The sixth part of Beauty Unrealized focused on cinematic images and the possibility of crossing the boundaries between cinema and other media, as well as the possibilities to break the limits of the cinematic medium itself. In his works, Adam Avikainen examined possibilities of expanding the cinematic moment into different materials and media, proposing a personal reinterpretation of cinema techniques and objectives. From her side, Catherine Sullivan translated the theatrical into the cinematic and vice versa in order to investigate the limits of both. At the same time, Sullivan marked the division line between the individual and the universal, revealing where the Self ends and the cultural patterns begin. Through his selection of videos and films, Francesco Bernardelli presented a different vision of the images in order to enlarge our field of visual experience and disturb dominant regimes of the vision as “manifestations of dominant ideology of Form and Control.”

10.03.2007

Catherine Sullivan: The Chittendens (multiple projection, 16 mm film transferred to video)

Catherine Sullivan, initially trained as an actress, is best known for theatre and video works in which she explores the conventions of performance and role playing, using a wide range of historical and cultural references. Sullivan investigates tensions between performers, their roles and their audience, as well as the discrepancies between role, person and body. The Chittendens, a six screen video installation shows sixteen actors playing stereotypes from nineteenth and twentieth-century America through the emotional patterns given by Sullivan. Using the grammar of theater, Sullivan successfully reveals culturally inscribed ways of coding gesture and ultimately the defining patterns of the self. The Chittendens was made in collaboration with composer Sean Griffin, who wrote the score for the video which Sullivan re-edited afterwards, thus creating the formal dialogue between the actors’ gestures and the music score.

Adam Avikainen: Breathe the same breath (video installation)

Adam Avikainen’s work can be seen as an on-going investigation of the potentialities of storytelling, both on a formal and content level. By applying a cinematic treatment to scripts and physical installations, the artist proposes whimsical fictions and self-made mythologies that act as raptures in the reality. For Beauty Unrealized Avikainen presented “Breathe the same breath”: a video, which reveals the the artist’s ironic attitude towards the world, and his intention to create experiences ‘between revelation and reason.’ Description: “A man gets into one of those jets with the people pacing up and down the aisles trying to sell you jasmine infused breast milk and flies to North America in search of his internet lover. Instead, he discovers a dipsomaniacal sailor slurping songs of cicadas. A post-transcendental walkabout. A square dance under the harvest moon with Caspar David Friedrich, Flannery O’Connor, Henry David Thoreau and Polly Jean Harvey.” (A.A.)

11.03.2007

Francesco Bernardelli: The Secret Ordeal of Beauty. Surrealist phantoms, fantasies and entropy (or the dissolution of matter)

The Secret Ordeal of Beauty is an attempt to escape predictable, linear connections in order to refer to a hidden ambiguity and a substantial treachery of the images. Within a short span of time, between the late 1940s and the mid-1960s, the increasingly intermingled social, sexual, political and aesthetic representations offered alternatives to the traditional and rather conservative structures of the cinema machine. By repeatedly fusing supernatural elements and concerns with issues of psycho-sexual drama and images of sexual ambiguity, many marginal forms and cycles of narratives (such as horror, erotic and fantastic) have actually facilitated a shift from a predetermined view of moving images’ characters towards a full call into question of established gender roles, power relations and ideological structures.
Francesco Bernardelli is a freelance art critic and curator based in Torino, Italy. Since 1999 he has curated film and video programs for Castello di Rivoli Contemporary Art Museum. He has recently catalogued the video collections of Castello di Rivoli and published essays on the historical connections between early performance, video art and experimental dance. Recent projects include Split Subjects (De Appel, Amsterdam 2005) and Figures of Excess (Beursschouwburg, Brussels, 2006).