Museum Cinema: Analyses of Hekla Dögg Jónsdóttir’s Development

For just under one month, January 17 to February 15 of 2015, the main exhibition space in Hafnarborg Museum was transformed for artist Hekla Dögg Jónsdóttir’s show Development (in the native language Framköllun). The relatively small but influential museum[1] but faces the ocean on the main street of Hafnarfjörður, a small town on the outskirts of Reykjavík, Iceland. Hekla Dögg[2] is a well-known Icelandic artist whose work has been internationally exhibited. She often works in sculptures and installations, and the installation on display here can be called her largest and most ambitious project to date.[3] She has attempted to capture moments of the unexpected in her work and uses multimedia installations to this end.[4]

Development captures the unexpected in new ways as she creates a version of a site-specific collaborative installation with the participation of 36 artists. The show can in fact be looked at as one piece of art presented as an installation and composed of different multimedia elements. Film as a medium for art and a site for creativity is at the center of the piece and becomes the carrier of creative thought. The collaborative aspects of the show reflect Hekla’s career, which is marked by interaction with other artists on many levels of the Icelandic art scene. Besides working as an artist, Hekla teaches at the Iceland Academy of the Arts and has curated exhibitions of other artists work. Furthermore, she was one of the founders of the influential Kling & Bang gallery in Reykjavík.[5] Her established relationships with other artists become an important function of Development.

Picture 1: This is a rough scetch of the installation from above. The curves in the top right and bottom left corners represent the curving of the walls which end where the curve meets the outer line. The other end of each wall is at each square’s opposite corner. The image is courtesy of the Museum’s webpage. http://hafnarborg.is/en/exhibition/development/.

Walking into a large space of 380 square meters the museum guests are greeted by what first appears to be a large white sculpture. It is in fact an installation of four rooms divided into two halves, which fills almost three-fourths of the hall. It soon becomes apparent that these are movie sets, one white and one black. Guests are not guided through the space in any particular way. Instead, the show invites inspection of the space at the visitor’s convenience. The space is located on the second floor of the museum. On the lower floor is an exhibition of the work of artist Hanna Davíðsson, whose work in decoration, painting, and drawing from the early 20^th century creates a sharp contrast with Hekla’s modern installation.[6] The floors are parquet and the ceiling is rises to a high beam. Facing the entrance is a long and tall, partially curved white wall and a raised white floor. The floor is strewn with white pedestals in various sizes, tripods, lights and one camera. In the middle of this set hangs a very large white sphere, around one and a half meters, suspended from the ceiling. Moving around the sculpture one comes to a small doorway in its side. Half of the doorway is painted white, but after that the wall is painted black. Inside is a small editing room filled with equipment and unused films. Further along is the other half of this structure, identical to the white set except painted entirely black. It has a similar black sphere hanging from the ceiling, but less filmmaking equipment and no pedestals. Outside this space stand two black monoliths. Moving past this black set one is greeted by another door as well as a tall pedestal on which stands a 16mm projector. It is projecting into the small theater on the other side of the doorway. Inside is a conventional, if very small, cinema complete with red leather chairs on loan from the National Film Archive.[7]                                                                      

Pictures 2 and 3: The black and white sets.

The silent film shown repeadetly throughout the day, in this small cinema is composed of black-and-white segments, each of them around two and a half minutes, roughly the length of one 100 foot 16mm Kodak spool each. Every segment is created by an artist or a performance group following simple rules: they are allowed to use one black and white film roll and must use the black and/or white sets built by Hekla in the museum. In the days before the opening 9 artists took turns individually bringing their creative input to her sets and adding their voices (or rather visages) to the film.[8] A few of the participants are generally known for video art, but their techniques and focus varies from one to the next. This makes their joined parts variegated and distinct from each other in execution and subject matter.

Picture 4: Inside the editing room.

