narcisa hirsch, east-west€¦ · this period coincided with jorge romero brest, a highly...

Es Baluard. Porta Sta. Catalina, 10. 07012 Palma [email protected] Tel. +34 971 908 201 www.esbaluard.org

Reproductibilitat 2.1 Narcisa Hirsch, east-west (an approach to her work 1967-1999) Curator: Nekane Aramburu From 11th March to 3rd April 2016 This exhibition can't be visited on 18th, 19th and 20th March. Aljub

An introduction on the work of Narcisa Hirsch will be given by Nekane Aramburu, curator of the exhibition, on 11th March at 12.00 pm. Free activity with limited seating. For the first time in Spain Es Baluard is organising an exhibition of the work of Narcisa Hirsch in the emblematic Aljub space, constructed on the basis of pieces that are crucial for understanding the development of the moving image and linked to the Reproductibilitat project under the curatorship of Nekane Aramburu. Narcisa’s experimental films were a continued, sustained step forward in the investigation of the possibilities of the moving image from the south of the American continent. A German-born artist (Berlin, 1928) initiated first in painting, she carried out most of her work in Argentina, assembling, through her work, a relationship of fluctuating times between East and West, physical and mystical displacement, exploration of the interior and the exterior of beings and their contexts. It is now possible to highlight her influence as a pioneer of the ‘sixties and ‘seventies, developing installations, objectual pieces, performances, graffiti and urban interventions at an extremely dense social and political moment in the country where she has passed a large part of her life, Argentina, as well as experimental film proposals. Involved too in working with avant-garde collectives, she participated intensely in the experimentalism art scene surrounding the Instituto Di Tella in the ‘sixties. Her immersion in political filmmaking, from a personal conception that was outside what was understood by “political”, and in the feminine universe in the midst of the second-wave feminist movement, singularize the vital and creative positioning of this artist who continues to be active at the age of 88. Her greatest period of film production corresponds to the last Argentinian dictatorship, expanding later to video installation and publishing. Her pieces involve spectators, inciting them to decode the audiovisual message and leading them to a new place in time where the eye and the unconscious take us beyond the phenomenal and the technical medium being worked with at each particular moment. Most of her works from her first period – Narcisa’s most revealing – were produced in Super 8 and 16 mm, and later on she used video. For the cinematographic avant-garde, the eye was the directing organ. Whereas Eisenstein used it to delve deeper into violence, this creator revealed to us how, by treating images with subtlety, scenes and concepts are linked together, making cinema “as an instrument of poetry” possible, just as Buñuel asserted in his famous conference given in Mexico in 1958.


In all of Narcisa Hirsch’s work, we can see the connection between the existential and the drive towards a certain mysticism linked to the philosophical and religious tendencies of the East (idealized from the ‘seventies on), sexual instinct and the death instinct, the inside and the outside, past and future times aligned on the same frequency. This kind of production demands a new way of seeing, in which the perceptive rupture is evident. The interior and exterior landscape, in free association, approach the premises of Dadaist chance and the irrational, enigmatic associations of surrealism. Maya Deren defined her cinematographic work as chamber film, taken from the broadest term of chamber music or chamber theatre. Work from the realms of the provisional, the domestic, the fruit of technical limitations, is yet another of the characteristics of Narcisa’s work. “My husband had brought a 16-millimetre camera from abroad to film family events, birthdays or holidays. A camera I still have (...). I began filming along with another pioneer, Marie Louise Alemann, too. We changed to Super 8. I was told that another film had been made where a fixed camera is set up and all you see are the shelves of a studio; and a voiceover narrates what is seen on the shelves. I thought I would give it yet another twist: make a film with a camera set up onto a permanent wall and narrating what cannot be seen. I made two versions of that film, one in Spanish and one in English. That was the big hit of my career; it is called Taller in Spanish, and Workshop in English. That one and another I made with music by Steve Reich which is very tortuous too, because absolutely nothing happens for a very long time”. Workshop (1975) and Come out (1971) are her outstanding structural short films and those in which the influence of things conceptual and minimalist are most noticeable for their connection to Michael Snow and the fortuitous discovery the creator made of his work at the MoMA. In Wavelength (1967), the film in continuous zoom which moves forward from a physical position for 45 minutes, this Canadian sculptor and creator opened up a new path in the investigation of perception and time, a medium for constructing a place in time based on the image in order to position oneself in it, as Snow affirmed, and which Narcisa connected with synchronously. Of experimental film, she says: “Experimental film, also called ‘underground’ or occult film, is often considered enigmatic, because as with poetry, its language requires a participation that is open, one would say almost naïve on the part of the spectator who generally ‘fears’ that the images will become threatening as they are too unexpected. You don’t have to understand anything, you have to let yourself flow with the images and that is all. If you can relate to that, great, if not, well, it’s like music.” With Narcisa, we also begin to understand the deconstructing of hierarchy in the construction process of the images and the script, allowing the framework reality to


