corrupted truth metamorphosed
Final Edit for Fall 2008 Studio Critique
Press Play (2008)
Press Play from John Hendershot on Vimeo.
Wednesday, December 3, 2008
Sunday, November 23, 2008
Artist of the Week
Doug Aitken
Doug Aitken was born in Redondo Beach, California in 1968 and currently lives and works in Los Angeles and New York.
Aitken’s body of work ranges from photography, sculpture, and architectural interventions to films, sound, single and multichannel video works, and installations. He has described his work as "reflecting a world that is harmonious, mysterious, mesmerizing, passionate, and sometimes rough and violent." His work has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions around the world, in such institutions as the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Museum of Modern Art, and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.
Since the mid-1990s, Aitken has created installations by employing multiple screens. His electric earth installation drew international attention and earned him the International Prize at the Venice Biennale in 1999. The following year, glass horizon, an installation comprising a projection of a pair of eyes onto the facade of the Vienna Secession building after it had closed for the night, showcased an interest in architectural structures and in art that interacts with urban environments. In 2001, Aitken’s exhibition at London’s Serpentine Gallery used the entire building for the complex installation new ocean.
Sleepwalkers
Interview between artist and Werner Herzog
Artist Website
Doug Aitken was born in Redondo Beach, California in 1968 and currently lives and works in Los Angeles and New York.
Aitken’s body of work ranges from photography, sculpture, and architectural interventions to films, sound, single and multichannel video works, and installations. He has described his work as "reflecting a world that is harmonious, mysterious, mesmerizing, passionate, and sometimes rough and violent." His work has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions around the world, in such institutions as the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Museum of Modern Art, and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.
Since the mid-1990s, Aitken has created installations by employing multiple screens. His electric earth installation drew international attention and earned him the International Prize at the Venice Biennale in 1999. The following year, glass horizon, an installation comprising a projection of a pair of eyes onto the facade of the Vienna Secession building after it had closed for the night, showcased an interest in architectural structures and in art that interacts with urban environments. In 2001, Aitken’s exhibition at London’s Serpentine Gallery used the entire building for the complex installation new ocean.
Sleepwalkers
Interview between artist and Werner Herzog
Artist Website
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
Word: Journey
Word: Journey
Main Entry:
2journey
Function:
verb
Inflected Form(s):
jour•neyed; jour•ney•ing
Date:
14th century
intransitive verb : to go on a journey : travel transitive verb : to travel over or through
— jour•ney•er noun
I think journey is a good end to this series of “word” definitions. Ultimately that is what my work is. I think the concept of journey can be applied to many artists work, but I feel that my current body of work has a self contained journey within each piece. I also believe it is important for the overall effect of my work to create this sense of journey. It helps the viewer to transition into this environment of experience and emotional understanding.
Artist 1: Michael Snow
Snow’s work often has involved the slow sense of passing time, stretching the experience into a form of journey. My first encounter with Snow’s work was his critically acclaimed film Wavelength. The viewer leaves his films with a sense of accomplishment and wonder.
Wavelength (1967)
New York Eye and Ear Control (1964)
Main Entry:
2journey
Function:
verb
Inflected Form(s):
jour•neyed; jour•ney•ing
Date:
14th century
intransitive verb : to go on a journey : travel transitive verb : to travel over or through
— jour•ney•er noun
I think journey is a good end to this series of “word” definitions. Ultimately that is what my work is. I think the concept of journey can be applied to many artists work, but I feel that my current body of work has a self contained journey within each piece. I also believe it is important for the overall effect of my work to create this sense of journey. It helps the viewer to transition into this environment of experience and emotional understanding.
Artist 1: Michael Snow
Snow’s work often has involved the slow sense of passing time, stretching the experience into a form of journey. My first encounter with Snow’s work was his critically acclaimed film Wavelength. The viewer leaves his films with a sense of accomplishment and wonder.
Wavelength (1967)
New York Eye and Ear Control (1964)
Sunday, November 9, 2008
Review of the week
• Did anyone critique your work this week? If so, what were their impressions?
Paul looked at my trailer from last week’s studio critique. I found the feedback very useful. It’s given me a slight change of direction to figure out.
• What was the most motivational or creative moment of the past week?
I think the meeting with Paul, reviewing my footage, and as strange as this sounds, thinking about how I would’ve shot this last year.
• What do you want to achieve in next week's studio practice?
I really want to shoot something that I feel confident with.
• What did you achieve in your studio this past week?
Finally constructing something with the footage.
• What has been an artistic failure this week?
I’m still feeling confused and not sure where to go with this.
• What was the most profound thought in relation to your practice this week?
Don’t forget what kind of artist I am.
Paul looked at my trailer from last week’s studio critique. I found the feedback very useful. It’s given me a slight change of direction to figure out.
• What was the most motivational or creative moment of the past week?
I think the meeting with Paul, reviewing my footage, and as strange as this sounds, thinking about how I would’ve shot this last year.
• What do you want to achieve in next week's studio practice?
