SLIDE LIFE Premire in Brooklyn + Beacon, Jan. 5 & 6

SLIDE LIFE from Mollie McKinley on Vimeo.

Thursday, Jan. 5 :Vaudeville Park, Bushwick, BK/////////////////////////////////////// Friday, Jan. 6 :The Coffee Shoppe, Beacon, NY///////////////////////////////////////// The HigLife plays live, and we screen the SLIDE LIFE music video I wrote, directed and shot for Jason Ajemian. Come party with us!

THE PRIESTESS conducts an alchemical fire ritual// MANIFESTING DESIRE

Thursday, Dec. 22, 2011.  Beacon, New York, 6:00PM.  The darkest day of the year giving way to the light of FIRE.  You'll find us in between Tallix and the Roundhouse, near the waterfall, on the creek.  (Main Street.)  I'll be helping you manifest your desires for the new year ahead.  Bring your intentions.


(Extra points if you come and can name the occult significance of the above fire rituals!)

GEOFFREY PUGEN, FRANK POLLARD, SARAH MOSK, LEGACY RUSSELL, NICA ROSS, JOSEPHINE SHOKRIAN & MOLLIE McKINLEY.

 

A little shout out from my Chicago friends at Make-Space.net

LARGE FORMAT EXISTENTIAL MARINA

AARON FINBLOOM + ADRIANA DISMAN IN "EXISTENTIAL MARINA"

  

4X5 documentation of EXISTENTIAL MARINA.  Freshly scanned.  (There is more...they'll make their way to the website soon.)  After scanning these, as I was walking out of the darkroom in Chelsea, a dude carrying a huge, weathered orange life-saver walked by me.  It was wrapped up in sea-worthy ropes and was slung over his shoulder.  Mysticism meeting existentialism is SO REAL.  These are gonna be BIG prints.

"THE TRANSCENDENT BODY+OTHER GEOMETRIES:" DEC. 9, 2011, BEACON, NY

THE ARTIST STATEMENT PICTURE SHOW #2
CURATED BY MOLLIE McKINLEY
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TOP: GEOFFREY PUGEN'S "BRIDGE KIDS"  BOTTOM FROM  LEFT: LEGACY RUSSELL'S "FIRST KISS/LAST DANCE"; FRANK POLLARD'S "AGENCY MENTAL DEFENSE WEAPONS"

 

Another Perspective on Boats

If you've been following my work, you know how I truly love boats, in all of their manifestations and metaphors; so, I'm fairly sure you will understand my deep love for this Miami Vice scene. Thank you for existing, Don Johnson.  

(And a shout out to my childhood neighbor, John Schulian, who was a writer for many Miami Vice episodes. We used to water his 80's ferns for him when he was out of town on set or doing whatever badass things a Miami Vice writer would do.)

Intimacy Versus Spectacle in Performance

Today's meditation: are they Mutually Exclusive?  A perfect and cutting meta-example from Buñel's masterpiece, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie.


What is the difference between intimacy in a live performance versus on screen?  How does the audience or camera engage with the intimacy of the performers/performance?  Can a performance be both a spectacle and intimate?

Related art news topic today: in a formal letter to MOCA director Jeffrey Dietch, and released to the public via Art+Auction's gossip section as well as Artinfo, Yvonne Rainer calls out Marina Abramovich and the LA MOCA on a rather exploitative and perhaps sadistic "performance" which will occur over the course of the annual museum gala.  During the gala and formal dinner, performers will lie naked on tables, with plastic skeletons atop them; there will also be performers kneeling on rotating lazy susans placed underneath each dinner table, with the performer's head emerging from the center of the table, enacting continuous yet disengaged eye contact with the patrons seated there. From Artinfo:

[The performance] involves installing performers under gala tables, turning them into disembodied rotating heads for three-hour-long stretches over a period of two days.  The performers would be paid a paltry $150 for their troubles..."

