Feelings Are Shit. The Real Trick is to Disappear

FEELINGS ARE SHIT. THE REAL TRICK IS TO DISAPPEAR

O U T P O S T event

Event: Thursday 26 & Friday 27 January, 6pm

Open to public - admission free*

OUTPOST event is pleased to host Feelings Are Shit. The Real Trick Is To Disappear, a two-evening programme of screenings and discussions in dialogue with the moving image works of Chris Kraus presented by Patrick Staff and Lucy Pawlak. Part one of this iteration of Feelings Are Shit... includes Kraus’ 1987 film How to Shoot a Crime, an accompanying film by artist Corin Sworn and a participative discussion around ideas raised by the films and the economies of their screening. On the second evening we present Kraus’s rarely seen feature film Gravity and Grace, with a co-operative curation of the work of artists Vicky Timms and Phoebe Swell.

Kraus, a self-described "failed filmmaker", is author of novels such as I Love Dick, Aliens & Anorexia and Torpor, co-editor of Hatred of Capitalism: A Semiotext(e) Reader and the founding editor of the Native Agents new fictions series, also for Semiotext(e). Kraus' most recent publication Where Art Belongs “examines artistic enterprises of the past decade that reclaim the use of lived time as a material in the creation of visual art”. Originally receiving little to no attention when made, Kraus' films toy with subjective positions, an intricate interplay of fiction and actuality and the blurring of boundaries between public and private, domination and submission.

A selection of publications by Chris Kraus will be available to purchase over both evenings at the gallery.

*Suggested donation of £3 to support the screening

PART ONE:
Thursday 26th January: Confessional Tales 4 Political Ends

How to Shoot a Crime (Chris Kraus & Sylvere Lotringer 1987, 28 mins)
Kraus presents several versions of the area surrounding Front Street (NY) all existing at one time and yet remaining separate. In each version the same sadomasochistic traits are played out to differing degrees. Conversations with a pair of dominatrices and an interview with a developer of the themed mall, ‘Historic Front Street’, are cut with police videography demonstrating how to document the details of a crime scene. “We never shoot the body first, you have to establish the situation, then show the body so they are not overwhelmed.” How To Shoot a Crime further explores Kraus’ interest in the control exercised by narrative, its capturing of the viewer through a system of codes, the intricacies of sadomasochism and the lived material of a city.

After School Special (Corin Sworn, 2010, 20 mins)
In After School Special the American teen film Over The Edge by John Kaplan is invaded, appropriated and reconfigured by Corin Sworn. Dubbed with her own script, cut with footage from a Wings Over Canada documentary on Kitsault, poetry by Shayne Ehman and Ronald Reagan’s speech ‘The Creative Society’. Both process and content of this action upon the original feature perform a protest – as demanded by one of the protagonists of the film “Give us our programming. Deliver us the Television”.

Over The Edge (1979) New Grenada is a planned community set in the desert, its inhabitants, preoccupied by their zeal to attract industry to their town fail to see the disaffection brewing amongst the younger generation. When a kid brandishing an unloaded gun at a cop is shot and killed the parents find out that their children have had all they can take. (IMDB Plot Summary)

With a participative discussion on co-operation, co-option, appropriation and (auto)gentrification.

PART TWO:
Friday 27th January: The Alien Entity Emerging From The Group

Gravity & Grace (Chris Kraus, 1996, 90 mins)
“The Wartime notebooks of the philosopher Simone Weil, published posthumously in a book called Gravity and Grace are chronicles of her will to wait for God. In the movie Gravity and Grace, a group of earnest lunatics wait for Aliens to rescue them from a New Zealand suburban yard. Mid century, late century. When any of my friend – competitors in New York asked about the film I said, “I’m working on a little movie about God.” That usually shuts them up.”

Featuring a cameo from Kraus as a Senior Curator removing Gravity from a group show: “The sublime has always been on the side of shit. Face it Gravity you’re work just isn’t shitty enough. It’s illustrative of the peripheral conditions of shit... I don’t think we can accommodate you”

With Co-operative Curation of the work of Vicky Timms and Phoebe Swell

Chris Kraus is an author, filmmaker and editor at Semiotext(e).

Corin Sworn is an artist based in Glasgow who is interested in the means by which artifacts are borrowed, adapted and reconfigured to tell various stories. Her work often explores the alternate narratives that cultural products might develop through use.

Lucy Pawlak is an artist interested in how groups structure and organize themselves in relation to their surroundings. Probing how we act together is at the core of her practice.

Patrick Staff is an artist who uses collaboration, re-enactment, abstracted movement and dialogue, sound, sculpture and obscuring structures to explore the political, physical and performative implications of social spaces.