#david beal

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Dogs, 1963 / photographs by David Beal

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So I really can’t stand Dāv. What do you mean probably?! It’s your name! This feels like a middle schooler who desperately wants to be cool and unique.

But if you really want a new name just own and say “my parents named me David but I prefer Dāv. The pronunciation I prefer is Dahv.”

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Gregory Abbott - Shake You Down

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Dogs, 1963 / photographs by David Beal

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Inventories of Light | David Beal

Miyoko Ito created one of the most extraordinary bodies of work in the last century of American painting. It records the growth of a lucid private vision

Miyoko Ito created one of the most extraordinary bodies of work in the last century of American painting. It records the growth of a lucid private vision that could only be translated to the canvas by adhering to a meticulous, sui generis technique. Ito was influential in her adopted hometown of Chicago, especially for the run of paintings she made between the early 1960s and her death at sixty-five in 1983. She has long been ignored by the other power centers of the art world. In 1975 she was included in the Whitney Biennial but otherwise has received scant attention in New York; she had two solo shows here during her lifetime, a posthumous show at Adam Baumgold Gallery in 2006, and one small but illuminating retrospective at Artists Space in 2018. Her later paintings were shown in her native Berkeley for the first time only six years ago. A volume on her work is forthcoming from Pre-Echo Press later this year, but otherwise there have been no major catalogs and little academic research on her life and career to date. A new show at Matthew Marks is her first at an A-list commercial gallery in New York since her death.

...

The paintings generate some of their power from the tension between the wild inventiveness of their spatial design and the rhythmic consistency of their surfaces. Paint is secured to the canvas in hundreds of short, horizontal units; the even dispersal of these matte brushstrokes over green and red grounds gives them a sense of trembling luminosity and acts in counterpoint to the irregularity of Ito’s shape-making. The paint is thick enough to retain its dimensionality and thin enough so that the tooth of the canvas shows through; often the original charcoal outlines are still visible between the shapes. While the paintings seem rigorously planned, their execution carefully regulated, they also seem to have been discovered in the process of their making. She spoke of each painting as “a beginning again.”

Miyoko Ito, Untitled #126, ca. 1970

First Veronda, 1983

In 1978 Ito was interviewed on camera by Lyn Blumenthal and Kate Horsfield, two fellow Chicago artists; it’s the only known footage of her. She speaks for nearly an hour about how painting has centered her life. There is something in her tone—her long pauses and small exclamations, her disarming smile and lack of pretense—that sheds light on the elusive poignancy of her art. Painting is “like breathing,” she tells them. “It’s a necessity, it’s do or die…Every time I have a problem…I go deeper and deeper into it. I have no place to take myself except painting…it’s been my biggest life-giving force.”

[doubleexposurejournal-blog-blog]

Yearbook 2012: David Beal

In our Yearbook series, Double Exposure contributors share lists and essays that attempt to define their year in film. In this entry, David Beal examines his favorite film of all time

The Hours

2012 is over, and my mind is whirring with a collage of dense images, careful sounds, and curious faces from the past year at the movies.  But I’m going to take this opportunity to talk about a different, readymade collage that I saw this year: Christian Marclay’s The Clock.  Over a few years, Marclay and a team of interns relentlessly combed through thousands of DVDs looking for any shots or sequences that included a ubiquitous machine: the clock.  They assembled the clips they found into a movie that will hopefully last as long as time goes by: for a full day, the time displayed by on-screen clocks corresponds perfectly with real time.

That’s the simple conceit of The Clock (it’s screening at MOMA through Jan. 21).  Marclay’s real triumph, however, lies not just in his idea -- constructing a real-time, functional clock based around artificial movie-time -- but in the fact that he made a delightful movie to boot.  The Clock is much more than a collage of brief clock shots from the vast back catalogue of film history; it’s a formal collage of everything that makes movies what they are -- sound, music, performance, theatricality, costume, architecture, and maybe even a little truth.  Bringing together the disparate strands of his source material into an immersive and unified space, Marclay creates a massive piece of investigative journalism that burrows deep into the lively nooks and crannies of movie-land, and visualizes a cinematic collage that all filmgoers have held in their brains since they saw their second movie.

Marclay’s instinct as an artist is to voraciously consume and elegantly recycle. He’s shown this in the past -- whether through his previous video collage works like Telephones or Video Quartet, or through his experience as a turntable-manipulator collaborating with musicians like John Zorn, Sonic Youth, and the Kronos Quartet -- but he’s never done anything on quite the same scale as The Clock.  I attempted to match the brazen ambition of his work and watch it for a full cycle, and I’m proud to say the operation was successful (thanks to partner-in-crime Max Nelson for taking the plunge with me).  One of the reasons it’s interesting to watch The Clock for 24 hours is because you don’t really have to -- in fact, the risks might outweigh the advantages.

The struggle of staying awake for a full day eventually threatens to eclipse one’s attentiveness and sensitivity to the rhythmic intricacies of Marclay’s creation -- circadian rhythms often trump movie rhythms.  Part of the appeal of The Clock also lies in the notion that it can be thousands of different movies for thousands of different people.  Just as Marclay is making minute-by-minute decisions about the boundaries of each clip, viewers have the power to make the ultimate decision about the boundary between The Clock and their lives -- in other words, when to enter The Clock, and when to exit The Clock and return to their own clocks.

However, if you spend at least four or five hours with it -- and especially if you reach dazed euphoria at hour 22 -- The Clock has a peculiar ability to manipulate your perception of time after you leave the theatre, and this distortion bleeds into subsequent days.  It’s as if you’ve just come out of a temporal Rotor: time is literally dizzy, both compressed and elongated.  Even stranger, your daily experiences have phantom alibis in the world of The Clock (“What was I watching at 3:26 p.m.? 3:27 p.m.? 3:28 p.m.?” I kept asking myself throughout the next day).  It’s magical.

