LS | Attitude Cinema

William E. Jones | Eyelines, 2011

Copyright © William E. Jones

Courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

LS | Attitude Cinema

William E. Jones | Eyelines, 2011

Copyright © William E. Jones

Courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

LS | Attitude Cinema

Geof Oppenheimer  Interview

CB – You work with diverse media, in a way that neither art nor politics is reducible to the other term.

Can you tell me about your language and themes choices?

GO - I think it is about politics. I would say politics as a subject matter rather than as the motivation. As I said in the beginning, I am interested in how people organize themselves and what is the aesthetic residue of those systems. That is really what I am influenced by.

My understanding of art is that it is always an extension of some sort of politic. There is always an aesthetic component for political ideologies and movements. That kind of political agency being involved in an aesthetic is something that mobilizes the work I make.  An aesthetic, in and of itself and a material, in and of itself can be viewed as a politic. Different materials, different forms carry different political and cultural connotations with in them. So video for example speaks well to the pedagogical role of media where the base materiality of sculpture for me speaks to more evocative of psychological social aspects. What is interesting to me, and what may at the same time suck about our world, is that to give something agency in the world we live in today, because it is so overwhelming, with so many splinters of ideological systems out there that the purity of form like the futurists where after is almost impossible. I mention the futurists in that they were people I was looking at allot as I made Anthems.

CB – The video work choice, for Attitude Cinema exhibition, is an investigation into social mapping and pattern making.

Can you tell about Anthems?

GO - Anthems was made with a group of young men from a very well known ROTC drum core from Chicago where I live. ROTC is a military training program for youth in the United States, officer training. The drum core has been used since antiquity as a training regimen for boys to become men, citizens to become solders. It suppresses individuality into an acetic of the group pageantry. I like how it conflates acetic and national conventions. In the video, a confrontational situation, both visually and sonically, is set up between groupings of musicians marching in formation on screen. Shifting formation, and with superimposed images, the marchers are simultaneously playing four different national anthems. The audio tracks of the performance are highly edited and mixed so that the sounds of the individual anthems are lost in a wall of sound. Over the course for the video the sound and imagery build to a crescendo of incomprehension and then fades out to pure abstract blur that is devoid of any kind of representational mark. It is a violent imposition of different social structures upon one another.

CB - In the last one period the video art is a big source of inspiration for the cinema. Can you tell about this phenomenon?

GO - I’m sorry Camilla, I do not understand this question.

CB – Which currents have influenced your video – film? How is your relationship started with video art?

GO - This is a good question. I was trained as a sculptor and still think about video this way. All the work I make is sculpture but one can sculpt with anything, sculpture is a thinking process of space and time not material.

To answer your question more directly, I look at allot of structurlist film, the German filmmaker Peter Roehr, and especially for this video, Kenneth Anger.

CB – David Lynch ha dichiarato in un intervista che l’ unica cosa di cui era certo su Mulholland Drive , prima di cominciare le riprese , era che il film sarebbe iniziato con un‘ immagine del segnale stradale ‘ Mulholland Drive ‘ illuminato dai fari di un automobile , e che una serie di storie si sarebbero intrecciate .

Come inizia la tua prima fase di realizzazione di un nuovo lavoro ?

David Lynch said in an interview that the only thing that was certain about ‘Mulholland Drive’ film, before he starts shooting, was that the film would begin with an image of traffic sign ‘Mulholland Drive’ illuminated by the headlights of a car, and that a series of interwoven stories would.
As start your first phase of execution of a new work?

GO - Most of the time the first thing I do is draw. Like you said, I work in a lot of many different mediums and spend a few months figuring out what form the piece is going to take. I start with an idea, or a collection of ideas and drawing helps me figure out what the form will be. I start with an idea and am at first not sure if the final form will be a sculpture, film or photography. I guess I am a very traditional artist in that way. Drawing helps me think. Having said all that I do often have an image I at first or one thing I lock on to. With Anthems it was the sound. I have very specific ideas of the type of mash-up I wanted of the national anthems. That was the first thing I made and everything came from there.

CB – In your opinion is there a California style for realise contemporary art ?

GO - Its funny, foreigners always ask this question! I don’t know if there is a “style of Californian Art” but there is perhaps a way of thinking that is unique to California. That is characterized by openness to new ideas and a fetishization of the next thing, for better or worse. To follow on that I guess you could say that if contemporary art is by definition the avant-garde then there are always new forms coming out of my state. You see this not only in art but also our economic activity, media and sport.

CB – Platone is critical to remember the existence of an inevitable relationship between the arts and the rest of the social activities, the inevitable hierarchies that govern, establish their polity, both materially and conceptually.

It is a philosophical interpretation of aesthetic activity.

What do you think?

GO - Yes, always.