This set, editing room and cinema sculpture becomes its own contained black and white universe into which artists are invited to participate, bringing their own artistic vision into Hekla Dögg’s rule-bound world. The product is then edited and exhibited right in this same space, and even though it is brought out of the sculpture, to a lab for photocemical processing. The editing room thus binds these tree areas together and the process into a totality in the middle of the space physically, and in the middle of the temporal process from shooting to viewing. Visitors are invited into the piece as well to view the result of this merge from the safety of the familiar cinema seats. The only things that are not either black or white in the piece are these seats ant the yellow boxes around the film cartridges and a few other objects in the editing room. The red color of the chairs, seen despite the dimness inside the cinema, accentuate the spectators place as an outsider, invited into this domain and watching from an outside point of view. The very act of watching, situated inside the piece, therefore becomes a part of the art-performance itself. Spectators become participants in a performance of creation and reception. Without them the self-contained universe would collapse.

Picture 5: The projectionist preparing to change reels. On the other side of the projector is the entrance to the cinema.

After the opening of the exhibition, more artists joined the creation and both asked and were asked to participate by filming their own contribution in the same rule-bound manner. These parts to the piece were filmed both when the museum was closed and when it was open, depending on the artists time and caprice. Some of these became performances in themselves, though the act of filming them was the main focus. Each time the piece was added to the end of the collection/film, making it four reels, each comprised of 9 rolls, by the time the show was closed on February 15th. As more and more artists joined the creation they became a somewhat more diverse group. The original group consisted of artists in circles close to Hekla herself, often related to Kling & Bang Gallery which she co-founded. By the end of the show a total of 36 collaborators from a wide spectrum had added their voices and an interesting cross-section of the Icelandic art scene at this time had been carved.

The participating artists experimented with a medium not familiar to most of them in the process of making this installation and by asking them to do this Hekla posed questions as to the nature of filmmaking and production as an art form within the museum institution. She contacted friends within the film industry in Iceland asking them to join the project, however, they were unwilling to participate according to the artist, who was present in the exhibition on both of the days I went there. The divide between filmmaking and the art world that she encountered and questioned in this piece is a prevalent one in Iceland. Filmmaking and video production are not included in the Academy of the Arts, which has widened the gap between these two areas, which would seem to overlap. Further, Hekla brings the cinema into the museum space and establishes it as a place to witness art. The red chairs, brought into the space and expanding it beyond the common and simple viewing hall prevalent for video art and normally containing only of one black bench at the far end of the room.

Hekla questions the relationship between cinema and museum, but it can be argued that there is another gray area in her piece. In a sense there is a question about the nature of curating art and film to be found in the execution of this piece. Through her personal vision Hekla brings together artists and arranges their work in an order. However, the resulting film is in fact put together almost randomly. Each of the artists chose a time to film their contribution, and Hekla edited these parts together according to the order they were shot in. This creates an uncertain element in the piece and some randomness in the films construction. Is Hekla then an artist curator?

In relation to this is may be of use to look at Terry Smith’s book Thinking Contemporary Curating (2012) where he situates the artist-curator historically and criticizes the blurring of these boundaries. Smith comes to the conclution that the artist curator negatively subverts the appropriate relationship between artist and institution.[9] Hekla’s ambiguous relationship with the institution comes from her arrangement of other’s work, yet this is in the interest of her own artistic vision, and thus can rather be likened to a collaborative piece than a curated one. The question is an interesting one though.

This question can be argued both ways and could perhaps be a topic for a much longer paper. For now, Development can at least be called a thought-provoking piece that questions creative space and its own nature of becoming. By blurring boundaries and examining the function of creative spaces Hekla Dögg Jónsdóttir created a compelling exhibition in Hafnarborg museum. The searching nature of her show Development thus finds moments in the unpredictable as other artists bring their unique creative talents into her prepared and rule-bound universe.

 

Picture 6: The artist on her set.

