Talking Head

1981 - Film & Video (Film & Video)

2 min 27

Michel Auder


Talking Head is a short film in black and white of Auder’s daughter Alexandra, hidden behind a hemp plant, playing with a plastic wrapper and babbling in an imaginative way. The viewer is uncertain whether Alexandra knows she is being filmed but given that Auder was constantly filming she was probably oblivious to it. Her statements make little sense to the outsider : ‘The thing never came back again. It wasn’t the same thing. That thing. Was nice.’ But to her it seems to represent some imaginative narrative connected to the peeling back of the plastic wrapper. The viewer of the film feels as though he has been admitted to her innermost mind, the unconscious. The informal documentary nature of Auder’s films has had wide repercussions in terms of contemporary film making. This kind of low-tech practice informs the work of such artists as Steve McQueen and Gillian Wearing and ran parallel to the fly on the wall practices of documentary filmmakers in the 1970s such as Ken Loach. The acquisition of works by Auder provides a reference point for a number of works in the Kadist collection (Laumann, McAlpine, Menick etc).


Michel Auder was born in 1945 in Soissons, France. He lives and works in Brooklyn.


Colors:



Sounds of War
© » KADIST

Laetitia Sonami

2006

Although at first the work Sounds of War presents itself with a degree of playfulness and humour, a close inspection reveals its painful undertone...

Stalactites (Few More Mistakes). Round Bar of Wood (Portrait of Gilbert & George)
© » KADIST

Saâdane Afif

2005

In this work, Saâdane Afif quotes André Cadere’s round wooden batons using the copy share and remix principles...

Pop (blue time)
© » KADIST

Saâdane Afif

2005

Blue time is a song co-written by artists Saâdane Afif and Lili Reynaud Dewar...

Other related works, blended automatically  
» see more

The Town
© » KADIST

Michel Auder

1999

The Town consists of footage taken from Auder’s studio of the skyline of New York, tracking planes as they fly across the sky and pass tall buildings...

Related works sharing similar palette  
» see more

Work No. 299
© » KADIST

Martin Creed

2003

This photograph of Martin Creed himself was used as the invitation card for a fundraising auction of works on paper at Christie’s South Kensington in support of Camden Arts Centre’s first year in a refurbished building in 2005...

Weather Forecast
© » KADIST

Guan Xiao

2016

Mixed clips from her collection of thousands of images found online, the three-channel video Weather Forecast is an inquiry into the necessity of a physical movement (a travel) for our identity to transform or change...

Assistant designer Solomon
© » KADIST

Sabelo Mlangeni

2019

The Royal House of Allure is a name of a safe house on mainland Lagos where members of the queer community in need of boarding, due to various circumstances, live together...

Pace now represent the Estate of American artist Paul Thek
© » FAD MAGAZINE

Pace now represent the Estate of American artist Paul Thek - FAD Magazine Skip to content By Mark Westall • 24 January 2024 Share — Peter Hujar, Paul Thek (II), 1975 © The Peter Hujar Archives Pace has announced the global representation of the estate of legendary American artist Paul Thek ...

Other works by: » Michel Auder  
» see more

The Town
© » KADIST

Michel Auder

1999

The Town consists of footage taken from Auder’s studio of the skyline of New York, tracking planes as they fly across the sky and pass tall buildings...

Related works found in the same semantic group  
» see more

Screening by John Menick
© » KADIST

Artist, filmmaker, and writer John Menick will screen his short video “The Secret Life of Things” (2006), a work in which an unidentified man describes his fixation with “last person on earth” films — films in which a single person awakens to find that he or she is the sole living inhabitant of a city...

On Becoming Earthlings
© » COUNCIL ART

Film programmes exploring the attempts of humans to represent the different scales of environmental crises (2015–)...

Marlon Riggs Screening
© » KADIST

Screening at 5pm at Little Roxie In connection to his exhibition, Evidence of Things Not Seen at KADIST , photo-conceptual artist, Hank Willis Thomas selected these films as a homage to innovative and influential creators in the medium of film whose work supports social justice as well as explores contemporary notions of identity, race, history and a national legacy of resistance...

Untitled Inkblot Drawing (CT-1491)
© » KADIST

Bruce Conner

1995

Bruce Conner is best known for his experimental films, but throughout his career he also worked with pen, ink, and paper to create drawings ranging from psychedelic patterns to repetitious inkblot compositions...