Interview with the director Keren Perlmutter by Yizhuo Li
Full interview available on the Medium channel of Buffalo International Film Festival.
A Coincidence and an Epic Choice
in Thought, literature
A lady was killed by a restarted train while attempting to cross the line, as reported in “Death of a Lady at Sydney Parade,” a newspaper paragraph in “A Painful Case” from Joyce’s Dubliners. Everyone involved offered a piece for the full picture, in which no one was held accountable. The Deputy Coroner at the City of Dublin Hospital concluded it “a most painful case,” and a lesson of road safety was smoothly drawn.
The pain and verdict went strenuous in Odon von Horvath’s “Judgement Day,” set in the 1930s Austro-Hungarian Empire, where the distracted station master was responsible for the eighteen deaths in a train accident. Following a similar round of investigation, witnesses and testimonies only became more obfuscating, if not excruciating, for the entire town. Who are to blame, and who are entitled to blame?
I skimmed through the former story standing on a peak-hour 6 Train last December, and saw Richard Jones’s production of the latter at the Park Avenue Armory. The faint coincidence of the two has come back to me during the lockdown, amid all the politicized arguments about the causes and handling of this pandemic. To borrow an almost cliched phrase in electoral campaigns now, “the epic choice” emerges, as though not already a quotidian reality, among the partisans. The stand is, alarmingly, no longer a spontaneous choice of the red pill or blue pill, but between reflexive allegorization of our times and satisfactory self-consistency—I remember very well quite the shock by my phone’s push notification saying “Judgement Day tomorrow,” again while I stood in the crowd browsing the ever more disconcerting news. Where and when is the judgement? About whom?
image: New Year’s Eve, 2015, Rovaniemi
David Hammons and Time-Based Media Essentials
Reflections:
An object of art becomes autonomous when granted the power to create context and visibility in situ.
Why time-based? Time is reminded of its experiential dimension and the consequently inevitable transformation of the physical context where an object/observer exists.
Observation is expected, as in the essential logic of technology.
Linear dynamics in technological history and contingent nature of time-based media art, due to the indispensable conditioning of time and space, form a foundation for the observer’s necessitated intervention.
The temporal base enables a synchronization of exposure/contemplation between the viewer and maker, a conduit of confronted, open conversation that’s otherwise frozen in a commodifiable shrine.
Studio visit with Dara B.
Surprises:
Lovely apartment in SoHo with Teletubbies, like a reversed ego of her Wonder Woman
Books, plants, , arched windows, dry-aged eccentricity as if processed by Paik’s painted circular fans; you wonder if artists consume light, air, and ink in the kitchen.