The Basis of Make-Up (III)
shows 38 of Heinz Emigholz’s notebooks and sketchbooks
from 1996 to 2004: cinematic studies of marble inlays
on the memorial slabs in the Johannes Cathedral in
Valetta, Malta in 2004; of Skull Rock in Joshua Tree
Desert in California, which gave the series its title;
of Cerro Castellan in Big Bend National Park in Texas;
of a rock shop in Quartzsite, Arizona that sells remnants
from the glass factory in Henryetta as “gems
from Mexico”; scenes from Bartlesville in Oklahoma;
a tree covered with shoes on Highway 62 in California
in 2002; and, in Gabriele D’Annunzio’s
Villa Cargnacco in Gardone, Italy in 1997, the mask
merchant’s room, the reliquary room, the workshop,
the globe room, the Apollinian veranda, the room of
the Cheli, and the Zambracca.
Miscellanea (III) shows
the portal, designed by Louis H. Sullivan, to the
Chicago Stock Exchange on Monroe Street in Chicago,
which was erected in 1894 and torn down in 1972; ruins
of a glass factory in Henryetta, Oklahoma, from which
Bruce Goff bought the colorful pieces of glass he
often used; a railway bridge over a creek in the desert
on Highway 62; the General Patton Memorial Museum
on Interstate Highway 10 and an intersection in Twentynine
Palms, California; “Gateway West”—the
Mexican border—and City Hall in El Paso, New
Mexico; a study of downtown Oklahoma City and the
national memorial designed by Hans Butzer in honor
of the people killed in the bombing of the Murrah
Building on April 19, 1995; the Community Center designed
by William Wesley Peters in 1982 and Frank Lloyd Wright’s
Price Tower from 1956 in Bartlesville, Oklahoma; the
Tower and geodesic Gold Dome that Robert B. Roloff
built in 1958 in Oklahoma City from Buckminster Fuller’s
plans; the jungle gym Bruce Goff built in Bartlesville,
Oklahoma in 1963 for children; a Lockheed T-33, the
training version of the first twin-jet U.S. fighter
plane, built on a German model, exhibited as a sculpture
in front of the Center of Commerce in Del Rio, Texas;
three buildings by Frank Lloyd Wright from the 1920s,
in which Bruce Goff had a hand; the oldest cement
fence in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the oldest brick silo near
Bartlesville, and a concrete schoolhouse from the
1920s in Dewey, Oklahoma; the burial sites of Louis
H. Sullivan and Bruce Goff in Graceland Cemetery in
Chicago; the warship “Puglia” built into
a mountain slope on the grounds of Gabriele d’Annunzio’s
mausoleum, the “Vittoriale” in Gardone
on Lake Garda –his body and those of ten loyal
followers in sarcophagi on marble steles, high above
Lake Garda.
The footage from the U.S. was taken in April and May
2002 during the filming of Goff in the Desert;
the footage from the “Vittoriale” is from
March 24, 1997 in preparation for the project D’Annunzio’s
Cave.
“Graz, March 27, 2004. Unfortunately, and it
almost seems out of defiance, people who use words
professionally often insist on unexamined relations
between the eye and reality: here the eye, and thus
“me,” there reality, what confronts me.
Here the camera, also “me,” there the
object of my viewing. Christopher Isherwood’s
I Am a Camera has consequently been repeated
with as much misunderstanding as has Louis Sullivan’s
“Form ever follows function.” Would anyone
counter-assert that he is a fountain pen or a computer,
just because he cannot write? No, I “am”
not a camera, and no person “is” one.
The answer comes: “I Am a Camera” is only
a metaphor, and the camera is an unbiased, incorruptible,
perhaps a completely “dispassionate” instrument
of documentation held at arm’s length. Cultural
researchers and curating theorists currently like
it with the variant “clicking the shutter.”
Practiced as a business, the interpretation of the
“unconscious” is somehow cheaper than
composing. Much has already been written elsewhere
about the impertinent equating of the eye and the
camera.
