RECENT PROJECTS
BLACK VATICAN | OCEANIC FEELIN' LP AND VIDEOS
Black Vatican/Oceanic Feelin' from A Roche on Vimeo.
Black Vatican, my band with Owen Gardner, has a new LP coming out this Fall on Locust Music here in Chicago. I made a video for the title track, "Oceanic Feelin'", with Susannah Dotson. She performs in the video and made the costumes. We were thinking a lot about Charlemange Palestine around that time, and maybe some of his visual style comes through.
Black Vatican | Worldless Phenomenon from A Roche on Vimeo.
I made another video for the song "Worldless Phenomenon". This video is made entirely from scanned 35mm slides animated in AfterEffects. Due to the high bitrate for this video, it will play best if the video is allowed to load before viewing.
The LP art uses some images related to "Do You Feel Like I Do?", the Winter '10 show I did with Laura Davis. Really thrilled with how this one turned out. Should be available very soon...
2001-2010 BARDIC VISIONS FROM BRITAIN AND THE AMERICAS | HANDS ACROSS THE WATER
In Spring 2010 my old friend David Price was in the U.S. doing research on his PHD, a really fascinating project partly about the fictive artists in Don Delillo novels. I suggested he swing by Chicago after he was done toiling away in a Texas library so that we could work together on a project for Saturday Cinema. This space, ran by Kat Parker-Monteleone and George Monteleone, runs new artist films on loop every Saturday in the window of their Chicago apartment. We decided to make a new film for every week. All we had to begin the project was a rekindled friendship and a vague notion that it would be cool to be as cool as Dieter Roth and Richard Hamilton. What follows is a bit of the blurb and video transfers of the films.
Title:
2001-2010: Bardic Visions from Britain and the Americas
Hands Across the Water
Andy Roche | David PriceInfo:
Roche/Price met at Chelsea College of Art and Design in London in 2001. Their first collaboration is the 4 Super 8 films in this exhibition. Each is given a title by both artists. Most films are the result of deals, not collaborations. This is also true in these productions. The first, Double Denim/Serge De Nimes, inspired by Chris Isaak, pairs the Australian dancer Lou Hartman with a nocturnal survey of Mexican westernwear.
Double Denim | Serge De Nimes / Andy Roche + David Price from A Roche on Vimeo.
Two Balls/Deux Balles volleys between a table tennis match contested by New Zealand musician Kerry Tyrrell and Price and a decades long racquetball match contested by Hospital Strategic Planner Art Roche and psychiatrist Dr. Tom Boxleiter. The planner and doctor are reduced to graphic elements.
Two Balls | Deux Balles / Andy Roche + David Price from A Roche on Vimeo.
Double Dippin’ |MissouriàMississippi | M+M/A Wednesday in Heaven follows a race across Dubuque, Iowa held in May between Roche and Price. Sharing a single bicycle, each cyclist was required to dip a bike tire in the tradition of RAGBRAI, where cyclists begin with a rear dip in the Missouri and conclude with the front in the Mississippi. Roche was confined to the rear; Price the front.
Double Dippin’, Missouri→Mississippi, M+M | A Wednesday in Heaven / Andy Roche + David Price from A Roche on Vimeo.
David Price: Head to Head/Colour Dreams follows Roche’s inquiry in Price’s ideas about abstraction and color, or colour. Skeptical, Roche interviews Price and allows him to demonstrate, in a controlled single roll experiment, his method.
David Price: Head to Head Web | Colour Dreams / Andy Roche + David Price from A Roche on Vimeo.
DO YOU FEEL LIKE I DO?
Glass Flag (Do You Feel?)/Andy Roche from A Roche on Vimeo.
On 2.25.10 Laura Davis and I held a one-night show at Per Populus Gallery in Chicago. Laura proposed "Do You Feel Like I Do?" as a title for the show, and I immediately agreed on the name. The title is similar to "Do You Feel Like We Do?" the Peter Frampton song. For years I've wanted to do something that considered the structure of that song and others by Frampton from that period. The really simple thing that excites me about this material is the question/answer structure he used. Wondering how you feelin', he never really offers an answer in the lyrics, but something of an answer is in the extended talk box guitar solos at the end of his songs. In place of clear words or a recognizable emotion, he synthesizes his voice with the instrument and some portion of the sublime inarticulateness of a young person becomes present in the music. In this sense, there is something to be learned about the structure of abstraction and the way it works with emotion.
Glass Flag (Do You Feel?) is part of an ongoing series. I've written about it elsewhere on the page, but this piece differs from earlier entries in the Glass Flag series as the game of telephone I'd performed with footage has ended. The video was shot entirely at Per Populus, with the exception of the ghostly appearance of vintage Frampton shot through the flag. The object itself is quite battered now and catches more light than it lets through. The video was exhibited atop the glass table used as a prop in the performance.
