Please check out my friend Stéphane Couturier’s new exhibition Chandigarh Replay and the coming out of his new book by the same name. Large-format digital cibachromes on the fascinating urban landscape of Chandigarh. A well thought-out exhibition by an artist whom I thoroughly admire.
A free conference on 70′s feminist experimental cinema in France. It is definitely marked on my calendar:
http://www.lepeuplequimanque.org/maisonpop-et-melies-2007/vendredi-12-octobre-2007
Pionnières du cinéma d’essai et expérimental
féministe français
Vendredi 12 Octobre – 20h30
Maison Populaire de Montreuil
ENTREE LIBRE
« Le regard des femmes, on ne le connaît pas » écrivait Viviane Forrester en 1976.
Avec cette première séance consacrée aux pionnières du cinéma d’essai et expérimental féministe français, ce cycle s’ouvre par le geste inaugural porté par trois réalisatrices de « découper, déchiffrer et inventer » le monde, exauçant le souhait de ces années-là de chercher « collectivement et individuellement un langage féminin ». Simultanément aux cinéastes et collectifs qui filmeront directement les luttes des femmes, certaines tenteront d’inventer une nouvelle façon de produire des images. C’est ainsi que le regard jusque là par trop absent des femmes se déploie, venant « changer qualitativement de mots et de pensées, pour amener un contenu vraiment révolutionnaire » à leurs films. « (…) j’ai le désir que femmes et hommes changent. Comme commencement à une beauté autre » disait alors Danielle Jaeggi.
En présence d’Anne-Marie Faure, Michka Gorki, Danielle Jaeggi et Hélène Fleckinger (historienne du cinéma féministe des années 70)
Programmation : Aliocha Imhoff & Kantuta Quiros et avec l’aide précieuse d’Hélène Fleckinger.
SORCIERES-CAMARADES (1971, 10 mn) de Danielle Jaeggi
« Un film sur les femmes / Un film par des femmes / Un film pour les femmes / Avec une caméra d’homme.
Un jour des femmes verront ces images de notre triste survie et se demanderont comment nous avons pu la supporter. » (extrait)
UN GESTE EN MOI (1972, 20 mn) de Danielle Jaeggi
« (…) Entraîneuse de pères – Folle les seins en l’air – Nymphomane familière –
Hystérique toque.
Images de femmes. Elles collent de partout.
S’en débattre en connaissance de sexe. » Danielle Jaeggi, Paroles…elles tournent !,1976
« Dans la société capitaliste, tout est basé sur l’aliénation, sur le fait que l’on existe par le regard des
autres. » (extrait)
INTERPRETATIONS (1975, 11 mn) de Michka Gorki
« L’infirmité des illusions
L’aliénation continuelle d’agressions imprévues
l’impunité d’une foule anonyme forte d’une cohésion de lâcheté
L’impuissance face à l’irrémédiable.
Maitriser ses révoltes fulgurantes
A chacun sa bêtise, bien personnelle, bien limitée. » (Extrait)
« J’ai réalisé un film dans lequel j’ai hurlé mes révoltes de femme, de comédienne aculée à la folie pour ne pas vouloir jouer le jeu de la bestialité de la société » Michka Gorki, Paroles … elles tournent !,1976
MALEDICTINES de Anne Marie Faure et collectif Vidéa (1975, 14 min)
Film expérimental sur le corps féminin. Vidéo collective, vécue, filmée et montée par cinq femmes.
Textes: KQ&AI
The revolution is about to unveil!
Brought to you by none other than:
Better World Inc. & Post-Modern China Doll
Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television, Choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players, and electrical tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol and dental insurance. Choose fixed-interest mortgage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. Choose leisure wear and matching luggage. Choose a three piece suite on hire purchase in a range of fucking fabrics. Choose DIY and wondering who you are on a Sunday morning. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pishing you last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked-up brats you have spawned to replace yourself. Choose your future. Choose life… But why would I want to do a thing like that?
(This is the poem by John Hodge. Then Renton finishes it off:)
I chose not to choose life: I chose something else. And the reasons? There are no reasons. Who need reasons when you’ve got heroin?
