C. A. Griffith,
Below the Line: (Re)Calibrating the Filmic Gaze,
in Jacqueline Bobo (ed.), Black Women Film & Video
Artists, London: Routledge/AFI, 1998
Patricia
Piccinini: Leather Landscape (detail),
2003, silicone, polyurethane, leather, mdf,
human hair, 290 x 175 x 165 cm; courtesy the artist/Roslyn
Oxley9 Gallery
|
The
following conversation takes place somewhere in a cultural
centre on the periphery of Europe. The protagonists nurse
skinny-lattes absent-mindedly as they wait for a public
open-forum debate to begin on the question of art and
film.
Mary:
What is it you can say these days about 'Film and Art'?
Myles:
'Art and Film'...who can say?
Mary:
Isn't it just the same old 'art and...' thing: 'art and
technology', 'art and politics', 'art and identity', 'art
and education'... It's such a lazy way to frame a debate.
Myles:
Well, not really. Isn't it more a question of form.
'Art and Film' denotes a formal question of the moving
image, with specific reference to the medium of the cinema
and the qualities of the cinematic. It seems to lead to
questions of the relationship between visual art and the
moving image: art about film culture and art works, which
are realized in the form of moving image.
Mary:
Okay. So we turn to recent work in the visual arts which
in some way intersects with the cinema: Steve McQueen's
1999 deadpan, Douglas Gordon's 24 Hour Psycho,
Mike Kelley's plan to realize a film on Caribbean pirates
along standard Hollywood patterns, employing Hollywood
prop artists and so forth, or the way Shirin Neshat's
recent video work has been 'produced' by the Barbara Gladstone
Gallery along the Hollywood model of capitalization and
investment. And of course that big Museum of Modern Art
Oxford show, Notorious: Hitchcock and Contemporary
Art in 2001.
Myles:
But aren't there a variety of different phenomena being
lumped together here. There are artworks that are about
specific film texts, there are artworks realized as films,
there are artworks that are produced in a manner consistent
with the Hollywood factory production model, and there
are even artworks that relate to component processes in
film production as in Patricia Piccinini's We are family,
the Australian representation at this year's Venice Biennale.
Mary:
Then there is another arena which is the self-consciously
arty cinema of, say, Greenaway and Todd Haynes as well
as the potentially more sanctimonious claims of something
like Kirby Dick's and Amy Ziering Kofman's Derrida
film as art as philosophical text. You know the one that
went down so well at the 2002 Sundance Festival.
Myles:
Not to mention films about art and artists, Julian Schnabel's
Basquiat or Ed Harris's Pollock or Mary
Harron's I shot Andy Warhol type of thing...
Mary:
So what do we do create a taxonomy of various ways in
which film and art terms collide?
Myles:
...and map that taxonomy onto a chronology of twentieth-century
art practices?
Mary:
But what about Brackage and the whole tradition of abstract
cinema and what about Disney's Fantasia - is there
room for this in our taxonomy of types and sub-types?
Myles:
Well, sure we can make great lists of lists...
Mary:
How do we account for video as opposed to specifically
film-based artworks? How does this complicate our would-be
taxonomy? And isn't there a problem with constructing
taxonomies in this somewhat abstract way? We risk obscuring
the issues of distribution, discursive context and other
contexts of consumption. We also seem to be conflating
formal and content issues in an ad hoc manner.
Myles:
How do you mean?
Mary:
Well, on the one hand it's the whole question of showing
in a gallery or screening in a cinema, and then what type
of cinema, and what context: a film festival? an art exhibition?
a commercial cinema house? home video rental? And, are
you looking at Pontecorvo's Battle of Algiers of
1965, say, as an art text or an event in the history of
avant-garde cinema or both or neither? Or even someone
like Viking Eggling, and the whole abstract-cinema thing?
On the other hand, there is the question of works such
as David Reed's installation Scottie's bedroom
of 1994, which is engaged with a filmic text but in a
manner that seems to require a different frame of analysis.
Myles:
...and we haven't even mentioned the whole male-gaze and
national-cinema axes of analysis that grind endlessly
through film theory classes and how this might relate
to theorizing or canon construction in the visual arts...
Mary:
Oh don't get me started on all that.
Myles:
God forbid...or worse, we could start on about interactive
narratives and non-linear texts. Digital film-making and
the fantasy that a cinematic text might become like a
multiple-choice question. "Click the red button now if
you want the hero to die horribly or the yellow button
now if you want him to find love and redemption..." And
if we do have to go into a digital frame of reference,
how can we ignore the independent porn industry and the
way porn has provided the models for much new work in
these areas, say Seymour Butts' CD-ROM in the early to
mid-1990s. And this is as relevant for both sides of the
question, the film angle and the art angle...
Mary:
So what are you advocating? Do we abandon analysis and
global theorizing in favour of a close reading of specific
texts?
Myles:
Reading particular texts perhaps as exemplars of...?
Mary:
...themselves if nothing else. But then why do we use
'reading' as the preferred term? Are we always engaged
primarily or even solely with a hermeneutic task?
Myles:
Hermann-knew-what now?
Mary:
Stop that... What exactly are we trying to achieve
in a conversation about art and film?
Myles:
Well, probably not 'exactitude', anyway...
Mary:
Okay, okay, but you take my point: we need to establish
some specific agenda or focus here.
Myles:
Well, yes. We've established that you cannot simply operate
the conjunction of art and film and hope to have adequately
delimited a frame of enquiry or discourse. But then again
is anyone really proposing to foist such a simple conjunction
on us?
Mary:
No. But one sometimes suspects that because cinema culture
appears to be available and accessible to a greater part
of the chattering classes than the visual arts, that there
is an attempt to provide a point of entry into visual
arts by pursuing an analogy between the two. This is further
encouraged by the range of specific crossovers and relationships
between these two seemingly overlapping domains of visual
production.
