Sunday September 10, 7:30pm
Peter Cramer and Jack Waters
Restored Resituated Recalcitrant Regurgitated Regenerated Remnants
Live expanded cinema performance
From the performance “Remnants” by Peter Cramer & Jack Waters – Image courtesy of the artists
As soon as you realize you’ve experienced something it becomes a memory. If you think about doing it again, or think about doing something else, that’s a plan. Most things you just don’t think about, they just happen. Sex is like that sometimes, sometimes not. Our minds and feelings are in a constant state of reordering, reorganizing, reliving. – Peter Cramer & Jack Waters
Microscope is very pleased to present “Restored Resituated Recalcitrant Regurgitated Regenerated Remnants” (1997-2017) a live expanded cinema performance by Lower East Side artists Peter Cramer and Jack Waters.
Taking form and inspiration from a series of actions and happenings by Cramer and Waters as well as other artists and collaborators in New York in the 1980s, the work was first presented under the title “Remnants” at Cinema Village 20 years ago as part of MIX Festival 10. The “modular, evolving, morphing site specific” piece features multiple overlapping projections of Super 8mm and 16mm films, 35mm slides, and video onto walls and a large hanging canvas sheet along with improvised live interventions by the artists.
Utilizing at its core “leftover” stock and original footage culled from the artists’ visual archives as well as erotic outtakes from their films and digital additions from the present time, the performance encompasses among its main themes the attacks on the legendary center for art and activism ABC No Rio by New York’s Housing Preservation and Development Department (HPD), the realization of AIDS-defining illnesses in their community and the burgeoning of AIDS and Queer activism, and the fun at their LES home and at Le Petit Versailles – a community garden and non-profit art space the two have been running since 1996 – with Kembra Pfahler, Carl George and other friends.
Additional footage includes Gay Pride and ACT UP marches; Allen Ginsberg’s memorial service at St. Mark’s Church; fountains, churches, and museums of Rome, Munich and Heidelberg; and documentation of previous performances of the work. The cacophonous soundtrack is a live mix of classical music, disco, funk, industrial, rock, excerpts from Jesse Jackson’s 1992 election speech, and messages from their home and ABC NoRio answering machines – with unintentional voice cameos by Sarah Ferguson, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’ secretary, and others.
General admission $10
Members & Students $8
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Peter Cramer and Jack Waters are artists known for their cross-disciplinary multimedia works that encompass experimental film, documentary, and diaristic approach. Through photography, film/video, installation and performance, their practice often addresses socio-political engagement and issues of ethnic, sexual/gender identity, AIDS activism and archival histories. Their work values the process and experience of creation as highly more significant than the final product. Collaborations with other artists include Barbara Hammer, Geoff Hendricks, Sur Rodney Sur, and Inbred Hybrid Collective. Their work has been screened among others at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New Museum of Contemporary Art, Anthology Film Archives, MIX NYC, Center for Contemporary Culture (Barcelona, Spain), Frise Künstlerhaus (Hamburg, Germany). Their work is discussed in publication including Alternative Histories: New York Art Spaces, 1960 – 2010 edited by Lauren Rosati and Mary Anne Staniszewski and Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Generation by Sarah Schulman and are also subjects of Art Spaces Archives Project – oral histories conducted by at the Smithsonian Institution/Archives of American Art.
In 1981 Cramer and Waters co-established Allied Productions Inc, a non profit arts umbrella, serving as directors of ABC No Rio alternative art collective from 1983-1990, and founding Le Petit Versailles (1996) a community garden based in New York City. Residencies include the Emily Harvey Foundation in Venice, Italy, Harvestworks, and Yaddo, New York. They are recipients of the 2014 Kathy Acker Award. Their films have been preserved with the support of the Estate Project for Artists with AIDS and the National Film Preservation Fund, and are available through the Film-makers’ Co-operative, Fales Downtown Collection, Visual AIDS and Allied Productions’ archives. Most recently they were invited to collectively create AIDS OS Y Version 10.11.6, a zine for Lost and Found Platform 2016 at Danspace Project in New York, and presented the performance Spaghetti Wrestling at the Museo Hermann Nitsch in Naples, Italy. Peter Cramer and Jack Waters live and work in New York.
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With the underwriting support of the Robert D. Bielecki Foundation
