A Town Like Parataxis (8)

Stories we tell ourselves:
At the Richard Killeen Retrospective

I didn’t think ‘triangle good, rabbit bad’
– Richard Killeen, New Gallery (2/10/99)

Im AxaduUdax am I
Life begins with qualitybuying up earlier works to burn them
Max a dudI’ve got a terrible tongue on meThe bus-driver’s fearDud ax am
C shows me negatives(jet-stream overhead)I M A X A D Uof the open road. Stop,chairs – and Ben, her ex – in bed
Ax a dudapissing in the – Armitage Shanks –M A X A D U Dscrabble in the cashbox,Adu Daxa
I can’t forget they’re everywherewind, behind a briar hedgeA X A D U D Ascratch your balding headpeur contre peur
Xadu daxX A D U D A XXadu dax
I’d rather unknow than not knowWill it stay there till the end of theA D U D A X AIf I could say thatI don’t really care if you get it or not
Adu Daxaworld – that spearmint lifesaverD U D A X A M I could say anything:Ax a duda
Converting the light to pixelsI dropped behind the signal boxU D A X A M Ithat look, glance, glimpse, stare,digitally enhanced
Dud ax amon Hobson Street?œillade, scrutiny …Max a dud
Anything is good“boat” = drowning / sailing
Udax am IIm Axadu

A Town Like Parataxis (9)

păratăx’ĭs, n. (gram.). Placing of clauses
etc. one after another, without words to
indicate co-ordination or subordination.
So păratăc’tIC a., păratăc’tICALLY adv.
[f.Gk PARA (taxis arrangement f. tassō)]
– Concise Oxford Dictionary, ed. H. W. & F. G. Fowler (1911)

A Town Like Parataxis (10)

Perdrix Press
6a Hastings Rd
Mairangi Bay
Auckland 1310
Phone: (+64-9) 479-2870
Fax: (+64-9) 478-5828
E-mail: jack.ross@xtra.co.nz

© Jack Ross & Gabriel White, 2000
All Rights Reserved
ISBN 0-473-07104-5

WHAT WOULD YOU PAY
FOR THIS VIEW?

You are cordially invited to a Garden Party
at 23 Maxwell Ave, Westmere,
on Sunday, October 1st, from 2 pm onwards
to celebrate the publication of

A TOWN LIKE PARATAXIS
A COLOURING-IN BOOK

Text by Jack RossPhotos by Gabriel White

A Town Like Parataxis
Poems by Jack Ross
Photos by Gabriel White

păratăx’ĭs, n. (gram.). Placing of clauses
etc. one after another, without words to
indicate co-ordination or subordination.
So păratăc’tIC a., păratăc’tICALLY adv.
[f.Gk PARA (taxis arrangement f. tassō)]

Took a walk around the old neighbourhood
- Margaret Urlich

Maybe you too live in a town like Parataxis - it's just around the corner, in the texture of a brick wall, a goal post against the sky. No coordination, no subordination: the sacred sites in your memory theatre.

is
rememberas
nothingnothing
does

A Town Like Parataxis combines image and poetry to articulate this sense of places somehow exempt from "our monotonous sublime."

_________________________________________________

I would like to ordercopies of Jack Ross & Gabriel White's A Town Like Parataxis
at $NZ 10 each.Your address & contact details:

Publisher:Perdrix PressPhn: (+64-9) 479-2870
6a Hastings RdFax: (+64-9) 478-5828
Mairangi Bay
Auckland 1310, NZ

Tongdo Fantasia

OUi boutique is pleased to present:

Gabriel White

Tongdo Fantasia

DVD/BOOKLET LAUNCH, WINDOW PROJECTION AND PHOTOGRAPHY

PREVIEW
THURSDAY 7 AUGUST 2008 - 5.30PM
OUi boutique, St Kevin’s Arcade, K rd, Auckland

EXHIBITION 8 AUG – 4 SEPT 2008

www.gabrielwhite.co.nz
www.ouiboutique.co.nz

Those of you who've been keeping up with this blog know my views on Gabriel White's video and photographic work. I wrote a review of his previous film Aucklantis (2006) here and a brief account of our own collaborations A Town Like Parataxis (2000) and The Perfect Storm (2000) here.

On Thursday he's launching his latest work Tongdo Fantasia. This film has been a long time in the making. It's been refined and recut until it represents the essence of a Westerner's alienation - and, at the same time, paradoxically, curious at-homeness - in a strange new cultural setting: in this case, South Korea.

A suite of photographs from the work were included in Landfall 214. These, and hopefully more besides, will be on exhibition at OUi boutique for the next month. So come on up to K Rd this Thursday to check it out. You really won't regret it.

Gabriel's Groundhog Day

“I’m both! I’m a celebrity in an emergency …”

This is my launch speech for the screening of Gabriel White's new film (see further details here):

There’s a scene in the movie Groundhog Day where the cameraman Larry is trying to pick up a girl at a party. “People think that I just point my camera at stuff, but there’s a heck of a lot more to it than that!” She’s clearly unimpressed, and makes a hasty excuse to get away before he even gets to show her the inside of his van.

