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c106: Winter 2003 - Art and Film: An Unruly Dialogue C106 article
Deborah Solomon, New York Times , March 25, 2001
C. A. Griffith, Below the Line: (Re)Calibrating the Filmic Gaze , in Jacqueline Bobo (ed.), Black Women Film & Video Artists , London: Routledge/AFI, 1998
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.
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.
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