be rethought from a different perspective. In addition there are three important factors for understanding the significance of her decisions as a creator committed to her age. Firstly, the interventions in the public space, appropriating it, which even included actions of spraying text on walls. On the other hand, construction from the active-collaborative between groups of creators with a common will, although she always saw herself as someone who worked very much from the fringe, in favour of subversion. And finally, due to the conscience of sharing the ideology of recognition of things feminine as a founding member from the very beginning of the Lugar de Mujer group. The three pieces that make up Es Baluard’s review are key to understanding her creative drive and commitment towards the narrative-representative. The first of the prominent works refers to Marabunta, made in 1967 as a performative project planned and developed by the artist and filmed in 16 mm by Raymundo Gleyzer. In another face of her creation, Come out from 1971 is presented, on the music of American Steve Reich, a structuralist film and an example of her stance in the face of image-time as an experiential laboratory. The central piece of the exhibition is Rumi from 1999, a fundamental work for understanding the essence of her political expression and poetical expression, seeking experience but also the sublime. Rumi is inspired precisely by the 13th-century Sufi poet and throughout it the subconscious, visual modulation and rhythmic sublimation are linked together, giving rise to a cathartic tale in the form of an enigma. Downloads:

High-resolution frames of works and credits-sheet: http://ow.ly/X01k9

Low-resolution frames of works and credits-sheet: http://ow.ly/X01tN

High-resolution portraits of Narcisa Hirsch: http://ow.ly/XTk09

Low-resolution portraits of Narcisa Hirsch: http://ow.ly/XTjW7 With collaboration of:


Biography

Narcisa Hirsch was born in Berlin in 1928. Her father was a painter and she arrived in Argentina at the age of five with her mother, departing from Austria after living there. In her early days as a painter and drawer her works were exhibited at Galería Lirolay, one of the avant-garde galleries of Buenos Aires in the 1960s. This period coincided with Jorge Romero Brest, a highly influential art critic, who had decreed the death of painting – the traditional easel painting. On the basis of this, Narcisa headed for the street, inspired by the new artistic currents that emerged above all in the United States with

performances, “LivingTheater” and events that were taking place in untraditional venues. She began with what were called “happenings” at the time, the most outstanding of which were Manzanas, Bebés and in 1967, Marabunta. With the documentation of Marabunta, she launched into the film medium, and its recording and construction. We must remember that after the coup d’état in 1966 the autocratic government of Juan Carlos Onganía dissolved the political parties, censorship was established by Decree-Law and action was taken on the universities, and as a consequence the student revolts began in Argentina. During this period and over successive years, she formed part of the group of filmmakers Grupo Experimental Goethe, which included artists such as Marie Louise Alemann, Claudio Caldini, Juan José Mugni, Juan Villola and Horacio Vallereggio, who approached film from different artistic disciplines, and their films were shown outside the circuit of cinemas and institutions (with the exception of the Goethe Institute) in the ‘70s and ‘80s. Most of the material for the films was made in Super 8, the best-known being Come Out, Taller, AMA-ZONA, Testamento y Vida Interior, Homecoming, A-Dios, La Pasión, Ana donde estás? , Rumi, El Aleph and finally El Mito de Narciso, a self-image-biography. As well as the purely experimental films, Narcisa conceived and continues to produce installations, such as El Silencio, and Predicando en el Desierto, both in collaboration with Enrique Banfi and the work El Grito with Jorge Caterbetti. When Super 8 vanished from the marketplace, she became initiated in video and began to write, publishing 3 books - La Pasión, El Silencio and Aigokeros, a book of essays accompanied by Haikus written in Spanish and later translated into Japanese – and more recently La filosofía es una pasión inútil, conversations with Florencio Noceti.


