the livingblog

As you might recall from a previous livingblog post, Lynn was featured in this year’s futurist-inspired Performa biennial of new and time-based media. Her piece Customized Marinetti (2009), which features en-masse, in-place jogging, moaning, and matching t-shirts emblazoned with the phrase IO NON SONO MARINETTI (I am not Marinetti), among other things, was commissioned specifically for the festival as part of Futurist Life Redux. According to the Performa website,

Inspired by the lost Futurist film Vita Futurista (Futurist Life, 1916), Futurist Life Redux is a new film featuring contributions by an incredible group of contemporary film and video artists—Trisha Baga, chameckilerner, Martha Colburn, Ben Coonley, George Kuchar, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Shana Moulton, Shannon Plumb, Aida Ruilova, Matthew Silver and Shoval Zohar (The Future), and Michael Smith—re-imagining the eleven segments of the original Futurist Life for the twenty-first century.

Futurist Life Redux was programmed by film archivist Andrew Lampert from the Anthology Film Archives and Performa curator Lana Wilson and acts as a coda to the Anthology Film Archives’ special futurist film program, “The Polyexpressive Symphony”. Film had a very specific role in the Futurist movement, according to an artforum.com article from November 2:

Seeking to liberate film from those narrative set pieces still beholden to the theater, the Futurists clamored for a cinema indebted solely to its own visual and aesthetic qualities. Those qualities—violent jumps of time and space, flux and dynamic mobility, conflations of different senses in one aesthetic idiom—already reflected, even epitomized, profoundly Futurist imperatives. In theory, film constituted the “ideal” art with which the Futurists would slay the musty conventions of “passéiste” culture.

Between this commission and the Media Modes Conference where a recent MA presented her thesis on Lynn, mid-November was a cornucopia of Lynn’s work in New York City. But wait- there’s more! Now showing at PS 1 as of November 1, 100 Years (version #2, ps1, nov 2009) features seven, that’s right, seven, images of Roberta Breitmore (1974-78), Which makes sense, because the exhibition represents ” influential moments in the past century of performance art history”. The exhibition is on view until April 2010, so you can’t use holiday chaos as an excuse not to see it. Make it a New Year’s resolution, if you must.