Media Control 2010: Up and Out, Chelsea Girls, and The Social Network

Christian Marclay’s Up and Out is a complex media product of its time.  The artist merges two separate, preexisting films into one to create the 1998 video: a soundless version of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blowup (1966) plays in its entirety against the audio track of Brian De Palma’s 1981 Blow Out (a film partially inspired by Blowup). Each film’s narrative focuses on a crime scene; Blowup‘s incident involving a photographer is seen and not heard, while Blow Out‘s conflict centered around a sound effects technician is heard but not seen. Seeing the two together as Up and Out produces fleeting moments of synergy: chase scenes come together and then dissipate, investigations nearly overlap before going their separate ways, clues inexplicably translate across both storylines.  The mixing of the two scenarios controls the way the viewer perceives each, the product of this experience being the new film, Up and Out.

Excerpt from Up and Out, Christian Marclay (1998).

In order to maintain conscious awareness of both films, rather than  following one narrative of the preexisting films and ignoring the other, the viewer becomes keenly aware of his or her own media consumption process and how the two films control the experience of one another. Screened in Seattle in 2010 as part of the Henry Art Gallery’s exhibition Image Transfer: Pictures in a Remix Culture, Marclay’s video resonated particularly well in light of another local screening this year: Andy Warhol’s Chelsea Girls, shown at the Seattle Art Museum this past summer. Warhol’s 1966 epic film presents two 16 mm reels projected side by side.  Largely without a coherent narrative, the films focus on short sequences of the artist’s cast of superstars engaged in extended dialogues and ordinary activities. In contrast to the experience of Up and Out, during which there is an opportunity for the viewer to focus selectively, Warhol exerts a particular control over the audience by only providing a soundtrack for only one reel at any given time and changing the reel that has sound intermittently throughout the screening.  When Warhol removes the sound from one film and turns it on for the other, the viewer’s attention naturally follows.

Excerpt from Chelsea Girls, Andy Warhol (1966).

Chelsea Girls and Up and Out appear in comparable formats but were created over thirty years apart; likewise, each is definitive of its respective time. Warhol’s control parallels media culture of the 1960s in the sense that mainstream content at that time was under the control of small number of large corporate entities (CBS, NBC ABC in television) and limited philosophies (Hollywood productions in film); the content creator was in control while the audience consumed the content as it was presented. In contrast, Marclay’s film represents a time of controlled media options; the audience can choose to listen to Blow Out instead of watching Blowup in the same way an individual can choose to read the scrolling news across the bottom of a CNN screen over listening to the newscaster.

In contrast, 2010 is a year well into the media culture of customized and user-generated content. Hulu and iTunes offer extensive selections of media options; through YouTube, the viewer can be the content creator and consumer.  In this regard, The Social Network offers a relevant, albeit obvious, glimpse into the present moment of media culture. The Mark Zuckerberg character performs the most overt control exerted in the film: the network of his creation facilitates his control over both physical and virtual relationships, as well as over the identity he constructs and projects as his Facebook persona. The Social Network is relevant to its audience as a story they helped to create through participation on Facebook, likewise demonstrating the audience’s own control over the film’s outcome.

Trailer for The Social Network (2010).

Although The Social Network is most representational of contemporary popular media culture, the media consumption process exposed by Marclay’s film better maintains its original relevance.  Film and television may have changed hands in terms of content creation and composition but ultimately, Marclay’s media-on-media control still rings true; seeing Up and Out still can influence how we watch the dueling reels of Chelsea Girls while also bringing out the various relationships between individuals and social media depicted in The Social Network. Up and Out demonstrates to its audience members how they experience the entertainment and culture at their disposal. In short, similar to the outcome of Blowup, Up and Out determines it not what we see but how we see what we see.

