Owen Land, FKA George Landow made films that are concerned with theological pursuits; what constitutes image and matter, the eternal present, metalepsis – or the extimate form of the holy trinity, often scabrously tested with his mode of Yiddish humour, to connect to an absurdist notion of spirituality. He was born into a conservative Jewish family, converted to Catholicism in his 20’s, orbited the right-on, far-out Christian sects of California in the early 1970s, forming his own religious position between Catholicism and Tantra. In 1973 he was invited by the Christian World Liberation Front, the CWLF, (Monty Python Life of Brian may have heard) on the Berkley campus, to document their spring tour, where the CWLF ‘radical Jesus Freaks’ would meet conservative Christians for discussion.

In 1967, Berkley was the focus of the popular hippie movement and all kinds of counterculture in USA. The street intersection of Haight and Ashbury was its epicentre. Here is Joan Baez, unplugged, on the street corner surrounded by turned-on, (slightly) tuned-in, (maybe not) drop-outs, curious and serious looking:

Meanwhile, young runaways from around the country flocked to the scene, protested, made love, took drugs and lived on the streets. In 1967 the Campus Crusade for Christ (CCC) aspired to the idea that the Berkley hotbed of campus radicalism, the left-wing coalitions of free speech movement and the Vietnam Day Committee (A coalition of left-wing groups that opposed the Vietnam war) could be reached and converted. The CCC were rejected so the infiltration and conversion plan failed. By 1969 many of these hippies were addled with years of LSD, hash, angel dust, speed, quaaludes and heroin, they were homeless, plagued with pre-AIDS Sexually Transmitted Diseases and desperate – ripe for Christian conversion. Jack Sparks, a member of the CCC moved with his family to Berkley to set up the Christian World Liberation Front.

The name Christian World Liberation Front (CWLF) was recuperated from the Third World Liberation Front, the Berkley coalition of Black students union, Latin American, Filipino, Asian American and Mexican-American political student groups who canvassed for campus reform.

The Five Third World Liberation Front (TWLF) Demands, 1969:

1. That a school of Ethnic Studies for the ethnic groups involved in the Third World be set up with the students in each particular ethnic organization having the authority and control of the hiring and retention of any faculty member, director and administrator, as well as the curriculum in a specific area study.
2. That fifty (50) faculty positions be appropriated to the School of Ethnic Studies, 20 of which would be for the Black Studies Program.
3. That in the Spring Semester, the college fulfil its commitment to the non-white students in admitting those that apply.
4. That to the Fall of 1969, all applications of non-white students accepted.
5. That George Murray, and any other faculty person chosen by non-white people as their teacher, be retained in their position.

The Christian World Liberation Front’s experiment in radical Christianity adopted the modes of political radicalism and typically, recuperated Black and ethnic minority action to present their mission as counter-culturally attractive. The CWLF were considered to be leftwing christians. They described themselves as rising above left and right politics, but this first fundamental move of naming through cultural appropriation, shows them to hold a reactionary stance.

Jack Sparks and The Christian World Liberation Front published their newspaper, Right On! to distribute through the “Cosmic circuit”, a magazine exchange group described by its organiser, Muz Murray, as being for ‘the exchange of underground, upground and overground magazines’. Right On! fronted Jesus as a radical amongst hippies.

Wanted Jesus Christ poster in Right On! No. 2, 1969

Kenneth Anger, to whom George Landow was artistically indebted (amongst others), set a similar, but inverted approach in his 1963 anti-Christian movie Scorpio Rising. Here is a scene where Jesus gives sight to a blind man, who then fellates Jesus, whilst we listen to the groovy pop track ‘He’s a Rebel’ by The Crystals. Recuperation and assault on popular culture, celebrity and religion through desire.

To get a feel for the Jesus freak scene, here is a film of the Jesus People, who ran a shelter for homeless drug addicts in Berkley. The film shows a conservative Christian reporter attempting to denigrate the Jesus People libertarian stance, that they might allow drug addicts into their congregation and accept that they continue a habit. It’s interesting to see how the polemical accusations were between clearly categorised ‘straight’ and ‘radical’ positions, between self-organised group and the institutional presenter.