That a cinematic specialized jargon sees an authentic
touch in certain shaky images (directly transmitted
from the brain of one of the protagonists) and gives
it the name “subjective camera” is more
an indication of a manipulative set of tools. As a
matter of fact, the camera is located in the space
between the cinematographer and the world. So it is
really two spaces: the space between the brain/eye
of the photographer and the camera’s field of
vision (which does not consist solely of a lens, but
also of an artificial “retina”) and the
space between this technical field of vision as a
recording instrument and the arrangement of the reality
that is captured. On both sides in the present interactions
of this relational network, space is actively and
physically made fluid. Space is melted down through
the work of the gaze and, in the moment of taking
the picture, welded in its components. In the act
of taking the picture, a momentary linkage of spatial
components is rigidified. The production of a representative
image is a special case in this constellation and
has little to do with thinking, if one grasps thinking
as a flow. Interest should focus on the theater of
the gaze, which plays out in the space between the
photographer’s brain and the camera’s
field of vision. The reality and content of the image
constitute themselves in it: this is no “me”,
but the product of a specific process.”—Heinz
Emigholz
D’Annunzio’s
Cave shows 15 rooms of the Villa Cargnacco in
Gardone on Lake Garda, where Gabriele d’Annunzio
moved in 1921 and lived until his death. The villa
is part of the “Vittoriale,” a museum-like
theme park honoring d’Annunzio that d’Annunzio
himself and his personal architect Giancarlo Maroni
spent almost two decades designing and furnishing.
In 1997, Heinz Emigholz began documenting various
rooms of the villa on 35mm film (some of this footage
can now be seen in the film The Basis of Make-Up
(III)), but he interrupted this project. In 2002,
he took it up again in connection with the production
of the film Goff in the Desert.
On June 24, 2002 a cinematographic jam session ensued
in the Villa Cargnacco; four friends–camerapeople
and filmmakers Irene von Alberti, Elfi Mikesch, Klaus
Wyborny, and Heinz Emigholz–documented the villa’s
rooms and inventory at the same time, but temporally
staggered and in their respective very specific styles.
The film D’Annunzio’s Cave resulted
from the wealth of material thus produced.
The world erected by Gabriele d’Annunzio…
consists primarily of nothing but projections and
backdrops that, if no interpretations are provided,
reveal their existence as hodgepodge. He designed
a sequence of rooms to which he allotted feelings
and activities by fiat. Interior architecture measures
attempt to create the ideal surroundings for a writer.
The concentration of “writing” is thereby
supposed to be objectified in a collection of books,
objects, cult objects, and fetishes. Like little shocks,
these objects are supposed to keep awake the constant
flow of memories and the timeliness of culture. They
become the plenipotentiaries of authorship. This representation
of the human spirit is not conceived as “private,”
but stands for a political offensive into the world
of those who are to be enlightened. D’Annunzio’s
“private sphere” becomes a political space
and a vehicle of propaganda for a particular way of
being. This way of being is derived from a sphere
of political power—an unambiguous interpretation
of reality born of and becoming violence.”
D’Annunzio’s Cave is structured
according to the sequence of rooms in the Villa Cargnacco:
vestibule, mask merchant’s room, music room,
globe room, Zambracca, Apollinian veranda, Leda’s
room, blue bath, leper’s room, reliquary room,
Dalmata Oratorium, the maimed one’s writing
room, workshop, room of the Cheli, kitchen.
“Gardone, June 24, 2002. An abyss of the state
of the art. Considering this spectacle, my hate began
to recede, covered by my satisfaction at the dust
that had settled like acid on everything and the chatter
of the guide who had taken over D’Annunzio’s
empire and had to present culture to astonished tourists.