I really want to shoot something that I feel confident with.
• What did you achieve in your studio this past week?
Finally constructing something with the footage.
• What has been an artistic failure this week?
I’m still feeling confused and not sure where to go with this.
• What was the most profound thought in relation to your practice this week?
Don’t forget what kind of artist I am.
Friday, November 7, 2008
Revised Artist Statement
50 Word Artist Statement:
This is a true documentation. There are no conventions for the documented event. The image is a document of truth, narration is a superfluous failure to connect, and the reaction can be universal. The image is most important. The sound is the connection. Together the documentation is a total experience.
This is a true documentation. There are no conventions for the documented event. The image is a document of truth, narration is a superfluous failure to connect, and the reaction can be universal. The image is most important. The sound is the connection. Together the documentation is a total experience.
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
Friday, October 24, 2008
Video for the week
I finally have my video work up on the internet! For anyone doing video work Vimeo seems to be a superior option to youtube. They're ability to show work in HD is nice. We'll see.
I'm A Well Adjusted Person from John Hendershot on Vimeo.
I'm A Well Adjusted Person from John Hendershot on Vimeo.
Complete
Paul Thulin has read your blog up to this point/entry. Your blog is currently up to date and complete.
Is it that you are scared of the "conversation"? IS it really that you do not want to take the time to reset the camera ? I mean don't you have a responsibility to set the camera up --- especially for the "conversation" -- even if it is an inconvenient time?
This idea kept going through my head. She wanted to talk and the camera (John) shut it down -- the "documentary" was exhausted. Does that bother you or am I processing our discussion wrong?
Is it that you are scared of the "conversation"? IS it really that you do not want to take the time to reset the camera ? I mean don't you have a responsibility to set the camera up --- especially for the "conversation" -- even if it is an inconvenient time?
This idea kept going through my head. She wanted to talk and the camera (John) shut it down -- the "documentary" was exhausted. Does that bother you or am I processing our discussion wrong?
Thursday, October 23, 2008
Week In Review
* Did anyone critique your work this week? If so, what were their impressions?
Not this week. I’ll be having a group crit next week.
* What was the most motivational or creative moment of the past week?
When I was able to get my footage to actually show up in my editing software. I feel like I can actually do something now.
* What do you want to achieve in next week's studio practice?
Edit this footage. Develop a story from it and get it critiqued
* What did you achieve in your studio this past week?
Not a whole lot
* What has been an artistic failure this week?
Not doing a whole lot of anything
* What was the most profound thought in relation to your practice this week?
Not much, it’s my dead space time.
Not this week. I’ll be having a group crit next week.
* What was the most motivational or creative moment of the past week?
When I was able to get my footage to actually show up in my editing software. I feel like I can actually do something now.
* What do you want to achieve in next week's studio practice?
Edit this footage. Develop a story from it and get it critiqued
* What did you achieve in your studio this past week?
Not a whole lot
* What has been an artistic failure this week?
Not doing a whole lot of anything
* What was the most profound thought in relation to your practice this week?
Not much, it’s my dead space time.
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
Word 2
Personal
Main Entry:
per•son•al
Pronunciation:
\ˈpərs-nəl, ˈpər-sə-nəl\
Function:
adjective
Etymology:
Middle English, from Anglo-French personel, from Late Latin personalis, from Latin persona
Date:
14th century
1: of, relating to, or affecting a particular person : private , individual
Marlon Riggs
His self documentaries have allowed viewers to better understand the world and feelings of this African American caught in an identity struggle between his race and his sexual orientation.
Tongues Untied (1990)
Black Is Black Ain't (1994)
Review of Black Is Black Ain't"
With BLACK IS...BLACK AIN'T, Riggs focuses attention on the "isms"that divide and separate, and challenges black people to "reconcile themselves to each other, to our differences ... We have to get over the notion that you can only be unified as a people as long as everybody agrees. You know we don't achieve freedom by those means."
For centuries American culture has stereotyped black Americans, but equally devastating have been the constraining and often contradictory definitions of "blackness" African Americans have imposed on each other. The right attire; hair from "conk" to Afro; ghetto slang or "proper" speech; "true" black religion versus the false; macho man or super woman; authentic, Afro-centric, or Euro-centric; sexuality and gender roles: Each one of these has been used as a litmus test in defining the real black man and the true black woman. But is there an "essential" black identity? Can blackness be reduced to a single acceptable set of experiences that African Americans should share or even aspire to?
BLACK IS...BLACK AIN'T forcefully confronts the identification of blackness with a hyper-masculinity born of the '60s Black Power movement. Colorism, the black church, the Civil Rights movement, family -- all continue to be defining factors in today's black communities. BLACK IS...BLACK AIN'T brings it all to the table, knowing, as Riggs says, that "there's a cure for what ails us as a people, and that is for us to talk to each other. We've got to start talking about the ways in which we hurt each other ... because nobody can unload the pain or the shame or the guilt by not speaking."
