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.