Peter Wareing

Stuggorings and Fijetterings (2014)

27 min 34 sec2 channel installation / Digital Video / Black & White / Sound

In Stuggorings and Fijetterings (2014) Wareing pairs original footage of artist Eugene Kreisler with selected scenes from Pier Paulo Pasolini’s 1966 film The Hawks and the Sparrows.

Artist Eugene Kreisler roams the streets of New Plymouth, New Zealand performing a distinctively personal vocabulary of movements and gestures, as he extends his hand out to the puzzled passerby. Kreisler’s idiosyncratic performances are statements in themselves of a claimed creative identity. With these improvised, fleeting, rudimentary performances, Kreisler opens up ways of disrupting the ordinariness and homogenizing use of public spaces. With these he also invites a call and response with his local bystanders.

The pairing of Kreisler’s seemly futile stuttering gestures resonates with the absurd nature of the friars’ performances to the birds in Pasolini’s surreal tale. In Wareing’s altered version of The Hawks and the Sparrows, the film has been divested of all dialogue and edited down to the first and last vowel and consonant producing phonetic staccato utterances; while the scenes with no dialogue have been blacked out leaving intact only its soundtrack. This structural editing device challenges its cinematic narrative, turning linguistic communication into bodily performances that echoes Kreisler’s scrappy performances, both appearing as fleeting vestiges of whole coherent actions.

Other works by Peter Wareing

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