From: Puget Sound Cinema Society (email suppressed)
Date: Tue Sep 06 2005 - 08:40:15 PDT
On Tuesday, Sep 6, 2005, at 06:40 US/Pacific, owen wrote:
> Hi Arturo,
> Thanks. Something I have felt for some time. Jargon sucks ! Why do
> critics curators and some artists seem to use jargon to such a
> maddening degree? Do grant writers use it too?
> owen
Given just a casual dose of the bollocks written in the last 15 days on
THIS list alone, owen, I'd say Arturo, you and I are probably the only
ones who feel that way. It is this penchant for obfuscation (ooh! a big
word!) that makes me NOT read or want to watch any independent film. If
Messrs. Dixon or James were my champions in the press, I believe I'd
rather not be written about at all, which in fact I'm not (and I like
it that way).* Combine this trend of bad verbiage with a parochial (and
yet another big word!) insistence on the supreme "purity" of gelatin
silver film and its attendant machines, and avant-garde work seems, to
me, more something to avoid stepping in than to watch.
I happen to think Bill Viola, Gary Hill, Richard Serra, Tony Conrad et
al have done some brilliant work in video--and a lot of repetitive
crap. But it would be just as bad had it been in celluloid. It's all I
can do to get a viewer to think critically about any visual
information, from pen & ink drawings to woodcuts to photographs to
Adobe Illustrator meanderings. In my world where visual literacy itself
is poor or non-existent, the medium of composed images is not half as
relevant as we'd like to think, and the medium is most definitely NOT
the message. The film v. video argument to me is as trite as the
woodcut/lithograph v. photograph argument of the 1800s, or even dumber
arguments in photography itself, such as arguments for and against
"pictorialism."
Someone should really write a sci-fi novel set in a world where silver
was rarer than a moral Republican, and in which video or an analogue
was invented before film, with a fully open (democratic?) tradition of
support, both in artistic collectives and industrial uses, rather than
being a specialized niche of "objets d'art" worshippers. What would be
"avant-garde" in that context, I wonder?
And yes, grant writers most definitely indulge in the Grand Thesaurus
of Bad Writing for their work. I really should make a picture just
using all the grants I've had to read over the last fifteen years.
Omar Willey
Puget Sound Cinema Society
*Although I've read very pointed and cogent things from both--is it
only when they publish on university presses this problem arises?
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