Currently reading :
The Last Days of Socrates (Penguin Classics)
By Plato
Release date: 29 April, 2003
I am featured as the “Chic Type” of the week (interview in French):
J’ai été sélectionné en tant que “Chic Type” de la semaine.
Voici l’interview, 3e partie:
I am featured as the “Chic Type” of the week (interview in French):
J’ai été sélectionné en tant que “Chic Type” de la semaine.
Voici l’interview, 2e partie:
I am featured as the “Chic Type” of the week (interview in French):
J’ai été sélectionné en tant que “Chic Type” de la semaine.
Voici l’interview, 1e partie:
I got this in the mail last week from Better World Inc., the other half of our collective of two named “Etranges Etrangers.” By the way, he is in my opinion the most cutting-edge French photographer living in Copenhagen. I’ve been trying to persuade him to move to Paris, but ok I’ll stop digressing…
Better World explained to me that they are images taken from erotic magazines in the 60′s, although I am very sceptical – some of these images are as erotic as medical records of mutilated genitalia…
I have not been very active on the blogging front, as I have been mainly doing research, script writing, and quite a bit of journaling to clarify directions I want to take next season.
The female genitalia project has taken off and I’ve been receiving more responses than I could possibly reply to individually. I do try when I feel it elicits a reaction from my part. I’m a bit amused that most of these tend to be private, either via private msg in MySpace or e-mail, and am definitely touched when I see that there’s a confessional element, a therapeutic process that is taking place. Some of these msgs are 5 or 6 pages long, and I think I’m going to post them anonymously somewhere here.
This and the overwhelming response that I received from the models have brought me to the decision to post a series of theorical texts on the female genitalia, starting from excerpts from my thesis. I think the logical place to start would be the beginning of photography in the nineteenth century, Over time, I’d like to compile the largest online resource available on the subject.
I was interviewed by Gildas from www.chictype.fr yesterday. For those who don’t know, it’s a Parisian Bobo (bougeois-bohème) website on fashion, culture, and dandysm. I think the video will come out next week and you will see me in all my 70′s geekgirl glory. There’s something about dandysm that’s so intellectually sexy that I even forget my feminist stance against the blatantly misogynistic aspects of it. I mean Baudelaire was such a woman hater, yet such an intellectual turn-on (no, no him, his ideas). At this day and age, finding great mental fucks is infinitely more challenging than finding fulfilling/satisfying sex.
Conversation inevitably turned to Lacan, his famous claim that the female sex organ is an emptiness to be filled, the drawing that he asked André Masson to make as a wooden sliding door for the famous painting “Origine du monde” by Gustave Courbet, and numerous (un)ethical practices including the stealing of Georges Batailles’ wife via analysis. Other discussions that were completely off-camera and off the record included pedophilia as the one label that prevents all meaningful dialogue and discussion on the sexuality of children, all in the name of”protection”. This is a subject that can get me ranting to no end, much like “patriotism” in the context of Iraq and 9/11, or “freedom of choice” in the context of health care reforms in the US. So I think I’ll stop spilling and start my day.
Currently reading:
The Unknowable Gurdjieff (Arkana)
By: Margaret Anderson
Release date: 06 August, 1991
Women In Antiquities
By: Charles Seltman
Release date: 1956
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Art in Theory, 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas By: Paul Wood Release date: 01 October, 2002 |
CLICK TO VIEW PORTFOLIO
Chin-Chin Wu © 2006-2008
The exhibition contains 15 life-size photographs, sound files audible through headphones, one cabinet de curiosités, experimental videos, and the making-of film.
Making of – Femmes: Portraits Dé/Visagés
Camera: Linda
Editing: Jean-Marc Sanchez
The exposure of the female genitalia implies an ontological vulnerability. Is this why it has remained as one of the last bastions of censorship in the field of representation? It seems to me that the female genitalia have suffered from the polar treatments of paternal protectionism, which excludes them from the social field, or male exploitation, which has demands perfectly “cultivated” and remolded vulvas. I wanted to see if there was a strategy that could neutralize traditional diametrical views of the female genitalia operating on these paradigms of attraction-repulsion. This series came into being in order to examine our capacity to look at the female genitalia as they really are, without resorting to a ready-made alibi.
