appropriation 26 výsledků

appropriation

It was a bizarre spectacle based on the lack of artistic talent of the main actors who were staging awkward aesthetics of clumsiness they found in themselves or models such as Stalin, Hitler, Miki Volek (a Czech rock'n'roll singer), Gary Glitter, The Olympic music group. Czech pop music and TV shows, our parents, Czech art historians, poets and many others. Anyone could become an object of ridicule and disgrace.
The „feature“ film Floodlit Death was made in 2000 by Ivan Mečl and Kakalík (David Kalika) in the production of TeleDVision of the Divus publishing house. Actors and mostly visual artists came from the Divus circle. The film shows the Prague ferocity in the 90ies with a typical period background – advertising agencies, mafia and the Persian Gulf War veterans. Not only the main character of a detective cannot deny the affinity to Vít Soukup's films.
In their own words, the text is, “the work of ANON. We are a collective of ‘Other.’ Some of us are sex workers, some immigrants, many of us queer. There are even a few privileged white cucks amongst us. Never the less, ANON is largely the work and brainchild of people of color (PoC). Our social disciplines are as varied as our identities: from journalists to dominatrixes. ANON are the intellectual cousins of #BlackLivesMatter divorced from liberalism.”
I have made the whole video in one day from the roof of the studio of video art at the Academy of Arts in Prague. I did not mean to film any art, I more or less only wanted to play with the camera.I had my headphones on and was listening to Badalamenti´s music composed for the serial Twin Peaks.
What is shared, what is private and what are the possibilities of self-presentation in contemporary screen based culture? Adopting conventions of a YouTube vlog, Magdalena’s teenage diary entries surface raw and seemingly unedited. Stored in a number of disused mobile phones; songs, gifs, low-fi images and movies weave into and trail off in unfinished stories, anecdotes, soundbites and faces from childhood, where experience of mental illness is quickly interrupted by pop lyrics.
“Our pseudo-lives were nothing but speech bubbles. We desecrated everything. […] We ground [it all] to dust,” says Vít Soukup as the pessimist Drudge in the series Old Mates. His approach to films was similar. He made works full of ironic references to high culture and low, and enjoyed using clichés in their raw state.
Vít Soukup shot Old Mates and The Silver Trail (1993) as two parts of an imaginary television series. Both stories are introduced by a television announcer who, in a serious tone, presents a chaotic tangle of banal interpersonal intrigue, as was the custom before genre-based socialist television series. Old Malina comes to visit his resigned friend Drudge, who denounces the vanity of life as a former member of the “coyote” generation of the nineties, deconstructed by postmodernism.