IN
THE WAKE OF A DEADAD
Andrew Kötting
LATEST NEWS (November 09)
Find
out about Andrew's latest feature film: IVUL
A recent installation, in collaboration with Eden Kotting, took place in Hastings in October 09
A
short film, Edgeland
Mutter, was made as part of the Sea Change initiative.
Lowave
have released the
third volume of the HORS PISTES DVD which presents three films selected
during the 2008 festival including In the Wake of a Deadad.
The 64 minute film, based on the installation, is distributed by the Lux and the Bfi. See trailers and read reviews here.
The
book is available directly from Andrew
Kötting (£30 including postage and packing UK only). It
can also be bought from the Tate Modern Bookshop,
The
Lux or even amazon.co.uk.
Find out more and read reviews here
OTHER STUFF
At
the end of 2008 Sonic Arts released a
CD
of contributions from film makers, poets, artists, musicians, friends
and family which create something beyond just a collection of music chosen
from personal taste, but a document of an artist’s life.
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BACKGROUND INFORMATION
Iain Sinclair on the Deadad project: pdf from The London Review of Books Volume 28 Number 16, 17th August 2006
The notes below are taken from the exhibition at the Herbert Read Gallery, Canterbury (reviewed in Contemporary visual arts on June 06. No82)
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In the Wake of a Deadad is Kotting’s powerful, often uncomfortable reflection on the recent death of his father. His Deadad.
That to philosophise is to learn to die
Michel de Montaigne
Andrew Kötting is one of Britain’s most intriguing artists, and perhaps the only film-maker currently practising who could be said to have taken to heart the spirit of visionary curiosity and hybrid creativity exemplified by the late Derek Jarman. Formally exploratory and aesthetically innovative, like Jarman he is also a great collaborator, building around his various projects a community of shared interest, while anchoring his prolific production in an ongoing report on the lives of those closest to him.
(more background information on Andrew Kötting and his other work can be found at the Lux website)
Whether in his film, gallery, publishing or explicitly cross-platform projects, Andrew Kötting has never sought an easy, simply-decked monotone to his idiosyncratic meditations on family, place, social ritual and the artesian threads of narrative, rumour, custom and sometimes dubious tradition that link such territories. An often melancholy humour and absurdist physical pranksterishness has carried, informed and even shaped the most personal of material. This prankster - denying the hourglass rush of life with jokes, sex, hands-dirty labour and clock-spiting endeavour on all fronts - finds his imperatives manifest perhaps most keenly in his latest cross-media exploration.
An installation in three parts, the work is both a chapel to his father’s memory, an exploration of the bonds of patriarchy and the secular exorcism of a difficult relationship.
In the Digital Diptychs, Kötting places himself in scenes taken from the pages of 60’s glamour magazines. Flat screen monitors are paired up with ‘still’ Découpages or three-dimensional ‘layered’ images, presenting the artist as participant in the scenes that as a child Kötting would fantasise.
Overseeing these diptychs, are two large Inflatable Sculptures, bearing the images of Kötting’s father and grandfather. Comic and melancholic, the tombstone-shaped portable monuments were filmed by Kötting at various locations around the world. The 65 places, (one for each year of his Deadad’s life), are of significance to Kötting his father or his grandfather and implied narratives unfold as the filmed inflations are projected into the Gallery space.
The exhibition is also accompanied by the 444 page In the Wake of a Deadad Book. The book includes the replies of an Invitation to Write that Kötting sent out to 65 individuals. Each was encouraged to write in response to four photographs of Kötting’s Deadad, including one of his dead body laid out in the chapel of rest. As well as Kötting’s own musings and confabulations about the project there is an introduction and conclusion by Gareth Evans and contributions from the likes of Adam Chodzko, Laurence Coriat, Mark Cousins, Jem Finer, Tony Grisoni, Gregorios - Archbishop of Thyateira and Great Britain, Sean Lock, Iain Sinclair, Dr Muhammad Shabbir Usmani, Janni Visman, Fay Weldon and Eden Kötting
don’t be afraid of death
When you are old
and about to be eaten
by a coffin,
don’t
be afraid
of death.
Naa.
Richard Brautigan
(The Edna Webster Collection of undiscovered writings)
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