- Frederick Wiseman's Boxing Gym
- No Failure to Communicate
- Anne Charlotte Robertson Interview
- Pummeling Through the Frames
- I Want to Have Your Baby
- Grbavica: Land of My Dreams
- Barbara Hammer: A Necessary Presence
- Carolee Schneemann: Color the Shadow
- Stencil Graffiti: Schablone Berlin
- Polish Experimental Films: Hair Snarl
- C Schneemann: Imaging Her Erotics
Schablone Berlin. Tucson: Chax Press, 2005. With Kyle Schlesinger.
Download the Introduction (pdf)
Out of print
Schablone Berlin is an artists’ book as well as a book of documentation, presenting stencil graffiti from the streets of contemporary Berlin. The book consists of over 100 color photographs showing not only the graffiti, but also its placement within the confines of Germany’s most international metropolis. The introduction examines the semiotic and performative aspects of stencils within the contexts of art history, media, and urban anthropology.
This art and text project by Caroline Koebel and Kyle Schlesinger is a loving drift through the streets of Berlin to examine and to be inspired by its raw, lively, lustful, sometimes esoteric stencil culture. Exquisitely photographed, this work plays in the in-betweens of poetics and politics, the trivial and the insightful, the amusing and the disturbing, the immediate and the aloof. One way or another, this book will seduce you.— Critical Art Ensemble
Contemporary trackers on the trail of an esoteric species, Koebel and Schlesinger have captured a gallery of transitory signs from the surface of Berlin's walls. The very sign of urbanism, these swiftly made images depend on a community of knowing readers to recognize their codes, nod, and signal back across the space of time and geography. The city is the site, scene, of a whole system of traces and communications. The marks show their ephemerality and questionable legality in the very stealth mode of their production. Stencilled, spray painted, rapidly produced, they haunt the walls with their fading imagery, semaphore signals in a common but still-specialized system, introducing their alternative image-speak into the regulated zones of public discourse. A beautiful collection, thoughtfully framed by its introduction.— Johanna Drucker
One of my favorite books I've read this year is Schablone Berlin, which for some odd reason Amazon is storing under the title Berlin Schablone; I hope people continue to seek it out and find it, a fantastic candybox of images and speculation. It's very user friendly and you hardly have to know a thing about Germany or the German language to understand it. Caroline Koebel and Kyle Schlesinger are admirable guides, pointing out a set of signs which we might never even have noticed in the busy citiscape of modern Berlin. Maybe you have to be there and be intimate with the city before you notice its "Schablone," i.e. the stencils that graffiti artists and other activists have plastered over every conceivable public surface, whether it be the curbs beneath the fire hydrants, or the diagonal juts of the fire escapes. You don't even notice them at first, and then, like every other living thing, they become inescapable.
The photographs themselves are lovely: lucid, clear-eyed, deliberately rendered and printed in small, postcard sized images. (Well, large postcards.) And the variety of stencilling is staggering. Every conceivable artist is invoked, from the gabby, petalled overpainting of Raymond Pettibon to the UFA pristinity of Cocteau: if he (or she) can be reduced to a few lines and shadows, then a stencil can be made and reproduced, within a few seconds, on the streets of any city. Why does Berlin have so many? Our guides have a theory or two to explain it. In turn the stencils force us to look again at the public buildings and structures they decorate or détourne: the sad magentas and river blues of Berlin are themselves totally hallucinatory. You could be nowhere else, Kudos to Tucson's Chax Press for bringing us this strange bewitching treat.—Kevin Killian
Hair Snarl: the Aesthetic Body in the Order of Things
Film essay published in The Brooklyn Rail in March 2004
A traveling program curated by Warsaw-based Lukasz Ronduda of short works from the Archive of Polish Experimental Film, “Polish Women Artists Films of the 1970s and ’80s” was first presented in April 2003 at The Kitchen, and subsequently in October at Hallwalls in Buffalo. The program will screen again in summer 2004 at the Tate Modern. But rather than surveying “Polish Women Artists Films of the ’70s and ’80s” as a whole, I want to look closely at how the films of three of the artist-filmmakers, Zofia Kulik, Ewa Partum, and Teresa Tyszkiewicz, offer particular insight into an international dialogue about the possibilities of the body in art during these two decades. Personally influenced in my own creative practice by such vanguard artists as Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Valie Export, Eva Hesse, Adrian Piper, and Carolee Schneemann, it is with great enthusiasm that I come to know the Polish artists whose work in many ways resonates with theirs. The vital output of these women artists from twenty, thirty, or more years ago regarding the investigation into how the body marked by sexual difference produces and deconstructs meaning and language systems comprises art historical turf wars largely responsible for the— in some cases— thriving careers and— in others— tenacity despite obscurity of contemporary artists addressing similar concerns.
Color the Shadow
Catalog essay in Carolee Schneemann: Split Decision, edited by David Liss and Photios Giovanis. Buffalo and Toronto: CEPA Gallery and the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, 2007.
