FEB 13th BLOG (missing from before.

Okay so while making myself a study guide I have discovered I was in fact missing one of my blog entries. This is the one I wrote that disappeared on I think. Luckily it only requires a brief answer.

According to Brandon Joseph, what effects did the Exploding Plastic Inevitable have on spectators? How is this similar or different from the films (such as Vinyl and Mario Banana) projected individually, as we have seen them in class?

Well to put is simply the answer is overwhelmed. The audience had never seen something like it before. All these films back to back to back. It was both powerful and according to some "perverse."

I understand the desire to allow your senses to be overwhelmed, but at the same time there is something almost superfluous about it. Can you really comprehend avant-garde if you see tons of it at once. Avant-garde is in a manner so difficult that without the safe nest of a class room to talk about it afterward it becomes just images. But then sometimes that is a good thing too.

Live Cinema

Summarize Mia Makela's five essential elements of Live Cinema, and relate these elements to the Live Cinema Explosion during Avant-Garde Night at the Lumina Theater.

The five essential elements of live cinema are space, time, projection, performance and participation.

Spaces refers to digital space as in how much room an object takes on your computer. Also it refers to desktop space or the programs and manners from which a VJ picks his videos from. Performance Space refers literally to the location of the performance and has an effect on the performance as a whole piece. Projection Space refers to the location of the projectors. Am I being too obvious? Physical Space, which is not as obvious, is the distance between the audience and the performers. In Lumina I am not too sure about the activities related to digital or desktop space, but the performance space was Lumina Theater, the projection space was from behind the theater and from the sides and there was basically very little Physical Space.

Time refers to the difference in seeing live cinema being seen live versus the act of viewing a film that has already been made. Both carry with them specific advantages and and disadvantages. The other way the writer refers to time is through the use of loops, which effect both viewers response and film maker response. In Lumina many people left during the films, because they did not feel compelled to sit through films they did enjoy, yet during Live Cinema less people left feeling obligated to stay, one consequence of "live cinema versus usual cinema."

Projection refers to spatial projection, meaning how the place you are in effects your viewing of the film. Also it refers to Media Facade, a concept I relate best to seeing a piece in the Guggenheim museum which is simply a call for peace in various languages hanging from the wall. At our presentation the idea of projection was not something that was obvious to me at the time. Yes we projected from various projectors throughout the room, but there was something very traditional about the literal space of the place we were in. I have to say this concept is extremely interesting, but I think projection doesn't really need its own category. Would it not fit more precisely in the category of Space? I am probably not right, just a causal observation on my part.

Performance refers, to well, the performers. In the case of live cinema the VJ's who work behind the laptops. Also it is refers to a concept the writer calls "liveness." Basically how the well "live" nature of the things, causes the things effect. HMMMM...maybe that only makes sense in my brain. Gesteral interfaces are the ways in which the performers become a part of the creation with the use of their bodies., with things like sensors. In Lumina there was certainly a profound sense of vitality, a code word for "liveness" throughout the performance and I personally think our VJ's did a fine job.

Participation is quite simply the way the audience responds and interacts with the piece. In Lumina the some of the audience was given instruments to make make "music" with. This added to the awareness and power of the piece.

What are the challenges facing "laptop performers" in relation to audience expectations about "liveness" and performance? How are some artists addressing these challenges?

Audiences have come to expect that films are made before performances of them and there is a sort of desire for the artist to prove that what they are making is in fact, live cinema. In London a group called Slug projects both the performance and the performer to insure a truly live experience. However, considering that this may affect the audience to not fully appreciate the full effect of the show by focusing on the proving process; another group actually shows the audience live and records it in order to make the process both of proving liveness and fully being engaged without having the burden of proving its liveness. That last sentence, had it included longer words, may be well worthy of Fried's approval.

Interesting read. Easier to understand the some things we have read. However, despite her passion for her craft and despite the amazing feeling I got upon seeing live cinema, I am still not sure if we should really call it "film." Sure it utilizes methods of film makers and the physical stuff of film, but their is something about it that is too different, too unique, to be called "film." Perhaps I say this because in my heart of hearts, despite both enjoying and appreciating my own live cinema experience, I can't beat the feeling of seeing a good ol' fashioned film. Live cinema is fun, but for me on a personal level its not the same experience. Live cinema is the roller coaster, and the cinema I love is the penetrating, powerful stuff the haunts your dreams and lives in you not from showy liveness, but from the quiet and assured cinematic presence. I am positive, in an attempt to not sound like Freid, that some people do honestly feel the reverse is true for them in their own lives. The only reason I say this, is that I just do not think they are in the same category. Yes, I know this article is about drawing distinctions, but I think perhaps, and I am fully aware of the dogmatic nature of what I am saying, that maybe we should just call them both something else. Cinema and Live VJ performance? Well, I will work on the absurd and pointless practce of defining art into subcategories later.