The Jesus People had another film made about them, this time showing a public debate where non-christians could voice their opinions. Here is a clip of a perhaps Alice Cooper fan, representing the Satan Group. These film clips suggest a time of fervent reappraisal of christianity and of religion, in tension with a more traditional, authoritarian church.

The relation between drop-outs and religion came to a head with the potential government support of Jim Jones infamous Jonestown. It’s a possibility that the position the Jesus Freaks adopted; counter cultural, anti-authoritarian and “left-behind” made space for contemporary Q-Anon and MAGA evangelical Christianity to occupy, all be it twisted towards a far-right position.

In the year that the Christian World Liberation Front commissioned the film of their spring tour, there was to be one of the most hyped religious cult appearances of the 70’s. This was Millennium 73, held over three days in November at the Houston Astrodome by The Divine Light Mission. Here is a movie by TVTV, made up of underground video makers including Ant Farm video collective, reporting on the event.

Their Lord of the Universe, Guru Maharaj Ji, was a fifteen year old boy whose family placed him as a bringer of global peace. Not a bad thing, but for their amassing of wealth from desperate followers, an inability to utter a profound thought and grievous bodily harm as retribution to a custard pie throwing prankster. The Jesus freaks amassed outside the Astrodome to argue with transcendental hippies, amongst inspired talk of levitating the building and the start of a golden age.

So this is a social and political context for George Landow’s film. He was surprised to be asked by the Christian World Liberation Front to document their spring tour, as he was known for his experimental work, although a work one year earlier, ‘What’s Wrong With This Picture part 2’ does include vox-pop.

This post identifies the situation that Landow was working within, not replicated in his work. His overlaying and dismantling of continuous time eludes our comprehension of the polemics of the speakers. He includes their words, giving them a platform, fragmented and encrypted as aaa-bbb-aaa-bbb-aaa, where ‘a’ is a frame of one time and ‘b’ a frame of another. It points to a place beyond the limits of our perception, sliding off their lips into the abyss. We can catch a syllable, or even the occasional word as it falls away. What then becomes more readable is the edit itself, its mise-en-scene, the gestures of audience, the collision of details, that appear satirical. It could be read as a send-up of the CWLF mission, of our perception and of the idea of documentation itself. It could doubly be a spiritual quest, transcendent of time, but the film’s visual satire provokes doubt. Permissive contradiction is at the heart of Landow/Land’s oeuvre.

The slippage in Landow’s work, its contradiction, connects to Freud’s ‘Jokes and their relation to the unconscious’, which we shall encounter in part II through Lacan’s quilt of Wit and the Unconscious, in relation to bald heads, hands, pens and the eternal present. There is also the question of imminent spirituality vs transcendental spirituality, Landow tends towards an absurd understanding of the spirit. So, until next time…

…

…So Freud made some headway into jokes in his text, ‘Jokes (Witz) and their Relation to the Unconscious’ (1905). Freud considered successful jokes to rely on what he calls, the ‘economy of psychic expenditure’, to gratify some sort of prohibited tendency. He began a taxonomy of jokes, including these two below, that our artist, Owen Land refers to in his film, On the Marriage Broker Joke as Cited by Sigmund Freud in Wit and its Relation to the Unconscious or can the Avant-Garde Artist be Wholed? (1977-1979)

There are four of five marriage broker jokes in Freud’s study, they share a technique of splitting the attributes, the imperfections of the bride into separate, disconnected statements, with an unmasking of the broker’s self-betrayal through both flawed thinking and enthusiasm. Freud gets stuck here, saying he has lead himself into the dark, but won’t give up in his thirst for knowledge.

Johnson’s dark joke-made-real of his terms ‘Processing in Rwanda’ through ‘humanitarian partnership’ is Grand Guignol humour in the extreme, but here the horror entertainment becomes actual horror. It relies on our xenophobic association of contemporary Rwanda with its historic, 1994, bloody genocide and the association of the word ‘processing’ with forcemeat. The history of Rwanda and UK’s own humanitarian darkness sets up a perfectly farcical ‘humanitarian partnership’. If he wanted to create an image of offshore concentration camps and stomach churning gore he couldn’t have found a more efficient vehicle! The Dead Kennedys or CRASS played this game as sardonic irony in the 1980s, as I thought my friend was doing, but not so with the UK government, the irony has melted through the symbolic subconscious association to become an imaginary-meets-real event in the Rift Valley.

