The objective of Punto de Vista’s retrospectives is to rethink the history of cinema, and to celebrate filmmakers and artists whose work has hardly been shown in Spain. Two retrospectives will take place this year. Curated by Alexander Horwath and Regina Schlagnitweit, the retrospective dedicated to Amos Vogel is intended as a tribute to the figure of this fundamental curator and founder of Cinema 16, on the one hundredth anniversary of his birth. Garbiñe Ortega, on the other hand, has curated the Nancy Holt season, a series of four programmes that bring together films by this multidisciplinary artist who was one of the leading exponents of the Land Art movement, and whose film work is practically unknown.
When people ask me how I can be optimistic now about the possibilities for progressive politics or for subversive art, I have a saying: ‘I have more confidence in my enemies than I have in my friends.’ I’m convinced that my enemies will continue to do the most outrageously repressive things and therefore will again, inevitably, evoke a revolt on the part of those who are being kept out or kept down artificially and by force. The power of the artistic impulse that creates what we call the avant-garde cannot be overcome; it will always rise again.
Amos Vogel
Photo: Amos Vogel & Alexander Horwath, 1993. Viennale/Austrian Film Museum
All of my work is involved with site, time, inside vs. outside space, orientation in space (often in some way astronomically designated), and aspects of perceptions —light, space, framing, focus.
Since 1969 my primary concern has been in making sculpture in the landscape or in open urban spaces—using stone, concrete, brick, and steel. Although sometimes indoor spaces—entire rooms—are used as sites, the sites, both in and outdoors, are an integral part of the sculptures—the ideas for the works developing out of my involvement with the sites.
My films, videotapes, and book, also conceived of in a perceptual framework, are usually evocations of landscapes or displacements of places. Indications of space (through tracking, pans, aerial, and walking shots) and aspects of nature—sunlight patterns, billowing dust, water reflections—are caught visually and transported elsewhere via film through time, while the psychology of the place is disclosed through the local voices, sounds, and/or music in the sound tracks, or accompanying text.Artist's statement for Video Data Bank, 1988