The other piece I exhibited was a light box diptych, Rack Focus (Log Jam at the End of Time). I recently reread Lippard's Six Years and felt challenged to be more direct. This piece extends perception one step in each direction beyond our biological capability. The top image depicts an image one-step beyond the horizon line, at "infinity". Of course, I had no idea how such a thing could be shown, so I've shown a double infinity. The two photos in this box show infinity rooms that employ different optical illusions to achieve the effect. The lower box is the opposite end of perception. Instead of suggesting a pole that recedes back into the mind, into fantasy, the image depicts the view when one could perceive one's own bangs in perfect focus, the world beyond one's hair rendered as blank white light. Each box was 2'x4'.
All installation views photographed by Clare Britt.
GLASS FLAG
GLASS FLAG (OLD GOLD)/ANDY ROCHE from A Roche on Vimeo.
Glass Flag is an ongoing video project that has included performance and installation in its various incarnations. The central image of this piece is the "glass flag" itself, a clear flag whapped in the foreground, fourth wall, of the image. A parallax is created when this changing surface overlays images of spaces combined in a sort of continuity edit. What has proven extraordinary to me is how durable this image is, how it is so often better than me. It affords a kind of plastic sublime to this project.
The first idea for the flag came about when I was considering anarchist politic's image problem, the black flag of alienation. A clear flag seems better for a politics of liberation and without hierarchy. Immediately, I thought of the optical possibility of such a flag. Imagine that cliche of americana, a proud bald eagle with a waving US flag superimposed across the image. A clear flag makes any such superimposition lighter, always. A flag that is nerver more than barely there.
I also thought of a section from Roubaud's The Loop where he describes the presentness of memories as "glass on glass". This continues my interest in how viewing or watching can be elevated as acts of witnessing. As Glass Flag has developed, this interest has some ways taken the form of conceptual superimpositions and dissolves. Versions and drafts of the piece submerge into layers. In good faith I've kept throwing more content at this structure. The flag is a sort of whisk in the image space that tears it apart in innumerable light gestures.
So far, Glass Flag has shown at the show Voices in Dubuque, IA and as part of Future Facing at Old Gold.
FUTURE FACING
Future Facing was a one-night group exhibition with Aline Cautis and Josh Mannis at Old Gold in Chicago on 11.13.09. This was the first show in the gallery's new space in Logan Square. It was a thrill to work with these two great friends on the show. I exhibited a new version of my Glass Flag video with a section at the end shot in the Old Gold space. In the new part of the video, a television monitor displaying an earlier Glass Flag is suddenly replaced by a spread of beer and snacks resting on a clear plate and cloth. Two hands enter the frame and pull out the tablecloth in the style of the old magic trick. I suppose if one is to be self-critical, or perhaps to attempt an institutional critique within the apartment gallery scene so prevalent in Chicago, I think this art often has to face an indifferent or self-interested social milieu instead of an indifferent or hegemonic institution. What is for now the coda to Glass Flag is hopefully more a slight of hand than a slight on the place of its presentation. The trick was to actually be seen. There were two other pieces of mine in the show, a lightbox called Red Talk and a hair painting called Wall Do.
Here's a short review of the show.
RADICAL WITNESS
RADICAL WITNESS/ANDY ROCHE from A Roche on Vimeo.
Radical Witness is a sort of digest of three earlier, separate videos: Announcing the Mysteries, TETEDEMORT, and Black Iron Vatican II. These three films have had a rich life in gallery exhibitions and screenings. They were first presented together in the 2008 Gallery 400 show Andy Roche: Black Iron Vatican. Since then, I decided to compile them into a single video for some screenings, and so this new piece, Radical Witness, was made.
In the summer of 2008 Remi Lafitte's label Atelier Ciseaux released a small-run DVD of the three videos called Andy Roche: Radical Witness of Iowa. At the time Remi was operating out of Paris and had recently released the 7" Vrais Noms-True Names from the group Lucky Dragons, so I was surprised and honored when he contacted me about this work that I thought of as somewhat in the past, albeit the recent past. In the process of preparing the disc many days were spent relooking and rethinking this work. Although it is dangerous to attempt a new draft of a work after the fact, I think the Radical Witness video successfully distills the ideas of the Gallery 400 exhibition.
In July 2009 I went over to France for several shows and screenings arranged by Atelier Ciseaux related to release of the disc. Each of the shows was added to the larger european tour of Pocahaunted and Sun Araw. We played together in Paris, Angers, and Lyons. Each night began with a video screening from the disc and then I performed a short solo set of new music from my group Black Vatican. The whole thing was great fun and I hope to do it all again someday soon.
