Dean and Konrad put together a knockout lineup of films tonight, presented to an intimate gathering of art world glitterati in Dean’s studio in Oakland. They ranged from a Melies film of 1906 to an Eric Saks film of just a few years ago, to Dean’s own film–from, what, yesterday?–all bound together by a use of animation or collage. Bill Morrison re-edited a deteriorating silent film from 1926, starring Boris Karlov and Lionel Barrymore, narrative intact, but with a level of physical disintegration that bordered on abstraction, parts of the film like looking in a funhouse mirror, or watching a movie while your house is on fire. There were a few films from the 50’s, cacophonous unions of image and be-bop, precursors to those iTunes effects, but hand-drawn, meticulous, gestural, like cool daddy-o. One of them, called Bop Scotch, fused images of sidewalks, terrazzo, concrete, stone, turning the ground we walk on into a crazy visual poem, man! Crazy!
Dean’s film was the most challenging for me. He made it with Bob, that is, former Mrs. Me, Bob, with whom I’m on very good terms I’m happy to report, but somehow his voice bugged me. Dean’s imagery was fabulous, culled and cropped from classic porn films, and kneaded into a narrative already so complex that Bob’s voice just bugged me, overcomplicating an experience that I was happy having without him. When his words were seen as text, against black, no other imagery, then it worked for me. His writing is so complicated, and so much about a clanging clashing commingling of words, that the clanging and clashing going on with Dean’s imagery was just too much stimulation. In the spirit of the evening’s entertainment, I’m going to mentally re-make Dean’s film and gag Bob and insert inter-titles of Bob’s text, white on black.
Prior to the screening, I chatted with a rather distinguished collector of my work who mentioned that recently, while entertaining a male visitor, the kind of visitor who receives compensation for visiting, on the way to the washroom noticed a piece of mine hanging in the hallway and asked, “Is that a ‘Chris Komater?'” I told him to tell him I work for trade…
—Image from Bill Morrison’s The Mesmerist (2003)