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76
Les Prairies's artists
JACKIE WINSOR
Yellow inside out piece, 1984-1985. Collection Frac Bretagne.
Photography : Florian Kleinefenn.
ŽELIMIR ŽILNIK
Zelimir ̌ ŽZilnik's ̌
films are based on a direct
documentary approach to social reality. The
protagonists of his films are often marginal figures
excluded from the social and political system –
street children, the unemployed, homeless people,
foreigners, transvestites, people without papers,
gypsies. Zilnik concentrates on different forms of
domination or exclusion from the state. Black Film
(1971) shows him in the streets of Novia Sad (Serbia)
inviting homeless people to stay with him for two
days. His camera shows first a highly unusual
situation, then an insoluble discussion on the
question of homeless people. With dark irony, Zilnik ̌
admitted that his position while making the film was
ambiguous. He wanted to make a socially committed
film as a means to forgiveness, but he couldn't keep
those men in his home because they stank so much.
He explained later that Black Film is an essay on the
position of the filmmaker. The work is emblematic
of the Yugoslavian Black Wave (1963-1972), of which
he was part alongside Dušan Makavejev,ŽZivojin ̌
Pavlovic ̌ and Aleksandar Petrovic. ̌ Like other
"New Waves" ̌ in the cinema of that period, it had a
profound effect on European film-making.
M. C. tr. J. H.
Born in 1942 in Niš (Serbia), lives and works in
Novi Sad (Serbia).
Jackie Winsor was associated with the post-minimalist generation
of artists that included Eva Hesse, Bruce Nauman Richard Serra,
and Richard Grosvenor but she has since developed a style of her
own that exploits the tension between abstract vocabulary and
handling the materials. Winsor's interest in form and materials
and their relationship to space was already apparent in her early
works in the 1960s. Her first concern was to arrange things like rope,
string, and steel cables, then to make combinations such as bricks
and ropework, nails and wood. She would work within a geometric
syntax of squares, cubes and grids, letting herself be guided by the
materials. This language enabled her to lay emphasis on the way
she used materials, something that was particularly evidenced by
processes of plaiting and knotting (Bound grid, 1971-1972), but also
by visible cut-outs (Yellow inside out piece, 1984-1985). Bound grid
(1971-1972) is a perfect example of her methods. It is a grid of wooden
branches roped together with plaited hemp. The process (knotting,
roping, twisting) and the thick ropework give such weight to the form
that it looks like a craft object or an agricultural implement. Winsor's
manual processes have ended up acquiring a ritual meaning – the
sense of an artistic ritual invoking a presence in a disembodied
modernism from which she has nevertheless taken certain principles
and patterns such as repetition, geometry, and a sense of series.
The forms and the vocabulary may be minimalist, but the materials
inhabit the forms and elaborate an inner syntax. The sculptures
convey the sensation of a "dogged existence".
A. B. tr. J.H.
Born in 1941 in Newfoundland (Canada), lives and works in
New-York (United States).
Black film, 1971. Courtesy of the l'artist. D. R.