A project organized by Fionn Meade and Mary Simpson
René Clair, Sung Hwan Kim, Meiro Koizumi, Anna Molska, Lucy Raven, Hans Richter, Steve Roden
Press Release (pdf)
Exhibition: September 4 - September 29
Opening Reception: Thursday, September 4, 6-8pm
Gallery at the LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies
Columbia University School of the Arts
310 Dodge Hall, 2960 Broadway
New York, NY 10027
Telephone: (212)854-7641
Hours: 9am-5pm Monday-Friday
Departing from an 1896 George Méliès short that no longer exists, Bivouac includes a selection of recent film and video works that utilize structural conceits to create simple backdrops for performance and narration. As the avant-garde films of René Clair and Hans Richter (also included here) revised and expanded Méliès' personification of objects and rudimentary theatrical effects, these contemporary works update and renew Constructivist and Dadaist strategies alike.
Anna Molska's Tanagrama, 2006/07, encounters two muscular models, wearing only pads and futuristic helmets, arranging seven large blocks into a geometric shape that alludes to Malevich's stage design for the Futurist play Victory Over the Sun (1913) and his subsequent Black Square painting; Steve Roden's anything else &/or nothing at all (drawing circles for jackson mac low), 2006, interprets a Fluxus score by the concrete poet Mac Low in the form of direct animation layered on top of an existing 1950s educational film titled "drawing the circle." Lucy Raven's Preenactment, 2008, re-contextualizes four picture books of Chinese propaganda from the mid-1970s that promote, agriculture, sports, and the heroic role of the worker. Sung Hwan Kim's Dog Video, 2006, acts out an abstracted comparison between two homes-one in Amsterdam and one in Seoul-and the house rules that apply in each domain. And Meiro Koizumi invites a Tokyo man to share an intimate memory while under the duress of responding to blunt questions and directives in CraftNight, 2008.