Work Cited

Hafnarborg online. “Development – Hekla Dögg Jónsdóttir.” Accessed march 1, 2015. http://hafnarborg.is/en/exhibition/development/

Iceland Art Center. “Hekla Dögg Jónsdóttir.” Accessed march 1^, 2015. http://icelandicartcenter.is/people/artists/hekla-dogg-jonsdottir/

“Nýr Safnstjóri Listasafns Reykjavíkur,” Reykjavík city official website, May 4, 2015.  http://reykjavik.is/frettir/nyr-safnstjori-listasafns-reykjavikur

Smith, Terry. Thinking Contemporary Curating. 2nd ed. ICI Perspectives in Curating. No. 1. Independent Curators International: New York, 2012.

Further reading of interest

Hekla Dögg Jónsdóttir. http://this.is/hekla/

Hafnarborg. “Spark – Hanna Davíðsson.” http://hafnarborg.is/en/exhibition/spark-hanna-davidsson/

Appendix: The 36 Collaborators in Development – in the order of their participation

Kolbeinn Hugi Höskuldsson

Claudia Hausfeld 

Sigurður Guðjónsson

Erling Klingenberg 

Gjörningaklúbburinn (The Icelandic Love Corporation)

Ásdís Sif Gunnarsdóttir 

Unnar Örn J. Auðarson

Hannes Lárusson

Rakel Gunnarsdótt

Hulda Stefánsdóttir

Sara Björnsdóttir

Ásta Fanney Sigurðardóttir 

Curver

Sunneva Weisshappel

Klāvs Liepiņš

Halldór Úlfarsson

Aki Asgeirsson

Páll Ívan Pálsson

Haraldur Jónsson 

Óskar Kristinn Vignisson 

Auður Ómarsdóttir 

Sigga Björg Sigurðardóttir 

Hildigunnur Birgisdóttir

Hrönn Gunnarsdóttir 

Ingibjörg Sigurjónsdóttir

Ragnar Kjartansson

Bjargey Ólafsdóttir

Sirra Sigrún Sigurðardóttir

Lukka Sigurðardóttir

Þórdís Aðalsteinsdóttir

Ilmur Stefánsdóttir

Ólafur Sveinn Gíslason

Páll Banine 

Katrín I. Hjördísardóttir

Magnús Helgason

Anne Rombach

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[1] In a recent article about the museum director on the Reykjavík city’s official website , the museum was touted as an important and influential part of the Icelandic art scene. “Nýr Safnstjóri Listasafns Reykjavíkur,” Reykjavík city official website, May 4, 2015.  http://reykjavik.is/frettir/nyr-safnstjori-listasafns-reykjavikur

[2] In Iceland, people are always referred to by their first names (sometimes their middle names as well) since surnames are a parent’s first name.

[3] “Development – Hekla Dögg Jónsdóttir,” Hafnarborg online, accessed march 1, 2015, http://hafnarborg.is/en/exhibition/development/

[4] “Hekla Dögg Jónsdóttir,” Iceland Art Center, Accessed march 1^, 2015. http://icelandicartcenter.is/people/artists/hekla-dogg-jonsdottir/

[5] . “Development – Hekla Dögg Jónsdóttir,” Hafnarborg online, http://hafnarborg.is/en/exhibition/development/

[6] The fact of their positions as women in the Icelandic art world is also worth noting. This creates another contrast as their work is devided by circa 100 years of (women’s) history. This also marks 100 years of women’s sufferage in Iceland.

[7] According to the museum director, Ólöf Kristín Sigurðardóttir, from whom I got a guided tour of the exhibition. Full disclosure; she is my mother.

[8] See appendix for a full list of collaborators.

[9]Smith, Terry. Thinking Contemporary Curating. 2nd ed. ICI Perspectives in Curating. No. 1. Independent Curators International: New York, 2012.

Curation On Top of Curation, and All In the Trash

In the course of my thesis work on aging VHS tapes, I came into a collection of the same that was in the process of being deaccessioned by the NYU Cinema Studies Archive.  They were stuffed a bunch at a time into the Techno Trash, and I would come through periodically to collect them for study (and, let's shoot straight, because I'm an acquisitive pack rat and I wanted them.)