Interview curated by Camilla Boemio

LS | Attitude Cinema

URV-ARÂ | Famous Shipper

Copyright © URV-ARÂ

LS | Attitude Cinema

LS | Attitude Cinema

William Kaminski | Ronee & Kurt Paradise Motel

http://www.williamkaminski.com/index.php?/projects/ronee—kurt-paradise-motel/

Copyright © William Kaminski

LS | Attitude Cinema

William Kaminski | Ronee & Kurt Paradise Motel

http://www.williamkaminski.com/index.php?/projects/ronee—kurt-paradise-motel/

Copyright © William Kaminski

LS | Attitude Cinema

Brandon Lattu | Water under the Bridge

Copyright © Brandon Lattu

LS | Attitude Cinema

Brandon Lattu

Video - Water under the Bridge

Brandon Lattu uses both photography and the idea of photography to explore relationships between meaning and representation. His practice consists of disassembling and reassembling information from the visual, consumer, architectural, and urban realms. For How Many Billboards?, Lattu has chosen the automobile for his subject, both as a nod to the viewer who is quite likely navigating traffic while pondering the piece, and to allude to corporate products that dominate billboards, whetting and capitalizing on human desire. The Cadillac Fleetwood shown in Lattu’s piece, in production from 1927 to 1996, came to be associated with the pinnacle of luxury, repeatedly served as the U. S. President’s vehicle, and was the most common base model for both the limousine and the hearse. The visual presence of a former icon of affluence on a present day billboard highlights the passing of time, and positions current objects of advertising as transient and soon to be relegated to history. Today, the 1994 Cadillac Fleetwood is a classic car coveted by lowriders, a subset of California’s car culture with roots in Mexican-American East Los Angeles. The lowrider is a symbol of creative expression and pride of cultural identity and community, especially for Chicanos. In Lattu’s piece, this reference can be seen in the list of attributes that includes hydraulic hoses. Lattu’s piece is an active advertisement; this Fleetwood is actually for sale and the owner can be contacted through the phone number given on the billboard. By using the conventions of a free classified ad for a billboard ad—itself the luxury model of printed advertising—Lattu underscores the shifting value of objects of consumer desire and the transformation of the meaning of such objects.


Brandon Lattu (b. 1970)
Brandon Lattu received his MFA from University of California, Los Angeles in 1998, and lives in Los Angeles. His work utilizes photography, sculpture, and video to investigate the state of representation today in order to push beyond the conventional empiricism that pictures of the world have traditionally invoked. Lattu is Assistant Professor of Art at the University of California, Riverside. Most recently, his work has been included in Walker Evans and the Barn at the Stedelijk Museum Bureau, Amsterdam; Tractatus Logico-Catalogicus, curated by Klaus Scherubel at the Vox Centre de L’image Contemporaine, Montreal; and The Movement of Images at the Centre Pompidou, Paris. Lattu was the subject of a survey exhibition held at the Bielefelder Kunstverein in 2007, which was accompanied by an artist’s book titled Office Gray Case. Upcoming solo exhibitions are scheduled at Leo Koenig Inc., New York and Monte Clark Gallery, Vancouver.

LS | Attitude Cinema

Attitude Cinema 

curated by Camilla Boemio

LS | Attitude Cinema

Geof Oppenheimer | Anthems, 2011

High definition video; TRT 0:04:40, Commissioned by SITE Santa Fe, New Mexico

Edition of 3 with 2 APs

Copyright © Geof Oppenheimer

LS | Attitude Cinema

Geof Oppenheimer | Anthems, 2011

High definition video; TRT 0:04:40, Commissioned by SITE Santa Fe, New Mexico

Edition of 3 with 2 APs

Copyright © Geof Oppenheimer

LS | Attitude Cinema

Geof Oppenheimer | Anthems, 2011

Working with diverse media, Oppenheimer takes the formal manifestation of civic value as his subject, interrogating the ways in which political and social structures are encoded in images and objects. It is a practice situated at the intersection of art and politics, but in such a way that neither art nor politics is reducible to the other term.

This four minute and forty-two second video is an investigation into social mapping and pattern-making. For centuries, the pageantry of military spectacle has been an umbrella for people to come together under one body politic. The drum core is a holdover from this cultural history. In the video, a confrontational situation, both visually and sonically, is set up between groupings of musicians marching in formation on screen. Shifting formation, and with superimposed images, the marchers are simultaneously playing four different national anthems. The audio tracks of the performance are highly edited and mixed so that the sounds of the individual anthems are lost in a wall of sound. Over the course for the video the sound and imagery build to a crescendo of incomprehension and then fades out to pure abstract blur that is devoid of any kind of representational mark. It is a violent imposition of different social structures upon one another. Produced with the drum and marching core of Rickover Naval Academy in Chicago, Illinois, Anthems was commissioned by SITE, Santa Fe for the exhibition Agitated Histories.

Geof Oppenheimer was born in Washington, D.C. in 1973. He received his BFA from the Maryland Institute, College of Art (1996) and his MFA from University of California, Berkeley (2001). He has exhibited at The Project, New York (2006 and 2008), Aspen Art Museum (2010), LAX ART (2009), PS1 Contemporary Arts Center (2006), The Contemporary Museum, Baltimore (2011), and SITE Santa Fe (2011). He currently lives and works in Chicago, where he is an Associate Professor of Practice in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Chicago.

LS | Attitude Cinema

William E. Jones | Eyelines, 2011

Copyright © William E. Jones

Courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

LS | Attitude Cinema

William E. Jones | Eyelines, 2011

Copyright © William E. Jones

Courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles, CA