Screening 09.12.24 20:00
Ken Okiishi: Death and the College Student (1999) Telly & Kaspar (2000) Vital Behaviors (2019)
Death and the College Student (1999)
Hi8. Color, sound. 32:18 min.
In what appears to be a college dorm room, Okiishi delivers a freewheeling presentation on the intertextual martyrdoms of James Dean and especially of River Phoenix, tortured film stars who became queer icons in their untimely deaths. Readings are interspersed with half-reenacted scenes from My Own Private Idaho (1991), Gus Van Sant’s classic of New Queer Cinema; and from The Matrix (1999), the blockbuster fantasy starring Keanu Reeves—object of gay desire in Van Sant’s film, now in the role of action star and messianic hero.
"Death and the College Student (1999), Telly & Casper (2000), and (Goodbye to) Manhattan (2010) variously locate the precariousness of the subject within a nascent history of global data streams, feedback loops, and the metabolism of neoliberal capitalism, as portrayed by bodies that have become cognitively and affectively congested. Okiishi’s characters trace some embedded virality and versioning that is symptomatic of paying attention within an attention economy. The artist lolls around in a dorm room, sandwiched between a television playing My Own Private Idaho, The Matrix, and Rebel Without a Cause, and a wall consumed by posters of the same films. Boys hanging around an early internet New York City unwittingly slip in and out of reenactments of the Larry Clark film Kids. Diane Keaton’s character from Woody Allen’s Manhattan spouts a busted script, translated back into English from German by google: “We do not haven ourselves often argued and I, I could my identity longer to a so brilliant, dominating man subordinate.” Each of these works troubles and exposes some potential for unmediated spontaneity within virtual spaces and networks." (Excerpt from a description by Annie Godrey Larmon)
Telly & Casper (2000)
DV. Color, sound, 29:23 min.
Telly & Casper (2000) takes place in an early internet NYC, where affects were just beginning to circulate in the digital / social network way (pre-Facebook, pre-YouTube, etc.). The city was beginning to feel more like a website than a mise-en-scene, as data flowed and redistributed urban experience along lines of legal and real estate "development,” gaining speed and efficacy of control through increasingly precise technologies of collecting data streams. In Telly & Casper, the glitches this produced "in real life" are inputted into urban space and narratives: the Larry Clark/Harmony Korine film KIDS, treated as a cinematic data set, is thrown onto adolescent bodies attempting to become something in these emerging networks of control and redistribution. The genres of remake and appropriation loosen control, as references fail to move in linear, fixed paths, while also being increasingly recorded and re-posted. This is the opening both of the possibility of new subjectivities and the possibility of in-real-time control of consumers and vampires addicted to feedback loops. Telly & Casper offers a view into a transitional state, when the body was starting to “freak out” (and “shut down”) against the pressure of so much social data.
VITAL BEHAVIORS (2019)
DCP. Color, sound. 64 min.
"The plot of Vital Behaviors is simple—the artist (Okiishi) asks the young model (Brian) to reenact Instagram pictures, working backward from the present with no further constraints. More like a Lacanian session than a “durational performance,” the variable-length finds its closure only when the mutual interplay of recognitions hit a climax, more riddling than cathartic.... Or I should rather say that Behaviors has no plot and is a documentation of Brian’s physiological re-composition of gestures from memory as if he were learning how to act (or really, realizing that he can act) in real time. Brian, who is also Okiishi’s actual physical (somatic) trainer, is suddenly the one being trained in the art of balancing recall and impulse.... Brian, as social media trainer, models your future, an unattainable ideal, the index of hotness." (Excerpt from an essay by Felix Bernstein)
More info here and here
The screening takes place in cooperation and with the kind support of Kunstverein München.
Screening
09.12.2024 8 pm
Kunstverein München
Galeriestraße 4
80539 München
Talk
10.12.2024 7 pm
Studio Widmann A_02.30