Avant-Garde Cienma Night

I really had a great time at the avant-garde cinema night. My favorite film was the stock broker film, though I fear we may have offended certain Asian members of the audience. My least favorite film was There is A Pervert in the Pool. It simply doesn't interest me at all. I thought, to put it too simply, it was lame.

Cinema explosion was an amazing time that I wish I could have been more involved with. It reminded of something like it must have felt like to be a member of the early avant-garde community in the Village. Maybe its not always easy to understand the films that came from that era, but seeing something like Live Cinema Explosion in action and allowing the audience to be involved in its creation, felt exciting and new. Perhaps that feeling, as base and simple as it is, is the reason why early avant-garde artists even made films to start with. I know that is a gross overstatement, but I feel closer to those artists now.

And some stuff about Tomb Raider...or why I wasted the entire 13th year of my life

What are the general claims about the film as a rejection of modernist aesthetics? (anti-art, feminism, etc.)

First of all Wess says that Awesh uses a system of deconstruction and defamaliaraztion. In other words she take the everyday video game character of Laura Croft and plays with our presumptions of what it means to be Laura, or what means to play a video game. Like all postmodernist her work would be seen as frivolous to modernist and in some ways anti-feminist.

How does he support these general claims with evidence from the film itself?

He mentions certain aspects from within the film, like the voice over narration. The most striking part seems to be the way Ahwesh keeps letting Laura die. As a viewer this is both frustrating and interesting. Also he compared the film to Maya Deren's masterpiece Meshes in the Afternoon.

To what degree does the analysis correspond with your own?

For the first time in the whole article his presumptions about feminism actually make sense. The rest of what he said all sounded pretty in line with what we have learned so far in the class. This is a small point, but while I understand after he explains it the connection between Deren and Ahwesh, I think that maybe this is too much of a jump. It is jump seemingly based on nothing, which while interesting, makes me question how sound his conclusions are. Also to claim that Meshes in the Afternoon, one the few avant-garde films that I passionately love is dated, well that is just wrong.

Oh the little differences: Early 70's avant-garde vs. No Wave

What are some similarities and differences between the American avant-garde of the early 1970s and the Punk or No Wave film making in the late 1970s? Address the following areas:

Aesthetic similarities and differences (which filmmakers do the cite as influences, which filmmakers do they reject?)

The member's of the No Wave part of cinema found inspiration from the likes of French directors like Goddard, Truffaut and Rohmer. This artists, instead of rejecting of traditional Hollywood narrative, took them and altered them to meet their own unique auteur principle. Early 1970's is different as it is a rejection of all things Hollywood and the brain child of the art world and the academy.

Technological similarities and differences

Both styles of cinema depended on cheapness, which I will mention later. However what makes them so different is the advent and use of a new camera, the Super 8. The Super 8 shots on near the same quality as the average home video and is just as easy to operate. Early 70's avant-garde has become more, shall we say "fancy," where as the the new technology allowed for the very Fluxus type idea that anyone could make film.

Economic similarities and differences

As I said earlier both depended somewhat on cheap means of creation. However, punk creation was even cheaper. The super 8 made is possible for almost anyone to create works of punk art. Of course as we have learned "art" is to many folks, a relative term.

Social similarities and differences

The art of early 70's avant-garde was considered by many to extremely formalized. Punks, as they so often do, chose to reject this. No Wave cinema is often more angry. Its anger is directed at society in general but more accurately at the art world which pins art into black boxes and demands that it follows its rule. However like early 70's avant garde some punks were in fact considered with the production and style of their films. To put it in another way, while punks may have tried harder to make political and social statements, it would be over stepping to say the early 70's avant-garde film makers were not doing the same thing in their own unique ways.

The Academy and then Avant-garde: A probelmatic romance

What have been the major critiques of the "academicization" of the American avant-garde film? Give your own response to these critiques in relation to the films and readings from our class.

There seem to be many specific criticisms on the “academicization” of American avant-garde. However the prevailing sentiment seems to more a subject of nostalgia. After all, avant-garde cinema is about stepping outside the normal means, about leaving narrative structures behind and in many cases, the democratization of art. If these types of cinema exist within the world of the academic then the films give up a piece of their very essence. However, as the writer of this article notes more than once, it is the academy that has held the community of the avant-garde together and academy for which the future of avant-garde will rest. Let’s take a look the some the more specific criticism made mention of in the article.

