Odpoledne

Breakfast in May - Houdini is a teenager

Ahh, those were the days.

Picking gum

out of

your braces. Going through

those

odd changes-

our pet/friend Houdini is in a pubescent stage himself. 

Second Open Call for those interested in being a part of ’ Harmonizing the Endogenous’- A Documentary on the Energy Healer Sharelle Roth and her clients. Your first treatment is FREE. Then simply tell your experience to yours truly- in a Video or Audio Testimonial. This is your chance to be a part of a metaphysically powerful experience. Message me- I am starting up the interviews on Sundays again, starting first week of June, and ending last week of June xxo.

(Treatments and Video Testimonials take place in Los Angeles & North Hollywood CA)

Vitamin Wig C - BD&D Antiques I

Vitamin Wig C - Dark Twain music video

Squirt my Boundaries

an Interdisciplinary Seminar

a syllabus by gc erenberg

Class Overview

Departing from a visual discourse, this seminar will provide Students with an explorative mental space, to create new theories and strengths within their studies and work. This Two-Semester Seminar will encourage unconventional methods and theories within Text, Video/Film, Installation, Sound, and Photographic works. Within the Nature of the Philosophical state of Materiality; we will motivate one another by proposing new questions, and revealing hidden curiosities through different forms of storytelling. Adventures in unconventional methods of specific fiction and non-fictional works will lead us all to a discovery; not just within respect to personal political truths, but within a much larger dialogue concerning the impact of Cinema, Linguistics, and Gender Ideologies. These dialogues will address the mythic dimensions of transformative process, testing the locks of the thinker’s own boundaries. The general focus of this class will be on producing work that incorporates daily activities, dreams and affirmations.

Throughout the history of art, there have been isolated and competitive forces centered more on financing sectors that exploit new forms of commodities, which in turn produce overly critical historical surveys. Throughout the history of survival, our species (including animals) have always learned to adapt, especially within an unprecedented experience and even at times, at moments of desperation. Public and private institutions, galleries, and ‘art collectives’ propose to challenge these ideas; yet nonetheless, students are paying too much to be a part of in the end. Artists working within the constructs of class, poverty and gender codes often face particular challenges, as they negotiate the gap between the idea/ideals of public domain. The internet has taken us into yet another realm of this confessional space, yet where do we go from there?

Whether it be writing, video/film, photography, horticulture, or performative works and sound; participants will be encouraged to embrace the value and potentiality of that form, and the significance of how the perspective of the artist is not always understood universally. Through various discourses in non-commercial artworks, screenings and working methods; we  will incorporate various ways in which the preservation and support of ones perspective can build an archive concerning other ‘survivors’ and ‘artists’ who have created recognizable (and at one time banned) diaristic and political work. Students studies and final projects will be encouraged to create new horizons of their own artistic language, that may not always be of a pre-meditative process.

Work Plan/Specific Activities

Students will be required to take notes during each screening as well as for the Readings. Notes from class will be due bi-weekly and will count as 40% of  the final grade. Class Discussions and Final Projects account for 60% of final grade. We will review the works of artists such as  Kriti Arora,  Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Krishnaraj Chonat, Bharti Kher and John O’ Reilly. Readings will include excerpts from work by Kathy Acker, Amitai Etzioni, Rene Gremaux, Gunter Grass, Gilbert Herdt, Bohumil Hrabal, Walter Mosley, Bambi Schieffelin, and others. Films screened will include work by Pietro Germi, Wiktor Grodecki, Hyoryu Kyoshitsu, Dusan Makavejev, Jiri Menzel, Jana Sevcikova, Jan Svankmajer, Kidlat Tahimik and others; whose discourse has inspired and granted room for growth and courage within their own community, and the lives of so many others across the world.   By the end of this Two-Semester Course, a multi-functional Symposium/Exhibition will be held on campus, featuring the works and philosophies produced by Students.

Outcome/Impact of Activities

Students will learn to take control of their own creative theories and realize the impact of their own voice. If institutions today can be at times generalized as profiting margins for people not related to any kind of art ‘discussion’ (i.e. bankers, collectors, the wealthy), then perhaps a more affordable education could become a globally available source, not just within the United States, but within other regions of the world as well. This would be carried through within the studio environment, outdoor settings, and via classroom discussions, screenings and readings. Creative practices need to be available for all levels of education, and accordingly deal with global issues, commonalities, human compassion, as well as form new concepts that shape a realistic understanding of re-creating our histories through creative impulse.

Provisional Schedule

Semester I

Week One

Introduction & Strategies.

Screening:  Au Hasard Balthazar (Criterion Collection) (1966), Robert Bresson (Director), 95 mins

Readings 

Too Loud a Solitude, Bohumil Hrabal

Week Two

Screening:   Withnail & I (Criterion Collection) (1986), Bruce Robinson (Director), 108 mins

Readings 

Finish Reading Too Loud a Solitude

Week Three

Screening:  Capricious Summer (Facets) (1967), Jiri Menzel (Director), 74 mins

Begin first-draft of Final Essay

Week Four

Screening: Rodrigo D (Kino Video) (1989), Victor Gaviria (Director), 92 mins

Readings

Amitai Etzioni, The Monochrome Society, pgs 102-140

Week Five

Screening:  101 Reykjavik (Wellspring) (2000), Baltasar Kormakur (Director), 90 mins

Readings

From the book Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Culture and History

                 Rene Gremaux, pgs 241-248

      Gilbert Herdt, pgs 419-430

Continue working on First Draft of Final Essay

Week Six

Screening :  NO SCREENING

Dialogue & Lecture on Magicians and Funerary Shrines in Southeastern Nigeria.

