Jesse Malmed In Person
In order to make a one-liner, one must first invent the universe.
Swinging through town on a west coast tour, Chicago’s own lingua-contrarian enunciationist Jesse Malmed unspools Untitled (Just Kidding), an ever-evolving suite of films and performative interjections made over the last half decade.
Jesse Malmed: “The works play in creative reading, studied density, the one-(hundred)-liner, choirs, screen texts, the bootleg, the cover, jokes, speculative etymologies, accents, loops, the cinemagical, body swaps, poetry, citation and human voice. Conceptually engaged, language-intensive and visually mesmerizing, the suite scrambles somewhere in the intersects of conceptual comedy, dizzying illogics, the poetic plu-future and sustainable sourcing. Through deliberate mistranslation and strategic denaturing of languages and codes, [Malmed] revels in and reveal[s] their extra-communicative potential as sound, as image, as object, and shift audiences’ concepts of the show, of the cinema.” (Untitled (Just Kidding))
Screening to include collisions and confoundments between textual forms—written, spoken, sung and otherwise enunciated; variations on versioning; shifting registers of spectatorial engagement and (maybe) an impromptu demo on spotlight expressivity in relation to the cinema proscenium. Expect to see the following videos and a lot lot more.
SCREENING: [list titles, all caps] …and more
Thimblerig (2012); digital video, color, sound, 11 minutes,
Body swaps, time manifest and made literal, multiverse tears, two minds to a body, dream babies, singtalk, represented realities.
Self-Titled (Rough Cut) (2015), 7 minutes, color, sound, video
“The final structural film. Finally!” (David Manning, Saugatuck Sentinel).
Conque (2012), 8 minutes, color, sound, video, performance
Sixteen—at least—ideas and images in search of a trajectory. The voice you hear is your own, interrupted and ruptured, while a little real-life actualizing is all they need. Frank Stella, Phreak Headroom, Robert Creeley, Quixotic Tivoli, the demography of the Sitcom Set, Pizza Burger Covers and and. My favorite parts are when the permeability of the screen is made clear: when the diegesis becomes our world and when cinema’s prosthetic memory becomes a site for immortality. For Jonah Adels.
Wreading (2012) digital video, color, sound, 18 minutes or so
Reading as writing. A romp through meaning-making and diffuse divination. The clouds hold secrets. Tuli Kupferberg is not the beluga, but the beluga sings human. Charles Bernstein. The world is a word is a world. Cloud covers.
Do Voices (2014), digital video/performance color, sound, 15 minutes
Choirs, choirs, Robin Williams, the contemporary folk art ensemble of youtube, George Mason University’s English Accent Archive, Shamuel Beckett and others come together for a We Are The World / We Arendt -style movie/concert/concert movie. Highly recommended for those already there, those on their way. Topics include: where you’re from and how you sound, the imaginative space of the bootleg, the morass of language, the virtuosity of a radio on scan and typing in stereo.