Stan Brakhage
Brakhage’s work, specifically his earlier work was a documentation of everything in his life. One of his earlier films Window Water Baby Moving was a controversial attempt by Brakhage to film the birth of his child. Brakhage was constantly looking for new ways to document his own personal life.
Window Water Baby Moving (1959)
Desistfilm (1954)
Review:
Brakhage's ambivalence about existence can be seen in his early film dramas, in which agonized individuals strain against imagined prisons; it can be seen in his first major work, Anticipation of the Night (1958), a testament to the failure of imaginative seeing, ending in the protagonist's suicide; it can be seen in the cosmic deconstruction that concludes the four-hour The Art of Vision (1965); it can be seen in what is perhaps his greatest achievement, the "Arabics," a series of 19 abstract films that are both glorious examples of light in motion and unsettling documents of seeing so "abnormal" that the viewer feels almost disoriented. And it can be seen in his five final completed works, being shown at the Film Center May 20 in a "Tribute and Benefit" to assist his family with the costs of his final illness. Four of the five are Chicago premieres (the 2001 Jesus Trilogy and Coda is not), and this is only their fourth public showing anywhere. (The two works left unfinished at his death are being completed by former students and will soon be released.)
Taking defiance of filmic forms to a new extreme, these works have qualities often found in an artist's late oeuvre. Brakhage refines his art to its essence, to an unpredictability that's nevertheless not random, neither borrowing from drama as in his earlier films nor supplying the potent symbolism of such late hand-painted works as The Dark Tower. The last four films in particular have an austere, almost autumnal visual and emotional evenness. All but one of the four — Max is the exception — were made by painting directly on the 16-millimeter film strip one frame at a time, and their shifts in perspective keep the viewer on edge to an almost delirious degree. Because each frame takes only one twenty-fourth of a second, Brakhage often chose to repeat each one two, three, or four times in the printing, resulting in between 6 and 12 images per second. At this speed, each painting is visible just long enough to be perceived in some detail but not long enough to become a static picture. The resulting tension between stills and implied movement is only one of the many ways Brakhage sets the viewer off balance.
Main Entry:
per•son•al
Pronunciation:
\ˈpərs-nəl, ˈpər-sə-nəl\
Function:
adjective
Etymology:
Middle English, from Anglo-French personel, from Late Latin personalis, from Latin persona
Date:
14th century
1: of, relating to, or affecting a particular person : private , individual
Marlon Riggs
His self documentaries have allowed viewers to better understand the world and feelings of this African American caught in an identity struggle between his race and his sexual orientation.
Tongues Untied (1990)
Black Is Black Ain't (1994)
Review of Black Is Black Ain't"
With BLACK IS...BLACK AIN'T, Riggs focuses attention on the "isms"that divide and separate, and challenges black people to "reconcile themselves to each other, to our differences ... We have to get over the notion that you can only be unified as a people as long as everybody agrees. You know we don't achieve freedom by those means."
For centuries American culture has stereotyped black Americans, but equally devastating have been the constraining and often contradictory definitions of "blackness" African Americans have imposed on each other. The right attire; hair from "conk" to Afro; ghetto slang or "proper" speech; "true" black religion versus the false; macho man or super woman; authentic, Afro-centric, or Euro-centric; sexuality and gender roles: Each one of these has been used as a litmus test in defining the real black man and the true black woman. But is there an "essential" black identity? Can blackness be reduced to a single acceptable set of experiences that African Americans should share or even aspire to?
BLACK IS...BLACK AIN'T forcefully confronts the identification of blackness with a hyper-masculinity born of the '60s Black Power movement. Colorism, the black church, the Civil Rights movement, family -- all continue to be defining factors in today's black communities. BLACK IS...BLACK AIN'T brings it all to the table, knowing, as Riggs says, that "there's a cure for what ails us as a people, and that is for us to talk to each other. We've got to start talking about the ways in which we hurt each other ... because nobody can unload the pain or the shame or the guilt by not speaking."
Stan Brakhage
Brakhage’s work, specifically his earlier work was a documentation of everything in his life. One of his earlier films Window Water Baby Moving was a controversial attempt by Brakhage to film the birth of his child. Brakhage was constantly looking for new ways to document his own personal life.
Window Water Baby Moving (1959)
Desistfilm (1954)
Review:
Brakhage's ambivalence about existence can be seen in his early film dramas, in which agonized individuals strain against imagined prisons; it can be seen in his first major work, Anticipation of the Night (1958), a testament to the failure of imaginative seeing, ending in the protagonist's suicide; it can be seen in the cosmic deconstruction that concludes the four-hour The Art of Vision (1965); it can be seen in what is perhaps his greatest achievement, the "Arabics," a series of 19 abstract films that are both glorious examples of light in motion and unsettling documents of seeing so "abnormal" that the viewer feels almost disoriented. And it can be seen in his five final completed works, being shown at the Film Center May 20 in a "Tribute and Benefit" to assist his family with the costs of his final illness. Four of the five are Chicago premieres (the 2001 Jesus Trilogy and Coda is not), and this is only their fourth public showing anywhere. (The two works left unfinished at his death are being completed by former students and will soon be released.)
