From: Arturo Menchaca (email suppressed)
Date: Tue Sep 06 2005 - 01:28:47 PDT
Just last fall I took a took a video art course at Northwestern
University. I'm a film student there and I basically wanted to see
what the art department's take on the moving image was. Overall, I
thought it was a great class, primarily because our final project was
to create a video art installation, which was a lot of fun. I ended up
using a combination of projectors, tv's, and laptops, for a total of 7
screens (or "channels" as they call them in the video art world). My
installation was mildly successful and I had a wonderful time trying my
hand at a mode of creativity I wasn't very familiar with.
Specifically, I really liked the creative options a spatially unique,
multi-screen set-up allowed for, and the fact that the viewer is
allowed to walk around freely posed interesting creative problems. It
was a nice change of pace from creating single-screen projections where
the viewer (as well as his/her attention) is basically held captive.
I'll probably try making some more video installations in the future.
But there were two things that ultimately left a bad taste in my mouth
about video art:
One has already been mentioned: video art demands little to no
attention span from the viewer. A person can enter a room where an
installation is, watch 25 seconds, and "get it." Or, just as likely,
they don't actually "get it" because they haven't seen the full
5-minute video loop, but they figure "oh, it's just more of this" and
move on. In this sense, filmmakers are lucky: we more or less have the
viewer's full attention. It takes more effort to not look at what's
on-screen in a darkened theater than it does to actually watch it. It
also takes a lot more energy to get up and leave a theater than it does
to move on to the next room in a gallery. You have to get up, step
over all those people, whisper "excuse me's" left and right, walk down
the aisle, and even then you're still not to the exit! This versus
moving effortlessly through a near-empty room...
The second has to do with the language video artists and the critical
writers on video art use: it is utterly incoherent, nonsensical, and
rambling. It seems to me that one thing video artists (and most
artists today) love to do is hide behind words, especially words that
sound "academic." They like to spout phrases like "haptical
modulation" and "digital convergence" without ultimately saying
anything concrete about their work they made. As far as I'm concerned,
this is never the case with any good experimental filmmaker. A-g
filmmakers seem a lot more practical (though not in terms of their
vocation of course). A good filmmaker like Ernie Gehr or Peter Kubelka
won't hand you a lot of vague b.s. when you ask what their film is
about. They'll tell it to you straight. The film in question may be
motivated by complex ideas/philosophies, but they won't attempt to
cloak these with ambiguous phrases. They *want* you to know what their
film is doing - or at least trying to do. Video artists seem intent on
trying to obscure meaning with linguistic haziness, intentionally
trying to make you feel like you couldn't possibly understand the
aesthetic significance of their work (and implicitly, attempting to
make their work seem more profound than it actually is).
Film comes down to a darkened room, a blank screen, a projector, and
some celluloid. Video art is an empty white room where you can do
whatever the hell you want to, worthwhile or not. Maybe that's why
filmmakers are more lucid: because everything has to be right there
on-screen.
Despite the abundance of light, the empty white room ends up being a
hell of a lot murkier...
-Arturo Menchaca
On Sep 5, 2005, at 7:23 PM, owen wrote:
> On Sep 5, 2005, at 5:28 PM, Matt Teichman wrote:
>
> >>>the televisual aesthetic and its mode of address <<<
>
> now that's the kind of language that get folks a'wantin' to see avant
> garde film !
>
> owen
>
>
> __________________________________________________________________
> For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.
>
__________________________________________________________________
For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.