Cannon Formation: This problem is one I understand and can relate to. The writer writes than only certain filmmakers, like Andy Warhol, get mentioned while others are left out. He mentions how in the process of canonization many important things are left out, such as the contribution of women. In my personal opinion, even in the study of the main stream cinema many important figures of cinema are set aside so that we may closer study something else. For example, if I watch Citizen Kane or anything else in the oeuvre of Orson Wells again I may spontaneously combust.

Freedom of Expression: Does a university setting limit the artistic freedom of those who would wish to study, to teach or create controversial anti-establishment art? Those who criticize this method of academicization would say so. I, a student who recently watched defecation on screen, would have to disagree.

Political Irrelevance: This is bit confusing to me. Basically the criticism is that the academy will over politicize a film and thus render it outside of its original aesthetic intentions. In other words by making the films into something they are not it makes them unapproachable and maybe artless. But as the writer points out many of the films simply aren’t approachable and make little to no sense to even the trained viewer, without a bit of academic and critical help in the explanation of their very existence.

In relation to this class I can not help but note that the very existence of this class is contradictory to many of the artists and critics in the avant-grade movement. However, at the same time I would never have considered or bothered to learn about much of the film we have watched in this class without the class. I might even brush them off as flawed attempts for shock value or narrative homicide, but with scholarly observation the true meaning of many of the films can be found.

To sum the articles up and my agreement with them is one simple phrase my grandfather uses every day; “Don’t bite that hand that feeds you.” Without the academy I am not sure avant-garde could sustain itself. Yes, sometimes the real world forces avant-garde film makers to bend their moral limits and accept some kinds of government funds, or worse, the impute of the evil corporation, but this is sadly enough, just the nature of the beast.

Art and Objecthood (Week Eight, I think)

I am not quite sure if this is the post from last week or for this week, but here we go. The question.

The answer I want to propose is this: the literalist espousal of objecthood amounts to nothing more than a plea for a new genre of theatre; and theatre is now the negation of art. Literalist sensibility is theatrical because, to begin with, it is concerned with the actual circumstances in which the beholder encounters literalist work."

If this is Fried's answer, what is his question? Why does he object to what he calls "objecthood," "theatricality," and "literalist" work?

To quote the article the question asked is "What is it about objecthood as projected and hypothesized by the literalist that makes it , if only from the perspective of recent modernist painting, antithetical to art?"

Before moving forward let's look at what exactly the question even means. The writer mentions that to him objecthood is "non-art." Painting, not from a literalist perspective, is too restrictive because it is limited to one plane, therefore with three-dimensionality it becomes something more likely to please the literalist, but ultimately it too fails.

Still I confess this whole article causes nothing much more than confusion. However considering what I just said allow me to explain it in a manner that I think is close to what the article is trying to say.

Because literalist work is so caught up in the way it is presented and received, it is less art and more theatre. Although not necessarily theatre which is art, but the showyness, the literalist ability to evoke something in viewers that is like the way theatre is perceived. So when you go to a gallery and see art, literalist art I mean, you are actually going to experience something, instead of actually, you know, seeing art.

So if this is the answer and the question. There still remains another question. What does he say is his problem with this system? Well I think, even though he spends what I feel are entirely too many pages to say this, basically if literalist art exists to be showy and not to be art, then it is needlessly at war with other art and isn't art.

Okay so, because I am having a bit of trouble explaining it, allow to me to pull an example from own life and in some ways make a point in favor of this writers. When I got the chance to go to the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao, Spain I recall being very excited to see great works of modernist art. The ones I recall most were these very large circular pieces of metal. They were all in a spiral shapes and they were all amazing. You couldn't help but be drawn to them in a truly theatrical way. However, in spite of the power of the emotions that overwhelmed me, I mostly felt an overly serious sense of "neat." But the whole experience for me, was somewhat, artless. Not detached in any way, but theatrical.

Thus art, according to this author, is the opposite of "objecthood." Objecthood then, is "non-art." So strangely a correct, overly simplified summary of this article could be. The opposite of art is "non-art." This is somewhat amusing to me. And like always, even though I think the writer has very valid points, I can't help but be weary of anyone who goes out of there way to define art as a particular thing.

Art is, as the old adage goes "in the eye of the beholder." Hmm...does that statement, as I have often wondered, sound hypocritical?