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Coming Up: Lottery of the Sea

By Holly Willis
April 5, 2010
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Lotter

Voluptuous folds of inky oil slop from a truck like cake batter in the opening shot of Allan Sekula's 2006 film The Lottery of the Sea, a dense, smart rumination on globalization and seafaring which will screen Tuesday, April 6, in its shorter (25 minute) version. Sekula, a photographer and theorist who teaches at CalArts, then asks a difficult question in voice-over: Is there a relationship between Adam Smith's idea of risk, the most frightening concept in economics, and the category of the sublime? Writing about the sublime, philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard argued that its goal was to present the unrepresentable. Sekula, however, is very conscious of the concrete realities of power, and shows us how to interpret that power in very tangible terms in the world around us. In one of the film's more gut-wrenching sequences, for example, Sekula shows the gallant efforts of a clean-up crew scooping fistfuls of gloppy muck from the waves off the coast of Spain after the tanker Prestige split in two, disgorging 20 tons of fuel oil. Sekula shoots these images mainly in medium close-ups, isolating the figures clad in white protective suits against the dirty waves in a precise icon of individual struggle against massive capitalism. Sekula's film will screen along with two other short videos after a lecture by artist and filmmaker Renée Green, as part of the current series of discussions hosted by the MAK Center for Art and Architecture titled How Many Billboards? Art In Stead. (Image: from The Lottery of the Sea.)

the details
Tuesday, April 6, 7:00 p.m.
Renée Green Lecture at the Schindler House
835 N. Kings Road
West Hollywood, CA 90069
Free, with the price of admission to the Schindler House or USC student ID
Co-presented by the MAK Center for Art and Architecture and the Museum for Contemporary Art
Info: 213-621-1745

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