The General Secretary is Trapped in a Snow Globe: William E. Jones on Peter Roehr
Film Montages (For Peter Roehr) (Jones, 2006)
Los Angeles Filmforum at MOCA presents William E. Jones, a Los Angeles based artist, filmmaker and curator whose diverse body of work explores materiality, memory and subcultures; he has recently produced a body of work in conversation with the career of the late German artist Peter Roehr. This program will include a rare presentation of Peter Roehr’s sound and film montages. These works restructure American advertising using strict, mechanical repetition.
Partially inspired by the physicality, eroticism, and congruency with Bob Mizer’s work, evident in Roehr’s wrestling film Ringer, Jones’ performance and video Film Montages (For Peter Roehr) explore the erotic possibilities embedded within Roehr’s life and methodical editing.
Following the screening, Jones will sign copies of his new book, Flesh and the Cosmos (David Kordansky Gallery, 2014)
Beverages & light refreshments will be available for purchase at Lemonade Café until 10pm.
This screening coincides with the exhibition Bob Mizer & Tom of Finland, currently on display at MOCA Pacific Design Center.
Introduction by Alison Kozberg
Ton-Montagen I-II (Sound Montages I-II)
Peter Roehr (audiotape, Germany, 1965, 60 min excerpt)
Introduction
A lecture performance that explores the relationship between Roehr, Charlotte Posenenske and gallerist Paul Maenz.
Film Montages (for Peter Roehr)
Directed by William E. Jones (2006, color, sound, video, 11 min)
An appropriated video work that also serves as a tribute to a great artist of the 1960s, Film Montages (for Peter Roehr) takes simple repetition as its first principle. William E. Jones arranges fragments of gay porn films into a musical composition at once austere and delirious.
“In the video, the hard sheen of butchness and 1970s high tech, accoutrements of leather men, mounds of flesh and eager faces, an invitation to phone sex, and the shrieks of an analog synthesizer all present themselves with a seriousness befitting totems of high modernism. Scenes from anonymous gay bondage porn, a boxcar orgy from J. Clinton West’s Dreamer (1975), the introduction of Joe Gage’s Handsome (1980), and the “leather freak” sequence from Rosa von Praunheim’s film-provocation It Is Not the Homosexual Who Is Perverse, But the Situation in Which He Lives (1970) replace Roehr’s skyscrapers and shampoo girls. Only the city lights remain.”
- William E. Jones
Film-Montagen I-III (Film Montages I-III)
Directed by Peter Roeher (1965, 16mm transferred to video, black and white, Germany, 23 min)
“I alter material by organizing it unchanged. Each work is an organized area of identical elements. Neither successive nor additive, there is no result or sum.”
- Peter Roehr