Monday July 29, 7:30pm
Scrapbook: Bill Brand
Expanded Cinema Performance
Limited Seating: RSVP to rsvp@microscopegallery.com
From “Pong Ping Pong” (1971) by Bill Brand (Photo: Western College, Oxford, Ohio) – Courtesy of Bill Brand
We are very pleased to welcome Bill Brand to Microscope for the New York debut of his 1971 performance and installation work “Pong Ping Pong”. The event is the fifth of ten performances taking place as part of our exhibition “Scrapbook (or, Why Can’t We Live Together)”.
The approximately 25-minute “Pong Ping Pong” — which involves the projection of 16mm film of a ping-pong match from a rotating electric table onto a circle of 8 foot tall screens — breaks the linearity of the table sport and engages with three-dimensionality in a circular space. The turntable used in the performance was also used to shoot the film, with the camera shifting back and forth to follow the ball as Brand navigated around the players and match.
Through the projection of the footage outwardly, from the center where the audience is also seated out to the circumference of screens, “the space is turned inside out”. The repetitive and dual nature of the game is referenced in the soundtrack, in which the artist recorded a series of words over and over again on a single reel-to-reel tape, creating a slow degradation. The artist’s voice bounces between the left and right channel and the distorting words and other sounds “accumulate to become a complex drone sound.”
The idea to present film more sculpturally grew out of the artist’s interest in theater and his work at that time on set design for a play by Samuel Beckett. “Pong Ping Pong” was completed a few months before Brand began his collaboration with Paul Sharits on “Sound Strip / Film strip” (1971) and was first shown in the spring of 1971 at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio where he was a student. The work appeared a few weeks later at Western College in Oxford, Ohio. It has not been presented in full since.
Space is limited, please RSVP to rsvp@microscopegallery.com
Bill Brand
“Pong Ping Pong”, 1971
Performance & Installation
16mm film, sound, projection turntable (steel, wood, glass mirror, electric motor), 8 x 4ft. prism screens
Pong Ping Pong is a 16mm film installation and performance about the circular and reciprocating mechanism of the film medium. The projector sits in the middle of a Stonehenge-like circle of screens.
The film is projected from a custom turntable that moves the entire image back and forth and slowly around 360 degrees. When filming, the camera was mounted on the turntable machine that slowly circled a ping pong table looking in at two men playing the game. With the film projected out from the center, the space is turned inside out.
A series of spoken words are heard reciprocating from speakers placed on opposite sides of the space. The words slowly degenerate as a result of multiple re-recordings on the reel-to-reel analog tape recorder used to create the sound. — BB
General admission $10
Students & Members $8
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Bill Brand is a multi-disciplinary artist whose films, public artwork, installations and works-on-paper have exhibited worldwide in museums, galleries, microcinemas. His 1980 “Masstransiscope”, an animated mural installed in the New York City subway, is in the MTA Arts and Design permanent collection.
His films have been presented at major film festivals including the Berlin Film Festival, New Directors/New Films Festival, Tribeca Film Festival and Rotterdam Film Festival. His work is discussed in Experimental Filmmaking: Break the Machine (2015) by Kathryn Ramey; Results You Can’t Refuse: Celebrating 30 Years of BB Optics, (2006) edited by Andrew Lampert, Documentary, A History of the Non-Fiction Film, (1992) by Erik Barnouw; and Allegories of Cinema, (1990) by David James; among others. Brand’s work has also been written about in news and journal articles by Janet Maslin, Jonas Mekas, J. Hoberman, B. Ruby Rich, Ian Christie, Noel Carroll and Randy Kennedy, among others.
Bill Brand’s artwork has been featured at Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum, Smithsonian American Art Museum, National Gallery of Art, Anthology Film Archive and Shanghai Duolun Museum of Modern Art, among others. He is represented in Paris by Galerie Arnaud Lefebvre.
Brand founded the showcase and workshop Chicago Filmmakers in 1973, and served on the Board of Directors of the Collective for Living Cinema until 1991 in New York City. He co-founded Parabola Arts in 1981 and is currently an artistic director. He served on the board of trustees for The Flaherty (2008-15) and is an advisor to the Orphan Film Symposium and Mono No Aware. Bill Brand is Professor Emeritus at Hampshire College and teaches Film Preservation at New York University’s Moving Image Archiving and Preservation graduate program. He is co-owner of BB Optics, Inc., a company that specializes in archival film preservation and post-production services. Brand lives in New York City.
From “Pong Ping Pong” (1971) by Bill Brand (Photo: Western College, Oxford, Ohio) – Courtesy of Bill Brand
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Microscope Gallery Event Series 2019 is sponsored, in part, by the Greater New York Arts Development Fund of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, administered by Brooklyn Arts Council (BAC).