1985.09 Transparent SMILE - Monty Cantsin performing with White Colours - BalTimOre, US@ - Monty Cantsin (tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE)
"Transparent SMILE - Monty Cantsin performing with White Colours" was conceived of as a group portrait of a collective identity with the individual portraits overlaid to produce a composite. Here's a link to the proposal for it: SM1984.07.proposal.html . It was an assembling, a collection of 100 transparencies per contributor. One Italian correspondent complained about my asking for transparencies protesting that such things didn't exist or were too expensive in Italy. That didn't stop any of the other Italian contributors. I suspect that the complainer didn't realize that the contributions could be hand-done on any transparent material & didn't have to be photo-copied. Vittore Baroni curated a Smile / Snarl assembling around the same time.
The complainer contributed one page only. They probably didn't get a copy. Somewhere, there's ONE copy of Transparent SMILE that has that ONE special page. I don't think I have it anymore. I might've given that one to etta cetera. Monty Cantsin (Ryosuke Cohen), from Japan, was the only person who didn't send transparencies - presumably because he didn't understand the language(s) of the invitation. Instead, he contributed a print on sea-weed! Fantastic!! I used 2 liter transparent plastic bottles as the packaging & made the return address sticker show the addresses of ALL the Monty Cantsins who contributed.
In collaboration with BalTimOre filmmakers Monty Cantsin (Steve Estes) & Monty Cantsin (Joan Lobell) I made a 17&1/2 minute long 16mm color sound film using as visuals some of the material gotten for the assembling. For the soundtrack, I used excerpts from Monty Cantsin (Istvan Kantor)'s "SMILE Neoist Music Anthology" (Montréal, 1985: ) & electropop from the then-17-year-old Monty Cantsin (John Berndt) (in collaboration mainly with his friend Jimmy Hedges). There's an early print of this film in the collection of the Film & Video Department of the Enoch Pratt Free Central Library in BalTimOre, USA. This print, which is the same as the prints in Steve's & Joan's collections, is missing direct-on-film elements that I added to the internegative later. I'm the only person with a finished print. I put my finished version online on my "onesownthoughts" YouTube channel accessible through the links provided below. It's broken into 2 parts because at the time YouTube imposed a maximum of a 15 minute limit on my uploads.
Below are some stills from that movie:
Somewhat humorously (to me at least) The Victoria & Albert Museum has had so much trouble conserving the bottle-enclosed issue of this that there's an article about it in the V&A Conservation Journal Spring 2000 Issue 34: http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/journals/conservation-journal/issue-34/science-surgery-the-contemporary-challenge/ Many thanks to them for doing, no doubt, a good job!
Neoists are the ultimate problem children for archivists & conservationists. I should know.
idioideo at verizon dot net
to the SMILEs index
to the Neoism page
to the Neoism/Anti-Neoism page
to the Anti-Neoism page
to the tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE as Interviewee page
to the tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE as Interviewer index
to the tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE movie-making "Press: Criticism, Interviews, Reviews" home-page
to the "tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - Sprocket Scientist" home-page
to the "FLICKER" home-page for the alternative cinematic experience
to find out more about why the S.P.C.S.M.E.F. (Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Sea Monkeys by Experimental Filmmakers) is so important
for info on tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE's tape/CD publishing label: WIdémoUTH
to see an underdeveloped site re the N.A.A.M.C.P. (National Association for the Advancement of Multi-Colored Peoples)