THE GAME IS NOT THE THING: SPORT AND THE MOVING IMAGE

Curated by Astria Suparak and Brett Kashmere

Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN
October 11 – November 8, 2024

No time for winners (or losers)! Spanning 13 decades of filmmaking, from pre-cinema to post-internet, guest curators Astria Suparak and Brett Kashmere’s six-part screening and performance series challenges the idea that the worlds of sports and art are mutually exclusive. The Game is Not the Thing offers an antidote to commercial documentary and mainstream feature film narratives, looking instead to the creative and critical approaches that artists and amateurs bring to the “sports film.”

Related Essay: “No Time for Winners”

Program Info: https://walkerart.org/calendar/2024/series/the-game-is-not-the-thing-sport-and-the-moving-image

Craig Baldwin: AVANT TO LIVE!

Editors: Brett Kashmere & Steve Polta 
Designer: Vivian Sming, Sming Sming Books
Project Archivists: Courtney Fellion & Megan Needels
Release Date: May 28, 2023

Published by: San Francisco Cinematheque & INCITE: Journal of Experimental Media

Full details and ordering info: www.sfcinematheque.org/avant-to-live/

Nearly five years in the making and clocking in at 508 pages, Craig Baldwin: Avant to Live! documents the life and work of acclaimed underground filmmaker/curator and Bay Area countercultural legend CRAIG BALDWIN (b. Oakland CA, 1952), an inspiring figure in contemporary media arts. Meticulously detailed, with contributions from over 50 writers, artists, illustrators, and ideologues, Avant to Live! is the first critical text to examine the artist’s filmmaking career while also examining the cultural impact of Baldwin’s Other Cinema curatorial project as well as his impact on generations of media makers.

AS A FILMMAKER, Baldwin’s works represent a radical fusion of form and content. Formally, his films are constructed largely from audiovisual material appropriated from pre-existing films. In this, they represent a radical stance toward media culture as a participatory field. As an artist, Baldwin engages with mainstream media as an adversary, using its languages in ironic opposition. In this way he talks back to corporately produced media and creates inspiring, wildly imaginative works which profoundly challenge the nature of one-way media consumption.

AS A CURATOR, Baldwin is known for Other Cinema, an extensive and hugely influential series of film/video programs he has personally organized in San Francisco since the late 1980s. Like his films, Baldwin’s Other Cinema represents a radically expanded approach to film exhibition, media consumption, and cultural engagement in which ephemeral forms of film history coexist alongside expanded cinema performance, underground/experimental film screenings, speculative lecture presentations, in-person artists, and more.

Contributors: Luisela Alvaray, Craig Baldwin, Irene Borger, Bryan Boyce, Stephen Broomer, Bill Brown, Anthony Buchanan, Joanna Byrne, Kristin Cato, Chris Chang, David Cox, Bill Daniel, Joan d’Arc, Manohla Dargis, Tom Day, Jesse Drew, Adam Dziesinski, Bradley Eros, Gerry Fialka, Adrianne Finelli, Kelly Gallagher, Max Goldberg, Sam Green, Molly Hankwitz, Joshua Leon Harper, Mike Hoolboom, Alex Johnston, Brett Kashmere John Klacsmann, Caroline Koebel, Liz Kotz, Jesse Lerner, Chip Lord, Patrick Macias, Scott MacKenzie, Jesse Malmed, Dolissa Medina, Peggy Nelson, Steve Polta, Rick Prelinger, Vanessa Renwick, Jeremy Rourke, Catherine Russell, Lynne Sachs, Benjamin Schultz-Figueroa, Keivan Khademi Shamami, Jeffrey Skoller, Soda_Jerk, Valerie Soe, Kathleen Tyner, Federico Windhausen, Michael Zryd

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One-Hundred Yard Universe examines American football through the lens of a single family's multi-generational experience with this complex sport in order to understand the game's emergence as an omnipresent feature in American life and culture. It reveals how larger systems of structural inequality, patriarchal masculinity, and identity are at play in shaping America’s most popular pastime.

Directed by: Brett Kashmere & Solomon Turner
Production: Hello Benjamin Films
Feature-Length Documentary, In Production

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INCITE JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL MEDIA
ISSUE #7/8: SPORTS

Edited by Astria Suparak and Brett Kashmere
Layout and Design by Jon Sueda / Stripe SF

The intersection of sports, performance, spectacle, popular culture, and experimental media is the focus of INCITE's new double issue.

