The premise of this exhibition is to develop a specific perspective onto the rich and complex history of video art. Uses of film and video in the visual arts initially developed as a type of informal or “amateur” cinema, one that differentiated itself from studio film production by the poverty of its means and the ingenuity of its experiments. The artists in this exhibition have been chosen from two different time periods: the late sixties and seventies (i.e. the first years of video art) and today. In both cases, these are works that develop their own forms of “production,” ones that are often very close to contemporaneous forms of amateur or home cinema. (Julien Bismuth)

julien! emanuel!

sorry for the pragmatics, so much moves move moving me

hope you are both at your best spring spring

misha

dear amateurautorists!

here we are testing light and cast:

julien! less and less i am able to cheat, so it will be a humble but hopefully nonetheless precise and actually urgent gesture that i will try to donate to our enterprise. i get an idea that your curatorial expertise is open ended like your patience–so i will keep my experimental moods–to soon materialize. in right scale. hopefully in perfect scale.

for now i found the lets say autorenfilm-alternative of the a little bit hollywoodesque scenery testing cast and light. lets say here we already went deconstructing le dispositif.

the amateur

misha

(att:humantracechile)

Sounds great, I am not sure what it is nor what it means but I feel like it is getting clearer as it gets blurrier. Can we get the cows to come for the opening? Maybe we should just have the opening for the cows, everybody else can stand outside…. 

Sent via BlackBerry from T-Mobile

julien! the cows- actually are sheeps! which makes your vision of the opening even more precise. but how to convince them? i feel a little bit using your patience, but honestly enjoy my hesitating fights–enjoying the worlds view through the camera-display–but hardly dare to use the record-button. some deepest naiv but intense iconoclast pleasures. respecting the opaqueness of the world, i consider a valid contribution: all the films that i did not make.

i am working on this smaller object, which should pay back (!?) my not yet (?) fullfilled vision of me myself catching the perfect moments, beautifully choreographed as much as soaked with the really real weight of the-life-out-there’s significance. in scale of an amateurs love.

means i am close, although the object develops a little humble. although:  as today i feel so strong (recently a little weaker) i imagined how a more brave statement would look like and for a second i gave up my till now title: “neuerdings die freiheit” and thought about this older object which we used to call “Der Verrat”–in our context we may call it “Director’s Cut” (made out of chairs). am sending a view.

am close! and thankful for the chance to bring my filmmaker’s ego down to earth.

hope that finds you at best

misha

(att:derverrat)

dear julien and emanuel,

i was reflecting your suggestion to consider my e-mail-straying as a potential contribution to manifest the authors amateurism. i wonder how that could materialize in the show in a convincing and consistent (short) way- and hardly allow myself to imagine any solution. it seems to necessarily stay out of reach for myself to imagine those solutions (as if i intended to let the messages work for me?). any form of presenting the glowing core of these e-mails can, i guess, only be a “curatorial gesture”–in this case anyway artistic…

but i also wasnt lazy and imagined the dark side of those reflections- as in the end its part of the job- tried to articulate my discomfort with the pressing of the record-button, by in the same time keeping the button pressed–in the hopefully most obvious way. a little too fresh to evaluate the result–but there is one–and actually in this case it serves more as a platzhalter for any other possible result, demonstrating the established method: direct cinema of our times might be best done with an internet-browser and a camera facing the screen, of course, i am afraid. to then let it flow- till the soon exhaustion. i did one try with highest ambitions-prefer to not comment now–the title says:

“Wetube10.1 By The Whoevertries Committee”.

This could be an adaequate something in the context of our authorbecoming amateurism—the threat of being misread we should consider–as, like always, a chance. (in case interested—would probably need one of those little screens for watching films on the road–probably best hang on the wall next to a piece of metal- i do have a little collection here)

we consider

TWC