Jeff Keen
18 - 23 September 2012
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| © Jeff Keen
White Dust
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JEFF KEEN
Exhibition, Film, The Tanks at Tate Modern: Exhibition, Film
18 – 23 September 2012
Part of the series The Tanks: Live programme
Brighton-based Jeff Keen (1923-2012) was one of Britain’s most unique
cultural voices, a pioneer in experimental film who transformed art and
cinema through a vivid sensibility fuelled by surrealism, comics and
B-movies. A veteran of the Second World War, Keen’s work is a powerful
evocation of the violence, colour, speed and noise of the 20th century.
His rapid-fire animations, multiple screen projections and raucous
performances redefined multimedia art in the UK. This major
installation, conceived by Keen in response to the unique nature of the
Tanks space, and a series of events will draw on Keen’s early
experiments in drawing, painting and animation, his fascination with
surrealism and popular culture, and his radical development of expanded
cinema, cut-up soundtracks and unruly live action.
Keen transformed cinema into a riotous collage of comics, drawings,
B-movie posters, plastic toys, burning props and extravagant costumes.
His early 8mm and 16mm films are built for speed, combining footage of
Beat-era motifs – jazz, motorbikes and car culture – with experimental
animations in which the achievements and atrocities of the 20th century
seem to flash by within a few short, cacophonous seconds. A single frame
could not contain the frenzied energy of Keen’s imagination, and by the
mid-1960s he began to use multiple screens and live action in
presentations of his work.
Keen’s films and performances emerged within the climate of literary
happenings and ‘bomb culture’ at Bob Cobbing’s Better Books in Charing
Cross as well as Gustav Metzger’s 1966 Destruction in Art Symposium.
Recalling American underground films by Jack Smith, Ken Jacobs and
Kenneth Anger, his work also resonates with Happenings, Fluxus and
Viennese Actionism. Nothing stands still in his work, it is a constant
process in which images and sounds evolve in quick succession through
what Keen calls ‘violently disconnected and overlapping patterns’ of
destruction, creation and accumulation.
Jeff Keen passed away on 21 June 2012. The presentation of his work in the Tanks is dedicated to his visionary creative spirit.
www.tate.org.uk/modern
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