For millennia, sports have been intrinsic to daily life, physical well-being, civic identity, and social harmony. That presence has expanded in the last century to occupy entire sections of newspapers and news hours, in turn begetting 24-hour television channels, talk radio stations, and endless punditry. Lately, sports have assumed a larger, more multidimensional place in our culture, advancing, for instance, further into the fields of contemporary art and film. The traditional schism, and often times, antagonism (jocks vs nerds, square vs cool) between sports and art have been blurred. Sports are now seamlessly integrated with pop culture, celebrity culture, music, and fashion trends. Meanwhile, ancillary aspects of sports have nearly eclipsed the sports themselves. In the information age, fans are the new experts, gambling with likenesses, and athletes are sets of statistical profiles and avatars. Sports economies are shifting towards the virtual; the daily fantasy site FanDuel paid out more than $500 million in cash prizes last year, new streaming platforms have emerged for live viewing of video game play, and eSports leagues are increasingly lucrative. 

In the era of flashy data visualization, instant analysis, Twitter journalism, Insiders, the rumor mill, the superfan, and the hot take, experimental media can offer a critical tool for addressing deeper meanings, concerns, connections, and contradictions. And for representing the poetics and aesthetics of athletics. A non-zero-sum game.

Contributors: Haig Aivazian, Christina Battle, Rosie Casals, Rebecca Cleman, Jason Concepcion (@netw3rk), Dan D’Amore, Sally Dixon, Cara Erskine, Russell Field, David Filipi, Walter Forsberg, Howard Fried, Brian L. Frye, Leo Goldsmith, Allison Grant, Isla Hansen, Alex Johnston, Brett Kashmere, Germaine Koh, Karen Kraven, Pasha Malla, Tara Mateik, Hazel Meyer, Cait McKinney, Cameron Moneo, Ayanah Moor, Jeff Parker, Damien K. Picariello, Jasmine Pisapia, Leila Pourtavaf, Risa Puleo, Rachael Rakes, Chris Reeves, Amy Sadao, Astria Suparak, Martine Syms, Geo Wyeth, Kim Ye, Tanya Zimbardo, Gregory Zinman

+ sportstalk from John Amaechi, Larry Bird, Jason Collins, Darryl Dawkins, Mark Gonzales, Kwame Harris, Martina Navratilova, Ronda Rousey, Sheryl Swoopes, Serena Williams, Venus Williams, Zinedine Zidane

Info: incite-online.net/issueseven.html

PITTSBURGH CENTER FOR THE ARTS, Pittsburgh, PA
15 May – 9 August, 2015

SPORTSNATION teams together new and recent works that reflect on and remix American sports culture. The audiovisual essay FROM DEEP (2013) and mixed media installation ANYTHING BUT US IS WHO WE ARE (2012) focus on basketball’s profound role in American life. Two new projects borrow from the visual language of sports. THIS IS PRO FOOTBALL (2015) appropriates hyperbolic catchphrases and poetic slogans summarizing the sport from the “voice-of-god” narrations of NFL Films for a series of amateur gymnasium banners. The vinyl floor piece GOALS (2015), created in collaboration with Astria Suparak, superimposes the goals of the major team sports into an actual scale color “field” abstraction of hollow “winning.”  

Info: center.pfpca.org/exhibitions/brett-kashmere  

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FROM DEEP is a feature-length experimental documentary about the game of basketball and its shifting place within 20th century American history and culture; focusing on the evolution of basketball from its indoor New England roots, to a Midwestern small town phenomenon, to an outdoor city game, with particular emphasis on its merger with hip hop in the mid-1980s and the rise of Michael Jordan as the world's first corporate-branded athlete.

CANADA/USA, 2013-14, 88 MIN, HDCAM
Concept / Edit / Production: Brett Kashmere
Camera: Toby Waggoner
Sound: Jeremy Fleishman
Music Direction: DJ /rupture

Info: www.fromdeep.net

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INCITE JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL MEDIA
ISSUE #4: EXHIBITION GUIDE