Through the Disney Portal: Jellyfish and Oil

The experience of the 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea ride at Orlando’s Walt Disney World is one burned permanently into my memory, despite having taken the fantastical journey only once. I recall the ornate, army green Nautilus, with its glaring fish eye windows, approaching slowly in the chlorinated lagoon. We were loaded aboard and seated on in a row of movie-style seats running the length of the half-submerged sub, each passenger assigned the smallest of porthole windows, providing an intimate viewing experience of the man-made, undersea world.  The booming narration of Captain Nemo, accompanied by organ notes for emphasis, began the journey, as sprays of bubbles blew past the windows, signifying the our sinking to greatest of depths.

I recall recognizing the bubbles as a special effect, having just spent an hour in line, watching the submarines circulating through the lagoon without ever going below the surface. Once the bubbles cleared  and plastic marine life was in view, I suspect every kid on the ship over the age of five knew that we were “pretending,” that none of what we were seeing were actual animals. Yet the theatrics of the ship, the tiny viewing hole, the voice of Captain Nemo himself guiding our viewing, provided all of the spectacle necessary to convince the 40 people aboard the Nautilus that everything through the window was extraordinary and full of wonder; there were things here that everyone wanted to see. The ride was discontinued in 1994 but has been memorialized on YouTube by devoted individuals who filmed the experience in full so that the artificial ocean could not be completely lost over time.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I have an affinity for the Henry Art Gallery’s use of the elevator as a video installation location. As a freight elevator, entering its surprisingly large space evokes a sense of transport to elsewhere. During my most recent experience in the elevator, the grand silver doors opened to reveal a rectangular portal into the ocean of Kiki Smith’s Jewel, a video depicting a bloom of jellyfish floating hypnotically in tangled masses.  As the elevator shut and started moving in a slow descent, my memory of the 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea journey was triggered. Bubbles did not flood the screen but the isolated video within this vehicle brought attention to the wonder of the cnidarian in a way similar to the viewing of the Disney attraction’s underwater theatrical experience. In the elevator, there is only the viewer and the crystal jellyfish, the creatures’ forms and anatomies glowing with luminescence.

Typically, I suspect that entering the elevator and experiencing Jewel would lead to consideration of how the video relates to the other works by the artist in the larger exhibition at the Henry. However, in this instance, in the midst of having a 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea moment of nostalgia, my mind kept wandering back to the question of what this video would look like if everything was drenched in oil; jellyfish were noted as one of the first casualties of the spill that has become central to the US collective consciousness over the past 40+ days. This past week, more images of the effected Gulf of Mexico sea life have emerged, but for the first month of the catastrophe, visual renditions had been limited to the aerial photos of orange streaks across the Gulf’s surface, which were ultimately more aesthetic than harrowing. While shock is far from the only way to convey information, since the oil spill began there had been an underlying sense that the visual impact of the disaster was being withheld. Consequently, I began seeking it elsewhere. In this context, Smith’s jellyfish appeared more surveillance-like, demonstrating the calm version of the ocean that no longer exists, playing on repeat, now more similar to the pleasantly artificial lagoon of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea than the disturbing reality reflected on the 24/7 surveillance camera of the spilling oil.

Jewels is not inherently about oil or environmental devastation. Yet I couldn’t avoid seeing it in these terms because of the oil spill’s physical drenching of the collective consciousness. It is a disaster that has caused a unique level of universal helplessness among the government, the Gulf coast residents and the American public.  Experiencing the images seems to provide the opportunity to interact with the situation on some level, albeit a superficial one; since the release of more graphic depictions of oil-soaked marine life, the proliferation of photographs across art and media online resources demonstrates a common desire to view and expose what had been discussed extensively but not seen until this point.  The images are now becoming something of a spectacle themselves, but there is some sense to this, considering how the American desire for excess and spectacle is ultimately linked to the consumption of oil. People have an innate desire to see what cannot be seen, including both the pleasantries of a constructed attraction’s excessive spectacle, as well as the very real consequences of living the excessive and spectacle-filled lifestyle reflected in the magical world of Disney.