Taking defiance of filmic forms to a new extreme, these works have qualities often found in an artist's late oeuvre. Brakhage refines his art to its essence, to an unpredictability that's nevertheless not random, neither borrowing from drama as in his earlier films nor supplying the potent symbolism of such late hand-painted works as The Dark Tower. The last four films in particular have an austere, almost autumnal visual and emotional evenness. All but one of the four — Max is the exception — were made by painting directly on the 16-millimeter film strip one frame at a time, and their shifts in perspective keep the viewer on edge to an almost delirious degree. Because each frame takes only one twenty-fourth of a second, Brakhage often chose to repeat each one two, three, or four times in the printing, resulting in between 6 and 12 images per second. At this speed, each painting is visible just long enough to be perceived in some detail but not long enough to become a static picture. The resulting tension between stills and implied movement is only one of the many ways Brakhage sets the viewer off balance.
Sunday, October 19, 2008
Artist of the Week
Marlon Riggs
Born in Ft. Worth, Texas, U.S.A., 3 February 1957. Graduated from Harvard University, magna cum laude, B.A. in history 1978; University of California at Berkeley, M.A. in journalism 1981. Taught documentary film, Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley from 1987; produced numerous video documentaries, from 1987. Honorary doctorate, California College of Arts and Crafts, 1993.
His theoretical-critical writings appeared in numerous scholarly and literary journals and professional and artistic periodicals. His video productions, which explored various aspects of African-American life and culture, earned him considerable recognition, including Emmy and Peabody awards. Riggs will nonetheless, be remembered mostly for the debate and contention that surrounded the airing of his highly charged video productions on public television stations during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Just as art-photographer Robert Mapplethorpe's provocative homoerotic photographs of male nudes caused scrutiny of government agencies and their funding of art, Marlon Riggs' video productions similarly plunged public television into an acrimonious debate, not only about funding, but censorship as well.
Trailer for Tongues Untied (1989)
Interview with Artist
No official Artist website exists
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
Complete
Paul Thulin has read your blog up to this point/entry. Your blog is currently up to date and complete.
Monday, October 13, 2008
Artist of the Week
Trinh T. Minh-ha
Trinh T. Minh-ha is a filmmaker, writer, academic and composer. She is a world-renowned independent filmmaker and feminist, post-colonial theorist. She teaches courses that focuses on women's work as related to cultural politics, post-coloniality, contemporary critical theory and the arts. The seminars she offers focus on Third cinema, film theory and aesthetics, the voice in cinema, the autobiographical voice, critical theory and research, cultural politics and feminist theory.
She has been making films for over twenty years and may be best known for her first film Reassemblage, made in 1982. She has received several awards and grants, including the American Film Institute’s National Independent Filmmaker Maya Deren Award, and Fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the California Arts Council. Her films have been the subject of twenty retrospectives.
-wikipedia
Interview with Artist
Surname Viet Given Name Nam (1989)
Artist Website
Trinh T. Minh-ha is a filmmaker, writer, academic and composer. She is a world-renowned independent filmmaker and feminist, post-colonial theorist. She teaches courses that focuses on women's work as related to cultural politics, post-coloniality, contemporary critical theory and the arts. The seminars she offers focus on Third cinema, film theory and aesthetics, the voice in cinema, the autobiographical voice, critical theory and research, cultural politics and feminist theory.
She has been making films for over twenty years and may be best known for her first film Reassemblage, made in 1982. She has received several awards and grants, including the American Film Institute’s National Independent Filmmaker Maya Deren Award, and Fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the California Arts Council. Her films have been the subject of twenty retrospectives.
-wikipedia
Interview with Artist
Surname Viet Given Name Nam (1989)
Artist Website
Friday, October 10, 2008
Week in Review
- Did anyone critique your work this week? If so, what were their impressions?
No critiques, just conversation. I’m in an in between spot with the work right now.
- What was the most motivational or creative moment of the past week?
Meeting with Sonali, brainstorming where to take the work. The idea that I can’t document not wanting to make work as work itself.
- What do you want to achieve in next week's studio practice?
Have some of this new diary footage shot. Figure out how to get AVCHD to edit properly in Premiere or Final Cut or anything.
- What did you achieve in your studio this past week?
Not much, I went through footage shot the week before and found a few gems that I made note of.
- What has been an artistic failure this week?
Freezing up, trying to avoid getting sick, but at the same time being worn down.
- What was the most profound thought in relation to your practice this week?
This is my thesis work.
Monday, October 6, 2008
Complete
Paul Thulin has read your blog up to this point/entry. Your blog is currently up to date and complete.
Sunday, October 5, 2008
Artist of the Week
Errol Morris
Morris was born in Hewlett, New York on February 5, 1948 and is an American Academy Award winning documentary film director. He received a B.A. in History from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1969. Morris has received three fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Guggenheim Fellowship and a MacArthur Fellowship. He is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and was a graduate student at Princeton University and the University of California-Berkeley. Morris' work received a full retrospective in November 1999 at the Museum of Modern Art in 1999 and he was given a special tribute at the Sundance Film Festival in 2001.
