For Bowen, the oral history serves as a record of family members who could not speak on their own behalf as well as reclamation of a history that is largely unrecorded.

     The formal strategies employed by Bowen in sum of the parts evoke ideas of “disrememberment” and what it means to exist versus to not exist.  Bowen’s physical presence and strong narrative voice contrast with the absence of family members, whose only trace of existence is embodied by their faint signatures reproduced against the video’s black backdrop.  Importantly, the centrality of Bowen within the video anchors the history in the present, and gives the video a strong emotional resonance.

Goin' Down the Road (1970).  Dir:  Donald Shebib.  Evdon Films, Toronto.

     Goin' Down the Road is a 1970 Canadian film directed by Donald Shebib and released in 1970. It chronicles the lives of two men from the Maritimes who move to Toronto in order to find a better life. It starred Doug McGrath, Paul Bradley, Jayne Eastwood and Cayle Chernin. Despite a lack of production expense, it is generally regarded as one of the best and most influential Canadian films of all time and has received considerable critical acclaim for its true-to-life performances. In 2002, readers of Playback voted it the 5th greatest Canadian film of all-time.

     The film reflected an important social phenomenon in post-war Canada as the economy of the eastern provinces stagnated and many young men sought opportunities in the fast growing economy of Ontario. Although the men in the film come from Nova Scotia, the "Newfie" as an unsophisticated manual labourer was a common stereotype starting in the early 1950s as many Atlantic Canadians moved to the cities looking for work, only to find widespread unemployment and jobs that may have seemed to have attractive salaries, but made living in large cities marginal at best. Many of Toronto's early housing developments (particularly Regent Park) were built to handle the influx of internal immigrants before they were eventually replaced by external immigrants from Africa, the Caribbean and Asia starting in the 1960s. (Wikipedia)

Delirum (1993).  Mindy Faber.

     Mindy Faber’s Delirium (1993) is a video portrait of the artist’s mother’s history of mental illness.  Like autoethnography, Faber’s video uses a portrait of her mother and their relationship as a greater exploration of a social/cultural phenomenon-- a history of women and madness and the link between domesticity and depression.

//The Annual// Recap

Photos of the work I made for //The Annual//, both on the night of installation and the night of the opening.  Bottom photo of pals Lyndall and Christine by Grey, found on the Gladstone's Facebook page.  Thanks so much to curators Noa and Deb for giving me the opportunity to strut my stuff!

The End

I've spent the last week and a bit working hard on the following project for an upcoming show in October.  Lots more to do, but decent progress is being made, I suppose.  Above is a photo of the work in progress-- essentially a drawing of a mid-century end title card made with black and white sesame seeds.  Below is some of the source material, as well as an excerpt from my proposal for the project.

The End
Summer 2012

Last week, North America faced record-breaking high temperatures from coast to coast.  Ominous newspaper headlines marked this summer’s early heat waves, storms, wildfires and power outages to be a glimpse of “what global warming looks like.”  For me, one of the most disconcerting aspects of global warming is the effect that it will inevitably (continue to) have on food production.

In addition to my ongoing concern over global warming, I have been thinking a lot about shifts from one historical period to the next, and our collective inclination to mark epochs and define the time we live in.  If the mid 20th Century and its golden age of cinema could be considered an age of illusion and suspended belief, perhaps our current era can be characterized by a general loss of illusions.    

Simultaneously a celebration of mid-century design and a meditation on loss, The End points to our inclination to repeatedly mark historical periods as a series of ends while pondering the precariousness of our environment in the present.

Busby Berkeley

I'm working on my second-to-last assignment for school right now on Busby Berkeley's choreography for depression-era musicals, for a seminar class on the topic of Beauty.  The choreography really is a feast for the eyes, which involved not so much dancing as it did posing and the movements of chorus girls in unison and shot from above to create some pretty dazzling living patterns.

In a 1998 documentary called “Going Through The Roof,” Busby Berkeley’s dance routines were described as the “Epitome of Broadway Modernity."  Best known for his choreography in depression-era “talkies” such as Footlight Parade, 42nd Street, Dames and Gold Diggers of 1933, Berkeley’s elaborate routines involving the synchronized movements of chorus girls and revolving stages were crowd-pleasing, ground breaking and highly influential-- echoes of them can be seen in everything from advertising to music videos of the late 20th Century. 

Providing some of the context that surrounded Berkeley’s choreography is important to a reading of his work. Berkeley’s signature work can be seen in films made between the two world wars during the years of the Great Depression, and he was at his most prolific in 1933-- widely believed to be the worst economic year in US history. Interestingly, despite the depression movie attendance was at a high, and depression-era audiences were most attracted to feel-good, codified genres. On a related note, central to the character of Berkeley’s choreography are synchronized, machine-like series of movements that feel rooted in Taylorist and Fordist principles of standardization and assembly line production such as harmony, anonymity and perfection.  A veteran of World War One, many of Berkeley’s ideas also came from military drill formations.  


Above: "We're In The Money" from Gold Diggers of 1933, featuring Ginger Rogers.

That's All Folks!

Installation with popcorn kernels, uniform and props, completed last week.  I've never put popcorn kernels on a wall before...now I know it's possible!

I think this piece is a distillation of a lot of the feelings I've had and things I've seen while visiting the States.  Most of all, I think it is about how history moves from one period of time to the next, and about the feeling that things are about to change.  It is also about the loss of illusions.

One of my favourite movies of all time is The Last Picture Show, which I couldn't help but think of as I was thinking up this piece, as well as thinking up the performance I did in McKeldin Square a few months ago.  While the film's trailer focuses a little more on the torrid affairs between the residents of the fictitious town, Anarene Texas, the movie is set during a time when the movie theatre was beginning to play less of a role in people's lives because of the home television set.



Also on the topic of the movement from one historical period to the next, I read the following quote in a class recently, written by the American art critic Martha Schwender on the use of appropriation in the work of the artist Sherrie Levine.  It excited me because it questions whether or not we are nearing the end of a long period of overarching irony/cynicism in contemporary art...or perhaps also a period plagued by a sense of cynicism in general?

Appropriation rose out of this desire to have it both ways, to keep what you loved-- or at least knew intimately-- and still make art. It was a great solution.  But I was born in the 1970s, following the burnout of the 60s, and it has run aground in recent years. Not only have artists like (Sherrie) Levine, Jeff Koons and Richard Prince been dragged through the legal system for their cultural borrowing, but the postmodern irony and cynicism on which Appropriation was founded also feels outmoded in the Occupy Age.

NFLD Stories of Leaving

Started a new blog yesterday afternoon for a school project, and it is likely that the project will become an ongoing one. The project will probably apply to very few reading this, but if you can think of anyone who would be interested, please feel free to pass on the blog address/call for submissions.

http://nfldstoriesofleaving.blogspot.com

FYI: Goin' Down the Road is a classic Canadian film about two Maritimers traveling to Toronto look for work in the early 70s. It provided much inspiration for this project.