Jennifer West's Long Weekend
Gritty skateboard wheels and the delicate, glossy surface of 35mm film emulsion would not seem to make a happy pairing. But in the hands of LA-based artist Jennifer West, who does unusual things to film stock, the union yields lush, trippy imagery and a witty practice that's both conceptual and performative. West just finished the long weekend with "The Long Weekend," a project put together by the Tate Modern in London which gives artists a venue and a weekend within which to present art. West showcased a new project titled Skate the Sky Film in which she arranged to have snippets of film stock subjected to skateboarders. "I have twelve hundred feet of film of wispy clouds in the LA sky that has been doused with inks and will be taped onto the ramp in the Turbine Hall," she explains in ArtForum's "500 Words"section. "Local skateboarders from the London skate scene, many of whom frequent the Undercroft, a skate spot just across the river from the Tate and a byproduct of LA skate culture's migration to England in the 1970s, will be invited to skate directly over the filmstrips, their wheels marking the film." Find video clips of West's work after the jump...
The Long Weeken's ongoing theme is do-it-yourself, and Tate curators, explains West, found a connection between that notion and the artist's frequent use of everyday materials in her work. West has been known to soak film stock in cleaning solvents, whiskey, espresso and so on; she then scratches it, or rubs it with sweat, or, as was the case this weekend, allows skaters to inflict their own special kind of wear and tear. West then projects the footage, again, often in unusual ways, with the result that we experience film as a material and viewing as an event. As Joanna Kleinberg writes in Frieze about West's work, "Eliminating the camera highlights the prosaic physicality of film as a strip of treated plastic in a way that allows the potions she applies to it and their descriptions to define the 'movies.'" ArtForum's wonderful video section includes two clips from West's work: