May 19, 2020
WHAT IS AN ETHICAL MUSEUM?
Consultants and A.i.A. columnists Chen & Lampert discussed some hard truths about the future of art institutions. With special guest Dana Kopel, they proposed solutions to the post-pandemic art world's most urgent problems. Dana is a writer and the former senior editor and publications coordinator at the New Museum, where she helped organize the New Museum Union. The conversation was hosted and moderated by William Smith, former Editor of Art in America.
Alive in St. Louis A CD/Video commission for Issue Project Room’s Isolated Field Recordings Series
Thursday, May 7th at 8pm EST, ISSUE is pleased to present Alive In St. Louis, a new recording, video, and “CD” from filmmaker, video artist, musician, and performer Andrew Lampert. The recording is part of the Isolated Field Recording Series, commissioning artists to produce field recordings to be streamed over the course of this challenging and isolated time.
Note from Andrew Lampert on Alive In St. Louis:
“Music recorded on the run, upon my return to a home I no longer know. St. Louis, my cage for 18 years, a place I instantly longed to leave after first visiting Manhattan at age 9. And now forced back after a couple decades by a cocktail of crises, coronavirus coupled with a broken boiler and burst pipe that wrecked my Brooklyn home, hard drives, and gear. Heartbreak in a time of global wreckage. Construction halted, options diminished, bags packed, an exhausted family and a sedated cat that fled 16 hours by car into the Midwest to requarantine and recalibrate. But for how long? Home school, sketchy virtual employment, suburban seclusion, too much time to sink and stew. In the absence of almost everything, the best stress relief is plucking strings, hitting keys, and making sounds to replace the negativity sparking in my synapses and shooting out my mouth. I may not make music to live, but these days I live to make music.
Alive in St. Louis contains a selection of songs, sounds and noises produced with a guitar, keyboard and electricity, largely captured on Iphone and mostly made alone. Featuring intermittent appearances from family and the radio, insistent reminders of where I am, and how/why I came to be anywhere at all. Even in isolation, I retain my constant collaborator, Zazie, age 7, co-member in the “couch rock” band The New Restaurants, whose tracks you will immediately recognize by their distinctive vocalese. One track includes my oldest friend, Josh Weinstein, playing double bass, recorded together at a safe distance apart in his backyard.
This is a CD. It happens to be presented as a live stream, and is delivered in the form of a video, but trust me, it’s a CD. The images you will see do not make it a video, a CD-Rom, or a laserdisc. They are the liner notes that come in the jewel pack. Your bluetooth enabled laptop, tablet and phone are not smart screens with speakers. They are CD players. You are not at home. This music is being played on the CD player in your car. You are at the wheel, listening and gazing out the window at passing billboards. Maybe you are the passenger noticing that at times the music syncs up with the landscape and everything feels as if somehow it was meant to go together. Keep in mind that this may not be a CD you listen to from start to end, what with all the pit stops along the way to wherever it is you are headed."
Screen Slate’s Jon Dieringer hosted a “historic” and in memoriam conversation on the YouTube video sensation “Double Rainbow” by Paul "Bear" Vasquez with guest commentators and major fans Nellie Killian, Caroline Golum and myself. It was broadcast on Screen Slate’s Twitch account and may still be available for their subscirbers. In any case, go brighten your life and watch the original video now.
Please join us for a celebration of Tony Conrad’s Writings. Published by Primary Information, this is the first collection to survey Conrad’s diverse and expansive writings. Spanning 1961 – 2012, the volume includes 57 pieces, including essays from small press magazines, exhibition catalogues, anthologies, and album liner notes, along with other unpublished works.
Co-hosted by Greene Naftali, Galerie Buchholz, and Primary Information, the event will include an introduction by James Hoff, readings by Constance DeJong and Andrew Lampert, the editors of the collection, and a performance by musician and artist C. Spencer Yeh. The program will be followed by a reception.
Event date: Thursday, February 27, 2020 - 7:00pm
Event address:
McNally Jackson
52 Prince Street
New York, NY 10012
“Film and performance artist Raha Raissnia (Instagram: @raharaissnia) joins us for the New Social Environment #34 with host and fellow moving-image-art maker Andrew Lampert (Instagram: @lamphole) for a conversation on Raha’s recent work, her relationship with collaboration, and working with film as a tactile medium. In response to the imminent crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Brooklyn Rail shifted our operations online. These New Social Environments provide a place to have vibrant conversations in a time of great physical distancing.”