Con Leche and Coca-Cola: Abstracting the Olympic Experience

Various groupings of Diet Coke bottles march through urban streets and alleys in Jordan Wolfson’s Con Leche, a 20-minute video piece. The bottles are filled with milk and exist as animations in a filmed reality.  In addition to the sound of marching feet in unison, the audio track is comprised of two voices: a woman reading found texts about social concerns including race, religion and sexuality, and the artist, directing the woman on logistical concerns such as the volume and tonality of her voice.  If nothing else, Con Leche is very absurd.

Jordan Wolfson, "Con Leche” (2009), Courtesy of Jordan Wolfson and Johann König, Berlin.

Con Leche is part of An Invitation to Infiltration, an exhibition in flux at Vancouver’s Contemporary Art Gallery, curated by Eric Frederickson and on view through the end of February as part of the Vancouver 2010 Cultural Olympiad. Naturally, I viewed the exhibition while in town for the Olympics. Earlier the same day, I wandered over to the Olympic Superstore, the largest of a small group of locations available in the city for the rest of the world to purchase official Olympic merchandise. Outside the Olympic Superstore was a massive line that wrapped around half of the department store building housing the space. Those waiting were being let into the building in groups of approximately 30 people every 20 minutes. Almost everyone else in line was Canadian, as evidenced by the mass of red, white and black sweaters, hats, jackets and mittens everyone was already wearing.  When the rope barriers were lifted and the doors opened, the line marched forward as the Superstore came within reach.  Once inside, three things immediately became apparent: the long wait made most people more inclined to shop in excess, promotional items from prominent sponsor Coca-Cola were being sold as “official” Olympic souvenirs, and restrictions in buying Olympic merchandise at this store only were likely a result of Visa’s need to control points of purchase as “the only card accepted at the Olympic games.”

Visa advertisement. Image from Photo District News.com

There are inevitably processions everywhere in Vancouver; there are lines for an unobstructed view of the flame, the competitions and the admission-free Vancouver Art Gallery. Outside the art museum in Robson Square, Olympic patrons meander between a zip line, concert venue and ice rink. In the middle of this, the Vancouver Art Gallery constructed an “outdoor drop-in theater” for the presentation of works from over 50 international artists in CUE: Artists’ Videos. The selection of the videos is exciting, with an Olympic-esque, all-star lineup ranging from Gary Hill’s Attention (2005) to Dara Birnbaum’s Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman (1978-79) and Su-Mei Tse’s L’echo (2003).

Yet the appearance of video pieces on the giant screen, complete with amplified sound, in the middle of the plaza was surprisingly subdued. Although there were people everywhere, almost no one was captivated enough by the screen to stop and watch, a rare effect in the media age. Although I was in Robson Square specifically to see these videos, I still found it difficult to engage while standing among the tourists, wandering around, indulging in the sunniest of Vancouver days; the videos, dropped in the center of this city with the Olympics on almost every other screen in vicinity, somehow could not win their merited attention. Instead of providing a cultural contrast against the endless sports, the videos became part of the Olympic spectacle.

CUE Artists’ Videos, Vancouver Art Gallery, Robson Square

In many ways, Con Leche was a very conventional art experience in contrast to the Vancouver Art Gallery screen. Tucked in the back of the Contemporary Art Gallery, Fredericksen describes its relation to the exhibition:

“Jordan Wolfson’s Con Leche is presented in a formal screening environment, separated from the rest of the show. Denying the curatorial attempt to force juxtapositions within this group, Wolfson’s video addresses the show’s theme through its content rather than through its formal engagement.”

While Con Leche certainly engages with the exhibition’s theme effectively, in contrast to the CUE videos, its spatial separation from the Olympics creates a  relationship with the Games that does not become lost in the overall spectacle taking place in Vancouver. More individuals will encounter the Vancouver Art Gallery’s video display, but there is question as to how deeply the works are experienced as one element within the larger chaos of Robson Square. The content of Con Leche, while only one video, also has immediate relevance to the experience of being a spectator at the Olympics. After spending a day in the primary traffic zones of the Olympics (Robson Square, the Superstore and the plaza containing the cauldron), the marching Coca-Cola bottles of Wolfson’s piece evoked the red, black and white-clad masses walking the streets.  In addition to people, this section of downtown Vancouver was also covered in sponsorship presence, ranging form a Samsung- covered building to the Superstore shopping bags with Visa slogan, “go world.”