Synopsis and technical specifications

Narcisa Hirsch Marabunta 1967 Documentary recording. 16 mm film transferred to DVD, black and white, stereo sound Duration: 7’5’’ Director: Narcisa Hirsch Camera and edition: Raymundo Gleyzer Music: Edgar Varèse Featuring: Narcisa Hirsch, Marie Louise Alemann & Walther Mejía Courtesy of the artist

A documentary on the happening of the same name that took place in the Coliseo theatre of the city of Buenos Aires on 31st October 1967. As a neo-Dadaist action transformed into political action, the process of creating the four-metre plaster skeleton becomes an essay, a provocation and an attempt to open things contemporary up to a country immersed in serious political and social problems. Marabunta was mounted by Narcisa Hirsch, Marie Louise Alemann and Walther Mejía as a dramatization of a collective anthropophagic ceremony of the skeleton covered entirely with food containing live parrots and pigeons inside, painted with phosphorescent colours, which flew out, and also playing with surprise and humour. Whilst people devour this woman’s body that had been assembled by the artists, the music of Edgar Varese can be heard, an analogy of human voracity.

Narcisa Hirsch Come out 1971 16 mm film transferred to DVD, colour, sound Duration: 10’ Director: Narcisa Hirsch Camera: Horacio Maira Courtesy of the artist

Whilst a repetition of a sentence is phased out electronically from a diffuse close-up, the image moves inversely, expanding from the micro to the macro. The piece is reminiscent of the films of Michael Snow and Empire by Andy Warhol, and shares their discoveries of how, on the basis of economy of resources and an impersonal recording, it is possible to resolve a complex process, in this case with just two shots. The sound recording that comes from the vinyl disc is a composition by Steve Reich (New York, 1936), one of the pioneers of minimalist music, starting with the use of loops and repetitive effects. The composition was produced for a charity campaign designed to raise funds to try and review the judgement of a trial for a race riot in which six young black men were arrested in 1966 and accused of killing a police officer. The voice is that of Daniel


Hamm, who was 19 at the time, describing a beating he received in the precinct and showing his injuries to prove it.

Narcisa Hirsch Rumi 1995-1999 16 mm film transferred to DVD, colour, stereo sound Duration: 27’ Director: Narcisa Hirsch Camera: Humberto Navarro & Narcisa Hirsch Production: Victoria Keledjian

Performers: Vanessa Dee, Paula Pravaz, Julio Galán, Susana Pravaz, Andrea Hirsch, Dolores Cardoso, Natacha Pravaz, Carlos Mallmann, Elias Cherñajovsky, Carlos Echeverría, Rafael Maino, César Marín & Avelino Salazar Courtesy of the artist In the film, the landscapes of a time and a place dreamt of and those of Buenos Aires and Argentinian Patagonia, where Narcisa Hirsch frequently resides and the intensity of which is reflected in many of her works, fuse in subtle transitions. The piece devises a narration based on the interpretation in images of the texts of Rumi (1207-1273), a Sufi master and one of the greatest mystical Islamic poets. The film begins with the poet’s texts written by the artist herself and then focuses on the orchestration of metaphors of the body, passion and powerful nature alternating between East and West. It is presented as a subjective proposal for reflecting on love, eroticism, the illumination of the soul, everyday things and the inner path. The thematic thread is thus constructed on the basis of the reinterpreted texts, the gaze towards the house and the inverse gaze facing a mutating, open landscape that evokes the filmmaker’s self-referential experience. The religious Sufi dance in which the dervishes twirl in strange circles, imitating the movement of the planets, ultimately characterise their transitions and the oneiric rhythm of this piece.

Selected resources Text by Andrea Giunta: http://alternativas.osu.edu/es/issues/autumn-2013/debates/giunta.html Interview: http://desdelapatagonia.uncoma.edu.ar/index.php/numeros/revista-n-16/item/190-reportaje-a-narcisa-hirsch The publisher MQ2 edited an essential anthology of her films:

Michael Snow, Wavelength, 1967: https://youtu.be/aBOzOVLxbCE Tribute to Narcisa Hirsch at the MAC-3rd FIVA 2015:

https://youtu.be/BKp_B31uG2Y Vidas de Película - Narcisa Hirsch: https://youtu.be/bFPGqEjE598 Documentary film by Daniela Muttis: https://youtu.be/qAhpXg9fhTA

narcisa hirsch, east-west€¦ · this period coincided with jorge romero brest, a highly...

Documents