Not intended as an act of tongue-in-cheek institutional critique, nor as an anti-fascist political agenda (Rainer brings up Pasolini's film, Salo, in this letter), I myself cannot help but think of Fellinni's Satyricon in regards to the context of these exploited young performers amidst wealthy patrons decked out in diamonds, gowns, and tuxedos.  In fact, there are numerous fascist/anti-empire/class-critique art films that have created monstrous formal dinner scenes with exploitative flavor such as the spectacle crafted by Abramovic—with Salo, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, Caligula, and Satyricon coming to mind first.  Its an entire sub-genre! 

In an unreferenced and anonymous email correspondence cited in an Artinfo article today, one of the performers had this to say:  “Of course we were warned that we will not be able to leave to pee, etc. That diners may try to feed us, give us drinks, fondle us under the table, etc., but will be warned not to."  Wealth, spectacle, and art continue to have a perverse and deep connection in our society; the fact that celebrity artists like Abramavic are idolized by younger artists and the higher ups in the art world alike, while twentysomethings choose instead to protest the more obvious corruption of Wall Street instead, just baffles me.  As Rainer states in her letter to Jeffrey Dietch:

"[The performers'] desperate voluntarism says something about the generally exploitative conditions of the art world such that people are willing to become victims of a celebrity artist in the hopes of somehow breaking into the show biz themselves. And at sub-minimal wages for the performers, the event verges on economic exploitation and criminality."

A very ripe controversy, indeed, and one that helped me to realize my own limitations regarding spectacle in performance.  One of the reasons why my own performances, such as the recent "Sun Threshold/Fire Magic," are presented as videos rather than live works, is because I believe that the intimate action would be interrupted or corrupted by the presence of an audience.  These intimate interactions become "other" under the gawking gaze of an audience, a spectacle wherein they are not intended to be so.  Exposed, public spaces do not necessarily foster/engender deep and intimate conversation, although it would be interesting for an artist to explore this rift and challenge the traditional environments that support intimate communication, such as bedrooms, couches by cozy fireplaces, private meeting rooms, quiet and dimly lit restaraunts, so forth.  (I can imagine a series of performances where intense intimacy is introduced into clumsy public spaces like the streets of New York, sports stadiums, a TGIFridays.)

It is my belief that my performers' and my own subtle movements, interactions, and presence within  scenes are best extracted within a closed set, where they/we feel the privacy to focus, relax, and let go—the privacy to take the performance wherever it needs to go, uninhibited by the gaze of spectacle-hungry strangers.  My work is not about addressing the relationship between audience and performer.  In this regard, although the works are largely improvisational and non-scripted, they really share more with traditional filmmaking than with performance art.

In this regard, I'm grateful for both Abramovic and Rainer's resussitation of a public dialogue regarding spectacle.  Now, if you'll excuse me, I must go read some Guy Debord.

NEW WEBSITE DESIGN

www.molliemckinley.com

For the pleasure of your eyeballs, brain, and spirit, I've redesigned my portfolio website.  Check out my recent video/performance/photo/installation artworks. 

(Some of my older films have been retired to the archives, like Birthday Cake for Horsemen and All Ye Merry Pilgrims.  They are still available for screening, just drop me an email.)

ACTUAL PHONE CALL

 

  

If you invite me over and your television is playing the Lifetime channel in the background, you better believe I will be photographing the dramatic re-enactments with my phone instead of talking to you.  Be forewarned.  As passé as his crocheted primary color sofa cover and nerd glasses may be, it brought me great pleasure to document his tearful ACTUAL PHONE CALL.

 

Capitalism Video Take One: Financial Pillow Talk with Mollie

Stay tuned for a party promo video wherein I read you excerpts from 365 Ways To Become A Millionare.  A collab with my dear friend, filmmaker/writer and politico Emily Dische-Becker.  Shot in Rhinebeck, New York.

