User:Astrid van Nimwegen/draft gradproposal

Project proposal draft - Astrid van Nimwegen

Tentative Title

??Make the ordinary extra-ordinary??

General Introduction

Currently I am experimenting on a series of moving images which consist of simple video’s of dutch landscapes seen from out a garage door which is opening first and closing again after two minutes. I record the same wide shot multiple times with a static camera. You see leaves moving; the weather changing and the light in those different shots is never the same.

File:Garage-cinema.tif

Relation to previous practice

In former works there always was too much going on, in this I missed the mode of attention from the viewer. Endurance and repetition have always been import elements in my work. I want to reveal the complexity of life through the simple. The images which reveal complexity behind the simple are to be found in the everyday so I want to search in this everyday and use my intuition to find and recognize them. Maybe my most made mistake is to make the simple complex instead of the other way around and therefore a lot of older video’s I did not found convincing enough.

Relation to a larger context

Bas Jan Ader / Abramovic / Scandinivian Films (dogma?) / Theatre of the everyday / Avant garde Cinema / Documentary / Minimalist art / Landscape Painting / Poetry / the Everyday / Psychoanalyse - Freud / Performance art

Practical steps

Currently I am reading 'Theatre & Everyday Life' by Alan Read and 'Everyday Life and Cultural Theory' by Ben Highmore. Of some chapters I want to write annotations and also want to describe work by Bas Jan Ader. In practice I am looking for other landscape video’s which speak in a way the same language as the garage door shots and my research is now to experiment with them further and search for a way to bring them together so that they can form eachothers context. Different ways to explore this are:

-To bring them together in an installation or collection;

-To edit them somehow in a linear timeline;

-To show the garagedoor video’s in a cinema as a short before the featurefilm;

-To project them in other landscapes;

-To let some small gestures take place in the landscape to see if this can add something

References

• 'Theatre & Everyday Life' by Alan Read
• 'Everyday Life and Cultural Theory' by Ben Highmore
• 'Essays on the blurring of life and art' by Allan Kaprow
• 'Tacita Dean' by Tacita Dean
• Work of Bas Jan Ader
• Work of Marina Abramovic
• Films by Roy Andersson a Swedish director
• Work of Peter Greenaway (videoprojections on paintings)