la commune beats ann lee
Lots of lovely things coming in the post to me lately. Firstly, HAIRSPRAY!!! from Alison for Christmas, which I might watch tonight.
And soon my copy of La Commune - Paris 1871, which has to be the best film I have ever seen, and is quite hard to get hold of, so I splurged £25 that I don't really have when a single copy came up on Amazon. It's six hours long, so that's value for money. We're going to beam it in a marathon session at de Appel soon. One of our tutors has asked us to write a 'one work' style essay ('one work' is the name of a series of books he is editing about singular, extremely influential art works) in which we each choose something that we feel is totally important, and I think I will write about La Commune. I was going to do Philippe Parreno & Pierre Huyghe's Ann Lee project, which I also think is incredible, but it turns out that another student has already done this and anyway, there is something too nice, or agreeably good quality, about this project. I mean, it's the project that nobody can disagree on: it's good.
(What happened is that Huyghe and Parreno bought the rights to Ann Lee, a Japanese manga character who had been designed to be 'bought' for the manga industry somewhere as a fairly minor character. They took her out of this context and gave her life in contexts of other forms of cultural production, namely under the mantle of contemporary art. The best known piece is an animation where she tells her life story so far as a product of the manga industry).
La Commune, though, is hard work, and only appeals if you are a slightly over politicised history geek, which is basically me.
I've gone on about it before, but the synopsis is this: Director Peter Watkins gathered together contemporary Parisians from the banlieus in a very basic set in a warehouse; they collaboratively retell the story of the Paris Commune of 1871 via an Indymedia style 'Commune TV' and a more traditional 'Versailles TV' - the retelling constantly shifts between the representative frameworks of contemporary reenactment, the two TV media 'voices', and the workshopping discussions of the reenactors.
(The Paris Commune was a short lived takeover of Paris immediately following the economic devastation of the city by the Franco-Prussian wars; Paris revolted and seized control in a stand-off with the governmental forces from Versailles. The Commune attempted a grassroots communitarian government until its collapse a couple of months later on 28th May. As a failed precedent its impact on political thought eg Marx etc was huge.)
Basically, the film completely rocks. Aside from being an exemplary piece of community collaboration, it also is just so compelling to watch. By the end I was in pieces.
Today I have to write a long-overdue exhibition review for the same tutor; a comparison of the New Orleans and Brussells Biennials for Ann (which are both car-crash biennials); search for people to actually pay me to write, as the last frieze review did not go well; go on this forum I'm supposed to contributing to but am not; plus, most importantly of all, I'm going to make a BREAD AND BUTTER PUDDING IN OUR NEW OVEN OH YES OH YES OH YES. Fuck Dutch food. Seriously.
And soon my copy of La Commune - Paris 1871, which has to be the best film I have ever seen, and is quite hard to get hold of, so I splurged £25 that I don't really have when a single copy came up on Amazon. It's six hours long, so that's value for money. We're going to beam it in a marathon session at de Appel soon. One of our tutors has asked us to write a 'one work' style essay ('one work' is the name of a series of books he is editing about singular, extremely influential art works) in which we each choose something that we feel is totally important, and I think I will write about La Commune. I was going to do Philippe Parreno & Pierre Huyghe's Ann Lee project, which I also think is incredible, but it turns out that another student has already done this and anyway, there is something too nice, or agreeably good quality, about this project. I mean, it's the project that nobody can disagree on: it's good.
(What happened is that Huyghe and Parreno bought the rights to Ann Lee, a Japanese manga character who had been designed to be 'bought' for the manga industry somewhere as a fairly minor character. They took her out of this context and gave her life in contexts of other forms of cultural production, namely under the mantle of contemporary art. The best known piece is an animation where she tells her life story so far as a product of the manga industry).
La Commune, though, is hard work, and only appeals if you are a slightly over politicised history geek, which is basically me.
I've gone on about it before, but the synopsis is this: Director Peter Watkins gathered together contemporary Parisians from the banlieus in a very basic set in a warehouse; they collaboratively retell the story of the Paris Commune of 1871 via an Indymedia style 'Commune TV' and a more traditional 'Versailles TV' - the retelling constantly shifts between the representative frameworks of contemporary reenactment, the two TV media 'voices', and the workshopping discussions of the reenactors.
(The Paris Commune was a short lived takeover of Paris immediately following the economic devastation of the city by the Franco-Prussian wars; Paris revolted and seized control in a stand-off with the governmental forces from Versailles. The Commune attempted a grassroots communitarian government until its collapse a couple of months later on 28th May. As a failed precedent its impact on political thought eg Marx etc was huge.)
Basically, the film completely rocks. Aside from being an exemplary piece of community collaboration, it also is just so compelling to watch. By the end I was in pieces.
Today I have to write a long-overdue exhibition review for the same tutor; a comparison of the New Orleans and Brussells Biennials for Ann (which are both car-crash biennials); search for people to actually pay me to write, as the last frieze review did not go well; go on this forum I'm supposed to contributing to but am not; plus, most importantly of all, I'm going to make a BREAD AND BUTTER PUDDING IN OUR NEW OVEN OH YES OH YES OH YES. Fuck Dutch food. Seriously.