Stan Brakhage: Expanding the Language of Film, Frame by Frame

One may read infinite interviews with independent filmmakers whining about making a $3,000,000 film on a $750,000 budget, but can we really pity them after we consider how Stan Brakhage (1933-2003) expanded the creative potential of the entire medium using nothing but blank film stock and some felt tip markers? The immensely influential filmmaker completed over 300 films while living a low budget life, working with amateur equipment and discards. His films take us to the extremes of our emotional states while dismissing the tedium of narrative structure. He has opened the doors to new understandings of human experience to all willing to accept his art.

Stan Brakhage - "Eye Myth" (1967)

One of the Greatest Men of All Time

Douglas Engelbart (1925-2013), whose vision of collaboration using computer technology to help solve the urgent and complex problems of all of humanity, died on July 2, 2013. His comrades believed that his ideas were never fully realized due to his ideas and generosity of spirit. For example, he resisted patenting the "mouse" he'd invented and it eventually fell into the public domain. The robotic rigidity of institutions is also to blame -- most powerful technology companies in American relegated him to R&D. Ted Nelson, professor and inventor of the first hypertext project, delivered Engelbart's eulogy on December 9, 2013. In his tearful delivery, he said the "...real ashes to be mourned are the ashes of Doug’s great dreams and vision, that we dance around in the costume party of fonts that swept aside his ideas of structure and collaboration...Perhaps his notion of accelerating collaboration and cooperation was a pipe dream in this dirty world of organizational politics, jockeying and backstabbing and euphemizing evil." Engelbart articulated his ideas for collaboration publicly in what is known as The Mother of all Demos delivered on December 9, 1968, nearly half a century ago. Some of what he described is still in the process of being realized in commercial forms such as Skype, Google Docs, and more.

Paul McCarthy: The Last Artist We Needed to Meet

Artist Paul McCarthy with J. Shimon after McCarthy's lecture at
The Art Institute of Chicago, May 2012. Photographed by J. Lindemann

A person definitely gets over meeting famous artists after being hired to photograph them by the dozens. There was one remaining exception, a single artist who seemed to rise above, Paul McCarthy. Our friend John McKinnon organized a talk at the Art Institute of Chicago last May (2012), and somehow intuitively knew we needed to connect. It was a rather conventional artist's talk, focused on more obscure works and maybe with a thicker than normal air of discomfort with the action of speaking about oneself. A handful of people came on stage to get various things signed, rather quickly leaving Paul standing alone. I approached him, we started out laughing, had a short, abstract conversation about holes/passages, barriers/containment, voids/hollowness, and began weeping. Julie immediately intervened and asked him why he quit teaching. "Didn't want to become one of those" was his reply. Yea, that is an issue isn't it. A contemporary art member/MBA/golfer type then whisked Mr. McCarthy away to the special VIP fundraiser dinner. Such is the life of a visionary artist.

Paul McCarthy lecture opening slide
at The Art Institute of Chicago, May 2012.

The New York Times Magazine ran a feature on McCarthy's work on May 10, 2013 titled:

"The Demented Imagineer."

More Real than the Real Thing: Media Artist Jack Goldstein on UbuWeb

Portrait of Jack Goldstein by James Welling

UbuWeb's founder, an American poet and professor of poetics at Penn State named Kenneth Goldsmith, writes: "It’s amazing to me that UbuWeb, after fifteen years, is still going. Run with no money and put together pretty much without permission, Ubu has succeeded by breaking all the rules, by going about things the wrong way. UbuWeb can be construed as the Robin Hood of the avant-garde, but instead of taking from one and giving to the other, we feel that in the end, we’re giving to all." It is on UbuWeb that a viewer can find a wealth of artist Jack Goldstein's works.

UbuWeb recently posted 10 films from the 1970s by Jack Goldstein (1945-2003), a Candadian born, California-based performance and conceptual artist. States UbuWeb, "Beyond their political content...the sheer beauty of Goldstein's '70s films constantly forces one to remember that, even when he deploys the strategies of spectacle ironically, Goldstein is a talented visual artist. That these works still look so fresh testifies not only to his refined aesthetic sensibility, but also to his influence on many of today's artists, for whom media culture and the loop have respectively become the subject and device du jour." According to the Jack Goldstein Estate website, "Goldstein was one of the first graduates of CalArts and went on to experiment with performance, film, recording and painting. This exciting early work of the late seventies, eighties and early nineties influenced many artists who came after him." His work was recently included in "The Pictures Generation" curated by The Met in New York City. Wrote Robert C. Morgan about Goldstein's work in the Brooklyn Rail: " There is a sense of ambiguity about it—an ambiguity without the weight of disaster. Instead, one senses a kind of arbitrariness in Goldstein’s work that is fully conscious of its beauty and elegance. His presentation is about the distance between beauty and the dark side of human and natural events, how they come together through a kind of poetic sublimation."

