6/6/19 // Kenneth Anger & Morgan Fisher

Posted May 22nd, 2019 in Co-Presentations, Events and Screenings, News / Events

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Kenneth Anger / Morgan Fisher Reception & Performance
Thursday, June 6, 2019 // 7:00 PM
Slash Art San Francisco // 687 Minna Street, San Francisco
Facebook Event

(Kenneth Anger / Morgan Fisher runs May 17 through June 23, 2019)

Laurence Rickels in The Case of California tells us that music is the ghost noise of identification, a haunting melody that replaces projection with mental images and associations recomposed as impressions. “Only the listener capable of self-concentration tunes in on the composer’s original wavelength.” Projection, and the projector, have their own associations with haunting, as the technology developed alongside the re-emergence of the esoteric and the magickal at the turn of the 20th Century. These two movements often find themselves entwined, and this is certainly the case here: music and magick both find their proper place in the projections of Kenneth Anger and Morgan Fisher.

Kenneth Anger’s legendary film Invocation of My Demon Brother was largely assembled with out-takes from his first version of Lucifer Rising combined with new footage shot in 1969 at San Francisco’s Straight Theater and the William Westerfeld House, which got its “Russian Embassy” nickname in the 1920’s when it was occupied by a group of Czarist Russians who ran a night club out of it. The house later became a center of acid test hippie culture, mystic experimentation, and rock and roll, the magick of which becomes projected through the film’s imagery. Invocation of My Demon Brother stars, among others, Lenore Kandel, Harvey Bialy, Anton LeVay, and Bobby Beausoleil. The film’s score for Moog synthesizer was composed by Mick Jagger.

Morgan Fisher’s Another Movie riffs on A Movie by Bruce Conner, which appropriates three movements of Ottorino Respighi’s 1924 tone poem Pines of Rome as score for the film. Observing that Respighi had written specific descriptions of the scenes that his four movements musically articulate, Another Movie depicts through moving images only the third movement, The Pines of the Janiculum, which Conner had excluded from A Movie. The rest of the film is left free of image, leaving the audience to contemplate the haunted space between Respighi’s pines and Conner’s now absent montage and making explicit the often overlooked relationship between sound and image.

/ will host a special event on the evening of Thursday, June 6th with a double feature screening of Invocation of My Demon Brother and Another Movie, introduced by Morgan Fisher. The evening will include a 16mm projection of Anger’s film presented by Canyon Cinema and a live musical performance.

Kenneth Anger is an independent filmmaker and author. He has been recognized with life achievement awards from the Los Angeles Film Critics, the San Francisco International Film Festival, the Silverlake Film Festival, the Mar del Plata International Film Festival, the American Film Institute, and the Maya Deren Award for Experimental Film/Life Achievement. Among other notable honors, he received the Poetic Film Prize at Festival du Film Maudit in Biarritz, France in 1949, which was presented by Jean Cocteau. Anger’s work has screened around the world, including at the Institut Francais de Vienne in Austria, the Galerie Agnes B. in Paris, the National Film Theatre in London and Anthology Film Archive in New York. He is the author of Hollywood Babylon.

Morgan Fisher is an American experimental filmmaker and artist best known for his structuralist and minimalist films referencing the material processes of celluloid film and the means and methods of producing moving pictures. His work has been included in three Whitney Biennial exhibitions, 1985, 2004 and 2014, and is represented in international public collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, Centre Georges Pompidou, FRAC Ile-de-France, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1987.

Kenneth Anger / Morgan Fisher is the fourth in a year-long series of two person exhibitions, to be curated at / by Los Angeles based artist and filmmaker Drew Heitzler. A limited edition zine-style catalog with a new essay by Tanya Zimbardo will be published for the occasion.

/ is a nonprofit visual art space founded in 2018 to advance and promote the expanding field of contemporary art in San Francisco through exhibitions, publications, and public programming.