It eventually emerged (or I eventually asked, and was told without any difficulty whatsoever) that the tapes were recorded by one William Anderson, who was "the Librarian of the New York Times" (I put this in quotes because I can find no reference online to that position, so I suspect his actual job title of being something else), and who privately kept several VCRs running and recording movies for his collection.  The tapes were scrupulously catalogued (this I had already guessed from their being systematically numbered, but I didn't imagine that the catalogue still existed!), and that his system had been transferred into a database when the tapes were received by NYU after his death.  The catalogue amazingly gives details not only on the movies themselves, but on the dates and TV stations from which they were recorded.  I have close to 200 of the tapes, but there were once nearly 1,600 of them, recorded over a decade from 1983-1992.

The tapes are T-120s -- they could be recorded with 2, 4, or 6 hours of content, depending on your VCR settings and demands for quality -- and it was clear from the number of titles on each label that Anderson had used the low-quality, high-density EP mode to cram as much onto them as possible.  But that's how we taped movies when I was a kid, too -- fit as many things on one cassette as possible, irrespective of what juxtapositions might occur.  I would be hard pressed to make a claim that the contents of each of Anderson tapes constitutes a deliberately curated series, though Lord knows many of them would make interesting evenings' entertainments, and they may just be thematically clumped by broadcasting, or fascinatingly disparate enough, to be passed off as deliberate curation.

One hell of a night's viewing.  Coming soon to a TV in my apartment.

But the collection at large certainly is.  It may be widespread, but the selections of taping this movie versus that movie are interesting choices.  It is tempting to screen these tapes as movie nights for friends, and if I did, I think I should like to print out the TV papers from the days that these were recorded.  Taped late in 1985, it may say as much that Andy Warhol's Dracula was chosen in preference to The Official Story (I made that up, but it was certainly chosen in preference to several other options) as that it was chosen at all.

An interesting occurrence on the cassettes is a large number of episodes of Matinee at the Bijou, an early PBS program that presented Golden Age Hollywood programing through the lens of early 1980s nostalgia.  One episode that I watched, also from 1985, featured a trailer for Money Madness (1948) (edited on video with the kinds of slogans that the producers of Bijou evidently identified with late-forties cheapo noir), two "Buy War Bonds!" slides, an ad for the concession stand, the Warner Bros. cartoon A Coy Decoy (1941), four Soundies, a cut down version of chapter 11 of The Phantom Creeps (1939), and a 45 minute reduction of the already short PRC elephant-in-Mexico "musical" Machine Gun Mama (1944).  Except that the films are cut to fit together in a 90 minute slot, this is perhaps not an unbelievable program that could have played in 1948, and it was certainly an enjoyable (if not great) 90 minutes' television, but the curation doesn't make any thundering good arguments.  Perhaps that music is enjoyable, by pairing the Soundies with a semi-musical.  What's most interesting, though, is seeing it as a time capsule of a certain nostalgic taste in 1985.  The acceptance and even embrace of battered, chopped up, jittery prints of whatever movies PBS could grab rights to broadcast, and the still corny/not yet cool "good old days" presentation, present a telling view of how these films were widely seen for a time between their release and their wider, cheaper proliferation on cable and home video (home video was very much a thing in the early '80s, but with a cheap tape going for $30, most folks' libraries would have been pretty carefully selected).  And maybe a clue to how many kids growing up in the '80s came to look askance as "black and white movies".  But for this kid who at least started growing up in the '80s, these tapes are going to make a mighty nice summer's programming!