ANDY ROCHE: BLACK IRON VATICAN
an At the Edge: Innovative Art in Chicago project
TETEDEMORT from A Roche on Vimeo.
ANNOUNCING THE MYSTERIES from A Roche on Vimeo.
BLACK IRON VATICAN II from A Roche on Vimeo.
From the Gallery 400 show text:
"With the exhibition Black Iron Vatican Andy Roche develops an
aesthetic examination of the Catholic left. In an installation of
multiple video works and posters, Roche draws a relationship
between the subjectivity expressed in the radical witnessing of
Catholic leftists and the reverie of pop culture devotees holed up
behind bedroom doors. Featured elements of this, Roche’s first
solo exhibition, include a recitation of the rosary as a howling dub
performance, images of nuclear warheads played like marimbas,
the arrests that follow the annual protest trespass at Fort Ben-
ning, Georgia, and scenes of ecstatic collective protest.
The central piece, Black Iron Vatican, a 16 minute long silent
video, shifts through allusion and documentary toward evocative
results. Opening with a scene of discussion, possibly religious
testifying, the action quickly segues into found footage of the
Hennessey sisters, famous siblings and Franciscan nuns from
Dubuque, Iowa, long active in radical social activism. In 2001,
Dorothy, at the time 88, and Gwen, at the time 68, were sen-
tenced to 6 months each in federal prison for trespassing on Fort
Benning’s Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation
(formerly the School of the Americas), a base implicated in the
training of Latin American paramilitary groups known for hu-
man rights abuses. Setting a foundation for issues of witnessing,
surveillance, testifying, higher powers and subterfuge, the Hen-
nessey sisters imagery gives way to hammering hands and com-
mences to a series of disconcerting intercuts, including recent
footage of Fort Benning protests, that suture together the mun-
dane and the fantastical as based in faith and body. In fleeting
footage that is sometimes frenetic and sometimes elusive, even
foreboding, the zone of trespass at Fort Benning is established.
When one protestor, enacting her belief, quickly crosses that line,
the force of her capture is felt through a long close-up shot. The
fuzzy and faded exposures and focus of Black Iron Vatican re-
call the formal qualities of independent cinema as well as leftist
guerilla filmmaking of the 60s and 70s, evoking questions about
the position of the sites, activities and aesthetics of contemporary
protest as they have been influenced by established histories and
practices.
Several other works in the exhibition, videos and posters, raise
questions of disappointment, powerlessness, worship and fellow-
ship. One video work, Announcing the Mysteries (19 mins), takes
as its inspiration long running Catholic Television programs fea-
turing rosary recitation. The original typically featured soft focus
and superimposed edits with multiple camera angles trained on
an idyllic youth in a lush landscape leading the rosary and slowly
joined by others in his or her faith. In his self-performed work,
Roche’s incantation is more guttural and ambiguous. Isolated in
a rural landscape his primal repetitions point toward an earth-
bound aesthetic and incomprehensible pain, as well as a faith
that eludes definition as either ironic or sincere. Roche’s posters,
drawn from Super-8 film sequences, explore these themes in
highly saturated imagery manipulated through film distortion and
layering, video processing, and radical scale shifts. Throughout
the exhibition, the failure to attain a true transcendence of spirit
is omnipresent; the body from which this expression is uttered
continually betrays the ecstatic witnessing that Roche portrays.
Gallery 400’s At the Edge: Innovative Art in Chicago series annu-
ally commissions four new projects from Chicago area artists. At
the Edge aims to support experimental projects that might not
find support elsewhere."
BORN TO LIVE LIFE
BORN TO LIVE LIFE from A Roche on Vimeo.
From 2005, Born to Live Life is an experimental documentary that follows Victor Cayro from deep inside the body to far out into the astral plane. Around the time I made this one, charisma, here something like profound narcissism, transcendental narcissism, was a force I was trying to understand. The summer we shot this I was thinking about Aguirre: The Wrath of God, Space is the Place, and Zardoz. Victor was thinking about Robocop and Die Hard. Dubuque, IA plays itself, Peru, and its cablevisionary double. Victor does something similar.
This film was part of my MFA thesis at SAIC, and it has appeared in many galleries and festivals. One highlight of its screening history is when it won Best of Festival at the 2005 Iowa City Documentary Film Festival with Sam Green and Rebecca Baron as judges.
An imagined feature length version of this with the planned title Crossing Streams never happened, although another short resulted from some additional footage of Harpo Hutchinson, a legendary Dubuque, IA light bulb collector. In the larger film he and Victor were supposed to meet up as avatars in some other space and time, but Harpo didn't like his costume and wouldn't wear it.
HARPO: DON"T SHOOT THE POWDER from A Roche on Vimeo.
