mike stubbs - gift
Gift, 1996
Super 16 displayed as single-channel DVD projection; stereo audio
13:30 mins; colour
Collection: Australian Centre for the Moving Image
Courtesy: the artist
contents: essay | artist's bio | artist's statement
Gift collects images that tell different stories about the landscape. Heavy industry creates wealth and employment, but also degrades the environment. Progress and hindsight make uneasy bedfellows. As time passes, values shift. The following quotes reflect some of those shifting values.
'We have understood that all the destruction of environment is an enormous danger that we face, and I truly believe that the lack of adequate images is a danger of the same magnitude. I have said that before and I repeat it again and again as long as I can speak I will speak out for that. If we do not develop adequate images we will die out like dinosaurs.' Werner Herzog, 1983 '
A lake is the landscape's most beautiful and expressive feature. It is earth's eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.' Henry Thoreau, Walden (1854)'
Much of the area now looks like a lunar landscape, interspersed by the remains of long abandoned factories and transacted by rusty pipes bubbling into vast white or black lakes of chemical waste.' Mike Stubbs'
There were always miners about. They moved with their strange, distorted dignity, a certain beauty, and unnatural stillness in their bearing, a look of abstraction and half resignation in their pale, often gaunt faces. They belonged to another world, they had a strange glamour, their voices were full of an intolerable deep resonance, like a machine's burring, a music more maddening than the siren's long ago.' D.H. Lawrence, Women In Love, (1921)
'The film is about grief of different sorts,' says Daldry, 'and one kind is that the community is well aware that they're about to be wiped out. And, of course, they were.... We had a town meeting to ask them, and there were, within the community, arguments for and against. There was even that ludicrous movie moment where the old guy in the back stands up and makes the speech about why it's important to allow us to make the film there. He felt it was part of their history and heritage and something that isn't told that often.' Director Stephen Daldry on the making of Billy Elliot (2000)
I grew up in a shotgun row
sliding down the hill
out front were the big machines
steel and rusty now I guess
outback was the river
and that big sign down the road
that's where it all started
come on down to the store
you can buy some more, and more, and more, and more
'The Sprawl', from Daydream Nation, Sonic Youth, 1988
1958 - Born in Welwyn Garden City, England; lives and works in Melbourne, Australia
Mike Stubbs' work encompasses film, video, mixed media installations, performance and curation. He has won more than a dozen major international awards including first prizes at the Oberhausen and Locarno Film Festivals, and in 1999 he was invited to present a video retrospective of his own work at the Tate Gallery, London. A selection of his work was featured at the 2003 Adelaide International Film Festival.
Trained at Cardiff Art College and the Royal College of Art, Mike Stubbs has recently joined the Australian Centre for the Moving Image as Curatorial Manager. Previous to this, he was Senior Research Resident at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art (Dundee, Scotland) and Director of Hull Time Based Arts, where he established several innovative schemes to encourage production and exhibition of new media art.
With cinematographer and producer Roland Denning, Stubbs co-founded Metamedia, a London-based production company specialising in art and music. He has produced installation group Granular Synthesis (Venice Biennale, 2002) and curated new media programs for various international festivals.
Stubbs has collaborated with performance companies, dancers and musicians in many of his works. He is currently exploring multi-channel cinematic installation, and participating in critical debates about the nature and future of new media art.
Website links
Metamedia, Mike Stubbs' production company
http://www.rolo.demon.co.uk/metamedia.html
Mike Stubbs' page at Dundee University
http://www.imaging.dundee.ac.uk/people/mstubbs/index.htm
Wolfen-Bitterfeld is famous as a great environmental disaster, an eco-tourist attraction; a paradigm of what should not be done. Composer Ulf Langheinrich was born in Wolfen-Bitterfeld but had not returned for fifteen years. The region was the centre of the East German chemical and mining industries. Much of the area now looks like a lunar landscape, interspersed by the remains of long abandoned factories and transected by rusty pipes bubbling into vast white or black lakes of chemical waste.
We have not set out to make an ecological tract or to romanticise the destruction. Rather than moralising, we want to examine the paradoxical feelings of pleasure and horror this place evokes.Implicit in the film is also the tension between the old and the new (post unification) East Germany. The old is industrial, monolithic, dirty, inefficient, obsolete, a wasteland - a past to be destroyed and buried. The new is fragmented, avaricious, precarious, anxious and illusive. These themes are alluded to rather than asserted; they are not the subject of the film, but they are part of the flow of sub-texts.
Ulf composed the music specifically for the film using sound recorded on location and mixed and processed in his own studio.'Gift' is the German word for poison.
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