Ballroom alumnus Bruce Davenport, Jr. checks in. Davenport was here in Marfa in the spring of 2011 as part of the Dan Cameron-curated exhibition The World According to New Orleans.

A special screening of Meredith Danluck‘s North of South, West of East is happening this weekend as part of Rooftop Films’ 2013 Summer Series. As Danluck explains:

Come out Friday to see my four screen feature, North of South, West of East that we produced with Ballroom Marfa, Ex Vivo and Leslie Fritz. It screened this year at Sundance and features Ben Foster, Stella Schnabel, Sue Galloway, James Penfold and local Marfa punks, Solid Waste as well as an original score by John “Johnny Pockets” Carpenter.

It’s literally four surrounding screens with four narrative films playing in perfect symphony. Rooftop has set this up outside, with 200 swivel seats so it’ll be super fun and… it’s free.

Get all the details at rooftopfilms.com.

Some highlights from Friday night’s opening of Artists’ Film International. Click here for the full gallery of 32 images. All photos by Mary Lou Saxon.

William Tyler
with $3.33
8pm | August 6, 2013
Highland Annex, Marfa, Texas
$5 at the door

Listen to Marfa Public Radio’s Talk at Ten radio interview with William Tyler on Tuesday, August 6, at 10 am on KRTS 93.5 FM or via their online stream.

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In the early ‘60s a number of Western musicians began turning on to the mesmerizing sound of Indian ragas. The Beatles and Led Zeppelin are the most widely-known of these dilettantes, while composers like Terry Riley, La Monte Young, Simone Forti and Catherine Christer Hennix went all in, bringing transcendent drone concepts to the West as disciples of the luminous Hindustani singer and teacher Pandit Pran Nath. Likewise, sitarist Ravi Shankar found a new constituency among Western hippies, while Brij Bhushan Kabra started playing traditional ragas on guitar for Indian classical audiences.

We find Henry Flynt — self-described “cognitive nihilist,” visual artist and polymathic agent of cultural disruption — in between these two pop and avant-garde camps of early adapters. Flynt had the instinct to blend Hindu and hillbilly aesthetics, flawlessly merging the holy music of India with Western religious music, Southern blues traditions and porchfront finger-picking from Appalachian hollers. The result was the genesis of a new transnational folk music as the hypnotic structures of Indian devotional jams began a 40-year transmutation through guitars, banjos, fiddles, ouds, effects pedals and home-wired electronics by Sandy Bull, Robbie Basho, Peter Walker, John Fahey, Bert Jansch, Daniel Higgs, Jack Rose, Ben Chasny and their cohort.

Nashville-based guitarist William Tyler is a practitioner of such mystical music, and proof that these sounds are still a living, evolving tradition. Tyler’s reputation is well-known outside of his own music: his playing can be heard on records from Will Oldham, Lambchop, The Silver Jews and Charlie Louvin. But it’s on the albums under his own name where he stakes his claim as a member of the illustrious traditions outlined above.

His 2013 album, Impossible Truth, exists as part of this lineage, but avoids the trap of static revival by adding dimensions to the sound that are all his own. In particular he attributes the album’s origin to readings about Southern California, its relationship to apocalypse and ecological disaster as illustrated in Mike Davis’ Ecology of Fear, and the self-involved social dynamics of the Laurel Canyon scene explored in Barney Hoskyns’ Hotel California. He desribes the resulting LP as his “’70s singer-songwriter record; it just doesn’t have any words.”

Marfa-based musician Celia Hollander will be opening for Tyler in her $3:33 guise. Hollander makes electronic compositions that range from meditative pieces for keyboard and treated voice to collaged battle raps from underground YouTube MCs. Her music shares a similar openness to aesthetic cross-breeding, a sound born as much from the ominous heavy-lidded hip-hop of Three Six Mafia as the pastoral digital abstractions of Asa Chang & Junray.

We talked with Tyler earlier this month about his impending visit to Marfa, the visual art that inspires his music and the “Randy Travis Rule” for analyzing the unfolding sense of nostalgia in relation to popular music.

Why did you choose to come to Marfa?

I have been fascinated with Marfa for a while. I used to have a record label that focused on reissues called Sebastian Speaks and one of the artists I worked with was Collie Ryan. She is an incredible painter and singer who self-released some albums in the ‘70s, very astral sounding folk in the Baez/Buffy Sainte-Marie orbit. Collie lives near Terlingua and that got me interested in the region and its history. And then finding out more about the nature of the arts community that resides there and its very remoteness, it all just seemed like an amazing anomaly that I can’t wait to visit for the first time.

Some background reading on Alix Pearlstein for those of you still cramming for Ballroom’s Friday opening of our installment in the Artists’ Film International series. Click here for all the details.

