09/14 @ 8:00pm - Brian McCarthy Presents “Soziale Plastik II”

David Cronenberg Stereo (1969), excerpts
Gary Hill Happenstance (1982-83)
Paul Sharits Tails (1976)
Michael Robinson The General Returns from One Place to Another (2006)
Ursula Scherrer Live Video Projections (2010)
Aki Onda Sound Performance (2010)
Scott Von, lecture on radical medicine
Joseph Beuys excerpts from New School Lecture (1974)

Inaugurating a three-part series at ISSUE Project Room, featuring guest speakers and experimental film and video.

Tonight’s program, featuring the work of Ursula Scherrer, Paul Sharits, David Cronenberg, Michael Robinson, Gary Hill, and Joseph Beuys, will focus on the theme of energetics, in its relation to radical medicine and the phenomenology of the projection environment.

Michael Robinson – whose abstract piece The General Returns From One Place to Another from 2006 employs slow pans and vibrant images of flowers, creating a mood of heightened tension which breaks with the Hollies hit “The Air that I Breathe” – will be shown with the work of Paul Sharits and Gary Hill’s 1982 “Happenstance” – a conceptual video work dealing with the semantic dimensions of abstraction – language, the absence of language.

Cronenberg’s early film Stereo from 1969 – a piece structured around the conceit of a pseudo-Reichian telepathic commune in the Ontario North Woods and itself a brilliant meditation on non-verbal communication and the psychological dimension of projection – will serve as a basis for an examination of the phenomenology of the projection environment raised to the status of an explicitly POLITICAL dimension and value – as material, as autonomous site.

Ursula Scherrer – whose visual work has implicit themes relating to energetic shifts in perception that the projection environment facilitates – will be present to speak about her practice (influenced by qi-gong and yoga) and do live video projections accompanied by musician David Watson.

Scott Von, psychoanalyst and physician, whose work integrates the bioenergetics of the performative body and the existential philosophy of the act, will be present to give a brief lecture on radical medicine.

Beuys’ visual work and pedagogy – as motif, point of departure, and associative constellation used to structure the evening – raises a question that will be the explicit theme for the series: can a politics based on non-identity and the immaterial be articulated, or is it, following Georges Bataille, something that must remain within the register of sacred experience – incommunicable, unassimilable, and beyond a strictly “political” categorization? How does the dimension of the Image function within this?

Cronenberg’s piece will be minimally and creatively reconfigured with the work of Paul Sharits (and his 16mm short Tails from 1976), featuring a live sound score by Aki Onda using amplified cassette material. Sharits, invoked here as a kind of ur-figure for the fragility of the body in the face of this dimension of the virtual or visual and the permeability of the body to shock, complicates Beuys’ notion that all dimensions of experience can be assimilated into a positive social recomposition – “Soziale Plastik”, his version of a postcapitalist utopia. Raising Beuys’ Marxian concept to the level of visual abstraction involves a fundamental reconfiguration of the status of the Image and the “community of intention”, which tonight’s program and lecture will address.

Future events in the series will feature live performance, selected portions from Gary Hill’s April 2010 lecture at Electronic Arts Intermix, guest lecturers, and the work of Peggy Ahwesh, Daichi Saito, Stom Sogo, and others.