Pinder Workshop

Last Friday I spent the day with Jefferson Pinder, a Washington DC based performance and film artist, as well as about 10 other students for a performance workshop at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee’s Innova Art Gallery. Pinder was invited to be an artist in residence and part of his residency was to offer this workshop. I really enjoyed the day! We started with introductions and swiftly moved into seeing some of Pinder’s first performance work. Procession was one of Pinder’s first performance pieces, in which he moved a 300 pound telephone pole 6 miles through downtown Washington, DC.















The imagery was especially significant to me, and reminded me of home. Along the way in his journey, he made 12 stops, in locations that he thought the pole could have existed. He was offered assistance from passerbys during his journey, and the whole time he was clad with a suit that referenced his grandfather, who always wore a suit, even to the dinner table.

After seeing his work and our introductions, Pinder took the rest of the morning showing up a seminal work by Jorgen Leth called, the Perfect Human. Leth is a Danish Film Director who is considered to be a leader in experimental film, who is well know for his series of films from 1967, called The Perfect Human.




What we viewed was a documentary of a project realized by Lars Von Trier, called “5 Obstructions.” In the documentary, Von Trier challenges Leth to recreate The Perfect Human, in a series of 5 films, but each time with a set of obstructions that challenge the way in which he creates the film. We watched the first two in class, which Pinder claimed were the best. I haven’t watched the rest yet, but I am eager to, since apparently, the relationship is not the same in the end because of the extreme challenges that Von Trier set for Leth.







I think Pinder’s purpose in showing us these films was to understand the rawness and beauty in working with restrictions. We were then requested to create a 5-10 minute film (based on a you tube video we selected during introductions) that also took a risk. Mine, was the risk of time, we had about 30 minutes to create two 5-10 minute films, so we certainly didn’t have time to think about it. I didn’t get to see the finished films since we ran over a little, but I hear I might have access to them soon. If I get them, I will certainly post.