From the December 2012 issue of Artforum:

From “The Nothing Act”, a profile of Alex Pearlstein’s recent work in the April 2013 issue of Art in America:

The circling camera of The Drawing Lesson was a device Pearlstein also used for her 2008 show at the Kitchen. Having created the four-channel video After the Fall in the venue’s black box theater downstairs, she then showed the piece in the white box gallery upstairs, alluding to the differing modes of performance in theater and art. Filmed using a set of four cameras, the video first shows a couple on the verge of having sex, and then the interplay between two groupings of actors, one in pink-and-red costumes and the other in gold-and-black. A couple of the actors feign injury from altercations. The way the actors are divided by costume and actions harkens back to Pearlstein’s earlier, more allegorical work. But the constant observation of the actors by the camera, as well as the greater immediacy of their connection with the viewer, makes the work feel more elemental. Building on such effects, Pearlstein went on to adapt the premise of the musical A Chorus Line (the 1975 play and 1985 film) for her video Talent (2009). A Chorus Line, which ran for over 6,000 performances, setting a Broadway record, is about actors auditioning for parts in a new musical. They laugh, cry, sing, dance and tell heartbreaking stories about themselves and their careers. Pearlstein stripped the musical of its songs and dialogue, leaving only the wondrous, spontaneous ephemera of actors at an audition: waiting, hopeful, bored or yearning for attention. At one point they share a loaf of bread. They turn their acting personas on and off and mingle occasionally, though they mostly stay in line as the camera moves in a parallel track back and forth across them.

Continue reading …

And finally, an excerpt from a Q&A between Pearlstein and John Pilson in the Winter 2013 issue of BOMB:

JP You’re an artist who has not become all consumed by video, but who sees the opportunity of it containing everything. I remember asking you for advice about how to edition things. I was feeling a little insecure about DVDs, thinking that I had to make nice boxes for them or something. You set me straight, “You have absolutely nothing to make up for. Everything you have to say has been put into that video. Nothing is required to make it more of an object.”

AP I’m glad I said that.

JP Those anxieties never exactly go away, but what you said really helped. It also seems completely in line with your work because it never points outside of itself. You rarely seem to be imitating anything: your videos don’t look like movies or TV shows, and they’re not cinematic, necessarily. Everything in them is active: the camera, ideas about performance, acting, figures, and space. Everything is competing for our attention. Anybody using the moving image has to contend with genre. With TV, you could measure in milliseconds how long it takes to know what you’re looking at: the news, porn, a documentary, or a reality show. Video artists have to contend with that, but they also have a great opportunity to question the assumed passivity of the viewer.

AP I consciously evade genre. Although, there are moments that may suggest a genre, say sci-fi in Light (2012) or suspense in Distance (2006)—but the suggestion is misleading, impure, and it doesn’t hold.

JP One does get the sense in your work that you’re scrutinizing something, or many things at once. I’m curious about what those things are?

AP The center point of what I’m thinking about right now is the affective space and the fundamental relationship between the camera, the viewer, and the subject—and what activates it. Camera movement, positing the camera as a viewer, and the gaze from the subject to camera can activate this. Light and sound can activate that space too. In both works up now at On Stellar Rays—The Drawing Lesson (2012) and Moves in the Field (2012)—a powerful light and a shotgun mic are mounted on the camera. As the camera nears, the subjects become very brightly lit, almost blown out, spotlighted, and you can hear their breath. These elements act to implicate the viewer.

Keep reading in BOMB.

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The opening reception for Artists Film International — Alix Pearlstein takes place Friday, 19 July 2013 from 6–8pm. There will be an exhibition walk-through with Alix Pearlstein on Saturday, 20 July 2013 at 10am. All events are free and open to the public at Ballroom Marfa.

Marfa Dialogues/NY to Debut in New York City this Fall

Interdisciplinary Project Brings Together Over 20 Leading Cultural, Academic and Advocacy Organizations Citywide To Address Climate Change in Art, Activism and Science.

June 27, 2013: The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Ballroom Marfa and the Public Concern Foundation will bring the Marfa Dialogues to New York in October-November 2013 as part of a continuing examination of climate change science, environmental activism and artistic practice.

Marfa Dialogues/NY will feature two months of programming including community forums, art exhibitions, musical performance and environmental panels, all accessible to the public and available via broadcast and digital media. Ballroom Marfa will present an art exhibition of environmentally-engaged works at the Rauschenberg Foundation Project Space (455 W. 19th Street in Chelsea), and will orchestrate additional events with Marfa Dialogues program partners at that location.

A calendar of events will be available in August at www.marfadialogues.org, along with ongoing context and discussion for participants. For more about previous Marfa Dialogues, see www.ballroommarfa.org/dialogues.