I felt as if I were on the inside of an embalmed corpse
whose intestines and brain had been shunted away because
they had begun to stink. Now the state has to take
care of this empty husk, because the poet wants to
communicate with us through it. What the collection
shouts out is the recognition that museums are useless
and only a method of doubly losing life. The fate
of modern art, which begs for patronage, is inscribed
in it. Every kind of aimless filth would be prettier
than this treasurehold of loot owned by one who, in
the name of art, robbed people of language and flushed
it as lotion into his own mummy. The thousand-year
empire of house dust; house dust mites and those in
flakes of skin take command.—Heinz Emigholz,
The White Square of Shame (Das weiße
Schamquadrat )
http://www.pym.de/d-annunzio_en.html
“Valletta, February 25, 2003, a Tuesday. I’m
sitting on the stone tiles of my room, looking out
over the cities of Senglea and Vittoriosa on the other
side of Grand Harbour. Eleven days ago, the film Goff
in the Desert had its world premiere in Berlin.
A film about American design; I love every bit of
it. D’Annunzio’s Cave will show
one consequence of European design, a culture that
isn’t one and only pretended to be one, the
rummage of a storehouse of booty. The name of the
collector and decorator of the displayed rooms is
Rapagnetta, the turnip, also known as d’Annunzio,
the announcer: ‘My name alone is an honorific
for contemporaries and successors. For my whole life
has proven the Providence that my Christian name announces.
I can and must not wish anything. The government and
the nation have the compelling duty to finally recognize
me, independent of my own wishes or my wrath.’
The Italian state confiscated the house, including
an extensive library, from the art historian Heinrich
Thode after the First World War and gave it to d’Annunzio.
D’Annunzio designated his activity there as
an act of “de-Teutonification”. Having
arrived at the zenith of his career as state artist,
he makes constant designing efforts to remodel the
immediate surroundings of his dwelling into a cult
site. Interior decoration becomes an act of asserting
Being. The stolen collection of every kind of art
object, rearranged in layers, becomes an externalized
“brain” revealing his thoughts and associations
in the form of fetishes. Things are granted meanings
like medals, sense becomes power, meaning becomes
kitsch, dialogue a decree. D’Annunzio stages
an intricately interlocking drug den whose branchings
postulate virtual cultural achievements. With his
furnishing aria and insistence on pomp, he becomes
the precursor of a “lifestyle” movement
in which fetishes, cultural theft, and staged squirreling-away
function as a substitute for thought: The Fabulous
World of d’Annunzio. Every generation has representatives
of this species. Society recurrently banalizes itself
into a playing field for the strategic goals of individuals.
Its Olympus regenerates via self-appointment. One
would like to be Lenin, of course not seriously, but
a little bit of arbitrary rule ought to be allowed,
at least on the playground of “art” and
its markets. This then calls itself “political
art,” but is really only the aestheticization
of the political. Roles for various art stars as would-be
dictators, a reasonable, post-facto “only joking”
included. D’Annunzio is the archetype of this
species, and our celebrities ought to blush in shame
at the level on which he plotted out and executed
his crimes, which are theirs as well.—Heinz
Emigholz, The White Square of Shame (Das
weiße Schamquadrat )
http://www.pym.de/d-annunzio_en.html
Total Runtime: 93m
Program 1: STRAUB-HUILLET’S
A TRIP TO THE LOUVRE
Program 2: THE DAILY PLANET (Unearthed)
Program 3: DAVID GATTEN’S
SECRET HISTORY OF THE DIVIDING LINE: A TRUE ACCOUNT
IN NINE PARTS
Program 4: THE TERRESTRIAL OBSERVATORY
Program 5: BLUE MOVIE with special
guest VIVA
Program 6: ALLEN ROSS’S
GRANDFATHER TRILOGY
Program 7: LARRY GOTTHEIM
Program 8: MANUAL OVERRIDE (“Slip
Inside this House”)
Program 9: SHADOWHUNGER
Program 10: HEINZ EMIGHOLZ
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Sun
Oct 2: 10:00 PM
The Heinz Emigholz program is supported by the Goethe-Institut
New York’s Film Archive.
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