Check out the beautiful volume, designed by Alexandra Gelis
Published by Canadian Film Institute and Pleasure Dome in 2018.
Contents
Introduction 12
1970s
Theatre of It by Jorge Lozano 16
EVENT 1 by John Greyson 18
1980s
Untitled by Jorge Lozano 22
Unuma by Jorge Lozano 24
Red by Jorge Lozano 26
A Letter from Fatima by Jorge Lozano 27
Part 1/Untitled, Part 2/Does the Knife Cry When It Enters by Jorge Lozano 28
Hygiene by Andrew James Paterson and Geoffrey Shea 30
1990s
Limited Warranty by Jorge Lozano 34
Samplings by Clint Enns and Mike Hoolboom 36
The Three Sevens by Marc Glassman 38
Cine Blanc by Rebecca Garrett 40
Tampon Thieves by Kami Chisholm 42
Eros y el Escandalo by Madi Piller 44
2000s
The End of Thought by Richard Fung 48
(Ima)genes by Gary Popovich 50
The Black Box by Mike Hoolboom 52
Ideology by Lina Rodriguez 54
May 1968 Graffiti by Mike Hoolboom 56
Land(e)scaping by Franci Duran 58
Conchitas by Clint Enns and Deirdre Logue 60
Eye Vision by Jorge Lozano 62
IDLE-Encendido by Clint Enns 63
2010s
Watch My Back by Ulysses Castellanos 66
Spatial Rhythms by Kika Nicolela 68
Death Match by Ulysses Castellanos and Kate MacKay 70
Situations by Jorge Lozano 72
Forests by Jorge Lozano 74
NaCl by Jorge Lozano 75
Genesis by Mike Hoolboom 76
Kuenta by Chris Kennedy 77
Stratigraphies by Mike Hoolboom and Jorge Lozano 78
Underscore (_) Subguión by Kate MacKay 80
Within the isolation of my opulence by John Greyson 82
D-Enunciation by Elida Schogt 84
Cleaning Practice by Alexandra Gelis and Jorge Lozano 86
MOVINGSTILL_still life by by Kate MacKay 88
Tactical Cycle-ordination by Stephen Broomer 90
Forms of Emerging Behaviour by Caspar Stracke 92
Resonance by Mike Hoolboom 94
The End of Type (writers) by Tom McSorley 95
In-Visible Hands by Larissa Fan 96
Illegal_its effect on the body by Mike Hoolboom 98
Recreactions by Alexandra Gelis 100
Jorge Lozano movies 102
Introduction by Mike Hoolboom
Jorge Lozano has made more than 130 movies since the late seventies. The artist works at a bewildering rate, particularly in the past half dozen years. It seems the muse is weighing heavily on his Colombian-Canadian shoulders, so he lets movie after movie flow out of his dream machines. Nearly half of his titles have arrived in a steady exhale in this late season of ecstasies.
He arrived in Canada in 1971 as an outsider iconoclast, pairing up with fellow Toronto Island dweller Mike Stubitsch to form “the theatre of it,” an absurdist duo of nihilist provocations. He worked crap jobs and went to art school where he became part of a nameless collective that included Gloria Berlin, Rebecca Garrett, Robin Cass, Robin Williams, Denise Cooper and Susan MacKay. Dedicated to “epistemological disobedience,” they created performance-happenings, videotapes and films, providing an urgent counterpulse to the alternative art establishments of Toronto.
The artist’s periods of making are marked by personal adventures and relationships. Though he is reluctant to appear himself in the work, he looks to his comrades to fulfill on-camera roles. He made and co-made half a dozen movies with/featuring Juana Awad in the 80s, identity parables and protests, all quickly shot and edited. He created a pair of intricately designed video animation docs and installations with Sinara Rosa that touched on their Colombian roots and North American racism via video graffiti titlings.
But his most enduring and prolific period begins in the mid-2000s with Alexandra Gelis, muse and intellectual confidante, a five star artist in her own right. Apart from their four collaborations, she appears in more than a dozen of his movies, and when she is not in front of the camera she is behind it, moving in for another close-up.
Their work is documentary-based, and ranges across North and South America, offering portraits of former gangster villages (D-Enunciation), the labour of the underclass (Cleaning Practice, NaCl, Ecnerefsnart (Transference)) or else philosophical essay portraits about the costs of looking and belonging (Stratigraphies, Clorox, Collapse) the interface of plant/animal life with their human predators (Two Coupling Insects Teach Latin, Forests).
Jorge has absorbed the lessons of mostly white movie avant scenes, and strained them through his own experiences as an immigrant, a person-of-colour, an outsider. Again and again he brings attention to subjects that don’t fit—a poet gone temporarily insane, a deaf woman at a concert, teen killers in Cali, a weed growing out of the sidewalk – and invites viewers to live inside his generous receptions of looking.
It is beyond the scope of this volume to have writing accompaniments for all of his movies, but we’ve tried to give a nod to some of the highlights, and let a choir of voices weigh in, and the artist amongst them, unfailingly articulate, a critical and complicating voice. When the white canon of fringe media is rewritten, his achievements may at last be recognized as central to the efforts of decolonizing the field, creating new forms of beauty while working from an undercommons that is no longer quite so invisible.