Several axes of reflection were explored in this series:
Horizontality, verticality. I think this is the key axis of reflection when it comes to how to show the female genitalia. The vertical axis is considered the “noble” axis because it distinguishes us from all the quadrupeds. It is also the position that “condemns” the vagina to its invisibility. For this series, I have established a horizontal position of the body that aligns on the same horizon the face and the genitalia, the mouth and the vagina. At the same time, we have a sensation of verticality given that the frame is tight and that the frontal point of view forces us to “face” the picture.
Human, animal. If the vertical position renders us human, are the genitalia not the last vestiges of our animal nature? Simone de Beauvoir describes this ancient struggle of women between the propagation of the species and the desire for individuation and transcendence as such: “Woman’s individuality is constantly combated by the interest of the species; she appears possessed by strange forces… It is not without resistance that the woman lets the interest of the species settle in her body.”
Nature, Culture/Raw, Cooked (Lévi-Strauss). If nature condemns us to animality, the human species attempts by all means to erase traces of our animal nature: clothing, accessories, piercing, waxing, paranoia of body hair… The ultimate step would be to cultivate or “cook” our genitalia, supposedly the rawest part of our body.
Face, genitalia. The personification of the female genitalia is a very ancient theme (Baubô the mythical vulva). If we operate a 90° visual rotation of the photograph, we can see, by a visual contamination of sort, a face that superimposes on the structure of the genitalia. The face is often deemed the most human and the genitalia the most animal part of our being. This visual confusion destabilizes established hierarchies.
Baubô, the mythical vulva
Mouth, Vagina. In the essay “Mouth” by Georges Batailles, the mouth is a high place of individualization in human beings because it is capable of words, whereas in animal life, the mouth is understood as “the principle element in the system of capture, killing, and ingestion of preys where the anus is the point of accomplishment.” In these portraits of women, the “lips” of the genitalia are open and expressive, allowing them to ascend to the same status as the mouth.
Masculinity, femininity. The “faces” that we see superimposed on the structure of the genitalia convey very “masculine” traits. This questions the validity of the foundations that separate the masculine and the feminine.
Eroticism, academicism. The pelvis that one perceives as toppled over reminds us of the arched back that eroticizes the pose according to conventional erotic codes, whereas the frontal viewpoint neutralizes the images (a form of academicism since the Dusseldorf School). This provokes an instability in the reception of the photographs and leaves space for ambiguity and hesitation.
I invited my models to stay open to these tensions, fragilities, and paradoxes of existence that constitute us as women.
I have been checkmated. That was awfully heartless of you.
Motionless. Speechless. Expressionless. Tearless. In my out-of-character ungracefulness, I refused to admit to my defeat.
Yes theoretically, there’s no turning back, but the steaming beast in me wanted to violently flip the board over, permanently rewrite the rules of the game, and gently and harmlessly perform an ice-pick lobotomy on your frontal lobe.
Or, I guess I could just as well playfully cover your eyes, and then steal that piece of evidence working against me.
(rapid heartbeats!)
But which piece should I steal? How many steps would I have to go back? Back to BEFORE that fateful moment when our eyes met as recognitions of irresolvable past-life entanglements haunted and drew us back? Back to that past-life entanglement that we left unresolved, because we resigned to the fact that it was irresolvable? Or back to BEFORE the first time that I remember shoving you away?
The points in time where heart conundrums and love debts definitively begin and definitely end have always been points of befuddlement for me…
After a while I said as casually as I could why don’t we suspend judgment a bit longer, pretend that there are possibilities that we don’t yet recognize, other dimensions perhaps — after all, are our understandings not limited by the physical realms of our perceptions, by the here and now?
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Currently watching : Women in Love Release date: 04 March, 2003 |
Ken Russel is my new fetish filmmaker! I think I’ll re-plunge into D.H. Lawrence this August.
*enraptured*
**Also check out this electronic magazine on neuroscience called Brain & Mind. Fascinating stuff!
LES RENCONTRES INTERNATIONALES DE LA PHOTOGRAPHIE D’ARLES 2007
Projections of photographic series, at the international photography festival in Arles, France, July 2007.
