Catching up on unpublished thoughts: The Nohl Fellows, Program One: Of an airplane that didn't hit the ground & a chameleon in black & white

If one thing united Weds 2 Nov '12  night's first of three film/video screenings of work by this year's Mary L. Nohl Fellows, it was Gesture.  Gestures performed, cinematic, intellectual, & conceptual.  The program, in two parts, presented the work of Sarah Buccheri, a retrospective from '97 to present, & Brent Coughenour, all new[ish] works from his year as a fellow.  While each artist showed a range of technique & content, neither the two programs nor the evening ever felt scattered, held together loosely by focused aesthetics and entertainingly obtuse program notes.

Though the UWM Union Theatre sat largely empty, the audience of fewer than twenty was attentive and enthusiastic.  Though, of course, being the Union Theatre, there was the exception or two: snoring was heard.

Landscape may be the wrong the word for Antarctic Territory, Buccheri's opening piece, as there was so little to be seen.  Both a document and meditation, the program opened with 5 beautiful minutes anxious abandonment at the bottom of the world from 2004.  One of her most recent pieces, Man Crashes Plane, followed: stylistically diametric to the opener, this video portrait of a non-tragedy captures a very similar anxiety to that first piece.  The gathering crowd becomes singular in its gawking awkwardness and misplaced impulse to help.  The two greatest joys of Buccheri's program totaled 6 mins together.  Door is a B&W Super8 film the causes a swinging door to dance across and around the screen; the quick editing breathlessly lifts the inanimate object into a character.  And, again a diametric, I'm Not Pregnant: A Secret History of the Female Potbelly is a 4 min performance of a (presumably, the title and all) woman's robust stomach slowly entering the stationary video frame to hold for a few moments, centered, before backing slowly out.  From the program notes: "A Simple Portrait of a floating belly into a key to lost and/or hidden knowledge."  In image and deed.

And here, at the program break, do the evening's notes become a joy.

Coughenour is something of a production fiend in 2011: All seven of his pieces were made in 2011 and presented in "various states of completion."  Some of the work rehashes old footage already in a completed and known commodity, others are super16mm film sketches that let the extra exposed portion of the film create a pulsing soundtrack, and one pesters a spider.  The notes to a piece culled from unused footage of a trip to Russia read "Sketch for a document of a time and place other than the contemporary."  This confident uncertainty and ephemeral concreteness colors the program.  From Work in Progress: "Something here to describe, in roundabout terms, not what it's about, but rather, what it does."  (I must admit here that the actual content of this piece escapes me and my notes, so many months in the past)  But the program and its notes culminate with "A Special Bonus."  These three video & film works of "no duration" represent the improvisational quality to Coughenour's recent work and the over-confident academic bravado with which such ad-hoc-ness is so often presented.

MAG.dock failed to attend any other Nohl Fellowship programs, one of which featured Coughenour performing something called Mysterium Cosmographicum.