Dara Greenwald will present works by Lesbians Organized for Video Experience (L.O.V.E.), Chicago’s Women’s Graphics Collective, and United Victorian Workers. Members of Voina, a Russian collective known for their radical performance art, will be screening and discussing the process of creating some of their most controversial works. Curated by NYC based collectives Red Channels, and Paper Tiger Television. Members of these local collectives will also be on hand to discuss their collective process.

PART 1: Documenting the Collective/Collective Documentation

In this multimedia talk, Dara Greenwald will discuss and show clips from several creative collective actions. These documents and actions came out of collective practices of creation both behind and in front of the camera. Dara will present projects she has been involved in creating and documenting, as well as historic projects that she has been researching. These historic examples have been under-explored in the histories of activist and documentary media and will contribute important examples to the contemporary explorations of the Congress of Collectives. Dara will be joined for Q & A by collaborators from collective actions, including Blithe Riley, Natalie Chap, and Josh MacPhee.

PART 2: Collective videos: work and presentation by Red Channels, Paper Tiger Television, and Voina

—The Virtual Choir, 2009 – Eric Whitacre, 5:50 minutes(excerpt)

—Angry Sandwich people or in a Praise of Dialectic, 2006 -Chto Delat, 8 minutes

—Detroit: Post Industrial Global Capitalism, 2011 – Paper Tiger TV, 11 minutes

—Garbage, 1968 – Newsreel, 10 minutes

—From Wall Street to Wall Street to Wall Street, 2011 – Red Channels with Glass Bead Collective, 4:38 minutes

—Humiliation of cop in his house, 2010 – Voina, 12:26 minutes

—F*ck for the heir – Medved`s little Bear!, 2008 – Voina, 0:52 seconds

—Banning of clubs, 2008 – Voina, 9:58 minutes

Congress of Collectives is an interlocking series of events intended to unite art collectives, collectivized spaces, and audiences, so that we may discuss, connect, and collaborate with each other. The Congress is a venue for addressing key concepts, frameworks, and problems of working collectively; for sharing strategies; and for creating new platforms for future projects. Perhaps most importantly, The Congress will promote enduring relationships between participants, and will culminate in an international exchange program between collectives. This project is spearheaded by Flux Factory, but has been shaped during planning dinner discussions, in which over fifteen other local and international collectives have participated. The Congress as developed collaboratively by artists, city planners, architects, arts administrators, film makers, and activists representing collectives from the US, Europe, and the Middle East. Congress of  Collectives events will take the forms of artistic production, workshops, panel discussions, film screenings, interventions, performances, and parties—all of which are open to the public.

Dara Greenwald is a media artist and researcher. She has participated in collaborative and collective cultural production for over a decade including the Pink Bloque, Ladyfest Midwest Chicago, Version Fest, Pilot TV, United Victorian Workers, Spectres of Liberty and other groupings that resist being named. She recently co-curated (with Josh MacPhee) a large-scale research project about the history of social movements entitled Signs of Change: Social Movement Cultures 1960s to Now as part of Exit Art’s Curatorial Incubator. From 1998-2005, she worked at the Video Data Bank/VDB, where she managed the distribution of one of the largest collections of experimental video in the United States. A major project she began at the VDB was the preservation of the collected tapes of the Videofreex, one of the early 1970’s video collectives; Greenwald has presented on and published articles about this early video history (including at Pittsburgh Filmmakers and Light Industry). Her own experimental videos have screened widely on the festival and media arts circuit (including at Liverpool Biennial, Cinematexas, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Eyebeam, New York Underground Film Festival, etc). Her writings about engaged media have been published in The Brooklyn Rail, Punk Planet, The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, Bad Subjects, and can be read on the Justseeds Artist Cooperative Blog.

Red Channels is a radical collective based in New York City. The collective is open for those interested in collaboration and new proposals. In New York we do not operate a physical space. We gather when we can, and when we wish, to organize events and and produce things. Just as there is no space, there is no fixed mission statement, membership, hierarchy, financial or legal status. We informally institutionalize around affinities and desires. Red Channels has revolved around cinema and discussion. Now we also curate, perform, publish, read, write, and take direct action. We look at previous attempts of dissent and opposition to stimulate our imaginations for collective transformation. We work to defy the categories of art and politics, activism and media, in search of a new communist culture. The goal is not to franchise, or to charter new branches, but to engage with our collective struggles in different contexts.

Paper Tiger Television is a video collective. We look at the communications industry via the media in all its forms.The power of mass culture rests on the trust of the public. This legitimacy is a paper tiger. Investigation into the corporate structures of the media and critical analysis of their content is one way to demystify the information industry. Developing a critical consciousness about the information industry is a necessary first step towards democratic control of information resources. Paper Tiger (PTTV) combines media art and activism to create an alternative spin on traditional media formats. An open, non-hierarchical, consensus-based media collective, Paper Tiger has been creating ultra low budget, funky, radical videos since 1981. A pioneer in the early days of public access TV, paper tiger was a direct reaction to traditional, corporate, mainstream media. PTTV continues to explore new ways to use media to engage in critical dialog around media democracy through form, content and process.