I guess the first point to make about Gabriel’s work generally, but especially his new film Aucklantis, is that there’s a heck of a lot more to it than meets the eye. Yes, on the surface it’s all very simple. He walks along the street, filming himself, and talking. Sometimes he does the washing-up while he’s talking. Sometimes he discusses where he’s going to put the camera.

This conciseness and economy of means is a mask, though. Gabriel has understood that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. The remorselessly quotidian and ordinary nature of the things he films is designed to wake us up to the myriad strangenesses in the ways we react to the world around us.

I guess the most obvious analogy is with Joyce’s Ulysses (which he actually invokes at one point in the film you’re about to see). Again, the concept is simple: the events of one day in Dublin, seen through the eyes of a number of different characters, but patterned on the events and people of the Odyssey.

Joyce undercuts the bourgeois complacencies of provincial Dublin by setting them against the heroic intensity of Homer. Or does he? Perhaps he means to say that Leopold Bloom really is as much of a hero as his original, Odysseus.

Gabriel’s own model is Plato’s Atlantis – does he mean to satirise our lifestyle or simply examine it? That’s for you to decide. He certainly succeeds in making provincial Auckland seem as much of a battleground for the gods as Plato’s lost continent ever did.

I’d prefer to posit a connection with Groundhog Day, which is (I have to admit) one of my favourite films of all time. Phil (or Bill Murray) is forced to repeat the same day over and over again until he exhausts every possible way of living it. He ends up becoming a better person through sheer boredom and failure to discover anything else to do with his time.

“One of these days someone’s going to see me interviewing a groundhog and decide I don’t have a future …”

Gabriel, too, is bound to the beat between Freemans Bay and the City Centre. He, too, resolves to get all he can from it. But is it Gabriel the character or Gabriel the filmmaker I’m talking about? Is there a difference? In Groundhog Day the weatherman Phil is constantly paralleled with the groundhog Phil. Every day the groundhog is frightened by his own shadow, and so the endless winter goes on. Phil the character tries kidnapping his alter ego, singing its praises, abusing it – nothing works. When he stops acting like a kind of human groundhog himself, though, the enchantment is broken.

At one point in his own film Gabriel speculates that his shadow is spying on him through stealth technology. He’s getting the better of it, though, by watching it spy on him, and thus getting an angle on how he appears to it. He even acts up to it at times to give it interesting things to watch …

Groundhog Day required a cast of hundreds, a set of Hollywood Stars, finding a more photogenic small town to stand in for Punxsutawney, Philadelphia, and a few million dollars. Aucklantis succeeds in covering substantially more territory at a fraction of the cost by the simple application of wit and ingenuity.

It came as a great surprise to the makers of Groundhog Day when they started to get letters from rabbis and monks and religious leaders praising them for the wisdom of their film. It was, after all, just supposed to be another frothy Hollywood comedy. Gabriel’s film is funny, too, and one can read it on that level with no problems at all. Go deeper, though, and it’ll repay your scrutiny.

Screening on Saturday

Well, there are a couple of reasons for putting up this post.

The first is to publicise the screening, on Saturday 2nd December, of Gabriel White's new film Aucklantis (you can read my review of the parts I'd then seen here.) Full details of the screening can be found on his website here, but I'll just mention that it's at 3 pm, in lecture theatre WE240, AUT, Auckland (signs around St. Paul Street will direct you).

The second is to mention Gabriel's set of digital essays "The ABC of XY and Z," which are also now available on his website. Modesty forbids me from saying too much about these pieces, since the first, "Planet Atlantis" is an analysis of my novel The Imaginary Museum of Atlantis. The second, however, "Music Word Fire" (much longer) concerns the work of the composer Robert Ashley, and the third, "The Avoriginal" gives an account of Gabriel's own practice as a filmmaker. I'd certainly recommend giving them a look, especially (but certainly not exclusively) if you're thinking of coming along to the screening.

Further reports on that later ...

Aucklantis

[Gabriel White - photo by Lies Vandesande]

I remember back in the late seventies there was a lot of controversy because Richard Ellmann’s edition of the Selected Letters of James Joyce made public a few of the rather frank epistles he’d written to his wife Nora. I seem to recall a passage along the lines of how much he wanted to “fuck his little fuckbird’s cunt,” but it’s been a while since I checked them out.

An article I read at the time by some American smartarse began by debating the matter fairly solemnly before concluding that all obligations of decency and respect to the departed had to bow down before the sacred duty of giving the rest of us a good laugh. The author then went on to fabricate a series of similar letters by similarly grand men and women of letters (Hemingway, Faulkner, Gertrude Stein etc.)

Gabriel White’s latest video project Aucklantis is a fucking good laugh. That’s not all it is, of course, but isn’t that enough to be going along with? I mean, how many successful pisstakes are there out there that one can afford to neglect one?

If you don’t believe me, check out the sample here.