Saturday, November 9, 2019 @7pm
Tony Conrad: Movie Show
@ Light Industry
155 Freeman Street, Brooklyn
Presented with Primary Information
Introduced by Constance DeJong and Andrew Lampert
I want art to stand strong, to display how it manipulates its audience. I want it to take up their expectations, their sense of the world, their predispositions toward the way they think or use their language, and then to use these things perversely, politically, colorfully, “expressively.”
- Tony Conrad, “Dolomite: Having No Trust in Readers”
Tony Conrad (1940–2016) was an artist known for his groundbreaking art, music, films, and videos, although his work doesn’t fit comfortably within any of these disciplines. He eschewed categorization and actively sought to challenge the constraints of media forms, their modes of production, and the relationships of power embedded within them.
Newly published by Primary Information, Writings is the first collection to widely survey this singular polymath’s prolific activity as a writer. Edited by artists Constance DeJong and Andrew Lampert, the book spans the years 1961–2012 and includes fifty-seven pieces: essays originally published in small press magazines, exhibition catalogs, anthologies, and album liner notes, along with other previously unpublished texts. He devotes critical essays both to grand subjects—horology, neurolinguistics, and the historical development of Western music—and more quotidian topics, such as television advertising and camouflage. He also writes on media activism, network communications, censorship, and the political and cultural implications of corporate and global media. Its release has occasioned our show this evening.
Conrad’s writings on cinema form a substantial portion of the anthology, with entries concerning particular works of his like The Flicker, Loose Connection, Articulation of Boolean Algebra for Film Opticals, and the “Yellow Movies,” as well as numerous theoretical forays into the nature of moving image art. Our program surveys Conrad’s film and video output over several decades, marking his shift between these two technologies with a rare screening of Film Feedback, Conrad’s remarkable attempt to create the structures and effects of electronic feedback using celluloid. The screening also includes his final experiment in the flicker film, Straight and Narrow, made with his then-wife Beverly Conrad; early analog videotape documentation of Conrad explaining and displaying his fried and pickled films to an astonished audience at the Carnegie Museum of Art in 1974; his first video, Cycles of 3s and 7s, a digital exercise in computational rhythms; Movie Show, in which Conrad manipulates footage from of his earlier film Articulation of Boolean Algebra for Film Opticals; the rare musical performance video Accordion; and In Line, a psycho-reflexive study in maker-viewer power dynamics.
Straight and Narrow, Beverly and Tony Conrad, 1970, 16mm, 10 mins
“Straight and Narrow is a study in subjective color and visual rhythm. Although it is printed on black and white film, the hypnotic pacing of the images will cause viewers to experience a programmed gamut of hallucinatory color effects. Straight and Narrow uses the flicker phenomenon, not as an end in itself, but as an effectuator of other related phenomena. In this film the colors which are so illusory in The Flicker are visible and under the programmed control of the filmmaker. Also, by using images which alternate in a vibrating flickering schedule, a new impression of motion and texture is created.” - B&TC
Film Feedback, Tony Conrad, 1974, 16mm, 14 mins
“Made with a film-feedback team which I directed at Antioch College. Negative image is shot from a small rear-projection screen, the film comes out of the camera continuously (in the dark room) and is immediately processed, dried, and projected on the screen by the team. What are the qualities of film that may be made visible through feedback?” - TC
Lecture and Screening with Tony Conrad at Carnegie Museum of Art for Independent Film Makers Series, Carnegie Museum of Art Department of Film and Video, 1974, digital projection, 10 mins (excerpt)
Cycles of 3s and 7s, Tony Conrad, 1977, digital projection, 12 mins
“Cycles of 3s and 7s is a doubled statement. First and foremost, it is a commentary on computer art and the role of computers in video. Secondly, its arithmetic project has some bearing on the construction of musical scales. In reclaiming the computer as a performance instrument, I intended that the human operator must compete directly with the computer, doing what the computer does best. The selection of a simple hand calculator was a deliberate denial of the computer aesth/ethic of bigger, faster: computer art must be doable within even the most modest architecture. Cycles of 3s and 7s shows that it is not the answer that ‘counts,’ but the pleasure in getting there. Simple rote calculation is turned into rhythm and song; accuracy of gesture and count become a game. These are ‘stories’ about numbers, the kind machines should like to hear and tell—if they ‘liked.’” - TC
Movie Show, Tony Conrad, 1977, digital projection, 6 mins
“A curiosity, Movie Show looks backward to the era of structural films, particularly Ken Jacobs’s Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son. The clip of film used in this performance is taken from my Articulation of Boolean Algebra for Film Opticals, the work with which I closed out my interest in combinatorial and logical structures.” - TC
Accordion, Tony Conrad, 1981, digital projection, 5 mins
“A man, an accordion, a ladder, and a video camera. It’s as simple as that.” - AL
In Line, Tony Conrad, 1985, digital projection, 7 mins
“How peculiar that people like being an audience because they enjoy their submission to the authority of the program. This ritual of being dominated is a conspiracy with themselves that we enjoy but refuse to acknowledge. ‘Oh, no. I don’t like TV because I’m submissive; it’s because it makes me feel good.’ The programs are always carefully crafted to be sensitive to people’s self-protectiveness, even if they offer a good scare, or a good cry. Well, if this is all true, what happens when, by chance, you submit to a program that refuses to be polite about your closet masochism? That tells all?” - TC
Tickets - $8, available at door.
