Doug Aitken’s moving image installation, Sleepwalkers, was projected earlier this year on the exterior and courtyard walls of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It is now showing at the Miami Art Museum.

By Michelle Weinberg

It’s the tail end of summer and the art world is closed down, recharging and gearing up for the overloaded season ahead. However, there are some signs of life. During this slow season, images that move seem more vibrant than those that stand still.

If you crave art that is visionary, irreverent or eccentric, a vintage film or an experimental video festival can deliver the goods with an authenticity that the market-driven gallery scene just can’t muster. The Louis Wolfson II Florida Moving Image Archive presented the Sixth Annual Rewind/Fast Forward Film and Video Festival at the Miami-Dade Public Library’s downtown branch Aug. 24-26. This festival was so wonderful, so unique and so disastrously underattended it is shameful. Fewer than 10 people turned up during the screening I attended, and a third of those were library customers who wandered in by chance. The Moving Image Archive, which touts itself as Florida’s movie memory bank, has a collection of newsreels and instructional films, and boasts the largest collection of home movies in the United States. Please catch it next year.

In Nova-Kino, the high point of the festival, filmmaker Mark Boswell blends the almost-endangered 16mm film medium with high-tech digital video techniques, mixes documentary and fictional footage, and manipulates Hollywood sentimentality by overdubbing, looping and surgically splicing the film. Boswell, who once worked closely with like-minded cinephiles during the heyday of South Beach’s Alliance Theater, returned to Miami from his home in Brooklyn to introduce his works — precise, wild and cogent rebuttals to America’s obsession with global military domination. In Nova-Kino, he clearly revels in the paranoid and enduring Cold War romance between the U.S. government and its Communist demon enemy.

Other films of note: In RocketKitCongo, filmmaker Craig Baldwin uses wholesome hobbyists and crafters as an analogy for CIA-tinkering and reckless missile production to show a devastating view of the slew of badass dictators that has oppressed the people of the Congo. Spiders in Love, an “arachno-orgasmic musical” by Martha Colburn, is a comic assault on rabid female sexuality featuring wildly animated, fanged, phallus-devouring spiders. Both films present images of violence that arouse strong visceral responses — carnal desire, queasiness and laughter — and an archetypal vividness lacking in much contemporary video work. For more information about the Wolfson Moving Image Archive, call 305-375-1505 or visit www.fmia.org.

 

Sleepwalkers

A short walk across the cultural plaza (read: homeless hangout) from the library will bring you to a documentary video of Doug Aitken’s monumental moving image project, Sleepwalkers, at the Miami Art Museum. The installation, which was projected earlier this year with great fanfare on the exterior and courtyard walls of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, is part of the Power of Ten exhibition celebrating 10 years of art at MAM; it will be shown on the exterior of the new museum in Museum Park whenever that controversial project becomes reality. After the explosive 16mm works featured at the festival, Sleepwalkers seems rather bloodless. It tries to be profound, but winds up resembling advertising. There’s a complacency in the direction of the actors and the political correctness of their expressions and gestures that is disappointing, despite the film’s high-tech mastery and bravura. The Power of Ten exhibit will be showing at the Miami Art Museum, 101 W. Flagler St., until Oct. 28. For more information, call 305-375-3000 or visit miamiartmuseum.org.

 

Cavernous cameras

Moving images continue to distinguish themselves — above and beyond the merely adequate paintings that accompany them — at Diaspora Vibe Gallery in the Design District. The gallery is showcasing an enterprising group of artists from PopOpStudios in the Bahamas. One of those artists, Blue Curry, created an original video project featuring a tiny video monitor inside the cavity of a piece of fossilized coral. On the screen is an image the actual size of the removed section of coral, a whimsical exercise in redundancy, which has more juice than its description would suggest. Lundby Strand, another video installation by Michael Edwards, is buzzing with street life and abstraction. PopOpStudios seems like an industrious collective, and the artists’ residency in Miami affords us a glimpse into how artists create scenes in small, island communities. The Bahamian artists will be showing Work! at Diaspora Vibe Gallery, 3938 N. Miami Ave., through Sept. 22. For more information, call 305-573-4046 or visit diasporavibegallery.net and www.popopstudios.com.