Edited by Brett Kashmere and Walter Forsberg
Fall 2013

Contributors: 40 Frames, Adam Abrams, Steve Anker, Rebecca Barten, Christina Battle, Scott Miller Berry, Bill Brand, Bill Brown, David Cox, Bill Daniel, Donna de Ville, Clint Enns, Bradley Eros, Kate Ewald, Flinching Eye Collective, Walter Forsberg, Brian L. Frye, Sandra Gibson & Luis Recoder, Elena Gorfinkel, Sabine Gruffat, Sabrina Gschwandtner, Josh Guilford, Sarah Halpern, Ed Halter, Adelheid Heftberger, Kier-La Janisse, Michael Johnsen, Sharon Johnson Chris Kennedy, Richard Kerr, Bryan Konefsky, Christy LeMaster, Alain LeTourneau, Jeanne Liotta, Kate MacKay, Alex MacKenzie, Jesse Malmed, Caroline Martel, Theo Michael, Alice Moscoso, David Nelson, Gordon Nelson, Tara Merenda Nelson, Greg Pierce, John Porter, Melissa Ragona, Marcus Rosentrater, Ben Russell, David Sherman, Spectacle, Tess Takahashi, tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE, Jonathan Walley, Audrey Young

Portfolios: The Blinding Light!! Cinema, Light Industry, Magic Lantern Cinema, Orgone Cinema, Other Cinema, The Robert Beck Memorial Cinema, Spectacle Theater

Table of contents, sample articles, etc: www.incite-online.net

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Biography

Brett Kashmere is a media artist, curator, and writer living in Oakland, California. Over the past two decades, Kashmere has developed and organized numerous arts initiatives, community projects, and publications. He is Executive Director of Canyon Cinema Foundation and the founding editor of INCITE Journal of Experimental Media (established in 2008), an artist-run publication dedicated to the discourse, culture, and community of experimental film, video, and new media. Since co-founding the Antechamber Art Gallery and Cinematheque in Regina, Saskatchewan in 1998, Kashmere has continued to generate a cultural impact in each city he’s lived in. 

Kashmere’s writing on experimental cinema, moving image art, and alternative media exhibition has appeared in journals and magazines such as Millennium Film Journal, The Brooklyn Rail, The Canadian Journal of Film Studies, Moving Image Review & Art Journal (MIRAJ), PUBLIC, Esse, Take One, and Senses of Cinema; compendiums and anthologies including The Encyclopedia of the Documentary Film, Process Cinema: Handmade Film in the Digital Age, A Microcinema Primer: A Brief History of Small Cinemas, Carolee Schneemann: Unforgivable, and The Films of Jack Chambers; online publications such as the Women’s Film and Television History Network blog and Canyon Cinema 50; as well as commissions for the National Film Board of Canada, Carnegie Museum of Art, MOCA Cleveland, and Canadian Filmmakers’ Distribution Centre. He is currently co-editing the anthologies Craig Baldwin: Avant to Live! and Strange Codes: The Films of Arthur Lipsett.

As a curator, Kashmere has created programs and exhibitions for the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Strasbourg, La Cinematheque quebecoise (Montreal), Eyebeam Center for Art and Technology (New York), Light Cone (Paris), TIFF Cinematheque, Images Festival, and Vtape (Toronto), the Seoul Net & Film Festival, Winnipeg Cinematheque, Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, VIA Festival of Music & New Media (Pittsburgh), San Francisco Cinematheque, Society of Cinema and Media Studies Conference, Synoptique Film Journal, Pittsburgh Filmmakers' 3 Rivers Film Festival, and Cinema Project (Portland). 

Kashmere’s creative and scholarly practice reframes dominant narratives about sports and illuminates new perspectives and histories. Previous film, new media, textile, installation, and writing projects explored the sociocultural history of basketball and its merger with hip hop, the disconnect between Canadian self-image and hockey violence, traditions of athlete activism, and counterhegemonic sports films and art. Supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, The Heinz Endowments and The Pittsburgh Foundation, National Film Board of Canada, Saskatchewan Art Board, and Saskatchewan Filmpool Cooperative, Kashmere’s films and videos have screened internationally at the BFI London Film Festival, Milano Film Festival, Anthology Film Archives and UnionDocs in New York, the Kassel Documentary Festival in Germany, Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center in Buffalo, the British Film Institute, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Conversations at the Edge and the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, The Images Festival in Toronto, the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, and San Francisco's Other Cinema. His new documentary essay, Ghosts of Empire (co-directed with Solomon Turner, in production), considers the culture and fate of American football at a moment of urgency and change, following discoveries about the risks of traumatic brain injury and neurodegenerative disease. 

Kashmere has taught media production, exhibition practices, and film and television history at Concordia University, Oberlin College, and University of California, Santa Cruz. He received a BA in Film and Video Studies from the University of Regina, as well as an MA in Film Studies and an MFA in Studio Arts from Concordia University in Montreal. He’s currently a PhD candidate in Film and Digital Media at UC Santa Cruz. 

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