Media

Tonight, the Dallas Video Festival kicks off at the Angelika Film Center. For 23 years, Bart Weiss and his cohorts have been pulling together innovative and challenging programming for the festival that always makes this one of the most fascinating movie-watching weekends of the year. What I’ve always enjoyed about Video Fest is its efficiency. What you don’t get at the festival are the kinds of mid-budget, mediocre feature films that clog the programming of most full-fledge film festivals. Video Fest’s movies are nearly always medium-conscious, and as a result, no matter what screening you walk into, what’s on screen will be something entirely fresh in either form or content or both. Sometimes the experimental, self-conscious fare doesn’t quite work, but rather than a shortcoming, this makes the festival feel like a breeding ground for ideas, an arena of experimentation that keeps the festival relevant. There are a number of excellent films at this year’s festival. Jump to find out which selections are not to miss.

One function of art is to open up new perceptions. Great art changes the world through the way it changes our understanding of the world. Jacob Lawrence’s 15 silkscreen prints chronicling the life of Toussaint L’Ouverture took me by surprise. I had been thinking about how to teach a 2D Design course. In front of those prints, I wanted to instantly transport my students to see how intelligently Lawrence has taken an economy of design elements (color, shape, rhythm) to create a world of feeling, experience, and narrative. Sitting in front of Superflex’s video work: Flooded McDonalds a couple of weeks later in the Peter Blum gallery in Chelsea, I was thinking about the Jacob Lawrence prints. Both projects evoke the pleasure and/or horror related to states of separation and merging.