Fog of War
Errol Morris Blog at NYT
Errol Morris website
Morris was born in Hewlett, New York on February 5, 1948 and is an American Academy Award winning documentary film director. He received a B.A. in History from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1969. Morris has received three fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Guggenheim Fellowship and a MacArthur Fellowship. He is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and was a graduate student at Princeton University and the University of California-Berkeley. Morris' work received a full retrospective in November 1999 at the Museum of Modern Art in 1999 and he was given a special tribute at the Sundance Film Festival in 2001.
Fog of War
Errol Morris Blog at NYT
Errol Morris website
Thursday, October 2, 2008
Week in Review
- Did anyone critique your work this week? If so, what were their impressions?
No critiques this week. This was more of a work week.
- What was the most motivational or creative moment of the past week?
It’s starting to feel good to leave the camera on. I think I’m starting to get some good footage.
- What do you want to achieve in next week's studio practice?
I want to grab the clips I’m attracted to from the pile of footage I’ve shot these past weeks, throw it on a timeline and start playing around with it.
- What did you achieve in your studio this past week?
I captured footage from a trip to Ohio, I’ve started to move it to the computer and sort through everything.
- What has been an artistic failure this week?
Haven’t shot as much as I wanted to, I’ve been too tired when I get home at night to take the camera out.
- What was the most profound thought in relation to your practice this week?
This is going to be a long process, but if I create this piece right, it could be the best work I’ve created so far.
Lamp
Wednesday, October 1, 2008
Artist Statement (100 words)
The camera is an excellent tool that can be used to document events in life. But what is the camera doing to the person using it? Buffers are placed between the artist and the subject, power is dramatically shifted from the viewed to the viewer. How can I truly document this event in both Claire’s life as well as my own without documenting me? Turning the camera on me shows all the hidden details of the event left out; my struggle with the disease, my love for Claire, my frustration with the ongoing artistic process. This is a true documentation.
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
Complete
Paul Thulin has read your blog up to this point/entry. Your blog is currently up to date and complete.
Sunday, September 28, 2008
Artist of the Week
Sadie Benning
Born April 11, 1973, is a video maker, visual artist, and musician.
She first made her name in the early 1990s as a teenage video maker from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Raised by her mother in inner-city Milwaukee, Benning left school at age 16, primarily due to the homophobia she experienced. Her earliest works, made from the time she was 15, were shot with the Fisher-Price Pixelvision camera, which recorded pixelated, black and white video images onto standard audio cassettes. The majority of her shorts combined performance, experimental narrative, handwriting, and cut-up music to explore, among other subjects, gender and sexuality. Her work was twice included in the Whitney Biennial. Later in the decade, she co-founded Le Tigre, the feminist post-punk band whose members include ex-Bikini Kill singer/guitarist Kathleen Hanna and zinester Johanna Fateman. She has since left the band.
Me and Ruby Fruit (1989)
(No Artist Website Exists)
Thursday, September 25, 2008
Questions of the week
* Did anyone critique your work this week? If so, what were their impressions?
My work was “critiqued” this week. I quote critique because the process I’m using to create my piece is very hard to critique in class. The comments were definitely helpful and I was very excited to show some footage never screened before. The response was helpful.
* What was the most motivational or creative moment of the past week?
Viewing the more intimate footage recorded at the clinic with the studio group. The footage
made me smile, and it made me feel more open to showing those moments in my work.
* What do you want to achieve in next week's studio practice?
Shoot, shoot, shoot
* What did you achieve in your studio this past week?
Shot some footage from the clinic, screened the footage, got excellent feedback.
* What has been an artistic failure this week?
Not always having the camera next to me. Not thinking in “constant documentary” mode.
* What was the most profound thought in relation to your practice this week?
Showing the private is good.
My work was “critiqued” this week. I quote critique because the process I’m using to create my piece is very hard to critique in class. The comments were definitely helpful and I was very excited to show some footage never screened before. The response was helpful.
* What was the most motivational or creative moment of the past week?
Viewing the more intimate footage recorded at the clinic with the studio group. The footage
made me smile, and it made me feel more open to showing those moments in my work.
* What do you want to achieve in next week's studio practice?
Shoot, shoot, shoot
* What did you achieve in your studio this past week?
Shot some footage from the clinic, screened the footage, got excellent feedback.
* What has been an artistic failure this week?
Not always having the camera next to me. Not thinking in “constant documentary” mode.
* What was the most profound thought in relation to your practice this week?
Showing the private is good.
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
1 Word
“We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started... and know the place for the first time.”
Review:
The program's other three films -- the 21-minute "Smell of Burning Ants," the 10-minute "Short of Breath" and the one-minute "Restricted" -- distill Mr. Rosenblatt's grim deterministic vision of the socialization process. In "The Smell of Burning Ants," silent home movies accompany Mr. Rosenblatt's first-person interpretation of his boyhood. It is a bleak tale of ritualized desensitization through sports, running with the pack, torturing insects, beating up weaklings and learning not to cry.