Purchase this book from CEPA Gallery
Color the Shadow is third in my series of critical writings about legendary multidisciplinary artist Carolee Schneemann. Having focused previously in an article for Wide Angle on her revolutionary film Fuses, in the new writing I examine the film Viet-Flakes: 1) as a poetic outcry against the Vietnam War, 2) in the context of the artist’s body of work, and 3) as an instrument by which to comprehend mass media and artistic expression in the contemporary context of Iraq.
Barbara Hammer: A Necessary Presence
Catalog essay printed in English with Spanish translation, Festival Internacional de Cine Lésbico y Gai de Madrid / Madrid's International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, Madrid, Spain, 2008.
Barbara Hammer: A Necessary Presence is an introductory essay to the work of legendary avant-garde lesbian filmmaker Barbara Hammer. It accompanies her 2008 retrospective at Festival Internacional de cine lésbico y gai de Madrid, including the films Lover Other, Dyketactics, Double Strength, Nitrate Kisses, History Lessons, and Tender Fictions.
Torture, Maternity, Truth in Jasmila Zbanic’s Grbavica: Land of My Dreams
Essay published in Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, edited by John Hess, Chuck Kleinhans, and Julie Lesage, No. 51, Spring 2009.
Set in Sarajevo a decade after the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Grbavica: Land of My Dreams plumbs the depths of a single mother's relationship with her daughter.
I Want to Have Your Baby
Artist's statement published in Millennium Film Journal No. 51, "Experiments in Documentary," guest edited by Lucas Hildebrand and Lynne Sachs.
Order issue at Millennium Film Journal online
In the collective performance action I Want to Have Your Baby (2003-2005) over 300 participants in sites including Los Angeles, Budapest, Havana, Berlin, Buffalo, and London conceived hypothetical offspring in a digital repopulating of the world with humane beings.
Pummeling Through the Frames: A Conversation with Caroline Koebel
Interview by Bernie Roddy in Afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism Vol. 37 No. 4, published by the Visual Studies Workshop, Rochester, NY.
Order issue at Afterimage online
The interview explores questions raised by the films presented at the University of Oklahoma in Norman in April 2009. The titles are Berlin Warszawa Express, ReAction: "From the Portfolio of Doggedness," hole or space, Grand Central/Central Terminal, Repeat Photography and the Albedo Effect, Sunroof (Benazir Bhutto Assassination), All the House (Haditha Massacre).
Anne Charlotte Robertson Interview
On November 11, 2001 I interviewed Anne Charlotte Robertson by telephone in anticipation of her upcoming NEA-funded residency at Squeaky Wheel in Buffalo, New York. Now in 2010 I am making the original (long) version as well as the published (condensed) version available here.
After a quarter century of filmmaking, Anne Charlotte Robertson has thirty titles to her name—thirty titles, that is, outside her film diary. Begun in 1981, the diary is thirty-eight hours and, as Robertson says, "just continues." The small gauge—mainly Super 8—films are the fruits of a fiercely independent process; the filmmaker admits to having used a crew "only once" while in art school and has "asked someone to hold the camera maybe four or five times."
No wonder, given the autobiographical nature of the work, that Robertson herself plays all roles of production. Previewing titles on her compilation videotape, ranging from Snooze Alarm (1979) to Melon Patches (1998), it becomes clear that the more exclusively—and obsessively—about Robertson, the more riveting the film. When I raised this point in a phone interview, she replied that especially in her early work, making films was a form of self therapy, a means to stop various cycles of self-destruction. For example, the frenetic Magazine Mouth (1983)—featuring animated pictures of Robertson, eyes bulging, said orifice wide open and entryway into her 'body-self' for all kinds of crap,—"got [her] out of the cycle of binging."
Caroline Koebel, "Anne Charlotte Robertson Interview," Artvoice (Nov 15, 2001)
Imaging Her Erotics: Carolee Schneemann
Book and exhibition review published in The Brooklyn Rail in Early Summer 2002
Review of Carolee Schneemann, Imaging Her Erotics: Essays, Interviews, Projects (MIT Press, 2002), and Carolee Schneemann: Embodied P.P.O.W. (Winter, 2002).
No Failure to Communicate
Interview by Marc Savlov in The Austin Chronicle, April 23, 2010
The interview covers extensive ground in conjunction with a solo screening at The Austin Film Society in April, 2010.
Body and Soul: Frederick Wiseman's Boxing Gym
Film review in The Brooklyn Rail, June 2011
Frederick Wiseman's Boxing Gym focuses the director's trademark observational eye on Lord's Gym in Austin, Texas. The gym, managed and co-owned by Richard Lord (with his wife Lori), bespeaks American Pluralism in the ideal, with its own organs, causality, language, and belief structure. Lord's stands in stark relief from the ordinary life beyond its doors, though it nevertheless scrapes against outside circumstances and events at key uncanny intervals in the film, moments that Wiseman captures with an engrossing authorial voice and a sense of the gym's inescapable rhythm.