If The Clock is riffing on a theme, it’s exploring how humans situate themselves in relation to a mechanical system.  In The Clock, the mechanisms are the various ways we measure time: analog or digital clocks, watches, sundials, daylight, or other people.  Sometimes the time-telling devices are prominent, and other times the viewer has to play a kind of Where’s Waldo to seek them out.  Occasionally they are nowhere, or only inferred -- a clip’s dramatic potential is, at the end of the day, more important than exact time.  Whenever they are present, they are accurate to a tee, but Marclay seems more focused on stringing together the small performances of the day: waking up, cursing your alarm, sitting in traffic, getting home late for dinner, settling into bed, dreaming.  After a while, measured and perceived time both end up receding, while Marclay’s cutting knife magnifies minute behavioral gestures into absurd cosmic spasms.

But one of The Clock’s main attributes is also its simplest: it might be the most watchable movie ever made.  Marclay’s experience as an improvising turntablist not only informs The Clock’s brilliant sonic flow, but its bewitching sense of cadence.  During the day, Marclay mostly edits within an even, 4/4 meter.  By the time 2 a.m. rolls around, however, the pulse has imperceptibly disappeared in favor of a jazzier rhythm, and the time signature lilts like a dream.  No matter what time of day it is, the hours fly by and The Clock induces a kind of hypnosis -- but it’s a hypnosis that depends on our constant awareness of time rather than our suspension of it.  By trapping us in a ticking clock, The Clock saves us from time.

When The Clock screened at Lincoln Center this summer, its run overlapped with another mechanically-minded exhibition at the New Museum, Ghosts in the Machine.  On display was Robert Smithson’s 1964 installation “The Eliminator,” which consists of four mirrors reflecting jagged, red neon lights that flash on and off every second, creating a consistent visual beat that always seems one step ahead of itself.  Each flash overloads the senses, and a viewer can’t do much to avoid falling into a trance.  “Memory vanishes, while looking at ‘The Eliminator,’” said Smithson.  It’s “a clock that doesn't keep time, but loses it.”

If “The Eliminator” loses time instead of keeps it, The Clock keeps time and loses it.  Watching it was one of the most meaningful experiences I’ve had at the movies, this year or any year.

[doubleexposurejournal-blog-blog]

Eight Nights of Haneke

Happy Hanukkah everyone! Whether he’s tweeting about cat farts or exposing the brutality and despair that lies beneath the hypocrisy of bourgeois society, Michael Haneke never fails to remind us why we love the holiday for which his name is a homophone. In honor of the Festival of Lights, Double Exposure suggests eight films by contemporary cinema’s most lovable director to watch while lighting the menorah.

Amour

As we entered Alice Tully Hall to see Amour at this year's New York Film Festival, I whispered to my companion, "Put on your yarmulke, it's time for Haneke."  Okay, so maybe I didn't say that, but it would've been wise given how much the film instills a fear of God in you.  You've already heard that iconic French thespians Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva, starring as an aging couple bound to their Paris apartment, give performances as stunning as their pre-existing legacies. Haneke, too, with so many masterworks behind him, is at the height of his career. -Joseph Pomp

Caché

Caché is one of Haneke’s keenest excursions into contemporary French culture. Its pitiless observations on Algeria, surveillance, television, marriage, and national guilt stick in your throat like shards of broken matzo bread. -David Beal

Funny Games

This 1997 thriller starts with spilled eggs and ends with spilled blood.  When Georg, Anna, and their son Georgie take a trip to their lake house for a vacation, they meet two young men who take advantage of their hospitality and force them into a series of sadistic games in their own home. If you need an extra infusion of Haneke spirit, check out the 2007 American shot-for-shot remake starring Naomi Watts and Tim Roth as well. -Maya Rosmarin

The Piano Teacher

Isabelle Huppert plays a sexually repressed piano instructor with mommy issues in this 2001 thriller. When she begins an affair with a young pupil, her lesson plan trades Schubert & Schumann for S&M. The Piano Teacher finds Haneke at his kinkiest, his camera punishing and withholding with a severity that mirrors that of the title character. -Will Noah

  Benny’s Video

"Don't forget to celebrate Hannukah with your kids" is the moral of this nightmarish 1992 film set in Vienna.  Benny's parents leave him at home for the weekend; a videophile, he heads to the local rental store, where he meets a girl, invites her up to his flat, shows her a video of a pig being killed, and then kills her.  What happens next?  You'll have to visit Netflix Instant to find out, although, as a Chinese waiter might say to a Jew asking about a spicy special on Christmas, unless you're a real masochist, this one's "not for you!" -Joseph Pomp

The White Ribbon

The children in a pre-World War I German village strike back against their elders, torturing those that have offended them and those who have molested their bodies and abused their minds—their parents and their priest. But the children are not blameless. 30 years later, these Aryan children become Nazis, linking their forefather's transgressions to genocide. -Ella Coon

Code Inconnu

This 2000 film, starring Juliette Binoche, is the best example of Haneke’s fondness for setting up parallel narratives in his movies. There are more stories and layers of meaning in Code Inconnu than there are nights in Hanukkah. -David Beal

Eight Crazy Nights

My magnum opus, Eight Crazy Nights was divisive among critics upon first release.  Still, one can see a clear through line between the subject matter of this 2002 masterpiece and my latest film, Amour. -Michael Haneke