From: Fred Camper (email suppressed)
Date: Mon Sep 05 2005 - 07:52:51 PDT
Michael Betancourt wrote:
"While this is likely debatable, what follows is something worth
thinking about. 'Video Art' as promoted in the art world--video
installation, big budget productions, etc--is a counter tradition
organized along lines similar to large-scale painting, and in many
respects it occupies the niche in the art world that was reserved for
history painting, large scale abstraction, etc. It is the big money
motion picture form as art. And the tradition it represents is
antithetical to 'avant-garde film.'"
I think this is an excellent point. I've seen many of these, and while I
like a few of the artists who work this way (Shirin Neshat being one),
even their work pales besides the best avant-garde film, while much of
what I see in the way of museum video installations is unwatchably
inarticulate. Long takes of the subject seem as unthought out as the
framing, both looking as if the montage of Eisenstein and the
brilliantly conceived long takes of Dreyer and so many others had never
happened. Never even mind avant-garde film; they look as if they were
made in abject ignorance of all of film history. One thing I find so
horrible about the MoMA's presentation of Hollis Frampton's great film
"Lemon" as a video installation is that they make it look like all this
other more recent stuff, especially when there are lights on in the
gallery; there's no place to sit; people walk by and stop for a minute;
it looks like the presentation of its object, a lemon, rather than a
film with the integrity of the film frame and film time.
Maybe there's something else going on in these video installations that
I'm not understanding. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe they are "conceptual" and
I don't get the concept. But good conceptual art, all the way down to
Yoko Ono's early 1960s index card descriptions of performances, takes
care with its materials, however limited.
Backing up my guess about film ignorance is the split between the
museum-and-gallery art world and the much smaller world of avant-garde
film and video. I may have reported here earlier about the Chicago
premiere of Barney's "Cremaster 3" at the Museum of Contemporary Art.
Tout le local art world was there, big name collectors and curators and
art school deans. That's nice, but these are people you would never see
at a Chicago Filmmakers screening, whether it is of Brakhage or young
Chicagoans.
My tentative hypothesis is that the people who go gaga over much of this
stuff do so out of total and abject ignorance of the history of film as
an art. Not knowing the language that's already established, they think
these poorly-photographed imitations of Lumiere on video, or that
Barney's sub-Fellini fantasy worlds (and I don't even like Fellini), are
somehow interesting.
Fred Camper
Chicago
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