“Rediscovering” a Classic for the First Time at “Tell It Like It Is: Black Independents in New York, 1968 – 1986”

The Film Society of Lincoln Center earlier this year ran an important series entitled "Tell It Like It Is: BlackIndependents in New York, 1968 – 1986."  Running over the course of two weeks (February 6-19) and programmed by Jake Perlin and Michelle Materre, Tell It Like It Is featured a startling twenty-five screening programs.  Included were screenings of relatively well known films such as She's Gotta Have It (1986) and Ganja and Hess (1973), known but rarely seen movies like Spike Lee's NYU Master's thesis project, Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads (1983), and many lesser-known (at least to this writer!) pictures including Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One (1968), A Dream Is What You Wake Up From (1978), and special evenings with filmmakers Jessie Maple, Kent Garrett, and Madeline Anderson.  Indeed, even when not pointedly labeled as “special evenings”, almost all of the programs were accompanied by introductions and Q&A sessions with some person or persons involved with the production of the film, or related to the filmmaker.  Where possible (at least ten of the shows) films were shown on film (some 16mm, some 35mm), but many titles were projected from DCPs or in other non-specified forms of “digital projection”.

Film Society’s website for Tell It Like It Is says that “[r]epresenting highlights of New York–based independents, activists all—producing these films in a time when minority film production was not supported and frequently suppressed—this program is full of major works by some of the great filmmakers of this (or any) era in American film history.”  And indeed, unsupported and suppressed at these films often were, many of them have not been readily available for viewing.  Several of the programs exhibited were originally shown on television, and few – including both the television and the theatrical works – are available on any form of home video today.  Many never were.  And while Film Society also asserts that the series “is comprised of key films produced between 1968 and 1986, when Spike Lee’s first feature, the independently produced She’s Gotta Have It, was released theatrically—and followed by a new era of studio filmmaking by black directors”, the programming of the series seems to aim at least as much to canonize great but underappreciated films as it does to revive widely recognized classics.

Indeed, one of the movies to open the series was Kathleen Collins's Losing Ground (1982), a film that ought to be a recognized classic, but which had never until now received the recognition it deserved.  Billed as "one of the first feature films written and directed by a black woman"[1], the film was completed in 1982 and aired once in 1987 on WNET, but otherwise went unreleased until now.  A year after that one television showing, Collins died tragically young from cancer.  But her daughter Nina, who introduced her mother’s movies on the opening night of the series, recently took out the negatives to Losing Ground and the director’s earlier film, The Cruz Brothers and Miss Malloy, and had new digital masters produced because "it was important for black history, andfeminist history, and because it was my mother's".  The films were then picked up by Milestone Films, an independent distributor that specializes in championing un- and under-seen older works, with a particular focus on films by minority filmmakers (Milestone is the company responsible for bringing such films as Mikhail Kalatozov's I Am Cuba [1964, revived by Milestone in 1995], Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep [1978, brought out by Milestone in 2007], and Kent MacKenzie's The Exiles [1961, Milestoned in 2008]).  They opened Losing Ground at Tell It Like It Is, where its run was extended to the entire duration of the festival, and are now promoting it for further screenings around the world, apparently ahead of an eventual home video release.  Important question: If a film sits in the can, unreleased for a third of a century, and then finally receives a theatrical release, is it eligible for Academy Awards in the year of its eventual release?  If so, I hope Milestone is gearing up for an Oscars campaign, because this movie is sensational!

The film stars the underused Seret Scott as Sara, a City College professor of philosophy married to Victor (Bill Gunn, Ganja and Hess), a slightly older artist who is simultaneously achieving great critical success as a painter and coming into a midlife crisis.  Just as he has made a great sale of a non-representational work to a major museum, he begins to consider that his true calling may be representational work, after all.  As her academic year draws to a close, Sara makes plans to spend the summer researching and writing a dissertation on the ecstatic experience; at the same time, as Victor’s sale is being finalized, he gets the idea that they should rent a summer house in some lower Hudson Valley town (much of the film was shot in Nyack), where he will have loads of lovely architecture, natural landscapes, and beautiful women to paint.  This conflicts with Sara’s plans, since in the pre-internet days in which the film was made, scholarly work like hers was bound to the kind of physical research libraries available in New York City, but not in most towns upstate.  She is angered by his disregard for the needs of her work, but agrees to have a go at doing her work outside the city, driving back to New York as needed.

