Just to recap - if a fan-vid contains shots from Law and Order and music from Evanescence, it is Rubbish. Yes, the some of those parts really is definitely less than the whole. There is no artistic merit to be found in there anywhere. The clip we watched in one of our early classes was perverted: an affront to my integrity as an opinionated student and a fantastic and ludicrous example of how a denizen of the internet can create something so carefully considered and contrived and still get nowhere in life. I hate that television show, as I do most of that procedural rubbish that is thrown onto our screens, and don't get me started on that wailey death-girl. Now please enjoy this clip of bridges being esploderised that, while similar in construction, is better than the former by an order of magnitudes.
Did you notice that in the Law and Boredom film clip that the music swells just as the male lead bursts through the lift doorway and trudges down the hall? Or that in the tilt-shift clip I posted earlier that at 41 seconds in, as the man first falls in the swell, the percussion from the accompaniment begins? Something deeper is going on here. It is the same thing that draws us not to the shapes and outlines of the looming structures in the actualities but to the wisps of steam swirling from their rooftop pipes; it is the the kinetic allure of Deleuze's 'movement-image', from his Cinema 1. All that is modern is movement. We are obsessed with that which we did not have before. If something is built it is finished, it is in the past. Roads, rails, channels - sure they're there and they're static, but they're tools for movement, continuously, for ever. There is a joy in the observation of movement, but when environments are made specifically for that kind of movement, like in any of the spatial dioramas of the Eames creations, the sensations can be further distilled.
Ozu's Tokyo Story is a powerful export precisely because it sets itself against concepts of the modern that we have since come across. it is static (stoic) and compartmentalised. Everything is in its place. the camera is mostly still, and reflects the mesmerising, almost kaleidoscopic chiaroscuro quality of the Japanese domestic interior. It's like an eastern Ikea advertisement in every room, with collaged found objects and talismans not displayed but integrated, collectivised, busy but ordered, not ostentatious. If it is a period piece, not 'modern day' (should we fall back to that conundrum!) it concerns us more with the human condition but curiously how it operates - with a plethora of unknown cultural cues and attitudes - in an intensely un-western space. While not as alien as it could have been before the war, the Japan in Tokyo Story is still quite exotic, and as such is a veritable export. We are unnerved in much the same way as watching historical programs about our own domestic space, as in the interviews with the Eames.
Friday 5 June 2009
When new is different, and old is old again
In conceiving modernity and its identification in modes of art, there is an implication that for something to be regarded as modern and noteworthy there must inherently also be something left behind, something now superseded or otherwise made mundane. ‘timeless’ pieces of art or objects of discourse are of course exceptions to this rule, but that is exactly what imbues them with this sought-after power of appearing fresh and new and avant-garde. There is a cool detachment, a confident and swaggering attitude in the way new art severs (or merges) itself from tradition. It is an inert rendition but is nonetheless complementary to the particular mannerism recognised in the original African-American jazz players in the ‘deep south’ of the United States (painfully underrepresented in O’Connor’s Wise Blood) who would stand on the stage at functions and play - with their backs to the audience – the kind of music that was incredibly hard to anyone in the immediate vicinity to notate...
As we can see, new or hybrid media are strange and rarely comprehended, nor is the reason for their existence fully formed. Is that why there are not more? The anthropologist is always wary of that which he tries so hard to prevent but which he must ultimately concede. He taints all that he records. The documentation of phenomena always dates it, makes it ‘past new’ and enforces a rate of decay upon it. Especially with technology (or in the state of the recording-of, is that a kind of self-reflexive act?), which even if we try to make it seem futuristic, it always ends up looking like the cardboard cut-out mainframes and hulking terminals from old Star Trek reruns or even the latest episode of Dr. Who, bleeping and blooping in the background.
The advertisement is the definitive example. Those we’ve viewed in our ENGL 3604 class of television ‘promos’ and other such early experiments with the televisual such as product placement appear to us now to be absolutely and inadvertently hilarious, though they must surely not have been then. Maybe they just haven’t aged well. So to play against this trap of appearing old before one’s even out of the blocks, I want to position on the other side of the ring the proverbial avant-garde work (if ads are avant-garde, then they age better..). This work for us is Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors (1533). Utilising the camera-obscura, Holbein adds another layer to the semiotics of the work by including above the floor the warped picture of a skull, disregarding the perspective plane. The eye cannot immediately discern the shape of the skull, but if we view it from the side – there it is.
Is what defines art as art this ability to avoid appearing ‘dated’? If we could ever suggest that we’ve moved past modernism and into post-modernism, then can modern artefacts appear to be old or out of date? One must account for personal or cultural tastes, the cycles of fashion and conceptions of the exotic, for these complicate things. If we can suggest the nucleus of contemporality is the city, (Rutman’s Berlin, Dupont’s Picadilly, or even the freshly melded New York seen in various Actualities) the place where things are eternally modern or always up to date, then the suburbs – the deep south - balance this out by being left by the wayside, unkempt, with potholes in the roads and too many red-brick apartment blocks from the 60’s. They could never have been modern!
Hi from Multitouch Barcelona on Vimeo.
As we can see, new or hybrid media are strange and rarely comprehended, nor is the reason for their existence fully formed. Is that why there are not more? The anthropologist is always wary of that which he tries so hard to prevent but which he must ultimately concede. He taints all that he records. The documentation of phenomena always dates it, makes it ‘past new’ and enforces a rate of decay upon it. Especially with technology (or in the state of the recording-of, is that a kind of self-reflexive act?), which even if we try to make it seem futuristic, it always ends up looking like the cardboard cut-out mainframes and hulking terminals from old Star Trek reruns or even the latest episode of Dr. Who, bleeping and blooping in the background.
The advertisement is the definitive example. Those we’ve viewed in our ENGL 3604 class of television ‘promos’ and other such early experiments with the televisual such as product placement appear to us now to be absolutely and inadvertently hilarious, though they must surely not have been then. Maybe they just haven’t aged well. So to play against this trap of appearing old before one’s even out of the blocks, I want to position on the other side of the ring the proverbial avant-garde work (if ads are avant-garde, then they age better..). This work for us is Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors (1533). Utilising the camera-obscura, Holbein adds another layer to the semiotics of the work by including above the floor the warped picture of a skull, disregarding the perspective plane. The eye cannot immediately discern the shape of the skull, but if we view it from the side – there it is.
Is what defines art as art this ability to avoid appearing ‘dated’? If we could ever suggest that we’ve moved past modernism and into post-modernism, then can modern artefacts appear to be old or out of date? One must account for personal or cultural tastes, the cycles of fashion and conceptions of the exotic, for these complicate things. If we can suggest the nucleus of contemporality is the city, (Rutman’s Berlin, Dupont’s Picadilly, or even the freshly melded New York seen in various Actualities) the place where things are eternally modern or always up to date, then the suburbs – the deep south - balance this out by being left by the wayside, unkempt, with potholes in the roads and too many red-brick apartment blocks from the 60’s. They could never have been modern!
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