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| from "Puce Moment" |
On Tuesday, October 22 I presented a series of films and videos loosely connected by the question of how the human body, both as an object and as a subject, is presented in film and video. Below are links to the videos I showed, as well as some casual notes about them:
"High As Kite Female Battles Against Reality," Anonymous, 2013
This anonymously shot (and edited) footage from my neighborhood in Brooklyn went viral. Incredibly complex issues seem to be jammed into this 6 minute clip--drugs, control, authority, class, race (it becomes clear by the end of the clip that the photographer is male and if not white (he sounds white) at least of the demographic of young people moving into traditionally Hispanic areas in Brooklyn), not to mention the complicated ethics of videotaping other people who have not given their consent (ethics which are becoming both more and less complicated as we approach the point where everything everywhere will be videotaped--"I'm a photographer!").
But what strikes me most forcibly here is how effectively the difficulty, danger, and anxiety of having a physical body--a relatively fragile body--is conveyed. When thems is talking about the abject, kids, heres it is.
Excerpt from "Olympia" by Leni Riefenstahl, 1938
Okay. So yes, it's true that she worked very closely with Hitler. And that she hung out all the time with Goebbels. And that this film was financed by the Third Reich to document the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. It's also true that Riefenstahl is essentially the mother of moving sports photography and it's no wonder why. The first person to appear, after a stately tour through the ruins of the Acropolis, does so in a cross-fade where he is superimposed onto the form of a statue of a discus thrower. As far away from the previous clip as possible, Riefenstahl shoots her athletes from below, making their god-like bodies even more godlike, with raking light across their (almost) complete nudity highlighting the merciless perfection of their musculature. The direct connection between these Aryan athletes and classical sculpture is made literal: WE PERFECTION, YO. Then the music changes and it's time for the women to come on. They look good, too, but methinks Leni had... well, see ART THOUGHTZ below...
"Puce Moment" by Kenneth Anger, 1949
I love this film. There is something so appealing to me about the way it's shot, the colors, the mood, the effervescence underlaid with melancholy. I like the scale of it; it's a parlor drama with only one actor. One actor and a lot of dresses. This is clearly a woman who was made to be looked at, and legend has it that after shooting this film she moved to Mexico where she became the mistress of the President.
"Meat Joy" by Carolee Schneeman, 1964
Schneeman is a seriously polarizing figure. Both adored and reviled for performances like "Interior Scroll" which has been reduced in the popular (reactionary) imagination to a cipher for self-indulgent-feminist-performance-that-we-can-laugh-about, Schneeman was the inspiration behind the character Maude Lebowski in the Coen bothers cult classic "The Big Lebowski." Schneeman is an excellent illustration of how the art world isn't nearly as enlighted as it thinks it is. Male artists who push the boundaries of the physical, like Paul McCarthy or Chris Burden, are lionized as risk-takers and soldiers of the mind, but people like Schneeman are ghettoized and/or ridiculed in part because she just wouldn't act like a lady.
So if you're a good feminist, how do you reclaim the image of 'woman' back from the patriarchal hegemony that has been holding it hostage to it's own hungry lusty aesthetics for forever? One way is to celebrate the flesh in a performance that doesn't have a gender hierarchy and which is funny, gross, serious, and also, still, (a little bit) sexy. AKA: Meat Joy. Enjoy.
[If you ever have a chance to see her 'seminal' work "Fuses" on film, go. It is an extraordinary look at the formal qualities of film and film making, the physical characteristics of film, which Schneeman altered by hand, and of sex. And definitely best seen not on the internet...]
"Feeling Free with 3D Magic Eye Poster Remix" by Shana Moulton, 2004
[Here we have a jump of 40 years of very important film and video history... a great deal of great stuff happened in there. But I'm going to skip to the present, and look at the more self-conscious, self-conflicted, and possibly self-loathing relationships of today between images of bodies, ideas of bodies, and our own bodies.]
"Feeling Free" is part of a cycle of works about a character named 'Cynthia', performed by Moulton herself. This installment began when Mouton found a VHS copy of the Angela Lansbury exercise video which is incorporated into the piece. Here we do see a woman acting like a lady. So much so that she is essentially dissociated from her own body--which is held together with wrist and neck braces and potentially a host of other orthopedic devices not as readily apparent to the viewer. The tacky decorations in Cynthia's living room begin to insinuate themselves into the Lansbury video she is watching--objets d'art and Lansbury's video image and Cynthia herself become equivalent. Angela Lansbury's not helping her connect with herself AT ALL! The only way for Cynthia to really boogie down is to retreat within herself; she can only be a body in her mind.
"ART THOUGHTZ: The Female Gaze, with Special Guest Tamara Suber" by Hennessey Youngman (aka Jayson Musson)
Hennessey Youngman is the artworld persona of Jayson Musson in a series of brilliant and hilarious internet videos called ART THOUGHTZ. Youngman, a streetwise, straight-talking realist, deconstructs all kinds of things germane to the young artist, including studio visits, curators, post-structuralism, relational aesthetics, and why Bono and Damien Hirst are so eerily alike. In this very Not Safe For Work video, Youngman takes pages from Laura Mulvey and John Berger and asks why it is that there are lots of pictures of naked bitches in art history from a male perspective, but, like, not so much stuff from a female one. "Do women have eyes?"
Right now New York is experiencing a moment of incredible anxiety about art making, and this is definitely true vis a vis issues of representation and the body. The fact that Musson has created an avatar to speak through itself is an indication of artists' desire to displace the responsibility of making clear statements away from themselves (and from their 'core brand' which is best kept as a whitish, slightly windy Warholian vaccum, where it can be free to be cagey.) And what Youngman is saying here, is how complicated aesthetics, politics and desire are to tease apart when looking at pictures of bodies, whether those images are 'art' or 'pornography'.
"Dark Green" by Paper Rad, 2011
Paper Rad is a intimidatingly prolific Provincetown, RI-/Pittsburgh, PA-based collective who make videos, music, insane installations, and general mayhem and ructions. This video, ostensibly a public service announcement about the benefits of recycling, depicts a worldview where everything, images, videos, bodies, popular culture, computers, the internet, the world, everything is melting. Though rather than melting into air, these things melt into a toxic, possibly intelligent, oily black ooze. All of the detritus of culture is shown clumping up here to form a kind of post-human, definitely post-body kind of world where the physical reality of garbage becomes a problem for the imagination. There are also kittens wearing top hats. So recycle, y'all; it's good for mother Gaia.
[My thanks to the T. A. J. Residency, and to all of the people who came to the lecture. I hope you enjoyed it. I would also like to thank Allison Freeman, who also gave a talk; in her case about the state of a certain kind of Daniel Buren-inspired painting in New York City happening right now. Big ups to A.F.]
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