Series by JM Babonneau aka. Better_World_Inc.
and by Chin-Chin Wu aka. Post-Modern China Doll.
We made this video with my coolpix camera and Better World Inc. did the editing. The choice of music is really eerie, which sort of transformed the whole experience for me. I dig it!
Calendrier :
Vendredi 6 Juillet, à l’occasion du OFF de la Nuit de l’année, festival ArtCourtVideo 07, sur la façade du Théâtre d’Arles, rue Molière (près de l’espace Van Gogh), Etrange Etrangers commence la projection à 22h30 pile.
JM Babonneau proposera, en tant que VJ (Visual Jockey), une animation inédite de ses travaux photographiques en collaboration avec le DJ de ArtCourtVideo à la fin des projections.
Samedi 7 Juillet, au Cargo de Nuit, 7 avenue Sadi Carnot, Arles.
JM Babonneau proposera, en tant que VJ (Visual Jockey), une animation inédite des travaux photographiques d’Étranges Étrangers en collaboration avec le DJ du Cargo de Nuit, entre minuit et 4 heures du matin.
www.cargodenuit.com
Photographie, France’s premier multimedia magazine on everything photographic, has covered our projections at Rencontre Internationale de la Photographie d’Arles 07.
At the projection this evening, we will be interviewed by Photographie.com. Rendez-vous at 10:15 on the façade of Théatre d’Arles, near Espace Van Gogh, rue Molière.
A few screen shots:
OK, this should come as no surprise, but I’ve been busy working on a video on my female genitalia series that we are projecting for the opening week of Rencontre Photographique à Arles.
This is the link towards our exhibition for Arles:
http://europeanphotographers.wordpress.com/
JM is arriving in Paris from Copenhagen on the 3rd of July and we are taking an early train on the 4th to Arles. We are likely to stay until Sunday the 8th. The program afterwards stays open. I think I’d like to see Zhang in the French Riviera, possibly hop to Vienne depending on the concerts this year, and take my Vienne sidekick Philippe’s invitation to Juan les Pins for Nora Jones and Keith Jarrett’s appearances (Attn: Tim!!).
What bothers me is that there’s a 10-day lapse of time and should I just bum around in the South or come back to Paris and get down to work? Or go to Peru and Istanbul? Afterwards, my Greek ex has extended an open invitation for me and Maxime in Athens and in a Greek Isle. Pékinoise is trying to get me to Beijing in September to make a short feature fiction. Meantime, I think I should shut myself off with Sandrine in some abandonned house in the countryside from July to August and finally finish the picture book project that we’ve been working on all year long. Decisions, decisions…
This is finally coming out! I’ll be at the Palais de Tokyo Friday!
Le vendredi 1er juin à partir de 19 heures,
à la librairie du Palais de Tokyo,
M19 vous invite au lancement de
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publisher, editor : Pierre Denan associate editors : Frédéric de Lachèze, Arnauld Pierre translations : Chin-Chin Wu en librairie à partir du 20 mai, ou commande sur site M19 dès le 14 mai |
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artist’s publication 480 pages couleur, format 24 x 32 cm 45 euros impression de la couverture sur couché 350 gr, pelliculage brillant impression intérieure sur couché brillant 150 gr œuvres créditées en trois langues : français, anglais, chinois périodicité annuelle |
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avec : Pierre Ardouvin, John Armleder, Olivier Babin, Francis Baudevin, Nicolas Chardon, Claude Closky, Liz Cohen, Pierre Denan, Véronique Joumard, Vincent Lamouroux, Lang/Baumann, Guillaume Leingre, Stéphane Magnin, Mathieu Mercier, Laurent Montaron, Bruno Peinado, Daniel Pflumm, Hugues Reip, Yann Serandour, Veit Stratmann, Yo Zolnir |
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| les artistes sont réunis par the artists are brought together by Pierre Denan |
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| Suite et somme d’œuvres originales, 2860 grams of art regroupe vingt et un artistes. Les contributions, au nombre de vingt-huit, se suivent les unes les autres. Aucune information de nature éditoriale n’est imprimée en surimpression des œuvres, lesquelles sont créditées en fin de revue. | |
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