Art Metropole

10 Jan. 2015

I See/La Camera: I

Writer

Jacob Korczynski

Time

4-6 PM

Book Launch
Sat. Jan. 10, 4-6 PM
Art Metropole, 1490 Dundas Street West, Toronto

I See/La Camera: I
64 pages, 21 × 27 cm, softcover
$21.00

Editors:
Tanja Baudoin and Jacob Korczynski
Contributors: Jacob Korczynski, Lucy Lippard & Sol LeWitt and Babette Mangolte
Design: Will Holder
Published: If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want to Be Part of Your Revolution, Amsterdam

“I See/La Camera: I is the outcome of an extensive research project into Babette Mangolte’s film The Camera: Je, La Camera: I (1977), and Lucy Lippard’s novel I See/You Mean (1979), which took place in the frame of If I Can’t Dance’s Performance in Residence programme with invited researcher Jacob Korczynski. Korczynski has investigated the relationship between the subjective role of the camera in Mangolte’s film and the simultaneous exploration of text and image in Lucy Lippard’s novel, situating I See/You Mean and The Camera: Je, La.

Camera: I in the context of feminist strategies of self-portraiture.
Eschewing the authority of autobiography through the fluidity of fiction, both the novel and film are anchored by an affective address of image making, and at the centre of each, an opening emerges from the absence of the body of the author.

I See/You Mean is a novel by Lucy Lippard, and a unique part of this recognized critic and curator’s oeuvre. “Through a collage of verbal photographs, overheard dialogue, sexual encounters, found material, and self-identification devices (astrology, the I Ching, palmistry, Tarot), it charts from past to future the changing currents between two women and two men.” The Camera: Je, La Camera: I is the second feature film by Babette Mangolte. “A going back and forth between observation and sentiment and/or imagination, the film is a self-portrait of the photographer-filmmaker during the years 1976-1977.” In addition to her extensive practice in film and installation, Mangolte is also well known for her documentation of performance works of artists including Trisha Brown and Richard Foreman, and her cinematographic work with filmmakers such as Chantal Akerman and Yvonne Rainer.

A research essay by Korczynski forms the centre of this publication around which various other materials are situated. These include a visual essay by Babette Mangolte composed for this publication, and a collaborative text/drawing by Lucy Lippard and Sol LeWitt produced during the development of her novel. The aperture produced by Lippard and Mangolte is an invitation, as you and I, implicated temporally as we move through the pages of the novel and the frames of the film, occupy a space they have vacated. The materials of the novel and film are not only text and image, but also my body and your body-an insistence on a presence that is our own.”

Jacob Korczynski is an independent curator and the recent recipient of a curatorial research fellowship from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. He has curated projects for the Stedelijk Museum, Cooper Cole, Western Front, and the Badischer Kunstverein and his writing has been published by art-agenda, Camera Austria, Flash Art, and BOMB. With curatorial projects taking the form of exhibitions, screenings, and publications he is also the editor of I See/La Camera: I (If I Can’t Dance I Don’t Want to Be Part of Your Revolution), Andrew James Paterson’s Collection/Correction (Kunstverein Toronto & Mousse Publishing), Jimmy Robert’s Revue (Leopold Hoesch Museum), and Nour Bishouty’s 1-130 (Art Metropole & Motto Books).

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