In the movie's most ambiguous image, one in which Mr. Rosenblatt implicates himself, the same little boy is shown pointing a gun, then putting his eye to a lens and aiming a camera. Shooting people and shooting movies about people, he suggests, requires a certain detachment. By implication, an extreme disengagement is what allows despots to wreak evil with a clear conscience.
New York Times Review
Sadie Benning
With an experimental filmmaker for a father, Sadie Benning has been taught from an early age the techniques for exploration. Her formative work, dealing with her own identity and sexuality are excellent examples of the exploration of identity.
It Wasn't Love (1992) Video
If Every Girl Had A Diary (1990) Video
Review:
Benning's subsequent Pixelvision works - If Every Girl Had a Diary (1990), Jollies (1990), A Place Called Lovely (1991), It Wasn't Love (1992), and Girl Power (1992) - all manage to retain the freshness of the first works, gaining self-confidence and often a sense of self-amused irony along the way. Using the most limited means imaginable to fill the visual field (her own image, written words, bedroom and household objects as props, blurry images abducted from the television screen), Benning has become increasingly adept at masterful sound editing, with her sound tracks acquiring a texture and a frame of reference that's strikingly beyond her years. Possibly her most complex tape thus far, It Wasn't Love has as one of its set pieces a brilliantly constructed montage using Prince's libidinal "I Want To Be Your Lover" to reconceive a sequence from Hollywood's Bad Seed (1956), in which the demonic girl Rhoda caresses her horrified mother with all the moves of an accomplished femme.
Sadie Benning or the secret annex - video artist
I am Searching for Nothing (1966) Film
The Monks of Cinema (1964) Film
Review:
In retrospect, it seems that Mekas was destined to create a bridge between European avant garde film and the artistic community of 1960s New York. Born in Lithuania in 1922, he emigrated to the US and settled in Williamsburg, Brooklyn in 1948, glad to be alive after surviving personal horrors during WWII. Mekas has said that he's in every frame of his films; they're his way of being in the world and touching it at the same time. Film became a way of appreciating, almost literally, every second of his life. He bought a Bolex movie camera — a type powered by a hand wound spring — and began the practice of what he called "single frame filming." That meant he'd load the camera with a roll of movie film, some 2 1/2 minutes' worth, but shoot it ever so slowly: one frame at a time. Projected at slower than the normal 24 frames per second, the objects, people, and landscapes are seen in a kind of animation effect. When he began to screen these films in the early 1950s, his technique was likened to the vision of Cubist painting. But he didn't feel he truly got the hang of the Bolex until about 1965 — just in time for the Vietnam - hippies — Beatles era. Artists and celebrities began to find Mekas and be filmed: John and Yoko, Jacqueline Kennedy, Salvador Dali — the list goes on.
Art Review: Jonas Mekas
-T.S. Eliot
Exploration
Exploration. Ex`plo*ra"tion\, n. [L. exploratio: cf. F. exploration.] The act of exploring, penetrating, or ranging over for purposes of discovery, especially of geographical discovery; examination; as, the exploration of unknown countries; (Med.) physical examination.
-Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary
Bill Viola
Viola’s work has always attempted to explore some facet of the human condition. Whether contemplating the death of his mother against the birth of his son, or investigating the natural wonderment of the renaissance painters, Viola has never stopped looking for answers to his own questions.
The Crossing (1996) Video
Acension, 2000 Video
Review:
Can one look a fish in the eye, and what would one see? For most people, warm-blooded animals have the wide eyes and precious smile of a child. In cartoons and fables, they display the warmth and vulnerability, the trickery and genius, of adults. Fish look familiar, too, but also repellant. Meeting their eyes feels like a dead-fish handshake.
One faces a surprisingly similar lens at the Whitney Museum—the video camera of Bill Viola. With a technique rarely matched in art today, not even outside video, Viola searches nature in hope of finding his humanity. What he finds instead are cold comfort and a cartoon of childhood. An earlier review describes my first encounter with Viola's operatic journeys, and a later article reviews his use and abuse of art history. A postscript here brings the saga up-to-date for late 2005.
http://www.haberarts.com/viola2.htm
Derek Jarmen
When Jarmen was diagnosed with AIDS and given months to live he decided to create one last work to explore the waning days of the end of his life. Blue was a beautiful attempt to create a poetic sendoff. Jarmen's works always questioned the purpose of life, even his final piece.
Blue (1993) Video
The Garden (1990) Video
Review:
The spirit of "The Garden," Derek Jarman's virtually wordless 90-minute assemblage of turbulent images, is a peculiar blend of reflectiveness and fury. Mr. Jarman, whose 1987 film "The Last of England" had a comparable free-associative vehemence, this time turns his thoughts to AIDS, Christianity and intolerance, combining these themes into a feverish vision of far-reaching decay.
