Film inspired by Patti

["Rebecca Lewis" <smoot>]

This is the description of a film showing in Brooklyn on May 1. (I do the
events listings for wfmu, a local radio station and I just got an email
that had this so I'm passing it along.) It doesn't seem to have her music,
but the director seems to be inspired by her.

During the month of May 2008 ISSUE Project Room devotes its programming to
the ecstatic moment.

Thursday May 1st (at 7pm)
dan graham

Dan Graham presents a screening of ROCK MY RELIGION

"Rock My Religion" is a provocative thesis on the relation between
religion and rock music in contemporary culture. Graham formulates a
history that begins with the Shakers, an early religious community who
practiced self-denial and ecstatic trance dances. With the "reeling and
rocking" of religious revivals as his point of departure, Graham analyzes
the emergence of rock music as religion with the teenage consumer in the
isolated suburban milieu of the 1950s, locating rock'ssexual and
ideological context in post-World War II America. The music and
philosophies of Patti Smith, who made explicit the trope that rock is
religion, are his focus. This complex collage of text, film footage and
performance forms a compelling theoretical essay on the ideological codes
and historical contexts that inform the cultural phenomenon of rock `n'
roll music.

Original Music: Glenn Branca, Sonic Youth. Sound: Ian Murray, Wharton
Tiers. Narrators: Johanna Cypis, Dan Graham. Editors: Matt Danowski, Derek
Graham, Ian Murray, Tony Oursler.
Produced by Dan Graham and the Moderna Museet.

Since the mid-1960s, Dan Graham has produced an important body of art and
theory that engages in a highly analytical discourse on the historical,
social and ideological functions of contemporary cultural systems.
Architecture, popular music, video and television are among the focuses of
his provocative investigations, which are articulated in essays,
performances, installations, videotapes and architectural/sculptural
designs.

Graham began using film and video in the 1970s, creating installation and
performance works that actively engage the viewer in a perceptual and
psychological inquiry into public and private, audience and performer,
objectivity and subjectivity. Restructuring space, time an spectatorship
in a deconstruction of the phenomenology of viewing, his early
installations often incorporate closed-circuit video systems within
architectural spaces. The viewer's perception is manipulated and displaced
through such devices as time delay, projections, surveillance and mirrors.

In installations focusing on the social implications of television, as
articulated in private and public viewing spaces, Graham refers to video's
semiotic function in architecture in relation to both window and mirror.
Graham has also published numerous critical and theoretical essays that
investigate the cultural ideology of such
contemporary social phenomena as punk music, suburbia and public
architecture.

Graham was born in 1942. He has published numerous critical essays, and is
the author of Video-Architecture-Television (1980). His work is
represented in the collections of numerous major institutions in the
United States and Europe, including Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Centre
Georges Pompidou, Paris; and The Tate Gallery, London. He has had
retrospective exhibitions at Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Holland; Museum of
Modern Art, Oxford, England; The Renaissance Society, University of
Chicago; Kunsthalle, Berne, Switzerland; and the Art Gallery of Western
Australia, Perth; and has been represented internationally in group
exhibitions at Documenta 7, Kassel, Germany; Art Institute of Chicago;
Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; P.S. 1, New York; American Film Institute
National Video Festival, Los Angeles; and The Museum of Modern Art, New
York, among other festivals and institutions. Dan Graham lives in New
York.

7pm $10

ISSUE PROJECT ROOM 400 Carroll St b/t Bond & Nevins Sts, Carroll Gardens /
Brooklyn (Web: http://www.issueprojectroom.org/events.html)

-- 
Rebecca