cube review

Three ways to expand Cinema.

– Utilize film stock and analogue projectors and sound to make formidable and piercing performances
– Create riveting, structuralist and in the moment live cine-sculptures and interactions
– Re-imagine the actual building, so luring the viewer out of their here-and-now into a intimate new space

standing outside the cube holding pen car park, my heart sank as on a second strained listen I heard a clear high pitched human wail emanating from the top floor of the cube.

 a wide range of aged visitors also shifted around waiting for the doors to open. No-one else seemed alarmed which alarmed me more. This was what I was dreading. Something challenging and 'arty'.

getting annoyed when I visit the cube feels like getting testy with a well meaning child. It's all so earnestly ropey, sticky floors, moth eaten blankets to throw over your knees if the temperature in the cinema hall hasn't risen above 10 degrees in the summer. The fact the volunteers seem to make up with enthusiasm and bad fringes for their lack of common sense and queue hearding when it comes to admitting paid customers. They always lose count. 

But where else can you still buy sesame snaps and a cuppa before triggering your sciatica watching a film in a dark room with red velvet curtains? It's a bristolian twin peaks experience without the soundtrack or kinkiness. I always find myself checking my shoes to see if I can pull off an ounce of alternative geek-chic when i'm there. I'm going to be caught out for not being intensely out there enough, I don't really know my godards from my tatis but to be honest, everyone that turns up seems so lovely that it's wasted awkwardness and we all love film, nostalgia and a community run cinema that gives free tickets to asylum seekers.

which brings me back to the beginning. of the wailing. 

if you've managed to escape eritreat or some kind of death camp nightmare, I'm not sure that getting into a building that you can wailing coming out of would be that comforting to be honest. But it's art.

Louisa Faircloughs installation upstairs was heard before it was seen. I spoke to a bloke about it who told me he remembered when the space upstairs was the community art room. It looked like the doors had only been opened for the installation recently.

Dark, except for a high dirty window on the front wall, the tall room was crammed with stacks of boxes and chairs. It didn't feel precarious but the lighting flicks of light and sudden piercing noises coming from the various projectors was. I think i counted 8? loops of film, proper old film were strung, moving, looped across the room from high to low and back again. Black film porjected, dust dancing in the light which came on abruptly in synch with different audible wails/drones of varying pitches every half a minute or so.

The sound wasn't pleasant, I ended up sat down, jerking my head around the room, like you do when you're trying to settle your eyes on an errant irritaing fly so you can swot it. Where was that bloody noise coming from? Which projector. After a while, the gloom and jarring repeated loops and noises faded a bit, chinese water torture made bearable. It wasn't enjoyable, uplifting or thought provoking but you couldn't not engage with it unless you stuck your fingers in your ears and went in with your eyes shut. Creeping up the creaky stairs to get to the loft, it did give the experience of stumbling into some lunatic lair. An annexe from the shining. disembodied voices with no faces,

spooky.

Unfortunately the Bruce McClure film, which was to be shown twice during the evening wasn't being shown until an hour after letting people into the building. There's only so many sesame snaps and ginger beers a woman can drink before I got even more tetchy, wired andhad to leave silently because of the screaming upstairs.

artist research: Agnes Martin

Oh i do like a bit of zen.
First came across the work of Agnes Martin, in an amazingly diverse book on drawing by Tania Kovatz.
it's a relief to relate to drawings that aren't just figurative and have an element of meditative art to them.

Read up more about the artist after discussion with tutor Vera Boelmer Kahn. There's a wonderful large section of handwritten notes by the artist in the book in the library about her. I think it's her prep notes for a speech she gave to some graduating art students. On yellow paper with grey lines, the blue biro scrawls across the pages notebook size inserted in the middle of the book in a clump.
There's some great quotations and somewhat reassuringly and predictably there's mention of koans and meditation

Still looking outward to other artists to find a connection and resonance with their own personal histories and stories as if I need that to justify what I like. Am not comparing myself in any other way....

Canadian born, in the vast prarieland of Saskatchewan in 1912, Martin studied in Oregon, California and New Mexico. Despite a stint in New York she spent the majority of her life in rural big sky america, finally settling near Taos in New Mexico. Her ashes are buried under an apricot tree in the grounds of where her work is now exhibited.
Described as an abstract painter her contemporaries and friends included Sol LeWitt, Robert Ryman, and Donald Judd. Her style was more influenced by the spiritual than the intellectual so she preferred to be described as an abstract expressionist. She was interested in eastern buddhist philosophies as guidance for living rather than a discipline.

   Martin praised Mark Rothko for having "reached zero so that nothing could stand in the way of truth". Following his example Martin also pared down to the most reductive elements to encourage a perception of perfection and to emphasize transcendent reality. Her signature style was defined by an emphasis upon line, grids, and fields of extremely subtle color.

 Her works contains flaws and signs of the artist's hand. 
Known for her grid patterned works before moving to new mexico after 1967 her works until then had been brown/black.

“When I first made a grid,” Martin said, “I happened to be thinking of the innocence of trees and then this grid came into my mind and I thought it represented innocence . . . and so I painted it and then I was satisfied. I thought, this is my vision.” Martin made fine vertical lines and lightly shaded horizontal bands in oil and pencil, softening the geometric structure, which seems to expand beyond the confines of the canvas. For Martin the grid evoked not a human measure but an ethereal one—the boundless order or transcendent reality associated with Eastern philosophies.


Keep it simple stupid.


References:

1. Glimcher,A., 2012. Agnes AMrtin: Painting, Writings, Remembrances by Arne Glimcher, United Kingdom: Phaidon Press Ltd.

2. Kovatz,T., 2007 The Drawing Book: A Survey of the Primary Means of Expression, United Kingdom: Black Dog Publishing.

3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnes_Martin