This arrangement goes alright for awhile, but when Victor becomes overly affectionate toward his beautiful young model, Celia, Sara decides she has had enough and decides that on her next trip to New York, she will take up a previously declined invitation to star in the thesis film of one of her adoring students.  Victor is at first surprised and a little condescending toward her intention to act, but doesn’t fight her.  But he becomes enraged and frustrated when she calls him on the phone and projects that she will be gone filming for five days.

On set she grows close to – and begins to find herself attracted to – Duke (Duane Jones, Night of the Living Dead), the uncle of the student whose film she is acting in.  The film they are shooting is a wordless, balletic adaptation of the traditional ballad “Frankie and Johnny”, telling the story of a married man drawn away from his wife by a dancing girl, and the wife’s efforts, shall we say (in the spirit of avoiding spoilers for either Losing Ground or “Frankie and Johnny”!), to get him back.  The scenes from the film-within-a-film – which is more or less presented to the audience as a ridiculous but heartfelt work by a goofy, joyful young man – are among the highlights of Losing Ground.  Shot on the huge concrete “academic platform” of one of the CUNY campuses, they simultaneously evoke the not necessarily desired minimalism of a student film and an abstracted space outside of reality, and are thus able to function both literally and expressionistically.  The “Frankie and Johnny” film story has obvious parallels to Sara’s own life, and in a series of powerful scenes, the story and themes of the larger film are explored and commented upon through these flamboyantly costumed and choreographed dance scenes.

When Collins’s films opened the Tell It Like It Is series, they were shown in the Walter Reade Theater, Lincoln Center’s largest (it has 268 seats) and oldest cinema, with a live introduction by Nina Collins.  The release was a critical and box office success, resulting in its extension to the end of the month.  By the time of the screening I attended – late in the series around 5 PM on a Friday – the film had been moved over to the much smaller Howard Gilman Theater (seats 85), which was filled to about one quarter of capacity. Not surprisingly for an audience of that size at that time of day and at that point in the run, the reaction was appreciative (laughter and small gasps where appropriate), but not overly vociferous.  But in talking with coworkers and friends over the course of February, responses to the series were positive.  Many acknowledged their unfamiliarity with the films, but expressed great pleasure at the opportunity to expand their horizons, and then genuine appreciation for the films they had seen.  Correspondents who saw Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One and Ganja and Hess, and others who attended screenings of Losing Ground, all expressed a sense of slight dismay that they had not previously been aware of the films they saw, and great admiration for them afterward.

That many of these films have not been available until now is frankly an injustice.  The Film Society of Lincoln Center’s efforts in locating and clearing the prints and digital files to put the series together are to be admired, and it is deeply gratifying that the wonderful people at Milestone are reintroducing the world to Losing Ground and The Cruz Brothers and Miss Malloy; the more so since it appears they will be publishing them on home video.  The opportunity presented by series of this kind for many people to see great works that they might otherwise have missed can be critical in forming new “canons”.  With the success of Tell It Like It Is, there is reason to believe that some of the films shown could at least be said to have been beatified, if not yet canonized all the way.  Hopefully with this newfound attention, many more of them will find new avenues of distribution on DVD, Blu-ray, and digital streaming services.

For additional information on the film, including a synopsis, cast and crew lists, biographies, personal stories about the film’s production and about Kathleen Collins, an excellent interview with Collins, and much more, see Milestone’s exhaustive press release here:

https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0150/7896/files/LosingGroundPK.pdf

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[1] The prize for the first is a bit tangled, given the independent nature of most films made by black women in those days and non-uniform definitions of the term “feature”.  One contender is Collins’s other film, The Cruz Brothers and Miss Malloy (1980), which she intended to be about thirty minutes long, but which grew to fifty – “feature length” by the Academy’s standards, if not your average moviegoer’s!  Another narrative film, Jessie Maple’s Will (which was also recently restored, and also played in Tell It Like It Is!) was released in 1981 and ran to a solidly feature length running time of seventy minutes, so while Collins may have made the first, she may not have, and Losing Ground was, in any event, not it.  All of this is record-book business, however, and must in no way be taken to diminish the merits of any of the films.