[Frameworks] Electric Visions: Screenings and Symposium

Sun Sep 22 22:46:15 UTC 2013

Dear Frameworkers,

Please find attached and below information on the Electric Visions symposium which will be taking place next Friday and Saturday, an occasion to launch R. Bruce Elder's new book DADA, Surrealism, and the Cinematic Effect.

Regards,
Stephen Broomer

Electric Visions: How DADA and Surrealism Anticipated the Later Avant-Garde

Join us September 27 and 28 for Electric Visions, a conference on the resonances of DADA and surrealism in later avant-garde movements (to be held in Rm. 307, School of Image Arts,  Ryerson University, 122 Bond St., Toronto). The conference will serve as the occasion for the launch of R. Bruce Elder’s new book, DADA, Surrealism, and the Cinematic Effect. This book, a companion to the author’s previous, Harmony & Dissent, examines the DADA and Surrealist movements as responses to the advent of the cinema. The proceedings will begin on September 27 with a series of screenings staged by Toronto’s Loop Collective, with curators Kathryn Elder, Paolo Granata, and Renato Barilli. Electric Visions will continue on September 28, a series of three panels will be presented, on the cinema’s and video’s avant-gardes, on the junction of art forms, and on the continuing reverberations of DADA and Surrealism in contemporary art. Speakers include Renato Barilli, John Picchione, Izabella Pruska-Oldenhof, Alla Gadassik, John Stout, Tom Sherman, Arturo Nagel, and R. Bruce Elder. These panels will be complemented by a presentation from Don Snyder, on American photography’s debt to Surrealism. Kathryn Elder, editor of The Films of Joyce Wieland (Toronto: Cinematheque Ontario, 1999) will introduce Friday’s film program, which will include works by Wieland (and others).

For further information contact Stephen_Broomer at hotmail.com

ELECTRIC VISIONS: How DADA and Surrealism Anticipated the Later Avant-Garde 

(Schedule of Events)

____________________________

All events take place in Rm. 307, School of Image Arts, Ryerson University, 122 Bond St., Toronto, ON.

FRIDAY SEPTEMBER 27, 2013

3 pm – Surrealism’s Reverberations in America

Kathryn Elder presents films by the American Surrealists

4 – 5 pm – Recent Works by the Loop Collective

(The Loop Collective is a group of independent media artists that formed to develop a public platform integrating experimental film and video with other art forms.)

5:30 – 8:30 pm – Italian Video

(Presented by Paolo Granata and Renato Barilli; discussant Tom Sherman)

____________________________

SATURDAY SEPTEMBER 28

9 – 10:30 am – The Cinema’s and Video’s Avant-Gardes

(Moderator: R. Bruce Elder)

Renato Barilli –  “From the Cinema and its Avant-Garde to Video and the New Avant-Garde”

John Picchione – “The New Avant-Garde and its Precursors”

11 am – 12 – Surrealism’s Legacy to Photography: Jerry Uelsmann, Clarence John Laughlin, and Frederick Sommer

(Introduction: Ajla Odobasic)

Don Snyder presents an illustrated lecture on themes related to American photography influenced by Surrealist ideas.

12 – 1:15 – LUNCH

1:15 – 3:30 – When the Arts Meet

(Moderator: Isabel Pedersen)

Izabella Pruska-Oldenhof – “Electric Light”

Alla Gadassik – “Len Lye: From Cinema to Harmonic Sculpture”

John Stout – “The New Avant-Garde in Paris: The case of Tel Quel”

3:45 – 6:00 - Continuing Reverberations

(Introduction: Stephen Broomer)

Tom Sherman – Video Decades

(Tom Sherman’s video works exemplify the electro-technical effect. He is the author of Cultural Engineering [1983] and Before and After the I-Bomb [2002].)

Arturo Nagel – On His Lorca and Bolaño Drawings

(Arturo Nagel has been working on a series of drawings incorporating texts by the Surrealist poet Federico Garcia Lorca and the Surrealist-influenced Roberto Bolaño.)

R. Bruce Elder – Work in Progress

(R. Bruce Elder’s art and writings have been dedicated to the quest for a poetic cinema. The work-in-progress to be presented features a Surrealist poem, along with mobile light forms.)

Extended notes:

Electric Visions

Join us on September 27 and 28 for Electric Visions, a conference on the resonances of DADA and surrealism in later avant-garde movements (to be held in Rm. 307, School of Image Arts,  Ryerson University, 122 Bond St., Toronto). The conference will serve as the occasion for the launch of R. Bruce Elder’s new book, DADA, Surrealism, and the Cinematic Effect.