A suite of nine records (sound effects) by Jack Goldstein, 1979

Transformation and Fair Use

Richard Prince from Canal Zone

French photographer Patrick Cariou sued Richard Prince for using/appropriating his photographs from his series Yes, Rasta circa 2000 as the basis of Prince's Canal Zone series circa 2012. The courts recently found that Prince had "transformed" Caribou's work to make a new more contemporary statement hence declaring it "Fair  Use".

Patrick Cariou Yes, Rasta (left) vs. Richard Prince Canal Zone (right)

Museumised: Rose-Coloured Resurrection

The Loud Family for the PBS documentary An American Family,
which "devastated" them when media called them "affluent zombies"
while accusing gay son Lance Loud (upper left) of
"camping and queening about like a pathetic court jester".

"We all become living specimens under the spectral light of ethnology, or of anti-ethnology which is only the pure form of triumphal ethnology, under the sign of dead differences, and of the resurrection of differences."

-- Jean Baudrillard, Simulations (p. 16)

With the mission of chronicling the "daily life of the Louds - an upper-middle class family from May 30 to December 31, 1971, PBS museumized the family as it fetishized their interactions and relationships in the series An American Family aired in 1973. They became specimens before the camera, which precipitated the parental divorce and the punk antics of Lance Loud, who had famously corresponded with artist Andy Warhol as a teen. Sited as the first "reality TV" show, An American Family changed the lives of the Louds, and it "changed my life," stated Craig Gilbert, the creator of the series stated in 2011 in a New Yorker interview. In a subsequent HBO drama titled Cinema Verite about the making of An American Family aired in 2011, the producers tried to "convey the surreal enormity of An American Family to viewers who are more accustomed to the idea of living in public, whether in front of cameras or through social media" and understanding the innocence of the early 1970s. Writes Baudrillard, "More interesting is the phantasm of filming the Louds as if TV weren't there. The producer's trump card was to say: "They lived as if we weren't there." An "absurd paradoxical formula--neither true, nor false: bit utopian"(50) wrote Baudrillard while concluding that the family were victims of a sacrificial spectacle offered to 20 million Americans (51-52). Such museumification of human subjects continues more broadly today in everyday life everywhere as every minute seemingly is captured and uploaded for all to see. An American Life is a harbinger of the Internet exploitation of the individuals and disasters to come.

Video is Not Film

Bill Viola with video camera © Russ Roca

Bill Viola (b. 1951), and his Australian partner Kira Perov spent three days at Lawrence University campus. Together they presented panel discussions, a work shop with Q&A session, an intimate lunch with students, and screenings of Viola's early video work.  Viola spoke repeatedly about today's digital technology, "We're experiencing an amazing renaissance and we don't even know it" he exclaimed. Viola's visit was spurred by a project curated by philosopher Christopher Zimmerman (LU '96) titled Bill Viola-Light, Time, Being focusing on screening Viola's early single channel video work from the 1970s and 1980s. In his 2011 essay titled "Video is Not Film", Zimmerman argues:

"...there is a tendency today to amalgamate film and video within the larger culture of the moving image. The accessibility and ubiquity of video and digital technology seem to have softened the once critical distinctions between two art forms. However, under closer scrutiny, the finer differences between film and video reveal essentially two different mediums, different developmental traditions, different apparatus producing different practices, and different aesthetic stances as to the meaning and significance of moving images." 

Zimmerman writes further on a number of topics relevant to Viola's video work from "Light and Reception" to "Being and Projection." Viola's experimental early videos screened in the Wriston Auditorium by Zimmerman on three consecutive evenings have been superseded by more polished projects shot at 3000 frames per second exploring themes of mortality and death according to Perov.

Viola performed himself as an artist with his head in the clouds wearing Buddhist Mala Beads and emphasizing the spiritual while needing to be reminded by studio manager Perov to organize his notes, address the audience question at hand, and/or use the restroom before taking the stage. Digital Processes student and Senior Studio Art Major Rachele Krivichi (LU '13) introduced Viola's convocation lecture. Viola's lecture on Tuesday, April 16, 2013, titled "Artless Art", included projections of this recent video projects such as Three Women (© 2008). Viola charged students with mindfully and responsibly using the digital technology that's "going into you in the deepest possible way". Use it as a tool, he advised, to merge the human soul and the digital.

Lawrence University Associate Professor of Art History Elizabeth Carlson facilitated Viola and Zimmerman's campus appearance sponsored by the Committee on Public Occasions.