Ken Russell and Kenneth Anger, I do the google search of the two names together every so often and nothing much pops up. I kind of can’t believe it. There are clearly so many overlaps of magical bad taste and taste in bad magic. They both make movies that look like dances and the costumes are great. Jack Smith appears in both their dreams and probably Aleister Crowly sent them both a Christmas card. Why is there not an institute of the Kenns? We shall remedy this oversight. As elderly (one to the point of dead) white anglo dudes and clearly products and producers of the mid 20th century, they are on the old-fashiony side. There is nothing immediately exciting or fresh or urgent and yet it is in this declining relevance that we can find space to invent.
Both of these fellows were born in 1927, they both made very strange movies that did not ever look like any one else’s. Despite their white maleness they are also freaky outsiders. When the studio systems in England and Hollywood abandoned Russell he got out the giant VHS and filmed C grade B movies in his garden. Kenneth Anger wrote Hollywood Babylon, enough said.
Their films believe in symbol and they also believe in flesh and it doesn’t make sense. They both work the magic of subversion but what is that really? Something quite different for each of them, Russell is much more about the necessity of rubbing up against the normative in order to feel the release whereas Anger is up to something else entirely (maybe). Where are we now with our notions of identity, symbol and flesh and resistance? What do we want and need from this moment of re-calibration? It’s such a rich mess. Let’s spend some time there with our nasty old uncles making a dance in the mulch of the disintegrating patriarchy.
I want us to invent and inhabit the space between these two beautiful weirdos, by re-making and re-inhabiting the dances contained within the films and practicing them until they crack open or lie down and die. We can’t know yet what will happen. The act of investing in these images, these works is to find the right spell for each of us, for what we need to know about now. It’s not the art or the artists but the narrow space between them that can hold us for a little while so we can see what’s there, in us and next to us. It’ll be a rejuvenating camp out in a kind of creepy wood.
Cards on the table: I have never gotten over Glenda Jackson in Women In Love, dancing the cattle away. We will definitely start here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYCQok8xVbo
