"Antek Walczak" Screening & Artist Talk
Electronic Arts Intermix
This event has ended.
The video works of Antek Walczak grew out of his participation in the art/fashion collective Bernadette Corporation and the late '90s downtown New York scene. On hiatus from the collective's video productions, Walczak produced a separate but parallel body of media work. In these provocative videos, Walczak speculates on the relationships between fashion, capitalism, globalization and the many other surfaces on which commercial images grow.
At EAI, Walczak will screen and speak about two of these works: Dynasty (1998, 49:52 min), and Run With Zeros (1999, 9 min).
The ambitious forty-nine minute Dynasty (1998), largely assembled from abandoned footage for unrealized Bernadette Corporation fashion spots, has an alternative title: "Beginnings That Never End." Walczak describes the video as a "celebration of the richness of the first ten minutes of any film" presented under false pretenses; a "collection of sketches, scenes, reports, and fragments glued together with fashion models and held up by voice-over-writing." Comedy, commerce and production play out across the loosely connected vignettes, which include the story of the daughters of the fantastically wealthy Baskins and Robbins families; Crime Punishers, a satirical police drama set in the suburbs; Acapulco Story, an action-packed story about drugs, sex and fashion, in which all the action happens off-screen; and a sci-fi story about psychic youth defending the Earth from aliens in 2010.
Run With Zeros (1999) is a short video that follows fashion designer Susan Ciancolo's Run 8 collection from fashion show to the racks at Barney's. In the process, Walczak traces the lifecycle of consumer capitalism: desire, consumption and disposal.
Characterized by what Walczak terms a "neo-Godardian lo-fi Rousellian distracted-narrative style," both works define an early-21st-century condition, "a passion for dead fictional substances and authentic forms, a haunted authorial voice speaking across grids of nonlinear layers, tracks, clips and timelines." In his media work, Walczak set his sights on the darkened cinema. Almost by accident, Walczak's videos also form a critical snapshot of creative life and attitudes in a strangely melancholy pre-millennial downtown New York.
Media
Schedule
September 23, 2009 from 18:30