Jordan Wolfson, "Con Leche” (2009), Courtesy of Jordan Wolfson and Johann König, Berlin.

The visual parallel between Wolfson’s video and the scene in Vancouver is not a reflection on the Canadian crowd specifically, but rather a demonstration of how a single video of marching Diet Coke bottles abstracted the Olympic environment into one of colors, logos and other absurd symbols. After watching CUE, one was still in Robson Square, wondering when the next hockey game started; after watching Con Leche, Con Leche was effectively, and affectively, everywhere.

Reinventing the Sitcom: TV Art and Meaning

The 2010 IKEA Seattle catalog offers many moments of advice on developing my identity by purchasing furniture:

“‘You’ is the secret ingredient that gives your home that little something extra.”

“Everyone can do their own thing…together.”

“Change in a wink.”

Here, we are offered an opportunity for self-improvement and affirmation. Separated from the catalog, these words appear more like estranged versions of personal advice.  If one were to follow IKEA’s life suggestions, the acquisition of some of the least unique objects in the world will somehow provide answers to the larger questions of self.

When reviewed critically, the words of IKEA’s sales pitch, like so many advertising campaigns, reflects a disconnected relationship between words and meaning: the store offers identity but only sells cheap, mass-produced furniture. A similar disjointedness is also at the forefront of Guy Ben-Ner‘s satirical Stealing Beauty, currently on view at Western Bridge. Filmed in various IKEA stores around the world, the work’s “situations” include brief moments in which the artist’s family plays a re-envisioned form of the sitcom family; the Ben-Ners disperse an unconventional set of morals focused on the role of the family in terms of property and productivity. At times, the phrases they speak evoke the IKEA catalog’s own mantras of identity and consumption.

Guy Ben-Ner. Stealing Beauty (excerpt). 2007.

When watching an actual sitcom, there is a tendency to passively absorb the characters, situations and dialogue because television most often prioritizes entertainment value over content.  Ben-Ner’s “characters” do not behave and speak as one would expect in a conventional comedy; instead of going through the situation/conflict/final moral cycle, the artist, his wife and his children exchange Marxist questions, often without any form of resolution.  When all of them speak, there is a feeling of overt scripting and over-acting that creates a rift between the people speaking and what is said.  This effect inspires active viewing of the work.  Because we are so accustomed to the look and feel of television, particularly the highly formulaic sitcom genre, a deviation from expectations is an immediate reason to pay attention and reconsider the images on the screen. This separation is ultimately one between signifier and signified meaning, as the artist employs typically benign vehicles (television and IKEA) to question issues related to capitalist society.

When I came upon Keys to Our Heart by Kalup Linzy at Prospect.1 (who just launched their new website counting down to Prospect.2), I recall experiencing a similar, albeit more dramatic, effect to that of viewing Stealing Beauty.   Although Keys to Our Heart includes more visual cues derived from Hollywood films (black and white medium, a period feel, elaborate costuming and sets), elements from the artist’s earlier body of work with the soap opera television genre (over-acting, archetypal character figures) also appear.

Kalup Linzy. Keys to Our Heart (excerpt) 2008.

Like Ben-Ner’s sitcom, Linzy’s work also utilizes a divide between dialogue and meaning; however, the latter’s rift is most apparent from the artist’s inclusion and manipulation of his own voice, ultimately using it for all characters.  Keys to Our Heart was installed in a crowded gallery of multiple high-impact works at the New Orleans Museum of Art during Prospect.1; yet, many, including myself, were drawn to the cacophony of the spoken dialogue and the way the words being spoken were out of sync with the actors “speaking” them.  In contrast to Ben-Ner’s piece, Linzy’s video is a societal critique more focused on identity politics and stereotyping. However, it is the unspoken dialogue beneath both scripts and sets of characters that reveal the most interesting truths of the works.

