Bill Randall

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Doug Aitken’s Sleepwalkers floated a soporific city symphony on the walls of MoMA, balancing long takes with short bursts of rhymed images. The multiplane video was silent, but Aitken talks 26 ears off in Broken Screen, his book of interviews.

The thin thread connecting the interviews is put best in the subtitle: “expanding the image, breaking the narrative.” It’s really just an excuse for him to interview a bunch of mostly gallery artists and filmmakers (and an architect) he likes.

Even though many artists are close to overexposed– would that Werner Herzog had bitten Matthew Barney– it is refreshing to have them out of their respective ghettos. Broken Screen reads like a great magazine that only lasted for two issues because it tried to do too much.

Some of the artists are new, like the fascinating Olafur Eliasson. Others, like Manny Farber and Alejandro Jodorowsky, seem curiously old-fashioned. Better are the lesser-known, like Pablo Ferro, the titles designer of Vertigo, Dr. Strangelove, and many others. And especially welcome is Eija-Liisa Ahtila, whose interview glimpses the nuts and bolts of an artist working with a seasoned film crew.

The book’s real value is in its lavish production. Like a little coffee table book, it teems with full-color reproductions of art, film stills, and even a clutch of photos from Robert Wilson stage shows. I doubt I’ll reread the interviews, but I leaf through the book every time I see it.

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

My friend and colleague Genny Baudrillard invited me to speak with her college humanities class on documentary filmmaking. They have recently watched Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke, a rich, complex film. So I mostly spoke on photography. A digressive version of the talk follows after the jump.

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I wind up at PingMag, a bilingual English-Japanese design journal, fairly often.  I first found it through this article on Namaiki while researching Fukuokan permaculture and the Power of Duck.  Since then, I often return to its articles on art, film, design, and pop-cult detritus .  A sample:

• This time, I was researching Koi no Mon, a crazed manga by Jun HANYUNYUU.
• Gez Fry, self-taught illustrator who fled a diplomacy career, explains his “manga-style” and slags US comics art
• The producers of Tokyo Loop, an omnibus of animation feature Tabaimo, Yoji KURI and Kotobuki SHIRIAGARI, among others.
• The making of Tekkon Kinkreet into an anime, with lots of production art and photos around the studio.
• The Butt-Biting Bug, about which the less said the better.
• YMCK, pioneering 8-bit band, with videos.
• Dark & comic animation from Run Wrake, described in an interview.
• Jennifer Baichwal, director of Manufactured Landscapes, a fine doc on Edward Burtynsky’s large-format photography (pictured above).
• Some guy who dresses in olde clothes and hand-cranks a projector to show film’s incunabulae.

I caught the tail end of the “Weight of the World” show at the University of Cincinnati’s College of Design, Architecture, Art and Planning. Maiza Hixson and Ryan Mulligan curated the uneven show, but it has some gems.

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