Kino - A Screening of Dreams and Hopes for Times like These
Matthew Robert Lutz-Kinoy
Bernadette Corporation
Busby Berkeley
Haris Epaminonda
John Hey (OAOA)
Institutt for Degenerert Kunst
Anders Nordby
Charles Irvin
James Richards
Koelnischer Kunstverein, Cologne, April 2009
A screening taking the recession as its starting point, its goal being to create new dreams and hopes in its audience. Starting with Busby Berkeley's By a Waterfall, eight artists were invited to contribute works. Berkeley was widely popular during the Great Depression, with its entertainment-hungry audiences, his films evoking pleasure and escape. (Although Berkeley's use of innovative and often sexually-charged dance numbers have been analyzed at length by cinema scholars, critiqued for their display (and some say exploitation) of the female form as seen through the “male gaze”, and for their depiction of collectivism (as opposed to traditionally American rugged individualism) in the spirit of Roosevelt's New Deal). The rest of the artists take a more contemporary stance on how to please its audience, by being entertaining, provocative, funny, confusing, or simply aesthetically pleasing.
