Celebrating Short Film | Short & Sweet | Roxy Bar & Screen | London

Text by Bethany Rex

Short & Sweet is an acclaimed, travelling short-film event series - a unique, international community of film lovers who father for lively events of short films and socialising. This winter Short & Sweet returns to London.
Aesthetica spoke to Jack Robinson, London Coordinator of Short and Sweet, to find out more:

BR: Tell us a bit about Short & Sweet. What's the idea behind it?

JR: Founded by my wonderful friend Julia Stephenson in 2006 Short & Sweet has presented some of the most innovative short films, music videos and animations: old films, new films, from established directors to completely undiscovered talent. The intent is to inspire all who attend, expose the best talent and ultimately celebrate film. From its early incarnation as London’s only weekly short film experience, Short & Sweet now screens to packed houses in London, Toronto, Cape Town and soon in New York City.

BR: What is it that you look for in a short film?

JR: We start off with the general criteria: we don’t screen branded shorts and we prefer films under 15mins. From there on, films that are engaging visually or narratively and have something to say really stand out. We always have an open mind and are often surprised by the amazing work we get sent.

BR: How can filmmakers get their films involved with Short & Sweet?

JR: The best way is to email a viewable link to submit@shortandsweet.tv that will get the work in front of the film editors. We will let you know if your film has been selected for London, Toronto and/or Cape Town, then we will require a high res version of your film that you can upload to our ftp. We have also had some fantastic idents created for us by fans like this one by Big Red Button: http://vimeo.com/35504244 and another gem: http://vimeo.com/26144975. Again if filmmakers want to submit a Short & Sweet ident please see the brief on our website (www.shortandsweet.tv) and submit the finished ident to submit@shortandsweet.tv

BR: You launched in Toronto last year, have you got any plans to take the programme elsewhere?

JR: Short & Sweet Toronto is almost 1 year old and still Toronto's only weekly short film evening! Jordan Crute is doing a brilliant job over there, screening short films from international and local talent every Monday night at No One Writes to the Colonel. We are now running in London, Toronto and hosting a special Valentines Day event in Cape Town at The Dream Factory. Over the next couple of years, our mission is to continue to expand our global community. First stop: New York City! For all the info about our forthcoming events and to join our mailing list go to www.shortandweet.tv

BR: You screen Music Videos and Animation as well, what do you think these different forms offer a viewer?

JR: We screen music videos and short animations as well as live action shorts to offer variety and add balance to a program. Each are quite differed but work together really well. Films are selected to take audiences on a journey: creatively, personally and emotionally. We hope to leave audiences both inspired and awestruck.

BR: Are there any short films at the moment that we should look out for?

JR: There are always fantastic films out there that need to be seen. Come to Short & Sweet every Monday in March to catch our selection! We are once again working with BAFTA and screening some of their official short film selection for 2012. One of the films that our audience absolutely loved from our last series of events in August was Dad’s New Girlfriend by Clay Weiner: http://vimeo.com/23693622

Short & Sweet will take place over 4 consecutive Monday evenings at the Roxy Bar & Screen, winner of the best entertainment pub in the UK. 5th, 12th, 19th and 26th March Only. Doors open 6:30pm, films start 7:30pm. Tickets are £3 and selling fast.

www.wegottickets.com/shortandsweet
www.facebook.com/shortandsweetlondon
@shortandsweetUK

DO YOU MAKE SHORT FILM?

The Aesthetica Short Film (ASFF) 2012 is now open for entries! ASFF is an international film festival hosted by Aesthetica Magazine. We're looking for short films of up to 25 minutes for this year's festival, which takes place in the historic city of York, UK from 8 - 11 November.

Films from across a range of genres and styles will be showcased across 15 iconic locations in the city, and in addition to four days of screenings there will be a series of master classes, workshops and networking opportunities with leading industry figures.

The winner will receive £500 and screenings at a number of other UK festivals among other prizes, and the runner-up will receive £250. A shortlist of finalists will be included on the ASFF sampler DVD, which will be distributed with the December 2012 issue of Aesthetica Magazine. Finalists will also be included in an editorial feature in the magazine.

Entry is £15 and the deadline for submissions is 31 May 2012.

Visit www.asff.co.uk for more information and to submit today, or for the latest ASFF 2012 updates, follow us on Twitter: @asffest

Canary Wharf Screen | Art on the Underground | Season 1 Film and Video Umbrella

'Celebration (Cyprus Street)', Melanie Manchot, 2010 (Excerpt) from Film and Video Umbrella on Vimeo.

Canary Wharf Screen is an innovative new motion picture screening programme that will launch at Canary Wharf Tube station at the beginning of next month. The project has been initiated and presented by Art on the Underground and will show some of the best artists' moving image, chosen by four of the UK's leading film organisations and institutions, including new digital commissions and rarely seen films from the last century.

