Anthony McCall & Andrew Tyndall - Argument

Argument is a dense and provocative feature-length essay examining one issue of the New York Times magazine to investigate the ideology of news, the language of fashion and the construction of masculinity.

"The twin principles of modernism and marketing: seeing fresh promise in familiar things."

Anthony McCall and Andrew Tyndall's legendary and provocative essay film Argument, first screened at the Edinburgh International Film Festival in 1978, has been almost unseen for the last twenty years. LUX has now made a new High Definition restoration of the film, and its trenchant analysis of media ideology seems more pertinent than ever. Three male voices dissect one edition of the New York Times through a series of locked-off shots, revealing the prejudice and latent content of news and advertisements, reading images as texts and presenting text as an image. Fashion photographs are used as a starting point for a political investigation of news, advertising, and images of masculinity - while at the same time, the filmmakers reflect on their own position and the possibility of radical film practice. Influenced by both the America and European avant-gardes, notably Godard and Hollis Frampton, Argument is stylistically beautiful and relentless in its enquiry.

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Rokolectiv Festival 09

http://www.rokolectiv.ro

Tim Sweeney (DFA, NY) @ Fantastic Club

Tim Sweeney ( beatsinspace.net/DFA, NY )
+ Khidja & Bogman

@ Fantastic Club
Calea Buzesti 50-52, 6th floor
( Volksbank building )
Friday 3.04, 22.00

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Emotional Orchestra

Commissioned by Electra as part of Her Noise
Tate Modern Turbine Hall, London
23 September 2005

New York based artist and composer Marina Rosenfeld presented a new performance for 40 female improvisors for an electro-acoustic string orchestra. Following a 2-day workshop involving London based musicians and non-musicians, participants performed Rosenfeld's animated improvisational score using an array of bowable instruments, including violins, cello, electric guitars, percussion and harp.

The 40 minute composition elicits extraordinary music-making, at turns brutal and delicate, from an ensemble of where many of the players will have never touched an instrument before. The work also features Rosenfeld's own graphic notation, in the form of video-animation, and a custom-designed garment created by New York fashion collective As Four.

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some books

Mapping Ideology
edited by Slavoj Žižek

Not so long ago, the term ""ideology"" was in considerable disrepute. Its use had become associated with a claim to know a truth beyond ideology, a radically unfashionable position. What then explains the sudden revival of interest in grappling with the questions that 'ideology' poses to social and cultural theory, as well as to political practice? Mapping Ideology presents a comprehensive sampling of the most important contemporary writing on the subject. Slavoj Zizek's introductory essay surveys the development of the concept from Marx to the present. Terry Eagleton, Peter Dews and Seyla Benhabib assess the decisive contributions of Lukacs and the Frankfurt School. A different tradition is revealed in an essay by the French post-structuralist Michel Pecheux, while the study of ideology is exemplified in classic texts by Theodor Adorno, Jacques Lacan and Louis Althusser. An intersection of Gramscian and Althusserian motifs appears in a now famous debate over 'the dominant ideology thesis', reprinted here. Pierre Bourdieu succinctly formulates his departure from this tradition in an interview with Eagleton. Further readings of the ideological are explored by Richard Rorty and Michele Barrett. Finally Fredric Jameson supplies an authoritative statement of the nature and position of the ideological in late capitalist society. Mapping Ideology is an invaluable guide to what is now the most dynamic field of cultural theory.

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Artistic Citizenship. A Public Voice for the Arts
by Mary Schmidt (Editor), Randy Martin (Editor)

How do people in the creative arts prepare for, and participate in, civic life? This question is central to anyone involved in arts education and in the creation of public policy for the arts. Celebrity endorsements of political candidates and controversies over NEA funding aside, the role of the artists - student and professional - must increasingly be couched in terms of the social: artists make art, but they also exercise their cultural citizenship as explainers, teachers, and advocates.

This volume will be developed at NYU, where the Tisch School of the Arts (not coincidentally founded in 1965, the year the NEA came into being) is one of the country's premier institutions for arts education. Mary Schmidt Campbell and Randy Martin are putting together a volume that will explore the central questions of "artistic citizenship," a term they create here to explore a unique and powerful form of civic identity.

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Noir Anxiety
by Kelly Oliver & Benigno Trigo

Among the elements that define the classic film noir-chiaroscuro lighting, voice-over narration, and such archetypal characters as the world-weary private eye and the femme fatale-perhaps no element is more responsible for the genre's continued popularity among movie buffs, filmmakers, and critics than the palpable sense of anxiety that emanates from the screen. Because the genre emerged in the shadow of the Second World War, this profound psychological and philosophical unease is usually ascribed either to postwar fears about the atomic bomb or to the reactions of returning soldiers to a new social landscape. In Noir Anxiety, however, Kelly Oliver and Benigno Trigo interpret what has been called the "free-floating anxiety" of film noir as concrete apprehensions about race and sexuality.

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