Jennifer West Presentation

I attended an event at the film school at which Jennifer West, an Assistant professor at Roski, screened and talked about her films.

Jennifer West

West started out by taking about a work that she is currently working on. In it, she wants to include 100 films that have influenced her. She believes that the ideas and memories created by movies mold an artist’s psyche. This idea is like that of Sherin’s when she told us in the class that inspiration could come from anywhere and that the world around us impacts our art making.

West then began to talk about her process when making films. She hand manipulates film celluloid with all kinds of materials. She scratches at the film, drenches it in lemon juice, coffee, lipstick, salt, etc. and does all kind of other things to the film celluloid. She calls this “direct film-making” because it is camera-less. However, she also has film that are image-based and which use a camera.

 

Stills from various films by Jennifer West 

Raising interesting questions about authorship, West does not create art in expected ways. Sometimes she makes her film a public performance, and asks viewers to do things to the film, such as drum on it or skateboard over it. West’s filmmaking is therefore sometimes collaborative, so there is no singular source of creation, putting the idea of authorship into question.

Jennifer West; Skate the Sky Film (35mm film print of clouds in the sky covered with ink, Ho-Hos, and Melon - taped to Tate Turbine Hall ramp and skateboarded over using ollie, kick flip, pop shove-it, acid drop, melon grab, crooked grind, bunny hop, tic tacs, sex change, disco flip - skateboarding performed live for Long Weekend by Thomas Lock, Louis Henderson, Charlotte Brennan, Dion Penman, Sam Griffin, Jak Tonge, Evin Goode and Quantin Paris - clouds in the sky shot by Peter West)

West’s films question authorship in even more radical ways in that she sometimes remakes someone else’s work. In one film that she screened, she manipulated the film celluloid of select scenes from Jaws 2. She therefore appropriates someone else’s film and makes it her own. According to West, she does not believe that her new fabrication of these Jaws scenes is subject to copyright law because she has transformed the original into something else. That’s a pretty definitive statement, but I think it’s a difficult line to draw and that the source of authorship in West’s work based on Jaws 2 is uncertain. Her work reminds me of collage art and its use of appropriation.

Jennifer West
Still from
Heavy Metal Sharks Calming Jaws Reversal Film (faded
pink super 8 film print - library copy of select scenes
from Jaws - from Lorain, Ohio public library - treated with black fabric dye enriched with heavy metals: iron and zinc vitamins, celluloid grated with stone, whipped with hair headbanging, impressed with thumb and pinky print
devil ears - headbanging by Monica Kogler and Jwest)
2011
6 minutes, 47 seconds

West’s work is very conceptual. She says that the final product is not as important as the idea—the materials she wants to treat the celluloid with and the content she wishes the film to have. It is therefore the process and not the artwork that is of importance to West. For example, in one film she subjected the celluloid to radiation. The result of the film was unexpected. The film turned out to be slow and relaxing with the celluloid's exposure to radiation.  West’s idea was to expose the celluloid to radiation and thus make something visible, exposure to radiation, that happens all the time. What she got in the product was an unintended irony in that her most relaxing film came about by being exposed to harsh radiation.

Most of the films that West screened were abstract. They were about layering abstract forms and thus creating movement, vitality and energy. The result was hypnotic and visceral. When I closed my eyes I could still see the flashes of the film through my eyelids. Though I admire the rhythm and movement that West creates through repetition, at times her films were so repetitive that I felt sleepy. Her films are also so hypnotic that I felt uncomfortable watching them. It felt almost like mind control.

Jennifer West; Regressive Squirty Face Film (16mm film leader squirted and dripped with chocolate sauce  ketchup, mayonnaise  and apple juice), 2007. 

West’s films, to me, are all about time. The film celluloid that she uses in the films contains the records of all that she has subjected the celluloid to. The films are therefore records of time, of process, and thus freeze time in a way.