In the first edition of DVD magazine Wholphin, a group of five writers independently created five different sets of subtitles for the same episode of Turkish sitcom Tatli Hayat (“The Sweet Life”). The DVD begins with the subtitles included in the actual television program and then provides the episode five additional times with the writers’ new scripts.

The end results of the Tatli Hayat reworkings were not as impactful as the videos by Ben-Ner and Linzy, but they successfully initiate questions regarding the role and manipulation of meaning in television.  Ben- Ner and Linzy then take these questions farther by exploring TV’s covert constructions of identity and societal roles.  All of the works ultimately consider how much actual meaning is created by the intentional and unintentional messages communicated by mainstream media.  While the this inquiry has become increasingly persistent across various disciplines, if an answer resides anywhere, it is in a moment of art TV.

Entering the Pod: Ann Lislegaard and 2001

It is easy to forget the elevator at the Henry Art Gallery if it is not typically essential to your visit.  The elevator’s history may not be as rich as the wall dissected by Jen Graves, but this structure has encased its own share of memorable, often subtler works.  Currently, Ann Lislegaard’s sound installation Science Fiction_3112 (after 2001: A Space Odyssey by Stanley Kubrick) inhabits the space, serving as a portal between the outside world and Lislegaard’s three large scale video installations below, in the Stroum Gallery.

Image from Crystal World (after JG Ballard). Ann Lislegaard. 2005. 2-channel, 3-D animation with sound, two leaning screens.  Image from Ballardian.

Although I always appreciated the effect of finding art in the elevator during the time I spent working/interning at the Henry (And Deer and Trees and Things by Cat Clifford was one of my favorites), this use of the space strikes me as the most effective, ultimately enhancing my experience of the exhibition overall.  Particularly as someone with a limited history with science fiction (both in terms of film and literature), the elevator became my point of entry for Ann Lislegaard: 2062.

The year 2001 has played an intermittent role throughout my life. The first time I was really aware of its images was when the opening sequences were projected across the doors of my high school before a senior party.  I graduated in 2001, so the group of faculty members and parents planning the event found 2001: A Space Odyssey’s prophetic insight appropriate for such an occasion even though many among the graduating class had never seen it, myself included.

Trailer for 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

This year, 2001 finally made its way back to me, when it was the most appealing movie available “On Demand.” The film’s level of impact on visual culture and its anticipation of our current dependence on images almost goes without saying by this point, and that became obvious after seeing it once.  A few weeks later, I returned to 2001 again inside the pod-like environment of Henry’s elevator. This time, it was in the form of Ann Lislegaard’s Science Fiction_3112, without any images; instead, the two and a half hours of Kubrick’s carefully selected sounds and silences are distilled into less than nine minutes of concentrated reverberations, instrumentation, and utterances, all contained within the elevator as it moves (or remains closed and motionless) between the museum’s three floors.

The theme of circularity permeates 2001: A Space Odyssey, and those were the images I clung to while in the elevator.  The view of the flight attendant walking along the wall and ceiling in a spiral as she delivers a tray of liquid dinner to Dr. Floyd and the rotation of the Discovery 1 as an astronaut exercises inside the perimeter were two moments that readily came to mind.  Likewise, at the back of Ann Lislegaard: 2062, a leaning black monolith, installed among the sounds of another film influenced by 2001 (Close Encounters of the Third Kind), brings us back to the references inside the elevator at the front of the exhibition. The focus of Ann Lislegaard: 2062 resides between these two 2001-related points of entry; yet the frame of Kubrick’s film reworked facilitates a deeper engagement with the main video works for myself, the non-sci-fi inclined, ultimately demonstrating the relationship science fiction maintains with universality through manipulations of time, sound and image.