Myles:
So you are holding out for some specially separate and
different realm of visual art?
Mary:
Of course not. But I am suspicious of the ways in which
the cinematic is often assumed to be the already known
and therefore less problematic while the visual arts are
seen as the obscure problematic domain requiring mediated
access.
Myles:
I don't agree. There is a tradition of books that seek
to educate readers in 'how to read a film.' But let's
say that we accept that you don't want to talk in the
way you've outlined, how do you then wish to proceed?
Mary:
Well, let's at least try not to be too philistine or too
pious in talking, whatever else we do. Okay?
Myles:
Okay. I think I can go along with that.
Mary:
Well, it seems to me that there are two key theses at
work in discussions of film/art. One is that cinema in
the twentieth century effectively displaced painting specifically
(and the visual arts in general) as the dominant means
whereby putatively public shared meanings are elaborated
and articulated. Consequently, ambitious art in the twentieth
century often seeks to attain to the condition of cinema:
Duchamp's and later surrealism's engagement with film,
the cinematic scale of abstract expressionism, Warhol's
attempt to solicit Hollywood, the embrace of cheap video
technologies in the 1970s and '80s, the 1990s' vogue for
film-referenced work and so on... Second is the argument
that as the cinematic apparatus becomes superceded - or
at least appears to become so - by novel imaging
technologies it becomes assimilated into the discourse
of the fine arts, which tends to adopt visual technologies
as art-means just as they pass from currency into obsolescence.
Patricia
Piccinini: Leather Landscape (detail),
2003, silicone, polyurethane, leather, mdf,
human hair, 290 x 175 x 165 cm; courtesy the artist/Roslyn
Oxley9 Gallery
|
Myles:
Do you propose to evaluate both these theses? And if so,
do you see them as mutually implicated or even consistent?
Mary:
Well, yeah...kind of...
Myles:
Yeah, to which? Yes, they are consistent or yes, you propose
to evaluate them?
Mary:
Yes and no.
Myles:
Are you being deliberately difficult?
Mary:
Well, you started it.
Myles:
Seriously, do you think such global claims can stand up
to any considered scrutiny? Don't they lack...
Mary:
...oh, please stop already with the lack.
Myles:
It's very easy to be funny when it's too hard to say anything
worthwhile. What about considering another axis of analysis:
the question of pleasure? This is the very question that
you are perhaps trying to evade as you dismiss the psychoanalytic
reading of viewing pleasures?
Mary:
What are you saying?
Myles:
Well, in as much as the theorizing of cinema has allowed
the question of pleasure, and more particularly scopic
pleasure, to pass into discourse without the dead weight
of Kantian aesthetic categories foreclosing the discussion,
it has provided an alibi for visual-arts practitioners.
This predominantly psychoanalytic way of talking about
cinema - which triumphed in the 1970s but which can be
found in emergent form as early as the 1920s in Kracauer
- gave the visual arts a way out beyond narrowly modernist
aesthetics while still allowing an engagement with the
question of pleasure.
Mary:
That's such a weird way of reading that history. It displaces
the feminist critique of the image so completely.
Myles:
Well, is it really? Remember that the generation of artists
operating with reference to the moving image in the 1990s
was the one educated in the 1970s and 1980s when psychoanalytically
informed feminist film criticism began to become a staple
of the art school curriculum.
Mary:
But that doesn't justify your re-writing of this history,
does it?
Myles:
Amn't I simply recounting the effective history of this
discourse? Its residue is to leave a free-for-all in the
bouncy-castle of viewing pleasures.
Mary:
At this rate we are going to end up exchanging our ten
top movie/vis. arts moments without getting anywhere...
Myles:
That's dead easy. (1) The scene in Gremlins II
where the gremlin cinema audience is on the screen and
it mirrors the actual audience in the cinema watching
the movie; (2) The whole of Jonze and Kaufman's Adaptation...
Mary:
...You've got to be kidding me...
Myles:
...(3) the scene where the killer watches home-movie footage
with his blind girlfriend in Manhunter; (4) the
episode of The Simpsons where Homer becomes a naive
artist; (5) Derek Jarman's Blue; (6) Isaac Julien's
The Attendant; (7) The Wizard of Oz; (8)
Visconti's Death in Venice...
Mary:
...can you be any more faggoty...?
Myles:
... (9) Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will.
Mary:
...well yes you can then...
Myles:
...(10) and of course Dziga Vertov's Man with a movie
camera. But that's in no particular order.
It's your
turn.
Mary:
I note you finish with the mandatory Russian guy and get
two minorities for one with Riefenstahl - a woman and
a Nazi...great.
Myles:
C'mon. You're being no fun. Make some real judgements.
Mary:
But your list is just a list of movies you like. It doesn't
speak to the problem of art and film.
Myles:
No. That's not quite fair. It's a list of ten art/film
moments where the distinction between the two collapses
for me. And, as it happens, I also get a real kick out
of these particular moments or texts.
Mary:
That's just too glib.
Myles:
Well, you tell me then.
Mary:
Well, I can't really respond that way. What I can do,
perhaps, is to point to some events or works that seem
to me to help frame this topic better and that could act
as a basis for a proper conversation. But also I can exclude
some of the unnecessary references that serve only to
distract from the key issues.
Myles:
Fire away.
Mary:
Well, in any discussion of this sort I'd have to include...
Myles
(looking around a little embarrassed): ...ssshh...I
think the debate is starting.
Mick Wilson
is a writer, artist and lecturer; he is the co-ordinator
of the Dún Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and
Technology's new MA in Visual Arts Practices: Art Making
/ Curation / Criticism, hosted in Temple Bar Gallery and
Studios.
