Brian Brooks Moving Company

I attended the Visions and Voices event featuring the Brian Brooks Moving Company. Though this was fundamentally a dance event, it was also related strongly to design. I'm going to talk about the visual elements, not the performance elements, of this event in order to relate the event to our Design Fundamentals class. 

Looking at the dances in a detached way in order to focus on their visual elements, I saw the dancers as forms and lines in motion. The dance thus became to me about the relationship of the forms with each other and the relationship of the forms with the space. The dancers, along with the lighting and the abstract scenic visual elements of the dance, alternately created tension and balance in their relationships with each other and with the overall composition, the space of the stage.

Because of the scenic visual elements in the dance, there was also always a play between foreground and background in the dance. Sometimes the dancers seemed like the positive space of the composition, and sometimes they seemed like the negative space, as in Descent, a dance in which the spotlight is not on the dancers. (see 2nd Descent picture) 

Descent (2011)

The dances were all very unexpected and had a balance of disjointedness and fluidity, of variety and harmony, that was ultimately satisfying. An image that illustrates what I mean came up in the dance Descent. In a section of this dance, the dancers did not get the spotlight. They were in darkness while the light was shone on pieces of cloth that the dancers were keeping in the air by using a board as a fan. The cloth in this dance floating in the air had a freedom and randomness to it, yet there was a pattern to its movements as the dancers kept it in the air and directed it across the stage. I feel like this image is a good metaphor for the entire dance, because there was always a feeling of randomness and freedom to the dances, yet they were obviously choreographed and had a pattern to them.

Descent (2011)

The dances were all avant-garde, expanding what dance is. For example, the focus was not purely dance, for there were always scenic visual elements that accompanied the dance. 

The visual design accompanying the dance were about making the invisible visible, according to Brian Brooks. Brooks used the visual design elements to emphasize the invisible forces that are always at work. For example, the lines in Run Don't Run emphasized the distance and energy between the dancers. The lines also amplified the choices of the choreography and the actions and reactions, the trajectory, of the movements of the dancers. 

Run Don't Run (2013) 

To me, the Brian Brooks Moving Company dances were about an aesthetic visual experience, not about narrative or representation  The dances therefore seemed like abstract visual art. However, unlike most famous visual art, which seems to be immortal, the dances are completely ephemeral and the memories of the experience are all that remain of them after they are over. 

Run Don't Run (2013) 

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.