The work of Austrian artist, Martin Arnold (1949), is often described as subversive because of its manipulative features which deal with films that already exist (mostly Hollywood films from the 1930s to the 1950s).
Obsessive work with film, overcopying individual frames and their successive composition, is all part of Arnold's work and since 2000 the replacement of video by digital technology has, for Arnold, opened up the possibilities for fine manipulative play with images, as is the case when he lets familiar film characters or objects disappear. Martin Arnold presents his installations in a cinema auditorium and in various galleries and museums. In his productions of the last three years he has "surprisingly" begun to work with his own image material. His production is appreciated in the context of visual arts and the reflections of moving images within the framework of this system (comparison to D. Gordon, S. McQueen, atc.). He is one of the most outstanding authors to come from the range of experimental filmmakers of the third Vienna avant-garde generation and its traditions (Kren, Kubelka, etc.); he has surpassed this heritage with ease.
"Using elaborate optical and aural manipulations, he turns scenes from old Hollywood movies starring the likes of Judy Garland and Gregory Peck into hilariously weird, black-comic nightmares. The footage he quotes is in itself unremarkable — a man walking into a room where a woman is reading, a middle-class meal, a romantic interlude between Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney — but he does ultra-precise (frame-byframe) edits that endlessly repeat the characters' tiniest movements, so they're constantly, frustratingly on the verge of something that never seems to materialize. For some viewers, these "compulsive repetitions" will have the effect The Exorcist (1973) did on some terrified Catholics; others will find Arnold's sleight-of-hand hypnotic and rewarding." (Gary Morris, 1999)
Martin Arnold has produced and directed six 16mm films including trilogy pièce touchée (1989), passage á l'acte (1993) and Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy (1998). His video appropriations, Deanimated (The Invisible Ghost), Forsaken, Dissociated (All About Eve) and Jeanne (The Suffering of Joan of Arc), all finished in 2002 and 2003, are installations presented in digital format. Two installations, Silent Winds (2005) and Cloudy Insulin (2006) – mark a turning point in Arnold's work: for the first time, he uses images that he himself has filmed. These two works, the first in his Lessons and Lectures cycle, present US students reciting texts they have had to learn for their exams. Via simple interventions, Arnold focuses his attention this time on language, articulation, and memory. Coverversion (2008), one of his recent works is a video-variation on the 1989 song by Milli Vanilli's Girl You Know It's True performed by Tofu.gti band.
Martin Mazanec
12 Dec 8:00 p.m. Film Auditorium — MARTIN ARNOLD /A/ – DEANIMATED ETC.
— lecture and screening — Non-fiction Animation
12 Dec 12:00 p.m. White Burrow — DEANIMATED (THE INVISIBLE GHOST)
— Martin Arnold — Austria — 2002 — 60' — Midnight Fever
— BLACK BOX: MARTIN ARNOLD: DEANIMATED (THE INVISIBLE GHOST)
— Video installation — Konvikt Resident
10–13 Dec AC UP Konvikt — MARTIN BLAŽÍČEK: SWING (1)
— Live videoinstallation — Aport Animation
