[Frameworks] Magic Lantern Presents: SELF-OBLITERATION (May 8, 2013)

[Watter, Seth]

[image: Inline image 1]

 Magic Lantern Presents:

SELF-OBLITERATION

Curated by Seth Watter

May 8th, 2013
9:30 PM
Cable Car Cinema & Café
Providence, RI
$5

FEATURING: Gregory Bateson & Margaret Mead; Ed Emshwiller; Carolyn Tennant;
Takeshi Murata; Jud Yalkut & Yayoi Kusama; Oskar Fischinger; VALIE EXPORT;
Jonas Mekas

In 1965, Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama began an installation series titled
Infinity Mirror Rooms. The viewer enters a space entirely made up of
reflective surfaces, which indeed infinitely mirror one another in a
dizzying mise-en-abîme. This impulse to dissolve the visitor in a play of
pure color or shimmering light was carried over into Kusama’s happenings,
which took place in galleries, studios, or in public locations like
Washington Square. They were variously advertised as “body festivals” or
“anatomic explosions,” and Kusama became notorious for covering her nude
performers (like most everything else she touched) with painted polka dots
to help erode the barriers of the individual self, body pressing against
body in a drug- and music-filled delirium. When asked in 1999 what the
phrase “self-obliteration” meant, the aging and mentally ill artist
replied: “By obliterating one’s individual self, one returns to the
infinite universe.”

Several of these relics from the psychedelic age were recorded by American
filmmaker Jud Yalkut in collaboration with Kusama. The resulting work forms
the centerpiece of this program, which explores the theme of
self-obliteration throughout the history of avant-garde film and video.
What is a body? Where does the body begin and end? And what are the
aesthetic, spiritual, or political possibilities that might arise from its
radical negation? Each work featured in Self-Obliteration poses these
questions in one shape or another. Dissolution and disfiguration are
terrifying prospects, and the odd subgenre of “body horror” caters to a
real and deep-seated human anxiety. Yet the spectacle of bodily breakdown
continues to hold both filmmakers and viewers in its thrall, promising
self-transcendence even if only in the form of, precisely, a
self-obliteration.


** Magic Lantern is supported by the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation and the
Malcolm S. Forbes Center for Culture and Media Studies at Brown University.


https://www.facebook.com/events/121197484744501/
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