The artists commissioned to make new work for Frieze Film were: Jess Flood-Paddock, Linder, Elizabeth Price and Stephen Sutcliffe.
Linder Forgetful Green (2010)
This year, Frieze Film was curated by Sarah McCrory and included not only four commissioned films but also a curated film programme. Frieze Film was shown in a specially constructed cinema outside the entrance to the fair and was free to the public.
The commissioned films by British artists were shown alongside specially selected programmes as well as existing films by this year’s Frieze Projects artists.
The four Frieze Film commissions were previewed in Channel 4’s innovative ‘3 Minute Wonder’ slot during the week of Frieze Art Fair.
Jess Flood-Paddock, Island – A Regime
Drawn from an exhibition and residency taking place in Malta, Jess Flood-Paddock made a three-minute film looking at the benefits of perimeters, routines and regulations of creativity; investigating how things are made.
During this residency, involving researching art collectives, alternative energy, and access to information, home and industrial economies, making, baking, gardening, swimming and film screenings, elements of time were spent looking at an alternative way of living and will edge into the film.
Shot mostly on a mobile phone, with brief sections and passages on a higher resolution camera to create momentary contrast, the work has the grainy look of lo-fi video. It features three main movements exploring scale, travel and disorientation, and distance from the location creating an island narrative that can be compared to the stories of Where the Wild Things Are and King Kong. The video has an original sound track made by two solo musicians, a banjo solo by Sam Steer and a psychedelic rock drone solo by Alexander Tucker.
Linder, Forgetful Green
Linder’s commission was filmed in the aftermath of her recent Chisenhale Gallery performance.
On July 10th, a 13-hour improvisational performance, The Darktown Cakewalk: Celebrated from the House of FAME took place at the Chisenhale Gallery, London. On the next day, the characters from The Darktown Cakewalk – a Star, a Muse, Puella Aeterna, a Witch, a Cakewalk King and Queen - found themselves blinking in the early morning light in the Rose Field of Cants of Colchester, the oldest rose growers in Britain. The three-minute film begins here – the morning after the night before as if in Heironymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights - now manicured, suburban and retail. Abandoned hairdryers, vacuum cleaners and other domestic appliances amongst the roses pun on the use of 20th-century Bosch electrical appliances.
The three-minute duration of the film mirrors that of the seven-inch single. Three minutes of sound was the optimum recorded length for a single due to the constraints of manufactured vinyl from 1900 until the 1960s. Songwriters and musicians composed and recorded songs appropriate to the constraints of this format. A three-minute single, a ‘spiral scratch’, is reflected in the filmed choreography throughout the rose garden, and echoes the mystical spirals of Dante or the mythic site of Glastonbury Tor.
The characters from The Darktown Cakewalk circle through the rose garden led by Linder as Minerva (Minnie Mouse’s original name) and eventually meet the artist Harminder Singh Judge as the goddess Kali by way of Gene Simmons from the rock group, Kiss. The film traces a compressed history of glamour, from its origins in 18th-century Scotland describing enchantment, to its present day aerosolic ghosts.
Elizabeth Price, The Tent
The Tent, Elizabeth Price’s new work, extrapolates an eventful fictional narrative from a black-&-white printed booklet and the body of art that it features in its pages. Presenting artworks with reduced economies, the book, a 1972 Arts Council publication entitled Systems, includes drawings, documentation of works, and photographs of the artists in the ‘British Systems group’, along with extended texts written by each of them.
The video’s imagery is derived from recording both the object of the book and the images it contains. The videography employs experimental, high contrast exposures that will cause white pages to bleach away almost entirely, and black pages to intensify so that they become suggestive of spaces rather than surfaces; so that the diagrams/images on those pages seem to float in voids.
The narration was formulated from the text of the book and delivered as motion graphics. Fragments of text have been excerpted and reorganised, to compose a fractured story that reveals the ideological and imaginative world articulated within the book. The narrative exploits the publication’s recurring themes: apocalyptic anxiety and futurological urgency; the idealized relations between social and aesthetic economies; and ambitions for art’s social agency. The soundtrack is also drawn from the material of the book. Sounds (of flicking pages for example) are amplified and manipulated to form the basis of the soundtrack.
Stephen Sutcliffe, Writer in Residence
Stephen Sutcliffe’s point of departure for his commission was Colin Wilson’s seminal book the The Outsider. In this book Wilson uses Thomas Mann’s 1943 novel Doctor Faustus as an antithesis to his own idea of a ‘positive existentialism’ and claims that Mann’s model for the character of Leverkühn was Friedrich Nietzsche. In Chapter 25 of Mann’s Doctor Faustus the composer Adrian Leverkühn has a meeting with the devil. This hallucination is brought on by a suspected syphilitic infection picked up from a brothel visit, for which Leverkühn has been unsuccessfully treated for earlier in the book. He is then enticed by the devil to sell his soul for musical perfection for a period of years, whilst his body slowly fails.
For Sutcliffe’s new video work Colin Wilson himself meets the amorphous character of the devil, confronting Mann’s theme directly, by collageing Wilson’s criticism from The Outsider with Chapter 25 from Doctor Faustus. Sutcliffe’s work continues his interest in collage, not only in the integration of both of the texts, but also with the implementation of differing filmic techniques to themes of artistic self-doubt with explorations of interior psychology, and in this case, Mann’s favourite topic: of the discord between genius and sanity.
