Coleen+Fitzgibbon


 * Zeitgeist Multi-Disciplinary Arts Center **
 * COLEEN FITZGIBBON: PUBLIC RECORDS **

Wednesday, March 9, 2011 @ 8:00 p.m. Location: 1618 O.C. Haley Boulevard, New Orleans, LA 70113-1311 Curated by visiting filmmakers Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder. Between 1973 and 1976 Coleen Fitzgibbon made some of the most rigorous abstract films to date. This program revisits some of these early 16mm films from an artist who is perhaps best known as one of the co-founders of the alternative arts collective Colab. Coleen Fitzgibbon was active as an experimental film artist under the pseudonym “ Colen Fitzgibbon ” between the years 1973-1980. A student of Owen Land (aka “ George Landow “), Stan Brakhage, and Michael Snow , Fitzgibbon screened her work at numerous international film festivals and museums, including EXPRMNTL 5 at Knokke-Heist in Belgium, Institute of Contemporary Art in London, Anthology Film Archives, Collective For Living Cinema, and Millennium Film Workshop in New York. Films being screened include:
 * COLEEN FITZGIBBON: PUBLIC RECORDS **

(1974), original Super 8 film transfered to digital, B&W, silent, 6 minutes (1976), original 16 mm film transfered to digital, B&W, silent, 9 minutes  (Full Color/Full Aperture Unprocessed Raster), (1974-2010), original 16 mm film transfered to digital, color, sound, 15 minutes (1976-2010), original 16 mm film transfered to digital, B&W, sound, 6 minutes (1975-2010), original 16 mm film transfered to digital, B&W, silent, 3 minutes (1975-2009), 16 mm film, B&W, sound, 8 minutes
 * Daily News **
 * Der Spiegel **
 * Internal System Fourth Pass **
 * Document (Public Records) **
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Dictionary **
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Time **


 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: 16px;">Millennium Personal Cinema Series **
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: 16px;">Coleen Fitzgibbon **

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">66 East 4th Street, New York NY 10003 <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Coleen Fitzgibbon was active as an experimental film artist under the pseudonym "Colen Fitzgibbon" between the years 1973-1980. A student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Whitney Independent Study Program, she studied with Owen Land (aka "George Landow"), Stan Brakhage, Yvonne Rainer, Carolee Schneemann, Vito Acconci. Fitzgibbon came to NYC from Chicago in the 1970s and worked at Millennium where she had some of her first one-person screenings. Fitzgibbon has screened her work at numerous international film festivals and museums, including The Toronto International Film Festival 2009, Museum of Modern Art, EXPRMNTL 5 at Knokke-Heist, Belgium, ICA, London, Anthology Film Archives, and Collective For Living Cinema.
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">MARCH 12, 2011 (Sat.) COLEEN FITZGIBBON: PUBLIC RECORDS **

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">"Between 1973 and 1976, Coleen Fitzgibbon produced a series of films that stand as some of cinema's most rigorous explorations of the medium. Associated with the Structural film movement and New York's No Wave scene, Fitzgibbon's films emphasize time, duration, and their own flickering mechanics while also hinting at a deeper socio-cultural meaning" -Gene Siskel Film Center


 * DAILY NEWS** (6 min.-1974) **DER SPIEGEL** (9 min.-1976) **INTERNAL SYSTEM FOURTH PASS** (15 min.-1974-2010) **DOCUMENT (PUBLIC RECORDS)** (6 min.-1976-2010)**DICTIONARY** (3 min.-1975-2010) **TIME** ( 3 min.- 1975-2009) Note - Most works shown are film to digital transfers.

