Warning: Creating default object from empty value in /var/www/kranfilm.net/public_html/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/more-fields_de/more-fields-object.php on line 142
Opening Address (Kran Film Collective)

Kran Film Collective

Opening Address

Kran Film was the host of Camel Collective for a 4 month residency  in Copenhagen 2010. This is the video that was among other produced from their residency with the Second World Congress of Free Artists at Aarhus Kunstbygning. Please see more about the event and Camel Collective at their websites at http://camelcollective.org/

The video itself takes its structure from Straub-Huillet’s film, Toute révolution est un coup de dés (1977). Shot among the new residential buildings in Ørestad City outside of Copenhagen, Opening Address presents four figures dwarfed by contemporary housing developments, the descendants of Bauhaus architecture. Four voices read from Camel Collective’s “Opening Address” to the Second World Congresses of Free Artists, a script that appropriates elements from the first Opening Address by Asger Jorn, delivered in 1956.

Jorn’s original text critically attacked the Weimar Bauhaus’ call: ARCHITECTS, SCULPTORS, PAINTERS: WE MUST ALL GO BACK TO BEING ARTISANS. He proposed instead that artists be engaged at the highest levels of theoretical and technological production. Yet, in light of the post-Fordist training of artists as the professionalized coordinators of linguistic performances and positions (the “educational turn” in art is one of its art-historical manifestations) it may be time to reconsider the artisanal as an always already political venture and to explode the possibilities dormant in its repression within the context of conceptual art’s hold on artistic formation in Western academia.

The video presents a moment of reflective pause and proposes a limited utopianism in the midst of a hyper-capitalist dystopian futurism.

Camel Collective’s script was delivered at a performance of the Second Congress of Free Artists at the Aarhus Kunstbygning, November 2010.

11 min. video, color, sound
2011