So this leads on to this post’s Owen Land Jokes as some light relief:

and

Two slightly different approaches on a military theme, separated by an art joke:

19. Even with one eye, Titian would be a titan (Owen corrects the manuscript with an ‘a’ inserted before titan.)

So here, if this is a script, there is a hope that the fetishisation of military attire and the secrecy of violence can be pulled apart by the unwavering strength of the artist!!!

Next time, Lacan on Freud’s witz, as I’ve ordered his Seminar V from Blackwells bookstore, to arrive any day now….! and his film ‘Thank Jesus for the eternal present’, as yet not much written anywhere, so looking forward!

This post catches up with earlier works of Landow, that reveal his fascination with the transcendence of a frame of reference, beyond the image and the material to light as force.

Key historian of American avant-garde cinema, P. Adams Sitney, championed George Landow as “the most devout of structural filmmakers and perhaps the most sublime”(Sitney, 1969). Giles Deleuze praised the work and used it to hang his argument for a shift into a cinema of non-human perception, “George Landow… L-A-N-D-O-W. A great American filmmaker.” (Deleuze, 1982, Seminar 8) He seemed to accentuate Landow’s name here, even though, or because the artist formally known as George Landow became Owen Land five years earlier.

Deleuze’s difficulty of recognising Land’s transition seems like an affront and antagonistic to his own train of thought, of the fluidity of phenomena, it doesn’t make sense in the contemporary age of access to immediate documents on the internet. Perhaps back then, he may have once read, but forgot, so tried to assert what he had at hand, an earlier P. Adams Sitney article with the artist named as Gerorge Landow.

G-E-O-R-G-E-L-A-N-D-O-W

O-W-E-N-L-A-N-D

A-P-O-L-L-O-J-I-Z-E

Land’s work concerns the radical movement of a frame of reference, from the image as representation; a mannered, mechanical and commodified image, through to the image as material – structural; grain, exposure, scratch, to the loss of image; only light passing through the holes in the image-material, the gap where the image once was.

Landow premiered this film as loop at the Film-Makers Cinematheque, calling it ‘This film will be interrupted after ten minutes by a commercial’. True to its title, the film was interrupted with an 8mm interjection of Rembrandt’s Town Council as reproduced by Dutch Master Cigars.
(P Adams Sitney, Structural Film)

So McEwans lager isn’t so far off. There is something lost in the translation to a linear film print. Landow’s early projection performances seemed to suggest the use of a loop, that is played until Landow decided to stop, here after 10 minutes of repetition. So the work might have had a definite transition between the 16mm loop and the 8mm advert. Has anyone seen the Rembrant ‘Town Council’ spot? Please post a link in the comments if you find it.

Bardo Follies 1967. George Landow

There seems to be three versions, a roughly 50 minute, a 25 minute and an 19 minute. Here is P. Adams Sitney’s account from ‘Structural Film’, Film Culture Reader:

The film begins with a loop-printed image of a water flotilla carrying a woman who waves to us at every turn of the loop. After about ten minutes (there is a shorter version, too), the same loop appears doubled into a set of circles against the black screen. Then there are three circles for an instant. The film image in the circles begins to burn, creating a mouldy, wavering, orange-dominated mass. Eventually, the entire screen fills with one burning frame, which disintegrates in slow motion in an extremely grainy soft focus. Another frame burns; the whole screen throbs with melting celluloid. Probably, this was created by several generations of photography off the screen-its effect is to make the screen itself seem to throb and smoulder. The tension of the silly loop is maintained throughout this section, in which the film stock itself seems to die. After a long while, it becomes a split screen of air bubbles in water filmed through a microscope with coloured filters, a different colour on each side of the screen. Through changes of focus the bubbles lose shape and dissolve into one another and the four filters switch. Finally, some forty minutes after the first loop, the screen goes white. The film ends.

