Morgan Fisher (US, 1942) examines and deconstructs with wry humour the machinery of cinema in his 16mm films, operating within the unlikely triangle of avant- garde cinema, film industry and contemporary art, only possible in a city like Los Angeles. Fisher’s films are an exploration of the film apparatus and its physical material, as well as of moviemaking production methods: from film’s standard gauge (35mm) to the use of production stills, the narrative role of inserts and the invisible importance of the projectionist. ”One thing my films tend to do is examine a property or quality of a film in a radical way,” he says. “Being radical is a modest form of being extreme. They each examine an axiom of cinema and say, ‘What if ?’”. Fisher, who counts among his influences the work of artists such as Sol LeWitt, Marcel Duchamp and Ad Reinhardt, uses avant-garde procedures in order to comment on mainstream cinema; as a result his work was marginalised for a long time for not fitting too neatly into any of the usual avant-garde categories. Too concerned with the specifics of industry procedures for the underground; too minimal and conceptual for Hollywood’s taste. In recent years, his film work is finally getting the recognition it deserves, following retrospective programmes at the Whitney Museum and Tate Modern. At Courtisane Fisher will present a selection of short films directed between 1968 and 1976, most of which will be screened in Belgium for the first time. Two of his later works, Standard Gauge and ( ) will be screened during the HISK master class on Tuesday 23rd.