The proceedings will begin on September 27 with a series of screenings of experimental film and video, staged by Toronto’s Loop Collective, in collaboration with curators Kathryn Elder, Paolo Granata, and Renato Barilli. Kathryn Elder will present Surrealism’s Reverberations in America, a programme of films by the American Surrealists. Kathryn Elder is a Film and Video Librarian at York University. She has edited essay collections on Jack Chambers and Joyce Wieland, both published by Cinematheque Ontario. This will be followed by a showcase of recent films by members of Toronto’s Loop Collective, a group of independent media artists that formed in 1997 to develop a public platform integrating experimental film and video with other forms. The screenings will conclude with a program of Italian Video presented by Paolo Granata and Renato Barilli, historians of contemporary art based at the University of Bologna.

On September 28, a series of three panels will be presented. The first, The Cinema’s and Video’s Avant-Gardes, moderated by R. Bruce Elder, will feature Renato Barilli, a renowned curator, author of many books on topics in literary criticism, art history, art theory, and cultural theory, most recently The Science of Culture and the Phenomenology of Styles (McGill-Queen’s Press), and John Picchione, professor of Italian literature at York University and author of the award-winning The New Avant-Garde in Italy: Theoretical Debate and Poetic Practices (University of Toronto Press) and Introduzione a Porta (Rome: Laterza, 1995), co-editor of Twentieth-Century Italian Poetry: An Anthology (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993) and most recently, co-editor of Edoardo Sanguineti: Literature Ideology and the Avant-Garde (London: Legenda, 2013). Following this, Don Snyder, professor of photography in Ryerson’s School of Image Arts and the author of writings of photography and music (and the overseer of project archiving films, television broadcasts and photographs relating to the Malboro Festival, will be presenting an illustrated lecture on themes related to American photography influenced by Surrealist ideas.

A second panel, When Arts Meet, will deal with the junctions of art forms, and will feature Izabella Pruska-Oldenhof, artist, co-founder of the Loop Collective, and assistant professor in Ryerson’s School of Image Arts; Alla Gadassik, PhD candidate at Northwestern University; and John Stout, professor of French and Comparative Literature at McMaster and author of Antonin Artaud’s Alternate Genealogies: Self-Portraits and Family Romances (Wilfred Laurier Press).

A final set of presentations, Continuing Reverberations, on the lingering presence and influence of DADA and Surrealism in contemporary art, will feature work (and talks) by Tom Sherman, video artist, professor of Transmedia at Syracuse University, and past recipient of the Bell Canada Award for Video Art and a Governor-General’s Award in Visual and Media Art; Arturo Nagel, artist and art historian, and formerly a faculty member of the Ontario College of Art; and R. Bruce Elder, a filmmaker, computer artist, art historian and past recipient of the Dedalus Foundation’s Robert Motherwell Book Prize (for books on modernism and modernist art), a Governor-General’s Award  in Visual and Media Art, a Los Angeles Film Critics Award, and a Canadian Film Award (a “Genie”).

For further information contact Stephen_Broomer at hotmail.com

DADA, Surrealism, and the Cinematic Effect

This book deals with the early intellectual reception of the cinema and the manner in which art theorists, philosophers, cultural theorists, and especially artists of the first decades of the twentieth century responded to its advent. While the idea persists that early writers on film were troubled by the cinema’s lowly form, this work proposes that there was another, largely unrecognized, strain in the reception of it. Far from anxious about film’s provenance in popular entertainment, some writers and artists proclaimed that the cinema was the most important art for the moderns, as it exemplified the vibrancy of contemporary life.

This view of the cinema was especially common among those whose commitments were to advanced artistic practices. Their notions about how to recast the art media (or the forms forged from those media’s materials) and the urgency of doing so formed the principal part of the conceptual core of the artistic programs advanced by the vanguard art movements of the first half of the twentieth century. This book, a companion to the author’s previous, Harmony & Dissent, examines the DADA and Surrealist movements as responses to the advent of the cinema.

Rudolf Kuenzli, director of the International Dada Archive, University of Iowa said of Elder’s new book, “DADA, Surrealism, and the Cinematic Effect, Bruce Elder’s superb companion volume to his earlier Harmony and Dissent, convincingly demonstrates that for the early twentieth-century avant-garde movements, cinema was the model, the preeminent form that prompted a recasting of the other arts. This wide-ranging study shows that Dada artists created cinematic collages and transformative machines, whereas Surrealists developed the film script as a new literary genre. His brilliant analyses of Duchamp’s Anémic cinema, Man Ray’s Retour à la raison and Emak Bakia, and Buñuel’s Un chien andalou and Las Hurdes are only surpassed by his intricate explication of Ernst’s cinematic collage novels, which he relates as models for Lawrence Jordan’s surrealist films. This is that rare book that casts the early twentieth-century avant-garde in a very new light.”

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