Voina is a Russian art collective that engages in street action art. It is a movement in contemporary art that is relatively new to Russia despite being widespread in the West and regarded by critics as one of the most valuable contemporary art movements.The group was created in 2007 with the aim of developing monumental patriotic street art in Russia. The group’s idol was, and forever will be, the great Russian artist Dmitri Prigov. Voina currently counts over 200 members who perform actions in its name, sometimes without informing the rest of the group.

The videos collected in Chen Tamir’s Life Stories program are as much about biographers as the lives they depict. Though each of these four works are more-or-less straight interviews, none of the artists here are content to let us believe that their documentation provides us with a direct link to their subjects. Each of them devise strategies to disrupt or amplify the flow of conversation in order to make obvious their machinations and ours. “The supposedly simple, neutral act of documenting people speaking about themselves” Tamir writes in the essay that complements the exhibition “becomes, in these works, a loaded exercise in power dynamics”. This is territory whose bounty has been well-reaped: anyone who has set foot in an art gallery or a college classroom in the last 30 years knows well the power differential that separates representer from represented. It sometimes seems that it is impossible for anyone schooled in the theoretical tradition that extends from Foucault onwards to tell a story unselfconsciously. But without any way to actually cede control, the artist’s disavowal of her authority is a gesture without consequence, like prefacing some bit of hurtful criticism with “no offense”. In Life Stories, the pieces that really work are those that dramatize these power relations in real time, drawing the viewer into the dynamic rather than just pointing dutifully towards it.

Mayaan Amir and Ruti Sela’s Beyond Guilt trilogy is the highlight in this measure. The Israeli duo shot three sets of interviews in erotically charged locations with different people all, in one way or another, prowling for sex. In part 1, they go to a nightclub bathroom to quiz the revelers therein about their sexual habits. Set to Fischerspooner’s pulsating “Emerge”, and punctuated with quick cuts to black, this is the most playful of the three videos. It is also the most confrontational: as the interviews progress, it starts look less like a series of conversations than a test of mettle. Sela and Amir goad their subjects into stripping for them, they watch a girl who looks no older than sixteen seduce two men, and grill an IDF sergeant on her feelings about Arabs. Through they wield the camera, neither is content to remain aloof. They laugh and joke with their interviewees, and disrobe as well, dancing around in their underwear with a group of men. That they are exploring the power they hold over their subjects becomes most apparent when Amir tries to barter with a young man for his necklace. He tells her it is priceless, and she offers him a blowjob in exchange for it. With each of his refusals, she ups the ante, until she has offered to take him and all of his friends on at once if he is willing to part with it. Whether or not she’d actually go through with it, the scene manifests a suspense and spontaneity that stands in opposition to the dreary schematization potential in such an exercise. In this single interaction, Amir and Sela demonstrate the filmmaker’s ultimate control, and flirt with the possibility of its undoing. For part 2, the pair posted an ad on a dating website inviting men to a hotel room for s&m play and dialogue. The men who show up know what they are in for in, and they evince a comfort with their sexuality not seen in the more furtive atmosphere of the club. They show off their toys, submit to handcuffs and blindfolds, and jump on the bed as they candidly describe their turn-ons. As in the first segment, the conversation quickly turns from sex to the army. One of the doms directly links his experience as a commander in the IDF to his preferred sexual role, another man compares his monstrous erect penis to the weapon he carried as a soldier. It seems impossible to discuss sex in Israel without also mentioning military service. Amir and Sela want to illustrate how mandatory conscription has, in this country, suffused every day life with the aura of force and domination. In this environment, the questions of control implicit to eros are laid bare. And given what we witnessed in the first video, it is difficult not to see the artist’s mastery of her subjects as the third point in a triangle. Beyond Guilt #3 finds Amir and Sela in another hotel room, this time with a 50-something career prostitute. They hand her the camera and conduct the interview from the other side of the lens. Interspersed with questions about her career, the pair ask her what she sees, how she would describe them. This role reversal is the most obvious of Amir and Sela’s maneuvers, but they don’t pretend to have subverted their dominion. Even as objects of the camera’s gaze, they know they have the ultimate say. From the front of the camera, they direct the prostitute’s photography and demand her commentary. They enact the impossibility of their submission. At the end of the video, the prostitute joins them on the bed. Together, in costumes, they pose languidly for their viewers. In all three of the videos, Amir and Sela resist didactic moralizing or abnegation of their responsibility. Each is filled with laughter and dancing, and characterized by a certain openness, the sense that at any point, it could swing in a new direction. Beyond Guilt allows for a genuine push-pull between documenter and documented without eliding the documenter’s ultimate power.

