For our fifth annual free New Year’s film program, we hosted a screening of Philippe Garrel’s 1968 film Le Révélateur at the Crowley Theater, with a live score by Philadelphia harpist Mary Lattimore and synth player Jeff Zeigler. Read our interview with Mary here, and enjoy these images from Marfalite Studios‘ Lesley Brown …
The official publication of the Texas Society of Architects weighs in on the Ballroom Marfa Drive-In:
“We hadn’t experienced weather as an object until we lived in Marfa,” said Michael Meredith, AIA, and Hilary Sample, AIA, founders of MOS. “The West Texas landscape naturally recedes into an infinite and scaleless distance, resisting a static sense of location or enclosure.” The design team thus sought a solution that would at once flow into the endless horizon and interrupt it.
William Tyler at the Highland Annex, August 6, 2013 from Ballroom Marfa on Vimeo.
Video from last week’s Highland Annex show, courtesy of Alex Marks.
$3.33 at the Highland Annex, August 8, 2013 from Ballroom Marfa on Vimeo.
Amie LeGette
Piny Showers
August 9 – September 8, 2013
Opening: Friday, August 9, 6-8pm
Please join us on Friday, August 9th from 6-8pm for an opening of Amie LeGette’s painting exhibition at Michael Strogoff.
Michael Strogoff
124 E El Paso St
http://www.michaelstrogoff.com
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.
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.
Itso Cash & Laxmi Luthra
Notes on the Desert
Sunday, June 30 @ 7:00PM
‘The desert is spread everywhere but can always reach new depths.’
Michael Strogoff invites you for a pair of talks by Laxmi Luthra and Isto Cash.
Luthra will bring three seemingly disparate videos into relation through a close analysis of what speaks through them and what we can hear about contemporary existence by listening: a DLP Cinema-Texas Instruments trailer, a french pantyhose advertisement shown in movie theaters in the early-1970s, and a promotional video highlighting advances in the military-industrial mimicry of four-legged animal mechanics for robotic warfare.
Cash will present a snapshot of recent uses of the theory of abstraction in artistic discourse, including discussion of gallery and museum installations by Allan Sekula and Reena Spaulings, and will explore why this theory, innovative in the mid-19th century, might be having an afterlife in the early 21st.
Abstraction, mediation, and a good time will be had by all.
Micheal Strogoff
124 E. El Paso St
Marfa, TX
http://www.michaelstrogoff.com
When all of the susurrus around this Playboy Marfa, Marfa Girl, Prada Marfa, 60 Minutes, Donald Judd thing dies down and the camera crews and installation teams go home, we’ll dial up this fresh video full of San Carlos horse races, Pinto Canyon cruising, Las Pilas cannonballs and DQ snacking from Shorthorn MVP Duemolly, Lebarton, Ben-Yehuda and all the next gen rap cats, skate bros and synth class alums in the Stomach Club crew and remember why everybody covets a piece of this Far West Texas/North Mexico vibe. Get more Duemolly at Stomach Club.
Hyperallergic is asking a number of questions about the new neon Playboy sign that was installed on highway 90 west of Marfa earlier this week. They’re not alone either, and curious readers looking for more local perspective would be well-served to lurk around the expectedly heated debate on the Marfa Public Radio Facebook page, or read in-depth local coverage from the Big Bend Sentinel.
While the Playboy installation is apparently curated by Neville Wakefield, Playboy’s Creative Director of Special Projects — who was also the curator of Ballroom’s 2011 AutoBody exhibition — it should be said that Ballroom has no direct connection to the installation. Or, as Hyperallergic puts it in their discussion of the inevitable threats of vandalism,
Prada Marfa, the now iconic piece of sculpture by artistic duo Elmgreen and Dragset (which has drawn a fair share of undue comparison to the Playboy project particularly by people outside the art world), was disfigured mere days after its opening and has sustained
numerous acts of vandalism over its eight odd years in existence. When prompted for comment, some speculated on the KRTS Marfa Public Radio Facebook page that the Playboy installation would be “vandalized to the extent of non-use within a month,” while another was more succinct about his thoughts: “target practice.”
This also means that the mildly NSFW spambot Twitter account @sexynudes is now showing up for the first time in our Google Alerts with their coverage of the Playboy project, a somewhat less than auspicious development when it comes to monitoring Marfa’s online presence.
Lucas, 49, had spent the previous six years as a Midwest League pitching coach for the Twins and had been in the Twins organization for 15 years, the same length as former hitting coordinator Bill Springman, whose contract was not renewed
He sat out Friday loss in San Antonio, the first game he missed because of a coach decision since days before broke out in New York three years ago.
He was killed along with four others at a house party early April 15, 2014.
Regardless there was a lot of celebration happening when the final horn went, officially making it the first back to back men’s hockey gold medals for Canada at the Olympics since 1948 (St.
Auburn prides itself on its “family” atmosphere, which means fans who have been around the longest often benefit most.
Well, for a brief but very memorable historic moment, we experienced the real Harper unplugged.
Nick Parker tied the game 1 1 just 1:10 later, but Pat MacIsaac would give the Wildcats a 2 1 lead after one period with a goal of his own with 19 seconds remaining in the opening frame.
Eleanor Friedberger recounts a surprise wedding performance here in Marfa during her Ballroom residency in this recent “Situation Critical” interview with Pitchfork …
“I actually performed Buddy Holly’s “Dearest” at a wedding once. I was in Marfa, Texas, doing a little residency and recording, and there was a wedding going on the same day as my show. The guy who I was recording with was also the AV guy at this wedding, so he had to take a break to go. I was like, “Well, if you’re going, then shouldn’t I go? Maybe they’ll let me sing a song.”
I was going to start singing as soon as they made their walk down the aisle together as husband and wife, but I did not know that they were going to stop and greet each and every one of their guests as they walked back. It took them so long. It’s only a two-minute-long song, so I just sang it over and over and over again– probably around 10 times.”
Take a listen to “I’ll Never Be Happy Again”, the single she recorded with a crew of Marfa players on iTunes, or order a copy of the 7-inch at the Ballroom Marfa store. (via Tim Johnson)
