The jump into ice-cold water that forms an integral part of Finnish sauna culture is given the name »Avanto«. This traditional ritual is a brutal shock for the body, but its beneficial physical and psychological effect is undisputed. Since the year 2000 the word has also been the programmatic title of the young annual Finnish festival that concentrates on local and international »non-conformist« media-art activities.

The intermedial experiments gathered there, which break radically with conventional forms of representation and performance practices, and range from classics of avant-garde experimental film and live performances to the most recent digital (music) videos, are intended to achieve a similarly powerful effect. This is not necessarily pleasant, as was proven by the »Noise Performance« by the artists' group OHNE at the very start of the four-day festival. Moving through the room in strict formations, these »neo-Actionists« attacked the listening and visual habits of the audience with a chaotic mixture of digital and analogue noise improvisations. The listeners really were exposed to a very physically wearing ritual. At the beginning of the performance, the artists drew attention to themselves in the darkened room by producing noises resembling farts and burps. The audience reacted rather calmly to this provocation, coming as it did after the screening of two films by Kurt Kren and Ernst Schmidt jr. whose transgressive potential would be hard to surpass.

The films, »O Tannenbaum« (1964) and »Kunst und Revolution« (1968), documented the happenings and material-actions of Otto Mühl and Günter Brus, in which naked bodies interact with blood, excrement, paint and natural produce in an altogether more radical fashion. Under the titles »Kurt Kren. Lord of the Frames« and »Ernst Schmidt jr.: Destruktionsfilme«, the oeuvres of these two protagonists of Austrian avant-garde film were at the focus of this year's historical film programmes. The fact that the radical nature and quality of their cinematic works were internationally recognized was later demonstrated by the filmmaker Malcolm Le Grice, who seemed to be very much familiar with the films of these two Austrians. In his introductory address, »Experimental Cinema in the Digital Age«, the British artist, who was the subject of this year's retrospective, presented several examples of early »abstract film« (including Viking Eggeling, Hans Richter and Oskar Fischinger) as a basis for discussing the fundamental aesthetic and ideological principles of alternative filmic structures and counter-concepts. In his talk, Le Grice emphasized the fact that abstract, non-narrative and non-linear film has never had just one fixed, and thus authoritative, form. With regard to digital media, he conceded that the non-linear potential inherent in these technologies does not in itself guarantee a non-linear artistic concept, and that the originally avant-garde artistic concepts such as interactivity and abstraction have long since been integrated into the mainstream of digital culture. For this reason, he said, it is necessary to examine the prevailing conventions of representation with »new« artistic techniques, forms and strategies as well. And during the festival, several recent films, performances and concerts demonstrated that these new critical methods also include the »old« media. One could see the manually processed, surreal film collages of Cécile Fontaine, and in the live cinema performance by the artists' group Cellule d'Intervention Metamkine, the burning celluloid could even be smelt. The artists used two Super-8 projectors, a cassette recorder, chemical materials, and even prisms and mirrors as a basis for their magical, poetic light-and-sound spectacles.

Altogether, the festival very successfully made a stand against any big, illusionistic narratives, something that was also shown in the programme »Avantoscope 1-4«, which brought together a remarkable number of small but outstanding Austrian productions in the form of audio-visual video works by Brigitte Bödenauer, Karø Goldt, Michaela Grill, Michaela Schwentner, Lotte Schreiber and Norbert Pfaffenbichler, among others. In this regard, the programme »Revolution Action« was really the only one to take a very different tack. It presented the MTV-compatible »Digital Hardcore« videos by Alec Empire. The video for the number »Deutschland Has Gotta Die« is the documentation of a concert that the band gave at an anti-war demonstration. At the end, the band leader, arrested by the police, appears in heroic fashion in a police car.

This shady manipulation of the documentary-like pictures was something Ernst Schmidt jr. already criticized in his artistic manifesto: »Film is only free when it presents reality in a completely unmanipulated way - or shows a completely manipulated reality.«1

www.avantofestival.com

 

Translated by Timothy Jones

 

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