Double Down

The entrance to Double Down: Two Visions of Vegas at SFMOMA is marked by silver wall text atop a blue vinyl sign, imitating the atomic, neon glamour of Las Vegas in the era of the Stardust resort and casino.  Leading visitors towards this sign is a wall lined with 15 photographs of sparse, post-industrial landscapes from Lewis Baltz’s 1978 Nevada series.  Seen adjacent to Baltz’s black and white renderings of half-constructed buildings, desolate valley businesses, and vacant sandscapes, the blue sign leading to the two video installations comprising Double Down dazzles the viewer by serving its purpose: to evoke the excess of The Strip.  The brief wall text on the sign further articulates this evocation, describing Las Vegas as “America’s most spectacular fantasy environment–and fastest growing city.”

#15 Nevada.  Lewis Baltz. 1977. Gelatin silver print, 8 x 10 in.  Image from Yancey Richardson.

As noted by the Associated Press, Las Vegas can no longer be posed as the ideal fantasy in the way it once was:

“And so it has been a shock as, quietly and slowly, everything has changed. Like many US cities, Las Vegas is watching its economy reel. Home values have plummeted. Foreclosures have exploded. Unemployment is the highest it’s been in at least 20 years.” (International Herald Tribune, 5 Jan 09)

When I visited Las Vegas last August, from a tourist perspective, the seams had begun to show on The Strip. Caesars’s Palace’s glitzy buffet was so understaffed that waitresses were piling all dirty dishes in a single booth rather than seeking a bus person to clear tables.  Despite its 2006 announcements of a $2 billion renovation, this year the Tropicana opened their pool to the public for weekend DJ parties in an attempt to lure a few more gamblers at their swim-up blackjack tables once frequented by the celebrities of the 1950s and 60s.  The massive City Center was visually unchanged from my last visit one year prior, more reminiscent of the half-built businesses in Baltz’s Nevada series than a luxury complex dotted with extravagant fountains and large-scale works of contemporary art.  This was a few months ago, before things became really bad in Vegas.

City Center in August 2008.

Las Vegas has always had many serious problems, including government corruption, the consequences of gambling and drug addictions, and severe poverty among many who live there.  However, these were things hidden to visitors by the extreme architecture, dancing fountains and upscale shopping centers of The Strip.  In effect, the city maintained an image associated with the American Dream of excess, splendor, and perpetual high rolling for outsiders.  Now, this strange utopia has been entirely altered for the first time in the city’s history.

Knowing that Nevada has maintained the second largest decline in housing prices in the U.S. from October 2007-October 2008 (31.3 % according to National Post Canada, 11 Dec 08) changed the way I encountered the sign at the entrance to Double Down.  The museum’s text was strikingly out of date, promising reflections on the city as though it still were where “what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas”, an advertising campaign that has all but disappeared in the last several months.

Working in a museum myself, I have confidence the wall text for Double Down was written significantly prior to when the exhibition opened in September.  Furthermore, the works in the gallery behind the sign continue to resonate in wake of Las Vegas’s newly flawed image.  Olivo Barbieri‘s site specific_LAS VEGAS05 (2005, 13 min.) is particularly fascinating at this moment in the city’s history; watching it can be as addicting as gazing at the faux landmarks of architectural and art history during the slow-moving cab rides of Las Vegas Boulevard.

Olivo Barbieri. site specific_LAS VEGAS 05. 2005. 13 min.

Through shots taken from a helicopter using a tilt-focus lens, Barbieri re-scales the scale models and precise replicas of world landmarks comprising The Strip’s casinos. With images of The Strip prevalent throughout the arts and visual culture, viewers know what icons to look for, anxiously waiting to see how the Luxor pyramid or the Venetian’s St. Mark’s has been re-envisioned as a souvenir “replicas”, even though all are already replicas of other places.  More importantly, the cameras overhead view suggests the sense of perspective and awareness buried by the spectacle aimed at Vegas pedestrians. A brief moment of camera time among the Neon Boneyard signs and enormous skull suggests a timely view of what Sin City could look like, should the remnants of the 90s excess be left on the side of the road to rust and fade.  The souvenirs of Barbieri’s film appear to be beginning an uncanny pause, like the unihabited moments of Baltz’s photos, begging to be remembered while recovering from something already forgotten.

