Tickets: €8
Reservations via bookings@ificantdance.org

On Thursday 31 January at 9pm, If I Can’t Dance presents an evening of texts and images with Jacob Korczynski at Cinema de Uitkijk in Amsterdam. Following an intense two-week research period in Amsterdam, Korczynski will present the preliminary findings of his research on Lucy Lippard’s experimental novel I See / You Mean (1979). The evening will end with a screening of Babette Mangolte’s film The Camera: Je or La Camera: I (1977), presented on 16mm.

Jacob Korczynski’s research for Performance in Residence revolves around a close study of Lucy Lippard’s experimental novel I See / You Mean (1979), a book that was in development for over a decade and is a unique part of the oeuvre of this well known American critic and curator. The publication “charts the changing currents between two men and two women. A collage of overheard dialogue, sexual encounters, astrology, the I Ching, Tarot, palmistry, the book is also a document of the author’s burgeoning feminist consciousness.”

Korczynski situates I See / You Mean in the context of a feminist aesthetic that he connects to contemporaneous practices in experimental film and more specifically the exploration of the subjective camera eye in the first three feature films of Babette Mangolte. He proposes his research as simultaneously engaging the image as text and the texture of the image.

To launch his research, Korczynski and a volunteer group will execute Lippard’s submission to the Projects Class at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax in 1969. An initiative of artist David Askevold, the Projects Class solicited instructions from artists that he and his students would then carry out. For the inaugural class Lippard was invited to write and submit a proposal alongside Dan Graham, Sol LeWitt, Joseph Kosuth, Douglas Huebler, Lawrence Weiner, Mel Bochner, Robert Smithson, and Robert Barry. Lippard’s instruction was an exercise in image making that would inform her writing process. For two weeks, Korczynski meets daily with a group of interested artists and cultural practitioners, who are photographed together every day at the same time in the same place by photographer Kyle Tryhorn. During the evening of the 31st, the photographs and texts will be presented.

The Camera: Je or La Camera: I, 1977, 16mm, 88 min. B&W/Colour
“Going back and forth between observation and sentiment or imagination, the film is a self-portrait of the photographer-filmmaker during the years 1976 – 1977.” – Babette Mangolte