The passion with which Mr. Jarman attempts this is not accompanied by any fondness for clarity, and so "The Garden" is as mystifying as it is intense. While its larger ideas emerge broadly and unmistakably, there is much to ponder -- in, for instance, an image of the Twelve Apostles as 12 women in babushkas, sitting at a table by the seaside as they solemnly run their fingers around the edges of wine glasses to create an ominous hum.
Tony Oursler
Oursler's unique direction of video project/installation has allowed him to question and confront human behavior in new and exciting ways. His consistently high crafted works further explore our society in a different way in each creation.
Purple Resonant Dust, (2006) fiberglass sculpture, projector, dvd plaver
Caricature (2002) fiberglas sculpture, projector, dvd plaver
Wall space has always been a hierarchical space. It’s a sacred territory. It seems to belong to the seamless painting. If you’re a painter, you paint from one side of the canvas to the other, and right now ’70s magazine illustration is the vogue.
There’s a history of experimental collage and stuff that’s been glossed over and lost because of people’s notions of craft. If you’re a photographer, it’s like Rauschenberg never happened. You just do huge, gorgeous, seamless photographs, and that’s your craft. It’s a very strange moment. Of course I like to muck it up. It’s just so antithetical to the recent history that I’ve experienced.
I’m really interested in what I call a “shadow history of art.” I’ve written a timeline that’s on my Web site that’s an alternative moving-image history. It begins with the first camera obscura and it ends with somebody injecting glowing jellyfish genes into monkeys. It came out of a feeling that there was no art history written for a video artist or a performance artist or an installation artist. It’s just not there.
-Oursler Artist Statement
Nam June Paik
One of the original pioneers of video art, Nam June Paik embodies the spirit of exploration. His early experiments with the emerging medium of video began a long and fruitful journey of looking for answers to his own questions. His later years saw him trek into the world of modern technology and the connection it has to our society.
Tv Budda (1974) Closed Circuit video installation with bronze sculpture
Video Flag (1985-1996) 70 Video Monitors
Review:
In 1993 for the Venice Biennale, Nam June Paik initially proposed to title his exhibition in the German Pavilion Electronic Super Highway: "Bill Clinton stole my idea!" His brash claim comes from a 1974 document commissioned by the Rockefeller Foundation, in which Paik proposed connecting Los Angeles and New York with "multi-layer to broadband communications networks, such as domestic satellites, wave guides, bunches of co-axial cables, and fiber-optics. The expenses would be as high as the moon landing, but the ripple effect 'harvest' of byproducts would be numerous."
As an incredulous curator said: "Frankly, we did not believe you [about Clinton's plan, not Paik's]. However after reading Time . . . we have grown wiser: the Electronic Superhighway is no longer the crazy fiction or an intellectual utopia of a little Korean Guy."(2) Paik concluded his 1974 "media plan" with a second prophesy that had already come true: "One hundred years ago Thoreau wondered: 'Even if the telephone company succeeded in connecting people in Maine with people in Tennessee. what would they have to say to each other?' The rest is history."(3) More of Paik's highways, later.
The old and the new: Nam June Paik - video artist and sculptor
Ross Mcelwee
When I first viewed Mcelwee's film Time Indefinite I was amazed at the wonderful construction of the piece. Mcelwee has been a symbol of exploration, searching for answers about himself and his world in all of his films. If I were to decide the best candidate for this word "exploration" it would be Mcelwee.
Time Indefinite (1993) Film
Sherman's March (1986) Film
Review:
Ross McElwee dismisses the notion of personal documentary, a descriptor that too neatly identifies his style. Though the term “personal” might appeal to his ontological beliefs, his films are never “purely” or systematically autobiographical: each looks to other people for its content. Like all vérité filmmakers, he relies heavily on serendipitous events – what Dziga Vertov called “life caught unawares” (1). His method can be more aptly described as deflective than reflexive. He enters the frame as a person primarily to neuter his presence as a filmmaker. While his films might include a large amount of autobiographical content, McElwee can never be said to be the subject of his own films. Having begun his creative life as a writer, studying under John Hawkes, he accepts William Faulkner’s maxim that “[i]t is himself that every southerner writes about.” However, McElwee’s vision, like his ironic posture, is always double. He finds in his own story the key to unmasking deeper social truths about racial inequity, Southern heritage and white masculinity.
Backyard and Ross McElwee’s Observational Comedy
Alan Berliner
Berliner's documentaries have been a career long search for understanding. Many of his films follow a path of exploration whether it be within in his own family or within himself. His films represent the essence of discovery.