Still from site specific_LAS VEGAS 05 by Olivo Barbieri. © Olivo Barbieri. Image from Da production house.

Gender Performances

WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution is a monumental exhibition.  Many excellent and thoughtful reviews have articulated the impact, the astute curation, and the excitement.  The aspect of the exhibition I found particularly striking was the simultaneous meaning and accessibility of the thematic organization.  What could have so easily been dominated by jargon and an excess of theory was resonant and readable, while actively refusing to oversimplify the works.

Although I had the inclination to ruminate over each theme, I was intrigued by “Gender Performance”, which is articulated on MoCA’s WACK! website: “Gender Performance groups works of film, photography, video, and performance in which artists deconstruct the cultural construction of gender as a category of identity”. Works within this theme include pieces by Sanja Iveković, Suzy Lake, Cindy Sherman, Dara Birnbaum and Adrian Piper, among others.  This category was one of the more intriguing in the exhibition when considered in terms of how the images the artists were manipulating and transforming relate to present constructions of the female identity in mainstream artistic media such as film and photography.

Installation view of WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, 2007, photo by Brian Forrest. ARTISTS (L–R): Katharina Sieverding, Niki de Saint Phalle, Jean Tinguely, and Per Olof Ultvedt, ORLAN; image from MOCA.

In 1974, Molly Haskell examined the previous five decades of how women had been portrayed in film through her book From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies.  Haskell concludes that films made prior to the strict enforcement of the Production Code in 1934 were more experimental in many ways than the films created in subsequent decades, and her exploration of “The Woman’s Film” creates an interesting dialogue with the concepts explored in WACK!’s Gender Performance.

Haskell defines the Woman’s Film as a genre from the 1930s and 40s in which the woman is at the movie’s forefront:

“If a woman hogs this universe unrelentingly, it is perhaps her compensation for all the male-dominated universes from which she has been excluded: the gangster film, the Western, the war film, the policier, the rodeo film, the adventure film…The well of self-pity in both [the Woman's Film and the male-dominated genres], though only hinted at, is bottomless, and in their sublimation or evasion of adult reality, they reveal, almost by accident, real attitudes toward marriage–disillusionment, frustration, and contempt– beneath the sunny-side-up philosophy congealed in the happy ending” (155-56).

Many of the films Haskell describes as falling under the Woman’s Film genre would not necessarily be described as feminist when viewed in terms of their narratives and frequently conventional construction of the female characters.  Their significance resides in their presentation of female priorities and fantasies during the 1930s and 40s, when this perspective was missing from mainstream media:

“Because the woman’s film was designed for and tailored to a certain market, its recurrent themes represent the closest thing to an expression of the collective drives, conscious and unconscious, of American women, of their avowed obligations and their unconscious resistance.” (168)

The Woman’s Film ceased to exist in the 1950s, with the availability of television for the housewives who comprised much of the market for the genre.  As Dara Birnbaum’s Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman (included in WACK!’s Gender Performances) suggests, unlike the Woman’s Film, television and other areas of visual culture may have included a presence of female characters but the programs were created in such a way that the image they constructed of women and femininity was often destructive and regressive.

Dara Birnbaum, Technology / Transformation: Wonder Woman, 1976

Despite the passage of almost thirty years since From Reverence to Rape was written, women are still considered to be a “niche audience” by the movie industry, as evidenced by the unexpected success of Sex and the City, which bears some relation to the Woman’s Film of the 30s and 40s.  Described as an “unconventional hit” by The New York Times, Sex and the City was certainly noteworthy for the age of its characters; the portrayal of middle aged women as a strong, intelligent, sexy people was all but entirely absent from film thirty years ago.  Yet the ending of Sex and the City still returns to the “sunny-side-up” happy, conventional marriage.

