Oedipus Wrecks: Sex, Violence & Incest - Stewart Home

Explicit Content : THIS IS NOT A CHILD FRIENDLY EVENT 
Submission is Free

@ IFAC Athina - Galaxia 11, 117 45 Athens, Greece
Event - Wednesday July 10th, 2019
Event - Τετάρτη 10 Ιουλίου 2019
Viewing - 17:00-18:30
Screening - 19:00-20:00
Closing reception - 20:00-22:30
Curated by Alessandra Falbo and Lee Wells
Επιμέλεια από την Alessandra Falbo and τον Lee Wells

Curator Assistant, Translator and PA: Niki Papakonstantinopoulou
Προσωπική Βοηθός, Επιμέλειας και Μετάφρασης: Νίκη Παπακωνσταντινοπούλου

See discussion for Greek text.

All as part of Eaux d’Artifice

This screening groups films by the English artist, filmmaker, writer, pamphleteer, art historian, and activist Stewart Home offering, in this way, an insight into part of his practice. It is the first time these works are presented in Athens and also the worldwide premiere for Porn The Theory (2019), his most recent video art piece made in collaboration with the artist, activist and pornographer Itziar Bilbao Urrutia. The new work closes this screening, which is part of the program of the group exhibition Eaux d’Artifice. 

The exhibition includes two collaborative pieces, each one a sequence of eight photographs & one text panel, by Stewart Home and the photographer Chris Dorley-Brown. In one of them, Occult Androgyny (2018), photographs of Home are merged with photographs of a London based Spanish witch incarnating the triple goddess in her maiden form. Photographs of her were used as references for his poses. He calls the final compositions morphs. Home’s body also appears in every image that composes Dual Flying Kicks (2018), this time imitating the hypermasculine poses of small plastic Bruce Lee toys.

During the event we’ll also be showing Re-Enter The Dragon (2016) - 40’48’’ - a film genre documentary produced, in its fiction but also in reality, by the ego and the superego Kevin Callan [1] & Stewart Home. As stated by the superego who, according to one of the voiceovers in the film, made a piece of writing in advance of the film’s production, the film looks at the legacy of martial arts figures such as Bruce Lee & Count Dante and, in particular, at the ways in which they are willing to, in the 1960s, teach students their fighting techniques now unpacked in popular culture and beyond it. Another electronic voiceover, a female one this time around, states that Stewart Home’s movie is about dreams and not reality, about the unreal quality of martial arts films and ideology of realism. It then follows with comments on the unreality of the fighting techniques and moves/flicks portrayed in films like Fist of Fury (1972) and on how this has been taken by fans. According to this voice all of this brings us back to the avant-garde cinema of the lettrists [2] who, in the early 1950s, characterized Hollywood cinema as a capitalist spectacle and believed separating sound from image and scratching the surface of the film itself (physically) would help bring the spectators back to the real world.

Themes recur and develop after spectators are taken back into a sped up description of Bruceploitation movies [3]. As the film progresses the voiceover also verses on the author’s other interests and opinions in politics, gender equality and race which are all serious topics however humorously approached. 

According to one of the author’s recent interviews and to the book itself Home is a fan of Bruce Lee movies since childhood. This makes it groovy that his most recent book Re-Enter The Dragon: Genre Theory, Brucesploitation & the Sleazy Joys of Lowbrow Cinema (Ledatape Organisation, September 2018) works towards the author’s political and social goals through the various Bruceploitation movies’ reviews that compose his film genre theory book.

Screening // Ut Pictura Poesis (1997) - 0’43’’ - “This was made as part of the Arts Council funded Blipvert Project in 1997. So it was one of six commissioned pieces cut into the ads at independent cinemas and was seen in that context by an audience of something like three quarters of a million people. It was shot at 50 Beck Road in Hackney (since I appear in it, Nick Abrahams was operating the camera) and edited at Artec at Highbury Corner (...). This was an attempt to distill the lettrist cinematic experiments of the early 1950s (and in particular the feature length pieces "Has The Film Already Started", "Anti-Concept" and "Screams In Favour Of De Sade") into 45 seconds. Proletarian post-modernism lives on…” - Stewart Home

No Pity (1993) - 11’38’’ - Promo video for short story collection "No Pity" by Stewart Home (AK Press 1993), made with Nick Abrahams and Mikey Tomkins and featuring music by Bloodsausage. The short stories are from the beginning of Stewart’s career as a writer. At the time his writing focused on skinhead gangs and anarchist activity. An art action and other doings referenced in the stories also appear in the film. 