Sitney mis-described the film a little. The woman isn’t being caried, she is sitting beside the stream, and she’s not waving at us, she’s waving to the right, towards the boat. It is a little strange that he writes this, then recently complains that Deleuze mis-described the film too. Deleuze imagines the opening scene of the film to be about a swimmer, who causes waves to form around her, rather than waving with her hand. The actual scene [I think – but with both of these illustrious writers describing it differently, the film might well be supernatural !?] is amazing in its fake feel, it’s not just the mannered wave, as if she is employed to sit there and wave at the over-stacked boatload of Disney refugees, the scene feels like Léger’s Ballet méchanique, set in the landscape of Duchamp’s Étant donnés. Some research reveals that the women were initially employed to distract tourists from dead plants, then caught on as a commodified erotic spectacle.

Here is the scene so you can have a better sense of it:

Deleuze (1982) appears tremendously impressed by a rough translation of Sitney’s idea of the work, or the semi-memory of seeing it, to draw connection between the film, Buddhism and Bergson, with the help of Carlos Castaneda, in his Seminar on Cinema: The Movement Image. He states, the film stops representing the image and becomes the granular, through a flickering journey into death. He says so elegantly, ‘Let us stop. Let us stop the world’ when the image no longer moves and the grain begins to melt, loosing representation, just the loss of material cinema in the bubbles of acetate and gelatine. Then there are holes between the grain, these holes, of nothingness, “become conduits for lines of force, which are sometimes lines of light, bringing accelerated movement” [back to the screen].

As another aside, Castaneda’s neo-shamanic work in the 1990s could be important for an exploration of the embodiment of the ‘lines of force’. Check out the Tensegrity® Cleargreen Incorporated. So now cinema moves from image to force, which can be channeled through Qigong like meditation/ control of breath and body, rephrased as a magical pass through the body by a seer.

In 2019 Sitney gave a lecture at Stanford University, where he attempted to show that Deleuze similarly ‘corrected’ Bergson’s insights to support positions promoted by Cahiers du cinema.
[It’s not publicly available as far as I can see, but again, if you find it, please comment here.]

Owen Land, speaking at LAFF in 2009 spoke about a mythopoetic autobiographical film that he was making, using comments made by film critics, including Ian White, to enact a persona of Owen Land. This suggests that Owen Land becomes a conduit for a displaced subjectivity, his persona is incorporated into a mythologised or secondary account of his life. He lives and makes art as a diffused artist, formed in part by his audience, a diffuse collaboration.

This is the approach to my work here at LUX, that Owen Land can become part of myself as a posthumous maker of an Owen Land work, called ‘I Grog, and its alternatives’. Or maybe I become part of what was once Owen Land, borderless and indistinct.

Some notes:

Sitney, P.A. (1969) Structural Film in Ed P. Adams Sitney (1970) The Film Culture Reader. Available online at http://arthurtuoto.com/Structural-Film-Sitney.pdf [last accessed 06.03.2022]

Gilles Deleuze

Seminar on Cinema: The Movement-Image

Lecture 08, 19 January 1982 –

https://deleuze.cla.purdue.edu/seminars/cinema-movement-image/lecture-08

Looking around the web, it seems that this joke is thinly recognised amongst some acoustic guitar teachers. A poster of it can be purchased from Etsy, here, alongside rainbow unicorns and Christian fan art:

https://www.etsy.com/ca/listing/771509717/more-jesus-les-paul-instant-download

Acoustic guitar fans know this joke, as the Gibson Les Paul electric guitar was seen as gold standard of guitars, and 1970s christian sing-ins seem to be documented with acoustic guitars.

[P. Adams Sitney, writing for Artforum, described Land’s search for the detritus of commercial culture: ‘the more banal, the more spiritually immanent.’]

But the design of this joke is such that it can be viewed also from the other side (or mutually inclusive other), a theological perspective. I went to Foyles bookshop to look at the theological section, and the Pauline Epistles do dominate! Some of the letters of Paul are debatably not written by Paul, there is a diffusion of naming again, like Owen.