Occult Season Part I: The Dunwich Horror

"Those figures are so silent and furtive that one feels somehow confronted by forbidden things, with which it would be better to have nothing to do. When a rise in the road brings the mountains in view above the deep woods, the feeling of strange uneasiness is increased. The summits are too rounded and symmetrical to give a sense of comfort and naturalness, and sometimes the sky silhouettes with especial clearness the queer circles of tall stone pillars with which most of them are crowned.

Gorges and ravines of problematical depth intersect the way, and the crude wooden bridges always seem of dubious safety. When the road dips again there are stretches of marshland that one instinctively dislikes, and indeed almost fears at evening when unseen whippoorwills chatter and the fireflies come out in abnormal profusion to dance to the raucous, creepily insistent rhythms of stridently piping bull-frogs."

H.P. Lovecraft, The Dunwich Horror

My understanding of that uncanny feeling in Cape Cod during the season of the Dead is shared at least by H.P. Lovecraft, and also by Dean Stockwell in the 1970 film after the short story (in one of his only leading roles ever.)  Magnificent.  Let's all go haunt a Puritan graveyard! 

Primitivist, ancestral performance and a Darwinian theory of beauty

A meditation on the human mind's reaction to beauty led me to a provocative and relevant TED lecture given  by the late philosopher Denis Dutton.  Mr. Dutton links Darwinian survivalist behavior to the creation of the earliest art objects, which he notes as being the Acheulean hand axes, created between 50,000 and 100,000 years before language. (About two and a half million years ago.)  The creation of these objects, he states, was not for butchering meat nor for another practical use; none of these numerous objects found in Africa have their points worn down, and their great number refutes the theory of their use as a butchering tool.  Rather, these objects were created by our ancestors for pure aesthetic purposes.  Perhaps, he states, these first works of art were created as a way to attract mates: master-crafted hand axe connotated planning ability, motor control, and intelligence of the creator. Over time, the creators of these objects were given higher social status and a reproductive advantage over the "less capable."

This theory, to me, proves that art is crucial in the continuing evolution of humanity.  Perhaps art still relates to the capable alpha-human attracting a mate through the display of intelligence, skill, and other traits linked to ancestral survivalism.  But moreover, the possibility of union between that deeper base instinct and our higher modes of conscious behavior (advanced emotional intelligence) opens up wide and brilliant possibilities for further leaps in collective consciousness.

"One fundamental trait of the ancestral personality persist in our aesthetic cravings: the beauty we find in skilled performances...We find beauty in something done well.  Is beauty in the eye of the beholder?  No, its deep in our minds, its a gift handed down from the intelligent skills and rich emotional lives of our most ancient ancestors.  Our powerful reaction to images, to the expression of emotion in art, to the beauty of music, to the night sky, will be with us and our decendants for as long as the human race exists."

—Dennis Dutton, TED Talk 2010

WATCH SUN THRESHOLD.

A site specific performance created and directed by Mollie McKinley. Starring McKinley and guest performer Ben Carver. Shot at the Harold Arts in Chersterhill, Ohio, July 2011. "Fever" by Peggy Lee remixed by McKinley. Excerpt from a two and a half hour performance of which forty minutes were captured in HD; the final edited video will be approximately 15 minutes in length.

three days until we go

BEACON OPEN STUDIOS September 24+25

Video installation, photographs, and a performance in a 17 foot box truck at Beacon Open Studios!!

Balloons, fishing nets, ropes, and life vests...

Come see what I've been up to this summer at the School of Making Thinking and the Harold Arts as an artist in residence.  Preview works from my current ongoing series, PRIESTESS.

On Sunday, Sept. 25, at 2pm, I will be giving an interactive performance: an amended version of my "Fear+Failure Party" video performance.  Come into the truck and confess your fears and failures to me as your Priestess of Liminality, and be absolved. 

Other artists will have installations in box trucks, too: its called Truck City and its located outside of Spire Studios at 45 Beekman Street, Beacon, New York.

See you there!