WP 2: Obvious

Cinema/Film

Sandra Gibson, Luis Recoder

To ask about cinema is not the same to ask about film. Cinema is the metaphysical idea (of cinema) and not the phenomenological “thing itself.” It is bereft of materiality in its escape into a dream-like immateriality. Cinema is not film. It is the death of film (from the moment darkness settles in, the materials disappear in the dark fabric of an abysmal masking device). Film is not cinema. Film goes up against the grain (but it has no grain) of cinema. It is the rotting flesh made up of bones and other corporal beasts lurking in the dark, suspended in a murky substance. The organic nature of film is the long intestine (umbilical/spinal chord) unwinding and slithering silently behind our backs (our spines), wrapping its infinite coil (or noose?) ever so swiftly around our necks! The death of film is not the death of cinema. Disembodied/disemboweled from an apparent (though not transparent) darkness, film is cut loose from its immaterial bond (its false disappearance, its fake death) and made to roam the world for the first time. Film can do without cinema once and for all. While cinema pretends to be continued…

Light Spill (Courtesy of Robischon Gallery)

Notes

Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder have exhibited their solo and collaborative performances and installations at the Whitney Museum of American Art (NY), P.S.1 MoMA (NY), The Kitchen (NY), Diapason Gallery (NY), Redcat (LA), Devin Borden Hiram Butler Gallery (Houston), Ballroom Marfa (Marfa), Robischon Gallery (Denver), ICA (London), Barbican Art Gallery (London), Peter Kilchmann Gallery (Zurich), Viennale (Vienna), KW (Berlin), Hartware Medien Kunst Verein (Dortmund), TENT. (Rotterda), Palais des Beaux-Arts (Brussels), La Casa Encendida (Madrid), Museu do Chiado (Portugal), RIXC (Latvia), Image Forum (Tokyo). Their work is in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art (NY), Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia (Madrid), Museum of Contemporary Cinema Foundation (Paris), as well as numerous private collections.  Gibson and Recoder are based in New York City.