Wide Awake (2006) Film
The Family Album (1986) Film
Review of Wide Awake:
It's possibly Berliner's most personal documentary ever. Though he's investigated his own family in other films, to my knowledge Berliner's never turned the camera on himself in quite such a penetrating manner. Of course, there's a danger there: anyone not familiar with the realm of experimental personal documentary (by now a discreet genre of art film which Berliner's work crucially helped to shape) will wonder how Berliner thinks he can get away with such solipsistic narcissism. But there's something undeniably engaging about the way Berliner presents his fatigue-drunk persona. It's not enough that he sits in his underwear, speaking passages clearly scripted as "natural" directly to the camera with a big radio-style microphone in his face – it's that, as the film goes on, he breaks from the script increasingly often to yell at his crew or to fuss over a line reading. This kind of intertextual awareness doesn't often creep into films like this – if we see a director like Berliner talking into the camera, we're usually just supposed to believe that he's talking directly to us, and directly off the top of his head. Berliner is not just being self-referential by allowing us to see the seams; he's being self-destructive.
Su Friedrich
Friedrich’s frustration with the complexities of sexuality and her exploration for answers to the personal dilemmas she has faced in life makes her an excellent candidate for this word: exploration. Her films categorically fall into the realm of the personal while uniting the viewer within the universal.
Sink or Swim (1990) Film
Hide and Seek (1996) Film
Review:
“The Ties That Bind” (1984) is a portrait of Lore Bucher Friedrich as a young woman in Nazi Germany (where she resisted the regime as best she could) and as a long-divorced office worker in 1980’s Chicago. In form, the film might be called a half-interview: the mother is seen and heard, responding to Ms. Friedrich, but the filmmaker is almost always off screen, with her questioning voice represented by those scratchy white letters. The rhythmically patterned silences, coupled with off-center compositions (which give the impression that Ms. Friedrich was cocking her head to one side), make “The Ties That Bind” tender and melancholy, fluid and musical.
The film is confrontational only toward Su Friedrich herself. Would she have done as much in the 1930’s as her mother did? Was she doing nearly enough then, in 1984?
Jay Rosenblatt
The Smell of Burning Ants (1994) Film
Prayer (2002) Film
Review:
The program's other three films -- the 21-minute "Smell of Burning Ants," the 10-minute "Short of Breath" and the one-minute "Restricted" -- distill Mr. Rosenblatt's grim deterministic vision of the socialization process. In "The Smell of Burning Ants," silent home movies accompany Mr. Rosenblatt's first-person interpretation of his boyhood. It is a bleak tale of ritualized desensitization through sports, running with the pack, torturing insects, beating up weaklings and learning not to cry.
In the movie's most ambiguous image, one in which Mr. Rosenblatt implicates himself, the same little boy is shown pointing a gun, then putting his eye to a lens and aiming a camera. Shooting people and shooting movies about people, he suggests, requires a certain detachment. By implication, an extreme disengagement is what allows despots to wreak evil with a clear conscience.
New York Times Review
Sadie Benning
With an experimental filmmaker for a father, Sadie Benning has been taught from an early age the techniques for exploration. Her formative work, dealing with her own identity and sexuality are excellent examples of the exploration of identity.
It Wasn't Love (1992) Video
If Every Girl Had A Diary (1990) Video
Review:
Benning's subsequent Pixelvision works - If Every Girl Had a Diary (1990), Jollies (1990), A Place Called Lovely (1991), It Wasn't Love (1992), and Girl Power (1992) - all manage to retain the freshness of the first works, gaining self-confidence and often a sense of self-amused irony along the way. Using the most limited means imaginable to fill the visual field (her own image, written words, bedroom and household objects as props, blurry images abducted from the television screen), Benning has become increasingly adept at masterful sound editing, with her sound tracks acquiring a texture and a frame of reference that's strikingly beyond her years. Possibly her most complex tape thus far, It Wasn't Love has as one of its set pieces a brilliantly constructed montage using Prince's libidinal "I Want To Be Your Lover" to reconceive a sequence from Hollywood's Bad Seed (1956), in which the demonic girl Rhoda caresses her horrified mother with all the moves of an accomplished femme.
Sadie Benning or the secret annex - video artist
Jonas Mekas
I am Searching for Nothing (1966) Film
The Monks of Cinema (1964) Film
Review:
In retrospect, it seems that Mekas was destined to create a bridge between European avant garde film and the artistic community of 1960s New York. Born in Lithuania in 1922, he emigrated to the US and settled in Williamsburg, Brooklyn in 1948, glad to be alive after surviving personal horrors during WWII. Mekas has said that he's in every frame of his films; they're his way of being in the world and touching it at the same time. Film became a way of appreciating, almost literally, every second of his life. He bought a Bolex movie camera — a type powered by a hand wound spring — and began the practice of what he called "single frame filming." That meant he'd load the camera with a roll of movie film, some 2 1/2 minutes' worth, but shoot it ever so slowly: one frame at a time. Projected at slower than the normal 24 frames per second, the objects, people, and landscapes are seen in a kind of animation effect. When he began to screen these films in the early 1950s, his technique was likened to the vision of Cubist painting. But he didn't feel he truly got the hang of the Bolex until about 1965 — just in time for the Vietnam - hippies — Beatles era. Artists and celebrities began to find Mekas and be filmed: John and Yoko, Jacqueline Kennedy, Salvador Dali — the list goes on.
Art Review: Jonas Mekas
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