Tova Mozard’s portraits Leona Babette, Westwood Los Angeles and Wall of Love are more conventionally “life stories” than anything else in Tamir’s program. Leona Babette is an aging cabaret singer, shown here in her almost entirely red living room. Mozard’s camera remains static, at a middle-distance, pointed on Babette, as she stumbles through a description of her work, picking up and abandoning songs halfway as quickly as she started. Mozard doesn’t ask any questions, even as Babette seems to beg for them. She assumes the role of her audience: an unspeaking spectator, watching the speaker unravel. When Babette faces the mysterious hand behind the camera at the end of the video and says “you don’t say much, do you?”, it is supposed to seem as though she is speaking to us. Wall of Love — which shows a Swedish objectum-sexual woman, estranged from her husband, The Berlin Wall, in her home, as she narrates in voiceover the story of her strange marriage — ends on a similar note: the subject points a still camera towards the videographer and snaps a photo. Tamir believes that in these actions we the audience are implicated for our voyeurism. Perhaps we are, but not meaningfully. Both pieces devote the bulk of their run times to satisfying our curiosity about these eccentric women — and while Wall of Love goes to great lengths to contextualize its subject in a banal domestic setting, the long shot that isolates Leona Babette in her garish furnishings only renders her more exotic. With only a brief nod towards the problems inherent to our fascination with freaks, both videos are structured to reward that fascination rather than undermine it. Mozard’s implication of our culpability may briefly point our thoughts inward, but our experience of the videos is so heavily weighted towards the pleasures she cautions against that whatever challenge they pose is perfunctory and easy to ignore.

“Easy to ignore” is not among the ways you’re likely to describe Human Opera XXX, which closes Tamir’s program. Meiro Koizumi’s video is a cruel and clever burlesque of the gauntlet run by anyone naive enough to consent to an on-camera interview. A title informs us Koizumi placed an ad offering money to anyone willing to recount a tragic episode of their life on video. As the camera zooms back from an indistinct paper background, it reveals a dark room cluttered with strange objects. Koizumi, his face covered in silver makeup, scurries around fiddling with things. Eventually an earnest Dutch man arrives. Koizumi seats him, and the video cuts to another angle, closer on the man’s face. He introduces himself as Rob Hoekstra. Just as he begins his sorry tale, Koizumi interrupts him. He tells him the image isn’t right and hands him a prop. Hoekstra starts again, but just as quickly, Koizumi stops him. He directs him to wave a wand back and forth as speaks. Somewhat reluctantly, Hoekstra agrees and again begins narrating a story about how his alcoholism cost him his wife and child. Koizumi continues to cut him off, adding additional visual flourishes. Hoekstra, whose face betrays a muted, deeply-felt sadness, only halfheartedly protests when Koizumi informs him that he needs to paint his face. Eventually Hoekstra is completely draped in elaborate articles (tin foil protruding from his face, toilet paper hanging from his arm), his face and chest tagged with permanent marker, and mouth stuffed with a roll of bread. He tries to bleat his story through the gag, but Koizumi drowns him out by wailing through a tube that points directly at him. The piece is structured like a joke, but Hoekstra’s anguish seems too real to be funny. This is a reductio ad absurdum of the interview process, and the command a filmmaker exerts not just over the finished product, but during production as well. Koizumi’s target is the artist himself, but his project is also more effective than Mozard’s two videos in forcing the audience to examine their motivations for watching. His spectacle is so quietly brutal that it’s tough not to question why we would elect to participate in a game so rigged from the outset.

To describe a person or event is to seize control over it, to transform the multiplicity of meanings innate to a real life event and filter it through a single, exacting consciousness. A director of non-fiction films or videos must take this responsibility very seriously, but they cannot be hamstrung by it. No matter how conscientious, the artist will forever dominate her subject. The videos in Chen Tamir’s Life Stories demonstrate that a kind of pragmatic irony goes much further than fearful ass-covering for any author looking to interrogate their own unceasing authority.

Hello Everyone:

For the past few months, I’ve been participating in a kind of art experiment: a book club in which artists of all different genres first discuss, and then respond to the book by creating a project. The book, ‘An African in Greenland,’ is about a man who travels from Togo to Greenland- and the adventures he encounters along this unique journey.

Our gallery exhibit opens next Thursday, September 17th, from 6-8pm at the EFA Space in Manhattan, featuring all kinds of art: sculptures, paintings, installations, photographs and videos- each piece inspired by the book. My installation, ‘Retold Journeys,’ is a video and sound installation that interleaves text from ‘An African in Greenland’ with footage from one of the earliest documentary films ever made, Nanook of the North by Robert Flaherty. The sound piece is an imagined arctic landscape found simultaneously above and below the surface of ice: linking the film images to an internal atmosphere of reflection that comes with traveling and encountering new cultures and places.

More information is below or at:
http://www.fluxfactory.org/an-african-in-greenland/

Take care and stay tuned,
AC