A New Romantic T.V. Sound
The reason that everyone tries to sell to teenagers is that teenagers are HUNGRY PEOPLE. And just as insecure, self-conscious people often make wildly good art, so do hungry people make good curators. We are all experts at giving the thing we want most. So what would happen if a teenager applied her channel-surfing skills to programming? Astria Suparak was nineteen when she started showing movies at her college, Pratt in Brooklyn. She had spent her first years in NY majoring in drawing and quietly watching the moves of curators like Bradley Eros and Brian Frye. She wondered if she could be their peer, as a very young woman without a film background. She decided that she could not because let’s face it, she was totally hot and had nothing and therefore she was very likely to get fucked if she risked having idols. So she aspired instead to the dj style, looking for the arc of the set, feeling the audience energy, and staying on the fly with it all. At age twenty-four Astria has curated all over the U.S. and Europe, testing out new programs at NY’s best venues and then touring with them like a kid with a band. She comes to you: museums and galleries, universities, independent/underground film festivals and micro-cinemas, as well as public places like bars, community centers, and living rooms. Just imagine what the young girls who watch her shows think – hunger, desire and the power to choose are suddenly instruments like guitars and video cameras. And it all starts with a list in a diary. Here Astria gives us her lists, four programs she’s curated in the last few years and the feelings that were in her heart and soul when she was making them.
DIRGES AND STURGEONS
Curated for Anthology Film Archives, NYC.
YACHT: Young Artists Challenge High Technology (for a Total eclipse of the heart). These new videos from America and Europe have tying threads of: the use of high (?) technology or the idea of “future” in a lo-fi way, dopplegang/replication, instant nostalgia as the residue of planned obsolescence, states of limbo. Plus lately I’ve been thinking about mating. Of the incessant struggle to be a self-sufficient, independent, biospheric thing, then seeing someone hot and wanting ass. And then when that doesn’t work: the introduction of another that is based on yourself: rearing children, cloning. Perpetuation and conditioning to perfection, like practicing a script.
Seth Price. GAME HEAVEN. 2001
Animal Charm. SLOW GIN SOUL STALLION/LIGHTFOOT FEVER. 1996.
Lawrence Elbert. WHITNEY: MAMA’S LITTLE BABY. 2000.
Pierre Yves Clouin. THE LITTLE BIG. 1999.
Jacqueline Goss. THE 100TH UNDONE. 2001.
Miranda July. GETTING STRONGER EVERY DAY. 2001.
Bjorn Melhus. DAS ZAUBERGLAS. 1999.
Seth Price. INDUSTRIAL SYNTH. 2001.
SOME KIND OF LOVING
Curated for Joanie 4 Jackie’s Co-Star Series.
I was thrilled to be able to reach young girls through Joanie 4 Jackie, to reach what I was when I first heard of what was then called Big Miss Moviola: angsty Southern Californian teen desperately trying to find ANYTHING different from clean Hollywood fakery, and stumbling across punk rock’s d.i.y. ethos, feminism, self-determination and sexuality. The works in SOME KIND OF LOVING are what would have helped me in my 1980s – early ‘90s childhood and adolescence: evidence of women’s ambivalence, apathy, passion and pain towards identity and sexuality, memories and fantasy. Plus good raw cunnilingus. The works have a rough home-movie aesthetic so the viewers can figure out how to make their own movies.
(current touring program differs from tape)
Jennifer Reeder. LULLABY. 1999.
Miranda July. THE DRIFTERS. 2002. (Audio)
Kirsten Stoltmann. SELF-REFLECTING. 1998.
Karen Yasinsky. DROP THAT BABY AGAIN. 1998.
Jane Gang. FINE LINES. 1998.
Miranda July. ATLANTA. 1996.
Stephanie Barber. LETTERS, NOTES. 2000.
Peggy Ahwesh. MARTINA’S PLAYHOUSE. 1989.
Miranda July. THE DRIFTERS. 2002. (Audio)
KEEP IN TOUCH!
Curated with Lauren Cornell for
The New York Underground Film Festival2002.
Have you ever danced at home alone, in front of a mirror? Have you ever continued a kiss that you were bored of? Or thought about having a kid, out of the sheer curiosity with what it would look like? These works are all so brazenly aware of their own representation, those fake gestures symbolizing love, and the self-proclaimed identity of “artist.” On the other hand, this is a Science Fair. We’re interested in breeding and practicing our (dance) moves until perfection is reached, and by golly you’re either with us or against us. Young people, always forward!
Matthew Wolf. DEAR AUNTIE. 2002.
Zakery Weiss. UNTITLED. 2001.
Seth Price. TRIUMF. 2000.
Leslie Thornton. HAVE A NICE DAY ALONE. 2001.
Jim Finn. EL GUERO. 2001.
Miranda July. THE DRIFTERS. 2002. (Audio)
Jacqueline Goss. THE 100TH UNDONE. 2001.
Monsieur Delmotte. CE QUI EST FAIT LE MAL EST FAIT. 1998.
Stephanie Barber. DOGS. 2000.
Miranda July. THE DRIFTERS. 2002. (Audio).
Bjorn Melhus. NO SUNSHINE. 1998.
A new romantic t.v. sound
Curated for The New York Underground Film Festival ’01.
I’ve been re-learning the 1980s, a time that I was too young to think properly. Twenty years of knowing Billy Jean was not Michael J’s lover, how suburban-home brown carpet gets matted, the density of a Capri Sun and the text commands for pre-video computer games. And when I put together this program I was re-listening to music that I grew up with and thinking about New Wave (specifically the British New Romantics) – how it was electronic and the attitude was lukewarm and distant, but the lyrics/hair/clothing were romantic and fluffy. There is also an influence of 1960s body-based performance art as another extension of the self-reflective theme. The aesthetic for the program was stripped-down, raw and grainy, like Sixties minimalist art blended with big Eighties video pixels. The title comes from a Duran Duran song.
Gedi Sibony. OUT TO REACH. 2000.
Kirsten Stoltmann. SELF-REFLECTING. 1998.
Zakery Weiss. COMMUNICATION. 2000.
Kirsten Stoltmann. TRUE CONFESSIONS OF AN ARTIST. 1994.
Karen Yasinsky. DROP THAT BABY AGAIN. 1998.
Cheryl Weaver. PEDESTRIAN ERRORS. 2000.
Tony Conrad. THE CLANDESTINE NAUTICAL CARNALITY
OF SHORT I. 2000.
Dara Greenwald. BOUNCING IN THE CORNER #36DDD. 1999.
Seth Price. AMERICAN GRAFFITY. 2001.
Stephanie Barber. LETTERS, NOTES. 2000.
Naomi Uman. PRIVATE MOVIE. 2000.
Brian Frye. IN LOVE WITH LOVE. 2000.
Regions: New York