Colen Fitzgibbon, b. 1950

Anthology Film Archives Presents:

FILMS BY COLEEN FITZGIBBON

FILMMAKER IN PERSON! Friday, March 6, 7:30 PM Saturday, March 7, 7:30 PM

FOUND FILM FLASHES (1973, 3.25 minutes, 16mm, b&w, sound) FM/TRCS (1974, 11 minutes, 16mm, color, sound) RESTORING APPEARANCES TO ORDER IN 12 MINUTES (1975, 10 minutes, 16mm, color, sound) INTERNAL SYSTEMS (1974-75, 45 minutes, 16mm, color, sound)

One of the gratifying side effects of contemporary media overload and its frequent inanity is a keen hunger of viewers for challenging, provocative work, and what better place to search for it than the history of avant-garde cinema? New York–based artists Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder did just that, and came up with the experimental films of Coleen Fitzgibbon, a rediscovered artist who produced a cogent body of work dedicated to exploring the possibilities of the medium during the early 1970s. In the four-minute Found Film Flashes (1973), Fitzgibbon, who worked under the pseudonym “Colen Fitzgibbon,” crafts an elliptical evocation of desire and sexual spectacle out of found footage, opening with fragments of black-and-white shots of a man looking downward. She then cuts to shots of various women, and the images stutter in scratchy, staccato beats, the anxiety and sexual tension in the visuals augmented by the discomfiting and glitchy irritation of the soundtrack. In the 12-minute film FM/TRCS (1974), we experience sequences of brightly colored pulsing orbs and globular shapes — a breast, perhaps? Or a hip? Fleshy thighs? A nipple? Or maybe they’re just orbs of pulsating color — it’s hard to know! Fitzgibbon destroys representation, leaving behind light, color, rhythm and texture, and yet the suggestion of the body remains. Also from 1974, Restoring the Appearance to Order opens with the sounds of running water, then an image of a dirty, paint-splattered sink. A woman steps into the frame and begins to scour, scrubbing away the paint and grime. The camera remains static; the shot continues for a full 12 minutes, ending abruptly before the task is complete, the work of art offering but a glimpse of the labor around it. The history of smart, feminist, experimental films has been sadly neglected; this program represents the brilliance waiting to be revisited. – Holly Willis, LA Weekly

Total running time: ca. 75 minutes..

Anthology Film Archives 32 Second Avenue, NYC Info: (212) 505-5181 [|www.anthologyfilmarchives.org]

Review of Coleen Fitzgibbon's Films @
//Los Angeles Filmforum// by [|LA Weekly]

Coleen Fitzgibbon: Internal Systems @ [|www.lightindustry.org/] Tuesday, June 17, 2008 at 8pm

Curated by Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder

Between 1973 and 1976 Coleen Fitzgibbon made some of the most rigorous abstract films to date. This program revisits some of these early 16mm films from an artist who is perhaps best known as one of the co-founders of the alternative arts collective Colab.

Films to be screened: Found Film Flashes (1973), FM/TRCS (1974), Internal Systems (1975), Restoring appearances to order in 12 minutes (1975), Document (1975-76).

Coleen Fitzgibbon was active as an experimental film artist under the pseudonym "Colen Fitzgibbon" between the years 1973-1980. A student of Owen Land (aka "George Landow"), Stan Brakhage, and Michael Snow, Fitzgibbon screened her work at numerous international film festivals and museums, including EXPRMNTL 5 at Knokke-Heist in Belgium, Institute of Contemporary Art in London, Anthology Film Archives, Collective For Living Cinema, and Millennium Film Workshop in New York.

The screening will be followed by a discussion with Coleen Fitzgibbon, moderated by Daryl Chin.

"Jewels & Gems"
Early Films by Colen Fitzgibbon

(June 23, 2008 at 7:30 pm. Curated by Colen Fitzgibbon) Monthly screening at the Collective Unconscious. 4th Monday of every month. Films from the Film-Makers' Coop.

C.Fitzgibbon will be showing early '70's experimental films and videos (Found Film Flashes, TRCS/FM, Document, LES, and some others). Fitzgibbon joined the Film Coop in 1974 after graduating from the Art Institute of Chicago and the Whitney Independent Study Program in NYC. Her own films have been shown at the London ICA, Anthology Film Archives, Palais des Beaux Artes, Knokke-Heist Belgium Exprmntl Film Festival, Rotterdam Film Festival and other venues. A member of the artist group Colab (Collaborative Projects, Inc.) started in NYC, 1977, Fitzgibbon stopped making experimental films/videos in the early 1980's to work as an independent film/video producer in the U.S. and Europe.



