We’re continuing our research into all things mascot. Charles Fréger is a photographer who has some amazing images of people in a variety of costumes. His Wilder Mann and Mardi Gras Indians series are beautiful in the way they’re shot but mostly due to what’s in the photos themselves. The Mardi Gras Indians are slightly more abstract than what we’re planning on making and the others are little more beastly but still good reference points. We’ve also been tipped off about something called the mascot diaries which is a podcast where the hosts speak to a different mascot every week about all sorts of stuff like scheduling, skits, down time, advantages of being tall, messing with the other team and whatever else comes up in the interview. It’s a great way to think about the person inside the costume because it’s so easy to see the giant smile and forget that there’s a real person inside. Another hive of information with regards to mascots is the national mascot association website and twitter page. We’re in the process of hiring someone to design the cartoon of the mascot. We decided that if we’re going to be acting like a fictional company then this is what that fictional company would do; hire a freelance designer.
Research for the other piece for the degree show is also ongoing. We’re thinking about CSM being a new space to many of the people who are coming through the degree show and therefore this work is about the potential of the space that they’re inhabiting. An art school is only an art school because of its contents which relies on the people and intention, the same as a readymade is just an object until it has meaning applied to it. The point of all this is to instil wonder/imagination and to enable people to see that same potential that we all see in art. We’ll get to designing the frontage after the performance lecture next week.
The preparation for the foley pit lecture is complete! The frame is built and all the contents has been secured – pasta, cornflakes, floorboards, plastic sheeting (IKEA bag material), rubble, and either tiles for the final hole. And it’s taken us nearly 5 full days to figure out the sound but it’s finally done!!! We tried shotgun mics, a variety of mixers, different amps and speakers. The script is done as well as the presentation and we’ve got an actor to perform it. The script is based around the Wilhelm Scream which is this stock sound effect of a man screaming that has been used in 372 movies and countless television series, beginning in 1951 for the film Distant Drums. It’s another reference to this background becoming foreground which we’re attempting to highlight.
In terms of art viewing we went to the Approach gallery to see a new exhibition by John Stezaker. As you can imagine it’s just what one would expect when going in to one of his exhibitions. This is not necessarily a bad thing since his work is always beautiful but we don’t go in with any expectation of being surprised. The title of the show is Love and on display is a variety of different photographs of couples combined with other imagery, sometimes landscapes, sometimes other people. If this was someone else’s exhibition it would feel cheesy and false but we’ve been to a talk of his and we know his process so it has a sense of authenticity.
Auto Italia is just around the corner and had a great solo show by Martin Kohout featuring a single video called Night Shifts. Shown on one of the biggest TVs we’ve ever seen, it was about people who work at night in this hyperconnected world, obsessed with screens and photographs, talking to Siri and wearing these very sci-fi looking light up glasses. Very lovely film, not necessarily making a judgement on the lives that it was documenting, but analysing them nonetheless.
The show at Cell projects is titled No, No, No, No. It’s a fairly inoffensive exhibition but by no means exciting. However, something that did catch our eye was Nancy Holt’s bio; while every one of the other artists’ began with ‘(insert artist name) lives and works in (insert city)’. Nancy Holt’s on the other hand is much more abstract, not something we would usually warm to, but its ambiguity made it pretty compelling. It read like this – Nancy Holt lives and works in fiction. A product of culture like war. Onelife is not enough; two is too many. Nancy Halt. Lives in the epoch of the trailer, in mobile home and in film. Far away from the city. Home is where the sunshines.
Finally there was the Cob Gallery where one of our friends was showing some new works. We’ve always really enjoyed Realf’s work and have previously worked with him on a couple of different projects, so if was great to see him doing well and to see more of his work in the flesh. But the rest of the exhibition was fairly weak; a lot of stuff that looks like art. We can imagine that a lot of people might describe it was ‘organic’ or ‘figurative’ and to top is all off, the exhibition was titled ‘Form’…
With regards to a series of still images that give the illusion of movement, we’ve been getting back into watching Friends, since it has finally appeared on Netflix. It’s been a great experience revisiting those characters that we spent so much time with as children. We now understand more of the jokes or they affect us differently. It’s also made us think about how it tells a story of the romance of friendship. Throughout the show we see what we interpret as familiar romantic behaviour planted on to platonic relations and this make for very funny content! It’s a cliché but it makes you laugh one minute and cry the next; their love for each other replaces the missing love that their family is apparently unable to give them. This then makes their stories highly relatable – a lot of us feel much more comfortable and open with our friends than our families even if this is a slight exaggeration of that. However, towards the end of the show, and as they get older, family begins to take precedent over their friendship with one and other. Monica and Chandler moving away shows this as the group will no longer be able to see each other every day. This cycle will then continue, their children’s friends will then become more important in their lives and so on and so on. (had to re-watch the final episode to refresh my memory and felt a fairly large golf ball in the throat, they really manage to get to you).
On the film front we had Ingrid Goes West, a fairly curious premise of a social media obsessed woman (Ingrid) following an Instagram crush to California with money from her recently deceased mother. However, we quickly learn that she has obvious mental health issues and the film, instead of making us feel sympathetic towards her, pokes fun at it by making jokes and making her look immensely shallow. The other woman she has followed across the country turns out be also as shallow as Ingrid and we’re unsure as to whether the message is INSTAGRAM BAD or MENTAL INSTABILITY FUNNY. It seems confused about the story it’s trying to say. 5/10
Now onto two excellent films! The first being Call Me by Your Name, a stunning love story which takes the form of a gorgeous crystal vase teetering on the edge of a similarly gorgeous table. The entire films we know that it’s going to be knocked and smashed into a thousand and one pieces but look on, helpless to its fate.
The second excellent film was The Meyerowitz Stories. Two of the most frustrating hours ever but we couldn’t take our eye and ears off the screen. the dialogue in the film is written in such a way that none of the characters are ever talking to each other properly; they’re talking alright, but they’re all having conversations with themselves but in close proximity to others. Harold (the dad) is the most insufferable character who is constantly and exclusively talking about himself without a care in the world for anyone else. This may sound somewhat unrealistic but in actuality it’s much closer to an authentic conversation than we’ve ever seen in cinema previously. For us, that’s something film can do really well, better than any other medium, is capture the reality of conversations. In a book, no matter how you lay it out, one piece of dialogue always has to follow another. You can’t simulate people talking over each other, which is something we all do all the time, and also you can’t capture the rhythm, speed, or tone that the conversation has. Even radio or theatre miss some of the nuances that film is perfectly suited for film to reproduce. Noah Baumbach has nailed realistic dialogue in this film. That’s not to say it’s only enjoyable writing if it’s realistic, Aaron Sorkin and Quentin Tarantino have done a great job writing dialogue as it could be as opposed to what is it, finding music in language the same way Shakespeare did centuries ago. Baumbach is committed to a different principal and we’re looking forward to seeing much more of it.
