Lili Chin on Alice Konitz – The beginning of an expanded conversation about film and sculpture

Alice and I know each other through a mutual friend. Alice has been living in California for over ten years as a practicing artist, working in sculpture. Her gallery Susanne Vielmetter is located in Culver City, Los Angeles. We live together as roommates in a building built from the 20’s. Gloria Swanson supposedly lived nearby way back in the day. This is the first time we’ve shown each other our work. I really enjoyed the exchange and found through our conversations that we several overlapping interests and inquiries…

Alice began in Sculpture making things that ‘function’ when she was attending school in Dusseldorf in the 90’s. While there, she made a few pieces that were exemplary of this idea, like a box with battery operated radio inside, on wheels and left in the hallway to be pushed around. The box made a public announcement and eventually was confiscated. Further along, she made more objects that seemed to have an apparent function, like a vacuum cleaner and a taco stand. Her objects are less about direct references and instead utilizes abstraction and geometry to draw out semantic associations.

After attending CalArts in the late nineties, Alice was informed by phenomenological ideas, such as investigating the direct experience of sculpture in its physical presence as you understand something directly by experiencing height, depth, width and movement.  The theatricality of an object became a point of investigation. Her taco stand had screens that could be moved and would interrupt your path of vision.

She had a show with drawings of owls and sculptures that she made at Susanne Vielmetter. Alice has spoken to me on several occasions about birds – Her pet cockatiel, Anton has been with her for ten years. In her childhood, she had a pet crow that travelled with her across Germany.  Her interest in birds is deeply personal and she has an unusual ability to communicate with them. It is no wonder then, that when she put the drawings of the owls side by side, she thought of the owls as actors looking at each other. In the show, the drawings were accompanied by a large sculpture with several hexagons. The surface of the sculpture was reflective, so you could see yourself and the owls in the reflection of the sculpture. In our conversation, she had talked about ‘looking through’ and ‘dissolving’ as an influence in some of her collages and objects.  This ‘looking through’ continues not only in the show with the drawings, but extends into her film.

She told me about an epiphany she had on a trip to Mono Lake that involved a synesthetic experience while driving and listening to the radio.  She saw some homemade advertisements along the road and heard sounds from the radio in between the advertisements. She had an image of each note being a color circle. After that she wanted to make a film in which the parts of the film would be intersected by these circles.

Shortly after, she made a film called Owl Society .I’d like to highlight the Owl Society because this is the first film that she made. The film involves characters wearing masks, interacting each other while climbing the branches of an old tree. These characters were models, and would exhibit their costumes as the fashion of the day. Formally the film has a very beautiful composition. With the forest as a backdrop, three characters wearing geometric costumes while holding masks in front of their faces, position themselves in the space of the frame.  As the film unfolds, the characters recite lines from various plays, such as Genet’s, “The Maids”, David Raabe’s “In the Boom Boom Room”, Brecht’s “City of Mahagonny”, etc.  Owl Society has very little editing in it, the image is predominantly a single shot, with the characters entering and exiting the frame to define a mise-en-scene. Occasionally the camera would zoom into the sculpture that resembled a wall, but when taken apart, it would seem like tires or semi circles planted in the environment. The sculpture is comprised of several discs. How it is used as a partition in the film reminds me of her previous investigation to ‘look through’. For me, having seen her body of sculptural work prior, I can’t help but understand the central focus of the sculpture. The characters importance were reduced, and remained at the periphery for me.

She manages to take an object, that she transplants from the physical world (which the actual sculpture inhabits) and ascribe for it a function in Owl Society. The geometry of the sculpture and costumes are defined by the location in which she has placed them, and the function she has designated for them. Organic shapes don’t seem to compete with the geometric shapes; rather, they generate a language for juxtaposing the fundamental shapes in sculpture with the natural. This dichotomy suggests a window into lives of a primitive tribe, and allows us to step outside of the modern day, while still applying the modern to the shapes around the characters. The semi circles, diamonds, squares, and triangles hold a stance that reminds me of civilization, but is at the same time very removed from it, because all we can really learn about the culture of this Society, is from their clothes and the sculpture. Strangely the sculpture seems to be a companion to these characters, or Owls. As they investigate, take it apart, and let it just be a sculpture, their actions don’t pin down what the sculpture is or does. I don’t find myself thinking about a specific use for the sculpture, in fact, seeing what the Owls do with and around the sculpture allows me to think of it’s many various uses, both decorative and functional.

It is also interesting to me that Alice chose to use the sculpture where the ‘cut’ happens. By zooming in and out of the sculpture, condensing the size of the sculpture from many discs to just one or a few discs, she gives a reminder that this is what anchors our relationship to the Owl Society.

Alice has made a film where she imposed several perimeters. The static shot, emphasizing the sculpture as opposed to the characters, minimal edit on the sculpture. These techniques, however, are not dogmatic. I am still able to concentrate on what goes on in the film, with the rules as a way to define and enhance my understanding of this object, instead of restricting me to thinking how it’s used in the film.

I enjoy what Alice makes and how her sculpture is applied in the film. She finds a fluid way to combine the object and moving image, letting the language of each genre inform the other easily. This shift from the world of physical objects around us to how it operates in a film, does not illustrate and confine the purpose of what she makes, but rather opens up alternative ways for thinking how and why it is made, or used. When the sculpture returns to the gallery, the object can still exist on its own, not necessarily hinging on the life it had in the film as a prop. My impulse is to return to the theatrical notion of the object, but at the end of the day, I find that it’s good enough to follow her imagination, roll with her owls showing off their fashion, and maybe go to the gallery to see the sculpture, maybe not. Her sense of humor and playfulness sustains my interest, and I am compelled by the balance she has found – beginning as a sculptor and now accessing the world of film. Both ways, separate and simultaneous, she returns to this original idea of ‘function’ that is an intriguing and logical vehicle for orbiting these two worlds.

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