Gabriel’s been back in Auckland now for almost a year. He brought back a lot of video footage and a lot of interesting ideas. Some of those ideas will see solid form soon (hopefully) in a DVD / book called Tongdo Fantasia, part of which is already available on his new trial website. It takes the form of a talking-head travelogue filmed in Korea, but the setting could really be anywhere. Gabriel’s method is to weave strange thoughts and associations around everyday objects as he talks to camera – banality is his domain, unexpectedness his stock-in-trade. He stalks the city like a latter-day Baudelairean flâneur, weaving a complex meditation on the bizarrerie of the ordinary lives and landscapes we take for granted.

The packaging and the ideas have evolved somewhat, but one can still see a definite continuity with the two projects we worked on together:

A Town like Parataxis: A Colouring-in Book (Auckland: Perdrix Press, 2000)

was a collection of poems by me with photos by Gabriel. It’s now almost unobtainable, as we only banged out a hundred or so copies on some institutional xerox machine before we got caught. The pictures, though, are still a miracle. Gabriel had a theory at the time that simple colour snapshots blown up to A4-sized black-and-white would show strange complexities of texture and design. The results certainly bear him out. That carwash looks like the gates of hell to me.

The Perfect Storm (Auckland: Perdrix Press, 2000)

was an extension of the method to video. [That one I do have some copies of, if anyone’s interested (price $NZ10 plus $5 postage & packing)]. The Public Library catalogue described it as “poems read by Jack Ross set against Auckland landscapes” which about sums it up. I remember viewers tended to spend their time speculating where we’d shot particular bits of film, rather than noticing the strange dance of the cars around the roundabout, or the peculiar costumes of the boys crossing the street outside McDonalds. In a sense it was too obvious for anyone to see it. Once they’d worked out that there was no real continuity between the text and the pictures, they lost the ability to see what we wanted to point out: the hauntedness of the everyday.

Aucklantis seems to me a step beyond anything Gabriel has done before because the tone has shifted just a notch. His decision to look at Auckland as a tabula rasa, a blank slate literally anything can be written on, works because it’s so hysterically funny. It’s hard to imagine anyone taking seriously Gabriel’s descriptions of how to paint a rock grey or how to open a blank account, and yet – like the best stand-up – they make you see things, all of a sudden, in a new light.

Gabriel’s work is reactive, in the best sense. He takes the place he lives in and interrogates its peculiarities. His formidable erudition comes down, in these latest works, to one man talking on a moving screen – somehow he succeeds in making this the Platonic essence of cinema.

Of course I can’t help but see some connections between these ideas and my amnesia-novel The Imaginary Museum of Atlantis, which Gabriel helped launch earlier this year (I’m actually a bit peeved at not having thought of that “Aucklantis” portmanteau-word myself). What mainly strikes me about it, though, is the elegant simplicity of Gabriel’s solution to problems I could only approach by wrapping them in layers of crabbed discordant text. (For a video-clip of part of Gabriel's launch-speech -- filmed by my friend Rowan McCormick -- click here).

His latest work is so brilliant it can’t help but make the rest of us feel a little jealous. I take some pride, though, in having had some part in stimulating him to make this quantum leap. I think anyone who watches the finished work will see just what I mean.

Happy Birthday, Gabriel!


Gabriel White: Select CV

Shows and Performances:

· Sep 5, 2006: Video work “Aucklantis” included in Lazy Susan and Smelly John (St Paul St Gallery, AUT, Auckland). Curator: Mark Harvey. Artists: Sean Curham, Alex Monteith, Tessa Laird, Brydee Rood, Cat Gwynne, Linda T, Susie Pratt, Cushla Donaldson, Ben Holmes, Melissa Durbin, Aaron Hurley, Gabriel White, Mark Harvey.
· Aug-Sep, 2001: Video work for Adrift – Nomadic Art from New Zealand (Conical Gallery Fitzroy, Melbourne). Curator: Emily Cormack. Artists: Richard Lewer, Caroline Rothwell, Patrick Pound, John Pule, Mark Braunias, Brielle Hansen and Anushka Akel.
· Feb-Nov, 2000: Senior Tutor, Studio One Elam School of Fine Art.
· 1999-2000: Member of Rotaction, sound performance group, directed by James McCarthy. Performances at Lopdell House Gallery, La Mata theatre and the Adam Gallery. Awarded best multimedia performance at the Wellington Fringe Festival 2000.
· 1998-2000: Stop Gap, Auckland based poster installation project. Curator and artist.

Published Work:

· “I for an I,” Landfall 200 (2000): 187 [article]
· Review of Tessa Mitchell and Ben Holmes, "I am a Dark River." Pander 9 (1999): 40
· Review of Ronnie van Hout and Mike Stevenson, "Premillennial: Signs of the Soon Coming Storm." Pander 8 (1999): 36-37
· Review of Ross T. Smith, "Hokianga." Pander 6/7 (1999): 54-55
· Forgiven by the Moon, CD with Steve Abel, (self-released, 1998)
· Spacesuit, self-titled CD (released nationally, 1997)