Review
LEBENSRAUM/LIFESPACE: SPECTACLE OF NOISE
Written and directed by Istvan Kantor
Screening
Friday May 6
EMMedia
Workshop
Saturday May 7
EMMedia
Hungarian-born media artist Istvan Kantor, better known as Monty Cantsin, is perhaps best known for the blood paintings he’s "donated" to the National Gallery of Canada, The Ludwig Museum in Cologne and New York’s Museum of Modern Art. These large slashed and dashed Xs, spattered on the walls in Kantor’s own precious life-blood, generated significant media attention, and Kantor found himself arrested and facing criminal charges.
As a six-year-old in Budapest, he pointed a wooden toy gun, made by his father, at oncoming Soviet tanks. Kantor regards this early childhood action as his first true work of art. A founder of the Neoist movement, Kantor emigrated from Hungary in 1976. His early Neoist festivals centred on collective living, music and performance-art. Shared meals were prepared and consumed mixed with the participant’s own blood. (Not something you’d probably want to repeat in this day and age.) His confrontational, iconoclastic work has always challenged authority and systems of power while dealing with revolutions and the relationship between the human and the technological. He has participated in major international performance events the world over, and his work has been compared to everyone from Marcel Duchamp and Charles Manson to Franz Kafka and John Cage. He has also produced records of arty, tongue-in-cheek pop music and, more recently, received the Governor Generals Award for Video Art.
Kantor’s most recent production, Lebensraum/ Lifespace: Spectacle of Noise, represents his first feature-length video. His life as a working artist is transposed into a brutal, hyper-Orwellian vision of a future where common amenities like heat and running water have become drug-like commodities for the under classes. Lebensraum assaults the viewer with an unrelenting barrage of images, some autobiographical and some historical. The sounds of typing, writing, breathing and wheezing create an industrial-strength soundscape that contributes to the general informational overload. Onscreen text rapidly exposits how the population of Capital City is controlled and under the surveillance of RST (Robotic Surveillance Transmission). Yogaborg Kantor practices "Transcendental Fuck-off Meditation" while supporting a rag-tag resistance known as TRS (Transmission Research Society) whose main activity seems to be jarring, messy cyborg-sex rituals that somehow support their doomed insurrection against the dictatorial forces.
The assaultive, bludgeoning nature of the repetitive images and noises makes for difficult viewing, battering both the brain and the retinae into a kind of numb resignation. This was, undoubtedly, Kantor’s original intent and on that level, the video is successful. At the end of it all, I felt drained, grimy and a little bit used. Kantor’s sense of humour, which I’ve been fortunate enough to witness first hand, is not entirely absent, although it may be the only subtle element in the entire piece.
Should this leave you wanting more, EMMedia will host a workshop that promises a hands on, crash course in Kantor’s theory and practice. According to the EMMedia, "If you like jerky camera shots from urban guerilla movies, jumpcuts and bad acting" or " If you have a taste for noisy, convulsive sequences…this workshop is what you were waiting for!"
Admission is free or by donation and no experience is required. |
Copyright ©2005 FFWD. All rights reserved.