Next Saturday Eduardo´s Costa films Names of Friends: Poem for the deaf-mute (1969) and You See a dress (1970) will be previewed at the Auditorium. At 6.30PM, the artist will be available for a conversation with the audience.
Eduardo Costa
Names of Friends: Poem for the deaf-mute
New York, 1969
Super 8mm/DVD, 40x500cm, edition of 6
Colour, silent, 2’13
Script Writer/ Performer/ Director: Eduardo Costa
Camera: Hannah Weiner
Eduardo Costa, Names Of friends: Poem For The deaf-Mute
Presentation text, MAMba, Buenos Aires, 2007
This groundbreaking work was conceived by artist Eduardo Costa in 1968 and filmed in super 8mm in 1969. The script, direction and performance are by Costa, the camera is by noted US poet Hannah Weiner, then a friend of Costa’s and collaborator with him and John Perreault in the noted Fashion Show Poetry Event of the same year. A 2 1/2 m conceptual film, the silent Names of Friends was lost in New York shortly after completion, and reappeared in Buenos Aires in 2007.
The Museum of Modern Art of the city of Buenos Aires presented Names of Friends May 16-June 24, 2007 in its digital and still versions. The face of the young Costa is shown from the tip of the nose down as he pronounces 53 names of his US, Latin American, and European friends. The names included are the first names of well-known artists and writers: Vito Acconci, Scott Burton, Marisol Escobar, Rubens Gerchman, John Giorno, Dan Graham, Lucy Lippard, Bernardette Mayer, Hélio Oiticica, Octavio Paz, John Perrault, Roberto Plate, Susana Salgado, Robert Smithson, Marjorie Strider, Anne Waldman, Lewis Warsh, Hannah Weiner and Luis Wells, amongst other who are or not in the art world.
Only those who read lips can fully understand the work. The regular audience instead is denied access to part of the information, which invites it to focus on the usually neglected movement of lips, tongue, teeth, jaw and saliva. Both the moving and still versions of the film present visually arresting images derived from a conceptual platform. The digital transfer of the original footage was projected at the museum’s auditorium. Frame-by-frame still and TV versions were in the exhibition room nearby.
You See a dress (1970)
9’’22; sonido; inglés
Eduardo Costa
From literature to performances, Scott Burton. Wadsworth Athemeun, April 14, 1970.
These tour pieces have their genesis in literature but seek to extend that medium. Although the writers’ individual intentions vary, all move beyond not only the printed page but further, beyond the word itself as the unit of expression. An important, often necessary, verbal element remains – whether in the formulation of the intention or the concept, or as an adjunct or a parallel to the performed part of the work- but in no case is there the verbal self-sufficiency of traditional writing, even that in non-traditional styles. These works are not in new style but in new mode. Their visual and/or aural aspects are at the least as important as the activity of reading, and usually more important.
Of equal importance here, and more innovatory, is the use of time. Other forms of literature, such as concrete poetry, have dealt with words as one more kind of visually apprehended information but the new “performed literature” incorporates as wall the element of duration. Their existence in time is essential to the very conception of these pieces. They are this categorizable as “theatre”, for they can only be experienced in extension, as processes or sequences in time, and they control the audience’s length and rate of exposure (the opposition is true of reading a book or looking at a painting). But these works for the theatre are unlike traditional dramatic art because they exist explicitly in the same, actual time as that of the viewer instead of offering fictive times and places. These are not illusionist but literalist theatre pieces.
For this reason they have a relation to the chief form of “abstract” theatre, the dance, and especially, recent dance styles which mix genres or substitute one for another. Also related are the two dominant tendencies now in the plastic art: “process” art, which changes or is changed throughout a span of time; and “conceptual” art; which replaces purely visual with verbal modes. However, the works on this program, whatever their genesis or esthetic parallels, exist first and last in the medium of live performances and explore systematically its characteristics.
You see a dress, Eduardo Costa
My piece does not imply a strong belief in the importance of physical objects or in the importance of visual over other kinds of perception. Also, it brings theatre closer to Hypnotism and Fashion.
Por primera vez en Argentina, Proa Cine presenta A Film Unfinished, un documental de la directora israelí Yael Hersonski que, a partir del hallazgo de filmaciones inéditas, documentos escritos y el testimonio de sobrevivientes, revela la verdadera historia detrás de uno de los pocos registros fílmicos que existen sobre el Gueto de Varsovia.