Amongst the recent books on Paul, this anthology stands out as worth the read:

Bodies on the Verge: Queering Pauline Epistles

Edited by Joseph A. Marchal

Here is a sample from the chapter, ‘Dionysus, Disidentifications, and Wandering Pauline Epiphanies’ by Timothy Luckritz Marquis, following Muñoz’ writing on Disidentification, of the performance and film work of Jack Smith, “whose mission was to “destabilize the world of ‘pasty normals’ and help us imagine another time and place.”(Muñoz, 1999)

This essay follows, with [José Esteban] Muñoz and some other writers as traveling partners, a disidentificatory Bacchic scene less obvious than [Jack] Smith’s—that is, 2 Corinthians, viewing Paul’s writing as a style of performance that makes room for new ways of being. In so following Dionysus, Paul, Smith, and Muñoz, I contend that future study of Paul’s letters and communities should pay more attention to productive moments of misrecognition in Pauline interpretation—from his first communities’ reception of his message and mission to our own attempts to map his rhetoric—since such moments are, in most new social movements, the ones that join to build a previously unseen community. (Marquis)

Avantgarde filmmaker Michael Snow writes about the cinema experience of watching a Jack Smith movie in The Collected Writings of Michael Snow, by Michael Snow, Louise Dompierre:

I’m not sure if he is swearing about the noise, or if the audience were all having noisy sex, except for Snow, who was not grooving, but this does highlight a relationship between the screen and what is beyond it. A present tense experience was rubbing up against the timeless, out of time, film.

So, I am ‘more Paul’, but at least the saint brings us back to experimental cinema, via Muñoz. Thinking about Disidentification, there is an important place for Owen Land’s work, to carve out a space for the psychologically queer, where his transformation of the world, a world born though the performance of his characters as a ritual, allows for what Muñoz writes as ‘rich alternative treasure troves of queer possibility’. Here not sexually queer, but definitely giving a voice to crazy, in a way that Dali was less able to identify with:

The first six cards of ‘I Grog and its alternatives’ are concerned with names and naming. Owen Land’s name changes are the first obstacle to an engagement with his films. It seems somehow a joke, an incongruity, something less than authentic, but in these first sentences, he is standing up for the changed name, perhaps as a punk used to have a moniker – Polystyrene, Sensible, Lux, Poison Ivy, to deconstruct the family history of The Law, but maybe it is something a little more subtle. The first six jokes set up the way to meet ‘Owen Land’ away from ‘George Landow’

These jokes are set in the 18^th century colonisation of America, its religion, social elite and slave trade, the history of names for things, groups of people, disease and wildlife. He questions the fatalistic emergence of etymology. What if sailors drank pee rather than grog, elite society men attended cocktail parties wearing foreskins rather than tuxedos and the guppy fish were a crab or bear?  How might we live today?

Following this are two religious’ jokes at the expense of Christian sects that fled Europe to America in the 18^th Century, with a Yiddish slant, Landow himself of conservative Jewish upbringing. He became a Christian convert with interests in Gnosticism, Messianic Judaism, Christian Fundamentalism, Scientology, Hinduism, Buddhism and finally as P.Adams Sitney (2011) wrote “his own fusion of Christianity and Tantra.”

THE FIRST SIX JOKES

1 Grog got its name because the admiral who first served it to sailors wore a grogram coat. What if he had worn a pea coat?

2 The guppy got its name from R.J.L. Guppy, who introduced it to England from the West Indies. What if his name had been Byrd, Crabb, Bear, Lyons or Katz?

3 The tuxedo got its name from the town where it was popularized, Tuxedo Park, NY. What if it had been popularized in Fawnskin, CA?

4 [?] Mennonites got their name from the first name of their founder, Menno Simons. What if his name had been Paris Simons?

5. The Amish got their name from the surname of their leader, Jacob Ammann. What if his name had been Jacob Nebel?

6. Lime disease was named after the town of Lime, CT, where it was discovered. What if it had been discovered in Tombstone, AZ?

Card 1. We are “pissed as a newt”, when inebriated and go out for a night “on the piss” in the UK and in Australia, but are angry, or “pissed at someone”, in USA English.

