[Josiah McElheny: Making a Projection Painting]
Today we're at my friend's studio
and we're projecting lost footage-- or abandoned footage--
by the great filmmaker, Maya Deren.
Long after Deren died, they found the leftover tails of shots
and unused shots that she did complete
that were then preserved as just kind of a reel
with no kind of edit to them.
And what I thought to do was to create a sort of performance
in which we would project the film,
and then I invited a film crew to come and film the film
as it's being projected on the screen.
And the idea was to film from the worst seats.
So imagine you're in a theater
where you're stuck five feet in front of the screen,
so that when you're looking up,
you see all this, kind of, distorted vision.
One comes from an unfinished and lost film called "Witch's Cradle"
in which she collaborated with Anne Matta Clark and Marcel Duchamp
and was filmed at the famous Art of the Twentieth Century gallery.
I'm trying to understand this relationship of abstraction and the body.
She navigates this area between abstraction and the body.
The body becomes almost abstract in some of her works.
In the end, the film will be shown not as a film,
but as a painting on a kind of structure
in which the front of the painting is a piece of glass
and behind it is a kind of fractured landscape,
which will then further distort on the painting itself.
When we showed narrative film on these distorting sculptures,
it didn't work at all.
It just looked like we were commenting on it,
or that you really felt us looking at this preexisting work.
Whereas using the unfinished film,
it transformed itself much easier.
It became something new almost instantly.
That was really interesting to realize
actually how enviable, in some sense,
an original work of art can be--
how complete it can be,
and you can't, somehow, distort it.
That the unfinished is what felt more malleable.