[|Colen Fitzgibbon Retrospective @ Harvard University -October 13th 2007]

Coleen Fitzgibbon was active as an experimental film and video artist under the pseudonym “Colen Fitzgibbon” between the years 1973-1980. Fitzgibbon was a student of Owen Land (aka “George Landow”) and Stan Brakhage during her years as a film/video student at Art Institute of Chicago (1971-73). Later she attended the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program under Ron Clark (1973-74), studying with international artists such as Michael Snow, Yvonne Rainer, Vito Acconci, Donald Judd, and Dennis Oppenheim. Between the years 1973-1976 Fitzgibbon made some of her most rigorous experimental work to date on 16mm and super 8 film. Films such as Found Film Flashes (1973), FM/TRCS (1974), Internal Systems (1974-75), Restoring Appearances To Order In 12 Minutes (1975), and Document (1975-76) screened at numerous international film festivals and museums, including EXPRMNTL 5 at Knokke-Heist in Belgium, Institute of Contemporary Art in London, Anthology Film Archives, Collective For Living Cinema, and Millennium Film Workshop in New York.

Fitzgibbon’s films of this period can be considered as part of a second wave of structural filmmakers. Influenced by the modernist cinema of the mid-to-late 60’s and heralded by P. Adams Sitney as “structural film” – an emerging canon of work which included films by Owen Land, Michael Snow, Paul Sharits, Tony Conrad, Hollis Frampton, Joyce Wieland – Fitzgibbon’s films were deeply rooted in the high formalist aspirations of the avant-garde. In one of her more minimalist films, Internal Systems, the viewer is presented with nothing but a blank monochromatic frame slowly shifting through various intensities of color saturation, flickering/shuttering repeatedly from light-to-dark (and back again) for a duration of 45 minutes. Even what may seem to be some of her more accessible work pushes the limits of perception. In the shorter 12 minute FM/TRCS, light, color, shape, texture, pattern, granularity, solarization, contrast, and movement incessantly flow as if from some undisclosed place, the effect of which is an incessant restlessness of the filmic frame. In her notes on the film, Fitzgibbon writes: “FM/TRCS is a study of image destruction and its subsequent effect on recognition and suggestion of new images.”

Her experience in the Whitney’s ISP program further enriched her critical disposition toward her subject matter, in particular the emerging discourse of institutional critique. Structural film’s critique of the cinematographic apparatus is broadened to encompass other institutions, techniques, and practices epitomized in her performance film Document (1975-76), previously titled Public Records. The material for this film was generated while Fitzgibbon was working for the then thriving information retrieval system of the microfilm industry. The 16mm unperforated and frameless strip of Kalvar microfilm was sent to a perforation machinist and then projected on an analytic film projector. As a film performance, Document accelerates, slows down, and freezes the microfilm disclosing public records as diverse as bank receipts, deeds, checks, and other transactions between the private and the public.

Institutional critique continued in more performance based work with artist Robin Winters under the collaborative name X + Y (1976-1978). During this brief period X + Y made a body of work spanning film, video, installation, and performance. Fitzgibbon’s collaborative sensibilities continued when she co-founded the New York based Collaborative Projects, Inc. (Colab). Forming in 1977, Colab was an organized group of 30 to 60 artists seeking an alternative outlet that would call into question and challenge the emergence of the “art market” in their New York milieu. Fitzgibbon recalls: “The Colab period was an attempt at a non-hierarchical socialist art movement within NYC’s international capital finance system, and had been inspired by other earlier groups such as Oldenberg’s Store, The Fox publications, Judson Dance Group and the teachings of Ron Clark, as well as others.” The roster of artists in Colab included Robin Winters, Jenny Holzer, Peter Fend, Liza Bear, Kiki Smith, Tom Otterness, Charlie and John Ahearn – to name a few. An integral member in Colab, Fitzgibbon organized artist shows in her loft studio at 5 Bleeker Street with thematic titles such as “Income & Wealth,” “Manifesto” (with Jenny Holzer and Robert Cooney), “Just Another Asshole” (with Barbara Ess, Jane Sherry, and Virginia Piersol); as well as being one of the key organizers of the notorious Times Square Show in 1980.