Sex and the City, image from New York Magazine

In contrast, Twilight is a very flawed film, and the book series is regressive through its highly problematic suppression of female sexuality  (The Atlantic presents an interesting but romanticized view on this aspect of the series; Skepchick offers a more critical examination.  Also worth considering is Roger Ebert’s striaghtforward reading).  Nevertheless, the movie has found massive success in appealing to the fantasies of many teenage females through the actions of Bella Swan, a fairly unconventional mainstream female character  (during the poorly written inner monologues of the book, she is at least presented as introspective and intelligent with less conventional interests than shopping and gossiping with the other female characters) who also has a strong affinity for masochism (she is infatuated with a vampire who simultaneously wants to have her as a lover and kill her).

Both Sex and the City and Twilight include facets of the original Woman’s Film: one presents a more complete and meaningful image of the middle aged women, the other features a less conventional female character who exhibits internal and external levels of self.  The popularity of these films offer the possibility that the female audience may more significantly affect mainstream media in the future.  However each film’s problems also suggest how popular culture has not learned as much from Haskell’s and Birnbaum’s critiques as we would have hoped.

Video and the Dark

The Getty Center’s California Video is an amazing retrospective considered through the lens of a place intimately involved this medium, both artistically and in the mainstream. Walking through the galleries painted black and lined with primitive and contemporary televisions showing a collection of highly influential works by artists such as John Baldessari, Chris Burden, Nancy Buchanan, William Wegman, Paul McCarthy, Bruce Nauman, and so many others is the video art history lesson impossible to achieve in a classroom setting on the same level. When juxtaposed against one another, these carefully selected pieces achieve a startlingly complete look at the way themes such as humor, linguistics, authenticity, and technical experimentation interact within video art and continue to influence current video works.

Jennifer Stienkamp. Oculus Sinister (left eye). Image from the Ventura County Star

As I wandered between video stations (most videos were playing beside 4-ft. posts containing text , two sets of headphones, and two headphone inputs for viewers who brought their own sets), I was reminded of Western Bridge’s Multiplex (on view 1.31.08 – 3.29.08), described on the organization’s website as “…an anthology of projected work in projected video and video installation from the first half of this decade.” Overall, both exhibitions were successful in their respective impetuses. However, the one thing I missed in California Video that I distinctly remember as present in Multiplex was darkness.

“Darkness automatically reduces our contact with actuality, depriving us of many environmental data needed for adequate judgments and other mental activities” (Sigfried Kracauer in Theory of Film, 159)

“….what [appreciators of film] really crave is for once to be released from the grip of consciousness, lose their identity in the dark, and let sink in, with their senses ready to absorb them, the images as they happen to follow each other on the screen.” (Kracauer 158-9)

Film and video art are not the same medium (and arguably, video installation and traditional videos also may not necessarily be considered identical either). However, Kracauer’s classical analysis of the role of darkness in projected media is still relevant. In the crowded galleries of California Video, I missed the dark isolation so overt in the way Multiplex’s individual pieces were installed in separate galleries, allowing for the simultaneous collective and independent experiences of each. While headphones and stations were likely the best solutions for showing so many videos in a single exhibition, the immersive, projected-identity aspect of a video piece seen individually in small, black room was lost in the reshuffling of visitors that occurred whenever a pair of headsets became available or another Getty tram arrived at the complex with a handful of visitors.

The External Flame. T.R. Uthco and Ant Farm, Image from Leap into the Void

The one exception was The External Flame by T.R. Uthco and Ant Farm, a full living room environment installation reminiscent of a 1970s room where one might have been watching the small screen when their “Artist President” was originally created. Despite its inherent relationship with the bizarre, The External Flame achieved what is often done by the black box: a forgetting of one’s self in exchange for a procession of images. Resting on a stiff, peach couch, I couldn’t help but fade into the background as T.R. Uthco and Ant Farm overtook my mind, just as they should.