Bill Randall

HOME ART TEACHING WRITING ABOUT

Crashing a pro photographers’ conference, looking at cameras and lenses costing more than an acre of land in some places, was a little like being in the locker room in middle school.

It didn’t help that I was carting around a Holga, a plastic toy that shoots on 120mm film. Its focus dial offers: head, person, people, and mountain range. Its case occasionally keeps out the light, and the people who develop your film usually apologize until you mention, to their relief, a Holga was involved.

All the gear lust & envy brought to mind a few artists working with meager means. I have in mind not Bolexes and Holgas so much as the PXL-2000. This plastic video camera, with an ethereal black and white image taped to cassette, came from Fischer-Price. Grown up not at all, it now has it s own film festival, of all things.

And the whole of the work from the PXL hardly compares with the work, almost undiscovered, of the Czech photographer Miroslav Tichy. Working in virtual isolation, he returned to his hometown in Moravia after studying art in Prague. He made his own cameras, crafting long lenses out of pipes, tape, and handmade lenses. The photos– almost always of women, spied from afar– have a glowing, hazy texture, being born with the patina that takes most photos years to acquire. His approach would take most pros years to learn, as they unlearn all the artistic traps of expensive gear.

Miroslav Tichý, MT Inv. no.: 1-30, © Foundation Tichý oceán

I’m fond of DivX and VLC, the freeware video codec & viewer, in the same way I like my laptop, held together with gaff tape. I wasn’t surprised when, watching some guy on a DivX video, he was engulfed in a swarm of triangles. Every movement left a trail of them, until he drowned in geometry. It seems the codec was misinstalled. Later, when VLC pushed the the gaff tape to bursting, this happened:

It’s an image of some poor farmer freaking out over losing his milk, swimming in digital blocks.

***

Last fall in Washington, DC, I first saw the work of an artist who uses these technological lesions as his medium. Takeshi Murata had three of his recent video works in the Black Box downstairs in the Hirshhorn. One was a forgettable computer animation, a devil’s rorschach in color.

The other two, though, were excellent. “Pink Dot” and “Monster Movie” both run found footage through a digital wringer, with results half-Brakhage, half-codec panic. “Monster Movie” takes footage from the 1981 junk classic Caveman. Almost unrecognizable, Murata’s monster fights his way through flowing gobs of digital gunk. “Pink Dot” pits Rambo against the same gunk, joined by a pink dot throbbing on fluorescent blue ground. Rambo appears behind the dot, subsumes it, disappers in a mess of blocks, then bursts through. As he stands still, the dot engulfs him from behind. It’s a zero-sum game.

Murata renders the digital image as a flowing vat of colors, like a well-used palette. He also understands how insubstantial the medium is. Anyone who’s lost a hard drive knows how fragile digital images are. I’ve imagined chemical photography as bricks, but digital as sand. Murata prefers sludge, and he makes it literal. His subject appears to be the human figure in motion, fighting through his medium. And the music, by Lexington, Kentucky’s own Hair Police, counterpoints it all.

***

YouTube never lets you down, with incomplete clips from both “Monster Movie” and “Pink Dot.” Shot handheld off the screen, it’s watchable, and YouTube’s own awful encoding adds yet another layer of muddy, endearing blocks.

My friend John Yost has completed his first feature film Every Good Thing to Rust, available online for free viewing. Congrats, John; you’re my hero. More so since your movie’s actually quite good. Imagine how awkward it would have been if it sucked like that unfinished cowboy movie I tried to make with Brian & JP. If you don’t know these folk, just watch the movie. I’m biased, but some thoughts after the jump.

(more…)

My brother and I spent our childhoods checking out Monsters of Toho Studios from the library over and over. So when a new monster took a page from Blair Witch, we met some of our oldest friends at the theater on opening night. I mean, come on: giant monsters.

(more…)