Art Review - March Issue - (Page 89)
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SHERWIN The Black Room, 16mm film on DVD, 25 minutes, colour with sound,
dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist Melvin ic has cast his filmic
imagination over a historical and geographical panoply in the past few
years. His subjects have included an aged bjects bjects Jamaican dancehall
star recalling her Kingston glory days Top Legs,, 2005 , and the memories
of Indian plantation workers from a former Dutch colony Stories of
Surinam, 2001 . It is his two Surinam Surinam, art-historical films that
have caused the most ink-spillage to date however. No Show 2004 -spillage
Show explored the curious account of a guide from the Hermitage museum,
giving a tour to soldiers during the Second World War, who perfectly
recounted details of the paintings of Fra Angelico and Rembrandt, even
though the frames that had held the works were in fact empty. The Black
Room 2005 , a sophisticated development of the ideas that underscored his
earlier works, sets the dialogue of an imaginary interview with the
Surrealist writer and film critic Robert Desnos against images of The
Black Room, walls preserved from the Villa Agrippa that stood long ago in
Pompeii. Time, subjective histories, and the power of imagination are all
central to these works and in Desnos, Moti finds the perfect expression
of these themes. Desnos was an advocate of automatic writing, like a
number of the Surrealists, creating poems and stories under hypnosis. It
was a practice that played with both his mental and physical wellbeing,
resulting in sleep deprivation and eating disorders. It was claimed Desnos
was addicted to the process, and, in a sign of his mental erosion, he even
went for fellow writer Paul Eluard with a knife. The Black Room creates a
symbiotic tension between Desnos’s authentic imaginative experience of
creating under hypnosis and Moti’s imaginary interview with the
Surrealist, which is set in 1931 after he had split with Breton’s branch
of Surrealism. Visually, the camera pans slowly across the black expanse of
wall, against which painted shapes float, suspended magically in a void.
Stylistically this was part of a move from a realistic depiction of the
world towards a fantastical space. The film is a revelatory exploration
of what can be seen and what can be spoken about, to paraphrase the
distinction drawn by Michel Foucault. Moti’s interest in how unearthly
experience can be imaginatively mediated has recently focused on the
figure of Katie King, a frequent ghostly visitor to ninteenth-century
séances, and last year he published a book, The Biography of a Phantom,
in which he reconstructs her appearances. TWENTY-NINE-YEAR-OLD DUTCHMAN
MELVIN MOTI Moti p 83-90 Future Greats AR Mar07.i89 89 5/2/07 22:44:22 Warning : Unknown : The session id contains invalid characters, valid
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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Art Review - March Issue
Manifesto
Dispatches
Consumed
Tales from the City
David Lynch
Marcel Dzama
Future Greats
Art Pilgrimage: Moscow
Mixed Media: Moving Images
Mixed Media: Photography
Mixed Media: Digital
Reviews
Book Reviews
On the Town
On the Record
Art Review - March Issue
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