A collaborative performance with Dawn Kasper and special guests in the space of her exhibit The Wolf and The Head on Fire at Portikus in Frankfurt, Germany on June 28. 2019.
I was the inaugural artist-in-residence at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation in New York City from January through April 2019. I worked on three separate projects while there, two of which were debuted in an exhibition and performance on June 14 & 15 2019.
Homage to a Happy Man : Celebrating Jonas Mekas
Poetry Project @ St. Mark’s Chuch
May 25, 2019
Calling to order the first meeting of the Jonas Mekas Preservation Society at his memorial.
Sunday April 14, 4pm
Emily Harvey Foundation
537 Broadway, 2nd Floor
New York, NY 10002
One of two experimental films directed by Arakawa, For Example (A Critique of Never), 1971, closely follows its protagonist, a homeless boy, as he wanders the streets of downtown New York City. Shot in a documentary style, the camera observes every step of his examination of the constantly shifting relationship between his body and its surroundings. At the time of production, Arakawa and Madeline Gins were deeply engaged in research on the workings of the mind and the body in the process of perceiving the world. The film premiered at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1972.
The screening will be followed by a talk and Q&A with Andrew Lampert, an artist, archivist, and frequent writer on art and cinema. He will illuminate
Arakawa’s film from the context of the late 1960s – 1970s experimental film scene.
Open Ears & Wide Eyes: An Array of Experimental Cinema curated by Andrew Lampert
Presented by New Music Circle at Webster University, Winifred Moore Auditorium
Saturday, April 13th, 2019 @ 8:00 pm
$10
For this event, Lampert will curate a selection of films from the 1950’s – to present day, which incorporate or work heavily influenced by the experimental music world, and will host a post-screening Q+A.
-
Film program:
Robert Breer
FIST FIGHT
1964, 11 minutes, 16mm, color, sound. Courtesy of Canyon Cinema.
Joan Logue
30 SECOND SPOTS: NEW YORK
1984, 14:45 minutes, video, color, sound. Courtesy of EAI
Steina and Woody Vasulka
DON CHERRY
1970, 19:20 minutes, video. Courtesy of EAI
Paul Clipson
LIGHT YEAR
2013, 10 minutes, 16mm, color, sound. Music by Tashi Wada featuring cellists Charles Curtis and Judith Hamann. Courtesy of Canyon Cinema.
Abigail Child
MERCY
1989, 10 minutes, 16mm, color, sound. Featuring vocals by Shelley Hirsch. Courtesy of Canyon Cinema.
Robert Fenz
VERTICAL AIR1996, 28 minutes, 16mm, black and white, sound. Score composed and performed by Wadada Leo Smith.
Variety Show with Jason Fulford
Thursday, February 28
7:00 pm - 9:00 pm
Aperture Gallery and Bookstore
547 West 27th Street, 4th Floor New York, NY
Aperture and Der Greif invite you to a Variety Show hosted by Jason Fulford, guest editor of Der Greif Issue #11.
Featuring performances and games by: Jason Fulford, Andrew Lampert, Sara Magenheimer, Jason Nocito, Gus Powell, Laurel Schwulst, Tamara Shopsin, Denise Wolff
Join Ugly Duckling Presse for a book release celebration with Ed Steck, Robert Fitterman, and Eileen Quinlan. February 22, 2019, 6:30-8 PM at Printed Matter
Eileen Quinlan will read a collaborative text with Ed Steck composed in conversation with her new book, Good Enough, published by Osmos Books.