Jill Salmons, Martial Arts of the Annang

Readings 

Teresa Barker, Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys; Chapter 1: The Road not Taken, pgs 4-7 & 12-14

First Draft of Final Essay Due

Week Seven

Screening: Old Believers (Facets Video) (1984-2001), Jana Sevcikova (Director), 48 mins.

Readings 

Gunter Grass, Local Anaesthetic; pgs 3-32

First Draft Essay Revisions (in class)

Take your essay and turn it into a visual representation of those thoughts,

theories and anxieties thus far. This will be the skeleton of your final project for Semester I

Week Eight

Screening:  Dusan Makavejev (Director), Sweet Movie (1974), 8 mins

Readings

Kathy Acker, Don Quixote;pgs 7-37

Week Nine

Screening:  NO SCREENING

Lecture on works by David Finn, Michael Leahy, Eva Hesse, Alphonso Lisk-Carew

Readings 

Schieffelin, Bambi and Miki Makihara, ed. (2007). Consequences of Contact: Language Ideologies and Sociocultural Transformations in Pacific Societies. Oxfordshire: Oxford University Press.ISBN 978-0-19-532498-3

Week Ten

Screening: O mikros Otik (Little Otik), Zeitgeist Video, (2000), Jan Svankmajer (Director), 132 mins

Readings 

Anais Nin, House of Incest

Final Project Due

Week Eleven

Final Class

Tea & Indian Food 

Screening:  Screening: Divorzio All’Italiana (Divorce Italian Style) (1961), Pietro Germi (Director)

Semester II

Week One

Screening: Yossi & Jagger (Lama Films) (2002), Eyton Fox (Director), 65 mins

Readings

Jean-Paul Sartre, Troubled Sleep; pgs 3-99

Week Two

Screening: Satanico Pandemonium (Mondo Macabra) (1975), Gilberto Martinez Solares, 87 mins

Readings

Finish Reading excerpt from Jean-Paul Sartre’s Troubled Sleep

Week Three

Studio Visits Part One

Readings

Walter Mosley, Life out of Context; pgs 5-48

Week Four

Studio Visits Part Two

Begin Outline/Draft for Final Project

Week Five

Screening:  Mababangong Bangungot (The Perfumed Nightmare) (1977), Kidlat Tahimik (Director)

Week Six

Screening: Údolí včel (Valley of the Bees) (1967), František Vláčil (Director)

Ilya Kabakov, ‘On Emptiness’, Between Spring & Summer: Soviet Conceptual Art in the era of Late Communism

Week Seven

Screening: Ostre Sledovane Vlaky (Criterion Collection) (1966), Jiri Menzel (Director), 93 mins.

Readings 

David A. Ross, ‘Notes for an Exhibition’, Between Spring & Summer: Soviet Conceptual Art in the era of Late Communism.  

Outline/Draft for Final Project Due

Week Eight

Screening :  Drifting Classroom (Emotion Video) (1987), Hyoryu Kyoshitsu

Readings

Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting; Chapter 5: Litost,

pgs 119-122 & 134-142

Revisions and Discussion on Final Project Papers & Outlines

Week Nine

Screening: Body Without Soul (MIROFILMS) (1996), Wiktor Grodecki (Director)

Final Project Exhibition Installation

Week Ten

Final Class

Tea & Israeli Snacks

Screening: Die Legende von Paul and Paula (1973), Heiner Carow (Director)

AT the 2008 Telluride Film Festival, the madcap philosopher and psychoanalyst Slavoj Zizek presented Dusan Makavejev’s 1968 film“Innocence Unprotected” as part of a program of personal favorites: a shout-out from the Balkans’ current international superstar of intellectual provocation to his most illustrious predecessor.

Enlarge This Image

Ged Clarke and Tarsem Singh/Roadside Attractions

Lee Pace and Catinca Untaru in one of the swashbuckling scenes in “The Fall,” a film with two parallel stories.

Mr. Makavejev, now 76, hasn’t made a major feature since “Gorilla Bathes at Noon” in 1993. But for several years in the late ’60s and early ’70s, he was an art-house and film festival favorite whose blend of sexual frankness and political critique, served up with a strong dose of black humor, kept Western audiences enthralled and Eastern bloc censors in a state of simmering outrage.

Read the Whole Article HERE

In the current season of events commemorating the 40th anniversary of 1968 and its global cultural shocks, an overarching irony has been raised: was censorship actually a creative influence on communist bloc film-makers? After all, look at the eminent directors it produced: not just Czechs such as Jiri Menzel and Milos Forman but also Poland’s Andrzej Wajda, Roman Polanski and Krzysztof Kieslowski, Hungary’s Istvan Szabo and Miklos Jancso, Russia’s Andrei Tarkovsky… the list goes on.

One of them, the former Czech new wave director Jiri Menzel takes the long view: “Censorship was not invented by the communists. Through all cultural history there is censorship. Of course, if you are not adult enough, your parents tell you what you can do or what you can say, and when you are an adult, you know for yourself and you don’t need parents to tell you. Censorship is the parents. Now, unfortunately society is not adult enough, and that’s a problem. We lose our adults too early. Every one of us has their own censorship because censorship is another name for respect for other people. Or responsibility.”

READ ENTIRE INTERVIEW HERE