Admiral Edward Vernon had the idea to water down the rum rations for his sailors in 1740 during manoeuvres in the West Indies, it seems to reduce the severity of yellow fever casualties amongst his men, which made them pissed. They called the drink ‘grog’ after the clothes Vernon wore. He was known to parade on deck in his Grogram coat. Grogram was a corded fabric with prominent transverse ribs, this kind of material lent itself to the peculiar lustre of ‘moire’ patterning when pressed.  

A year before, in 1739, Vernon and his fully-proofed crew captured Porto Bello, Panama from Spanish colonial possession. This is a curious link, as Land became obsessed with palindromes, citing:

A man, a plan, a canal, Panama

Card 2. R. J. L. Guppy was a naturalist, married to the daughter of a plantation and slave-owner on Trinidad, to descendants of French aristocrats who fled the French Revolution guillotine. He discovered the guppy fish in Trinidad and introduced it to the UK. This fish is used as a modal organism for experiments in fish genetics because of its short lifecycle and ease of breeding, producing two generations per year. They are used in experiments of genetic drift over many generations and the effects of in breeding, also in behavioural studies, sexual selection and evolution. The history of this fish sounds terrible, a reminder of the horrors of colonialism.

Land’s first alternative is ‘Byrd’. The Byrds were folk rockers, but William Byrd (16^th Century) was an English Renaissance composer who moved from Anglican to Roman Catholic religion.

My favourite alternative here is ‘Crabb’. Lionel ‘Buster’ Crabb was an alcoholic navy frogman who vanished during a reconnaissance mission for the MI6 in 1956. He was inspecting the screw of a soviet cruiser berthed at Portsmouth. A body was found decapitated and handless 14 months later, but no proof was ascertained. The story and surrounding conspiracy made news headlines for years. ‘Buster’ Crabb was the eponym of the American two-time Olympic swimmer and screen actor, Buster Crabbe, playing ‘Tarzan’, ‘Flash Gordon’ and ‘Buck Rogers’.

To be continued…

P.Adams Sitney (2011) Passages: Owen Land. Art Forum [Nov 2011]. Online at:

https://www.artforum.com/print/201109/owen-land-29195 [last accessed 2/2/2022]

At the turn of the century, LUX, Shacklewell Lane office, received a parcel from Owen Land, of a collection of index cards, entitled “I Grog and its alternatives”(2003). Little information was supplied with it, save for an annotated transcription of the index cards, but there was a sense, or perhaps a conversation, that these cards were a film script. Land admitted that his scripts resisted interpretation. The 200 or so cards, each written in neat letter forms, hold a humorous piece of oral literature with connection to historical events and people, etymology, religion, rock and roll, painting and avant garde filmmakers.

Over the next few months I shall be testing the cards, trying the jokes and re-viewing his work, was he an ironiclastic, not iconoclastic artist?

George Landow, also known as Owen Land, Orphan Morphan and Apollo Jize (1944-2011) could be rearranged as a Woolen Dagger or A Glowed Goner. His work was irreverent, intellectual and dangerous. It remains a key part of the history of avant garde film but has struggled to find its place in a broader cultural history. Landow’s early film Flemming Falloon (1963/64) was accompanied by this statement:

Landow proposes that if we accept the reality offered to us by the illusion of depth on the flat plane of the screen, we can then assign reality to anything at will. A cinematic equivalent of the illusionistic portraiture of the Flemish painters.

I went with a friend to see Frans Hals, the Flemish portrait show at the Wallace Collection last week. The small exhibition space was walled up with cheeky looking men, painted in Hals’ style of wet-on-wet brush strokes, in a limited pallet, with no attempt to hide the mark of the brush, yet still representing his sitters with convincing vitality. Landow’s film, a series of male portraits, were infused with light spills during processing and reproduced picture-in-picture, the material was evident, kind of cheeky in a high humour way, but also deeply serious, just as that Flemish painter may seem.

Reproduction Frans Hals Cavaliers found themselves in the front rooms and hallways of working class families in 1980s Britain, coincidently when The Laughing Cavalier was used by McEwan’s beer as its logo. Perhaps a brewer in the next century may use an Owen Land film still.