Ed Steck will read from his new book, An Interface for a Fractal Landscape (UDP, 2019). “Graphs, images, data, and language are elegantly interwoven into a topographic web.” —Fia Backström
Robert Fitterman, Lawrence Giffin, Holly Melgard and Andrew Lampert will perform from Rob’s Word Shop (UDP, 2019) and re-stage an improvised transaction of words and letters based on Fitterman’s durational performance work.
Photo by Lawrence Giffin
Photo by Skuta Helgason
Tosh Berman @ ARTBOOK
November 30, 2018
David Lewis Gallery, NYC
Performance with Dawn Kasper as part of her exhibition
Four Scores (From Zero to Nothing).
Photos by Kathy Halbreich
Sunday, November 2, 5:00 PM
Titus 2 Theater @ Museum of Modern Art, NYC
An introduction and conversation with Marie Losier on the occasion of her massivemid-career retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC.
LIVE with C. Spencer Yeh @ Qubit
Saturday, September 22 at 8PM
1850 Amsterdam Ave, New York, NY
Sharing a bill with bassoonist Dana Jessen, Yeh and Lampert will present the next installment of a collaborative performance first staged at the New Music Circle in St. Louis, MO in Spring 2018. Amplified violin and multiple film projectors are haphazardly paired in a way that purposefully undermines each of the artists' extended histories operating in the realms of "expanded cinema" and "live scoring". As a duo they are constantly thinking about how forms develop and change, or more likely, just freeze at some point but never rot, like a moose fallen into an icy lake. This is not a movie with music. It's a town hall meeting. It's a $17 cocktail. It's a novel about a carpenter who is afraid to turn 33. It's a blanket covered in cat hair. It's a stain that no dry cleaner can remove. It's a hot soda on a cold day. It's a #4 pencil. It's acrylic paint on aluminum. It's an Aunt Annie's Pretzel made by Uncle Phil. It's that other stuff that isn't lint. It's Rosh Hashanah holiday hours. It's yesterday's newspaper with tomorrow's news. It's a digital remaster of the bootleg recording of The Who's 1979 concert in Cincinnati where the audience was trampled pressed on 180-gram vinyl and it comes with a bonus DVD of the WKRP episode titled "In Concert" that poignantly references this tragic event. It's Ess-A-Bagel at the old location on 1st Avenue when it was still good. It's a 51-pound suitcase that you have to pay an extra $25 for because the person helping you is being a jerk. It's a hard way to make a living, but a good way to have fun.
Saturday, September 9 @ 3PM
3A Gallery, 629 E. 6 Street
New York, NY 10009
AS OPPOSED TO GRAVITY, a “contracted cinema” performance created in response to the exhibit TITLE by Jeff Preiss.
Hey Jeff,
Writing ahead of time about something that I won't necessarily do, at least not as described, always gives me pause. I don't want to reveal too much, yet at the same time realize that descriptive information helps entice a potential audience to discover, alongside me, what I'm doing. So, here it is:
Title: As Opposed To Gravity
Year: 2018
Length: Unknown
This performance will be presented alongside another piece of audio:
Title: What's Your Favorite Movie? (Adolfas Mekas)
Year: 2010
Length: 2:37
I'm not trying to be mysterious, it's just that what I'll do is speculative until it happens. A plan exists, but the reality of things is that I can't entirely predict the outcome, or how it will be experienced by those of us in the gallery, since we are all in it together. I'm committed to not knowing too much in advance about the results of my ideas.
In lieu of a better description, I might mention that As Opposed To Gravity is site-specific and made in direct response to your installation. In fact it includes your footage, which will be projected on 16mm. Your exhibit is concerned with the loop, the circle, the perimeter, and what I'm thinking to do focuses on the center, the space between. I'll be in the middle. That's all I can really think of to say other than that I'll probably never do this piece again after the 3A show. Maybe that is what we should be telling people.
Thanks again,
A.
The screening series Tarantula: On Film concludes on August 26, 2018 at 2PM at the Woody Guthrie Center. We’ll be screening Ken Jacobs’s underground classic Blonde Cobra (1963) starring Jack Smith, Bruce Conner’s mini-epic Permian Strata (1969) and Dylan's own entry into experimental filmmaking, his directorial debut Eat the Document (1972). Joining us for a post-screening discussion will be filmmaker and preservationist Andrew Lampert who, in recent months, has worked on restoring the film footage shot by D.A. Pennebaker featured in Eat the Document. For more information and a full description of films visit woodyguthriecenter.org Co-presented with Magic City Books
A screening and book launch event at Anthology Film Archives to celebrate the release of MANUEL DELANDA: ISM ISM on J&L Books.
