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Paul Groot
wrote this article for the Japanese Magazine Tokion, www.tokion.com

Emotional, funny and disturbings clips can be loud and
clear

 

Loud & Claer, produced by the Bifrons Foundation at
Amsterdam, are a series of 9 DVD's with short clips. Short
portraits of people, of situations, of mentalities, every
DVD as a collaboration of well knomn personalities of
three different disciplines. A visual artist, an
advertisement designer and a musical composer. It is an
"interdisciplinary" project, in which the the commercial
designer reacts to what the artist first presents, with
the music as intermediair.

On one of these DVD is "My Daughter", a filmsequence of
less than two minutes. The camera zooms in, along a small
corridor, slowly walking into a room, and there, turning
to the left, we see a girl laying on a bed. She is is
sleeping, naked, beautiful long legs, the camera touches
her body, looking at her sleeping face, then back again,
hesitating at her buttocks, slowly, then leaving her body
and at the end, stops at the sculpture of a skull, placed
upon the televison.

It could have been the intro to a horror movie, in fact
it feels like this, but it is less, or perhaps if you are
like me, it is more than that. Not only because of the
blurred use of colour and the slightly slowed-down shots.
Here, in nearly two minutes you have the essence of
horror, I mean the western horror. The superior japanese
horror is different from what the director of this film,
the artist Marlene Dumas gives, but she gives something
extra, that is her own speciality: real love. While you
perhaps thinks the danger of a Lolita effect creeps in
this image, there is something that will prevent this:
here we have a portrait of her daughter sleeping. It is
not the first portrait of her daughter and I hope it will
not be the last: the portraits of Dumas daugther are
always something special.

This portrait is accompagnied by music. An excellent
score by Ryuichi Sakamoto, a clear and at the same time
dark environmental soundscape that gives this portrait a
very special musical atmosphere. Fantastic music that also
accompagnes a second movie, "My Sister" a dark memory of
designer Erik Kessels. Here also a home movie, but one of
the Seventies, with the director as a young boy playing
table-tennis with his sister. Short fragments in which
certain continuing frames are repetead at the rythme of
Sakamotos intriguing music that reminds us of childeren
screaming. Here, in Kessels home movie, no horror at all,
juist family fun. But then, suddenly, it's even worse than
fantasy-horror. Itt becomes a tragedy, as the undertitels
do explain us, that the litte girl, the director's
sister, who plays with Erik and is looking at us in a
repeated sequences, died twenty five yeas ago at an
accident. Reading this, while just starting liking this
boy and girl, is like a stroke in your face. This
seemingly innocent girl, again and again watching us and
with her tennisbat on the table scratching the music of
Sakamoto. This clip is really unforgatable.

On another DVD we find "Lullaby", a clip where the
colourscheme continiously changes, Pipilotti Rist goes
wild in a environment of birds and wind, with the camera
located in reed and bushes: it moves from left to right,
and up and down, like the hopeless fate of a piece of
paper in stormy weather. This de-materializes the whole
scene and the result is like what you can expect from an
artist making a fast sketch of the moving nature. Very
convincing. And Japanese artistic old-timer Yayoi Kusama
uses her caracteristic colour dots for this new medium.
Her wel known signature, moving dots projected on the
wall, are reworked here in computerised formula's.
Accompagnied by an advertisment campaign for Kusama: "In
Germany we call her Yayoi, and we all love her!"

And of course the collaboration between Yello (music),
Gillian Wearing (artist) and New (advertisment). Here the
music is really perfect for the Waerings clip, a
non-moving view on a desperate, dement old lady on a
chair. Nearly to much too handle, but then the very funny
comments of her young grandson, give it a light, cynical
touch. The mental state of his grandmother is too much to
handle for him, so he is exagerating her age in order to
get a grip on her condition in his funny as desperate
raps.

This loud & clear is a project that will be continued
with Loud & Clear TOO.

I saw the new first production from this new series with
the sensational L.A.Raeven girls, two twin sisters who did
build a real art hype in Europe and America, as the two
girls who cant live apart. They fight and reconcile, they
eat and eat and vomit, and stay as thin as can be. They
make art of their living togeher together in a whay that
is both funny and hard to see. Here, two little girls
represent the sisters in a quite hard and emotionally
exercised battle, in wich they try to loose themselves
from a plastic tape. Quite emotionally, to see littel
girls so engaged in a desperate fight The music of Pupilla
and the strange abstract forms of Chris Rehberger seem
quite adequate in representing another sphere for this
emotional, funny but also quite disturbing clip.

 

loud & clear, and Loud & Clear TOO.
http://www.bifrons.net

 

 


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