The inaugural 2012 series will be split into four seasons, programmed in collaboration with Film and Video Umbrella, Animate, LUX and British Film Institute (BFI) respectively. Film and Video Umbrella (FVU) will curate the film season from 1 March - 27 May 2012, presenting The City in the City, a series of films by Marcus Coates, Melanie Manchot, Dryden Goodwin and Suki Chan that have been commissioned by the organisation over the last decade. A new site-specific film commission, Hold Your Ground (2012) by Karen Mirza & Brad Butler will also be premièred. Aesthetica has spoken to the artists about the piece and will publish the full interview online later this month.

The selected works in Season 1 of the programme explore how individuals navigate and occupy urban space. Within the environment of Canary Wharf station, surrounded by commuters, the programme considers the phenomenon of the crowd: as a fact of everyday existence, a source of collective identity and belonging and as a possible force and agent of change.

Aesthetica caught up with Steven Bode, Director of Film and Video Umbrella, to find out more:

A: What first prompted Film and Video Umbrella to become involved in the Art on the Underground project?

SB: Well, we were asked! Extremely nicely, as it happens! I’ve always liked the range and ambition of Art on the Underground’s activities, and we were flattered to be chosen as the organisation that would launch this programme of screenings.

A: Working through your back catalogue of artists’ moving-image commissions must have been some challenge. What was the selection process like?

SB: You’re right. There’s a lot of work to choose from! But we narrowed things down by prioritising pieces that had a conceptual or atmospheric fit with the Canary Wharf site, and that responded to its distinctive architectural and social context – its flow of people, its surges of movement, the presence of the crowd. There were works we'd made that met the brief that were ruled out because of format. But there’s a clear thematic logic to the choices, which comes across, I hope.

A: Do you think that, in relation to other stations, Canary Wharf has a specific character as an exhibition space?

SB: Absolutely. It’s like an epic amphitheatre – hugely cinematic. It’s only a stop or two away from "Metropolis" – very imposing, but full of echoes and associations. It’s arena-sized, and with some of the drawbacks that come with that. But it also resonates in other ways that, I think, genuinely add to the works that we’ve chosen.

A: Do the films have different stories or is it all very similar?

SB: The Film and Video Umbrella programme is called The City in the City - a play on Canary Wharf's particular place in the capital and, beyond that, a comment on the myriad communities that make up London. Many of the pieces address the phenomenon of the crowd, which, like the city itself, can look, from the outside, like an undifferentiated mass but, when you go closer, reveals an extraordinary complexity. So: there is very much a continuity of theme, but beneath that a diversity of different stories and approaches.

A: What should we expect from FVU in 2012?

SB: More newly commissioned film pieces by artists such as Simon Martin and Luke Fowler; an ongoing initiative for emerging artists, in collaboration with Jerwood Charitable Foundation, called Tomorrow Never Knows, plus some new ways of producing and disseminating work, using social media and other online platforms. Also coming up is Deep State, a longer companion work to Karen Mirza & Brad Butler’s Hold Your Ground, which premieres at Canary Wharf Screen. It’s an ambitious development of Brad and Karen’s ideas that revolves around a script by the author China Mièville. It will be finished in the Spring.

Season 1 will continue from 1 March - 27 May 2012, followed by Season 2 (Animate Projects) launching in June 2012 and Season 3 (LUX) in September 2012. The final season will launch in December 2012 and will see the BFI open up their archive to showcase a rolling programme of films.

www.tfl.gov.uk/art
www.fvu.co.uk
www.animateprojects.org
www.lux.org.uk
www.bfi.org.uk

All five films can be previewed on the FVU Vimeo page, however, this project is about how the chosen pieces resonate with this unique site so we would recommend you go and see the films for yourself.

Aesthetica in Print

If you only read Aesthetica online, you're missing out. The February/March issue of Aesthetica is out now and offers a diverse range of features from an examination of the diversity and complexity of art produced during the tumultuous decade of the 1980s in Art, Love & Politics in the 1980s, opening 11 February at MCA Chiacgo, a photographic presentation of the Irish Museum of Modern Art's latest opening, Conversations: Photography from the Bank of America Collection. Plus, we recount the story of British design in relation to a comprehensive exhibition opening this spring at the V&A.

If you would like to buy this issue, you can search for your nearest stockist here. Better yet call +44 (0) 1904 629 137 or visit the website to subscribe to Aesthetica for a year and save 20% on the printed magazine.

Conflations of Form | Lynda Benglis | Thomas Dane Gallery | London

Text by Travis Riley

Lynda Benglis’ name has taken on mythical connotations in the art world. Her provocative photographic spread in Artforum in 1974, in which she appeared oiled and naked, brandishing a dildo, and sporting a "macherin"’ pose (Benglis’ own term implying a female form of "machismo") sparked controversy at the time, and has subsequently been awarded verbal accolades by countless artists, not least Cindy Sherman and Vito Acconci. The image is undoubtedly a satire on the machismo of the art world, taking particular reference from Robert Morris’ own machismo 1974 advertisement, but it is also an attempt to generate a simultaneous femininity and masculinity. This is a recurrent theme in Benglis’ art; feeling no need to take sides, she is willing to make a statement that walks the line between the two.