Hex in the Park (2017) - 11’38’’ - was a Halloween 2017 ritual curse on property developers in the EC1 area of London in the form of a witches demonstration; while simultaneously being a protective action for two local parks (St. Luke's Gardens and Fortune Street Park) that will have massive amounts of sunlight blocked from them if proposed developments go ahead. It was organised by Stewart Home, Liz Rever and the St Luke's Community Collective. The film was edited by Owen Oppenheimer and the soundtrack is by Bioni Samp. Those involved in the protest were opposed to the construction of Taylor Wimpey's The Denizen in Golden Lane which is scheduled to replace 110 social housing units for key workers with 99 luxury flats being marketed to overseas investors who won't live in them or even rent them out (they'll be empty ghost homes), with no social or affordable housing provision on site. The demonstration was also against the then current design for the new Finsbury Leisure Centre on the other side of Old Street which would block sunlight from St Luke's Gardens and Burnhill House (a social housing tower). The witches wanted no reduction of on site leisure facilities and for the proposed housing block St Luke's Mansions to be moved from Helmet Row - where it would overshadow the park and Burnhill House - to the west site of the site against Central Street, where it would cause no harm. The video works as a spell and builds on the original Halloween working. There is more info on Hex in the Park here: https://reclaimec1.wordpress.com/.../hex-in-the-park.../

Stewart Home & Chloe Aridjis On Ann Quin (2019) - 0’15’’ - Stewart Home & Chloe Aridjis each give a sentence about why they like the 1960s British experimental novelist Ann Quin [4].

The Eclipse and Re-Emergence of the Oedipus Complex (2004) - 41’49’’ - was made while Stewart was in Melbourne as a visiting artist at the Victorian College of the Arts (May 04). In the movie avant-garde techniques and the avant-garde obsession with death interweave with reflections on the life and death of his mother Julia Callan-Thompson. Images of his mum working as a fashion model and club hostess during the sixties are cut against an at times deliberately dissociated soundtrack that uses stories about her to explore the limits of documentary cinema. This is simultaneously an expression of love and loss and an attempt to draw out the ways in which the avant-garde Lettrist cinema of the early fifties in France was commercialised in the later work of Godard, Marker and Resnais. For more info about Stewart Home's Australian tour, see ledatape.net.

Porn The Theory (2019) - 06’42’’ - presents a re-enactment of the butter scene from Last Tango In Paris (1972). In it Stewart Home plays the part originally assigned to the actress Maria Schneider (1952-2011) while Itziar Bilbao Urrutia acts as both Marlon Brando (1924-2006) and as Bernardo Bertolucci (1941-2018). The scene was, in 1972, decided upon last minute by the male director and by the also male actor without the actress’ previous knowledge of it. Maria learned about it as the shot was already in course. In 2019, Hegelian reversal is employed by Home and Urrutia in order to explore sexism and sexual abuse in the movies. The film aims at seeing what happens to the scene and also to the story behind it with the genders reversed. In this attempt, the film incorporates in its dialogue lines from the original film, from an interview given by Maria in 2007 and also from Bertolucci’s comment on it (2013). The duo originally agreed on having two versions of Porn The Theory, a soft porn one aimed at the art world and another one aimed at Urrutia's usual public. As it turned out the soft porn version was never finished and, for this reason, we are screening the only existent one. 

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Stewart Home is an award-winning visual artist and author of fifteen novels, seven works of cultural commentary, one collection of poetry and one collection of stories. His most recent solo exhibition was Dual Flying Kicks at 5 Years in June 2018. His most recent book is Re-Enter The Dragon: Genre Theory, Brucesploitation & the Sleazy Joys of Lowbrow Cinema (Ledatape Organisation, September 2018). Home was born and lives in London. When he isn't shredding copies of his own books as live art, he likes to entertain audiences by standing on his head and spewing obscenities. - https://www.stewarthomesociety.org/

Itziar Bilbao Urrutia is a visual artist, activist and pornographer based in London. Her practice is linked to its many sexual subcultures. After doing a Masters in Visual Arts at Goldsmiths
College, her interest in the disobedience of the Monstrous Feminine, has led her to explore mediums unrelated to the art tradition, such as porn as a film genre. Since 2004, her projects have been based on an exploration of the international fetish scene as a space of identity
and praxis, that lead her to establish her own fetish porn studio, The Urban Chick Supremacy Cell. Using digital adult content as a form of survival and of expression, she mixes the discourse of Femdom with the aesthetics and rhetoric of historical radical action and feminism, such as Valerie Solanas and the Baader-Meinhof group. - https://onlyfans.com/urbanchicksupremacycell/?ref=314671