Through program grants provided by the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Marfa Dialogues/NY establishes 18 programs radiating across New York. Programming partners include:

The Carbon Tax Center; The Center for Social Inclusion; Columbia University’s Earth Institute; Columbia University’s International Research Institute for Climate & Society; Cooper Union’s Institute for Sustainable Development; Gallery Aferro; High Line Art; IMC Lab & Gallery; Joe’s Pub at Public Theater; Mary Miss/City as a Living Laboratory; Materials for the Art; New School’s Center for New York City Affairs; NRDC; Sculpture Center; Socrates Sculpture Park; Storefront for Art & Architecture; Superhero Clubhouse and Triple Canopy.

Anthony Paletta has a lovely essay in The Awl about the history of drive-in movie theaters that starts out with straightforward nostalgia and heartwarming stories about drive-ins using Kickstarter campaigns to stay afloat. And then because it’s The Awl it takes a turn down a more interesting path, looking at the role of drive-ins as “charnel houses for heavy petting,” their openness to imaginative programming, ties to church experiences and as sites of on-screen catharsis.

Robert Schuller, preacher behind Richard Neutra’s Crystal Cathedral and assorted other preacherly activities, held earlier services at a drive-in, advertising “The Orange Church meets in the Orange Drive-In Theater where even the handicapped, hard of hearing, aged and infirm can see and hear the entire service without leaving their family car.”

The cultural imaging of drive-ins on screen has therefore been a bit complicated. James Cagney hides out from the police in the Sun-Val drive in (watching a Gary Cooper movie on the development of aircraft carriers). John Travolta sets up playground equipment in Grease. The central romantic conflict in Coppola’s The Outsiders starts at the drive-in. In Back to the Future III, Marty McFly sets off at the Pohatchee Drive-in (where a marquee hilariously proclaims a program of “Francis in the Navy, Ma and Pa Kettle at Waikiki, and Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy.” Dead-End-Drive In, a superb Ozploitation film, imagines a dystopian future where distaff youth are confined in a drive-in and subjected to a constant barrage of trash cinema. Imagine putting up an electric fence around Burning Man and you’re partway to a screenshot. These youths, too, understood a thing or two about the drive in.

In the course of charting this history — a sort of companion timeline to the one offered by Lonn Taylor in his recent assessment of Ballroom’s own Drive-In in the Big Bend Sentinel — Paletta also connects the multifaceted drive-in experience of times past with the vision that informs our project out at Vizcaino Park.

Drive-ins were engaged in a constant battle of invention to attract customers before dusk and most importantly, to keep them eating. According to Segrave, nearly 90% of drive-ins had a playground by 1956. Dances would be held prior to screenings. Other carnivalesque enticements flourished; fireworks, petting zoos, and pony rides with the ultimate aim to extract as much concession revenue as possible from the narrow hours of marketable darkness.

Most programming is family-friendly, but frequently more varied than you’d think. Full Moon Drive-In in San Diego is also a spot to catch Driving Miss Daisy, Rebel Without a Cause, and American Psycho. The Admiral Twin in Tulsa reports banner attendance at its Outsiders and Rumble Fish screenings. Marfa, Texas, is getting in on the act with a suitably out-there Ballroom Marfa sort of drive-in.

Keep reading Paletta’s suitably imaginative essay in The Awl. Find out more about the Ballroom Drive-In by visiting the project space adjacent to the gallery here in Marfa, or visit the Drive-In website. Also stay tuned to David Beebe’s Twitter for updates on his own DIY drive-in, next door to the Boyz2Men taco trailer at Airstreamland.

A few images from Ballroom’s recent trip to the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation in New York, where the next installment of Marfa Dialogues is taking shape. #MDNY

Marfa Public Radio summer campers came in earlier this morning to do some investigative reporting. For your consideration, some photos of the kids in action, including Exhibition & Programs Coordinator Rosa McElheny facing intense questions such as “Do you like cheese?”

Thanks to intern Berry Stein for the snapshots!

Icon Eye‘s Christopher Turner on Judd, Prada Marfa, Marfa. From “Desert Utopia“:

Illuminated at night, with a range of original shoes and handbags displayed in its windows, this Prada store never opens. Pressing your face to the glass reveals the plush carpet inside to be covered in dead flies. A permanent sculpture installed in 2005 by Scandinavian artists Elmgreen and Dragset, Prada Marfa, about 40 miles north-west of the town it is named after, is a sort of gatepost that marks the edge of a remote yet popular art park that has bloomed over the past two decades in the middle of the Chihuahuan Desert.

The artists describe Prada Marfa as a “pop architectural land art project” and its ironic, minimalist product displays make reference to the work of Marfa’s most famous artist-inhabitant. Donald Judd, a moody Midwesterner with Scottish roots – betrayed in his predilection for kilts, whisky and bagpipe music – arrived in Marfa from New York in the mid-70s. He kept his five-storey cast-iron building in SoHo but, disillusioned with the “glib and harsh” Manhattan art scene and his position in it as a doyen of minimalism (a label he always disavowed), he withdrew to rural Texas for increasingly large parts of the year. In Marfa he created his own utopian mix of elemental art, architecture and furniture and in the process was forced to meditate on the differences between these art forms.