I have to concur with Fred in lamenting the seeming deterioration of attention.
I make minimal work that relies on duration to hopefully raise epistemological
and ontological questions. Forget about 4 hours for 'The Art of Vision' or 3
hours for 'La Region Centrale' - some of my pieces only ask for 3 minutes (often
looped, so this is not entirely accurate)! Cinema audiences seem to switch off
because of the apparent lack of narrative and gallery audiences glance and move
on. I'm obviously only speaking from personal experience and maybe I just
haven't found the right audience yet - maybe my work is just crap, although I
include screenings and exhibitions that I have also attended in this - but it
does concern me that people seem less and less inclined to give art the time
that it deserves and needs. I know that many artworks can provide both instant
gratification and sustained contemplation, but for those of us that rely on
duration and the collaboration of the observer for the production of meaning,
this mass exodus to the instant is destructive and extremely frustrating.
________________________________
From: Fred Camper <f_at_fredcamper.com>
To: Experimental Film Discussion List <frameworks_at_jonasmekasfilms.com>
Sent: Tue, 14 June, 2011 20:40:15
Subject: [Frameworks] Avant-garde film, Facebook, and the nature of attention
This message is not about migrating the list to Facebook, or anything
like that, but was occasioned by the fact that we have had a huge
number of posts on that topic, showing how much interest the single
word "Facebook" can generate on this list, and by Brooks's comment
that for his students, email is just soooo old! (Well, he didn't say
that exactly, I know.)
Additionally, I've read that Facebook introduced its own email system
because it found that for its youngest users email was just too hard
to deal with -- the question of the subject line, for example.
It has often been observed that, in the face of new media, the nature
of attention has changed radically in recent decades. Television
channel flipping would be an early example, as would growing up in a
household where the television is always on. Since television, we have
moved more and more toward shorter and easier to send forms of
communication whose products also seem to me to be able to contain
less and less material of any, um, intellectual interest. Just take a
look at typical wall of Facebook posts to see what I mean. I have no
objection to anyone's having fun posting pics of one's life, but for
many, this seems to have become a dominant activity in terms of energy
and effort and time. The way many use texting today, it serves as a
continual interruption.
Now consider some of the key masterpieces of our particular branch of
art, avant-garde film: "The Art of Vision," "La Region Centrale," "La
Raison Avant La Passion," "Unsere Afrikareise," "The Chelsea Girls,"
"The Lead Shoes," "Carriage Trade," "Wait," "Hapax Legomena,"
"Eniaios." These are all works that, like the finest literature, like
Bach's "The Art of the Fugue" and other great works of classical
music, like a painting by Paul Cézanne (but unlike many postmodern art
exhibits today) require prolonged, sustained, serious attention. They
are based on, and depend on, a rather serious model of individual
consciousness, in which the mind of the maker (and, the maker hopes,
the viewer) is seeking, profoundly alone, to navigate its way through
the world, or through ideas about the world, or through some
alternative world, or through ideas about cinema and other media. This
is art with the power to change the way one sees, to change one's
life, and even, if more than a few would "get" it, to change the world.
Are such works, and the ideas behind such works, becoming less and
less accessible to those weaned on Facebook and texting and Twitter?
Will a new kind of art emerge from this culture of interruption and
inattention? Has it already? Is there anything in it that I would
recognize as "art," in terms of offering both aesthetic pleasure and a
model for consciousness? Of course I'm not sure that any of these
questions have answers, so feel free to offer no response. To be
honest, though, my gut prejudice is to fear that Facebook, texting,
and Twitter are turning us away from the whole idea of a solitude in
which the mind struggles to understand itself and the world, and
perhaps tries to remake itself and the world, in favor of the mind
instead as one interdependent cell in a beehive that produces a lot of
noisy buzz and not much honey.
Fred Camper
Chicago
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Received on Wed Jun 15 2011 - 02:03:38 CDT