Benglis’ show at Thomas Dane Gallery opened in the gallery’s two spaces earlier this month, coinciding with a talk at the ICA, in which she historically and conceptually reviewed her past work. On show in the gallery is a slim retrospective of her art, containing 19 works made between 1968 and 2009. On the far wall of one of the gallery’s smaller rooms is Benglis’ Hoofers I & II (1971-2). Named after a tap dancing group at Harvard, the two and a half metre tall, slender sculptures imply a set of oversized spirit sticks. The otherwise minimalistic forms of the thin, wall-mounted lines are coated with drips of paint and glitter resulting in a rough, gaudy exterior.

A shorter, but equally thin piece faces the right of the Hoofers, positioned off-centre on the opposite wall. The painting, Untitled (1972) is made with beeswax and resin on wood, and in its tones, green merging through yellow into deep orange, it immediately recalls a rich, moist, fungus. Its disjointed, lumpen surface contributes further to this likeness. The matt smoothness of the wax finish creates a very tangible skin, and contrary to its resemblance, the object is impalpably beautiful. Looking back across the room it is hard now not to see these three objects as tree trunks, one old and moulding, two decorated and ostentatious.

Spreading in the doorway between this room and the next is, Baby Contraband (1969), one of Benglis’ floor paintings. Made of brightly coloured, poured latex, it contains the phosphorescence and transience of an oil slick, but also has a fixed skin, an almost human quality. Benglis’ beguiling explanation of these paintings’ conception at her ICA talk takes us back to moon landings. Looking back at the earth from space, distance is trivialised, and all matter becomes evident simultaneously. The metaphor doesn’t need to be laboured, for the fallen paintings quite literally capture the shifting form of the earth at a distance, matter frozen in time, seen from above.

The gallery’s second space, just down the road from the first, takes the form of one large room. The pieces within are all set to the soundtrack of Female Sensibility (1973), a video work containing two heavily made-up women kissing and caressing against an insipid purple backdrop. The close attention to gesture gives the sense that this event is being enacted for the camera, and prevents the women becoming objects of a gaze, male or otherwise. The soundtrack in question is an appropriated passage from an American AM radio station. The music is country, and the talk all uncomfortably stereotypical in its masculinity, made worse by the later introduction of a preacher sermonising on the creation of Adam and Eve.

Two further floor works are shown in this room. Not contented with flatness, these attempt to rise up from the ground. The first, Night Sherbert A (1968) is a small heap of polyurethane colours, deep oranges, greens, and reds, simultaneously distinct and touching. The second, Eat Meat (1973) is a bronze cast, almost black in colour, piled high and slumped with a much greater sense of weight. Although the resulting forms are quite similar, the distinction between these two pieces is significant in Benglis’ art. Eat Meat represents a movement away from the action, spontaneity, and consequent expressionist reference contained within the previous, poured floor paintings. The bronze contains a much richer art-historical reference, and the casting process implies an established intent rather than a sporadic gesture. The work is still a result of formal experimentation, but has a sculptural fixedness that pervades the later works in the show, particularly Scarab (1990) and Kajal (1980). Two, folded and misshapen metal sculptures hung on the walls of the gallery space.

As the exhibition press material makes explicit, Benglis has borrowed from numerous schools of art, especially expressionism and minimalism. What is not made clear in the release is her simultaneous defiance of these traditions. Benglis’ sculptural forms are dimensionally and materially indebted to minimalism, but then are polluted by expressionistic markings and bodily references. She created large scale, expressive works, but with the addition of dayglo colours and glitter, the machismo of abstract expressionism is forfeited. There is a deliberate blurring between the two artistic ideologies, and consequently also between painting and sculpture. Benglis often finds herself labelled as a feministic artist, but in her Artforum ad she did not pose as a defiant woman, but a representation of both genders. Using the language of feminism she did not only defy the male gaze, but any construct of gaze. In her experiments with form Benglis walks a continual tightrope between structural conventions, creating an art which stands above categorisation.

Lynda Benglis, 10/02/2012 - 17/03/2012, Thomas Dane Gallery, First Floor, 11 Duke Street, St James's, London, SW1Y 6BN. www.thomasdane.com

Aesthetica in Print

If you only read Aesthetica online, you're missing out. The February/March issue of Aesthetica is out now and offers a diverse range of features from an examination of the diversity and complexity of art produced during the tumultuous decade of the 1980s in Art, Love & Politics in the 1980s, opening 11 February at MCA Chiacgo, a photographic presentation of the Irish Museum of Modern Art's latest opening, Conversations: Photography from the Bank of America Collection. Plus, we recount the story of British design in relation to a comprehensive exhibition opening this spring at the V&A.

If you would like to buy this issue, you can search for your nearest stockist here. Better yet call +44 (0) 1904 629 137 or visit the website to subscribe to Aesthetica for a year and save 20% on the printed magazine.

All images copyright Thierry Bal