In today’s crit we showed ‘All Art Begins With Shopping’ and the piece we’ve decided to call ’12 Angry Men’ (last supper name cards), images of both should be up within a couple of days. The titled is derived from the film involving a jury immersed in a murder trial. The film is about a case that is perhaps not as obvious as it first appears. The film portrays the notion if truth as malleable and personal, which we felt was hugely referential to the ideas we were attempting to convey in the piece; other than the obvious 12 white men around a table. Since both works had been shown in a previous crit there wasn’t a huge amount of new information that was gathered, other than the fact that it wasn’t merely the select few who had seen it previously understood what was being thought about. Saying that, the idea that the nametags are almost unnecessary; everyone knows who they are, why would they require nametags? We also wanted part of the table to be blank to suggest an ‘unfinished-ness’ which was only picked up on in today’s discussion (perhaps due to the new arrangement). The fact that they are only celebrity-esque to the group was also a new element brought into the mix; there are no last names and some, ‘James’ for example, are fairly common names. It was also mentioned that via a nametag one is capitalizing on the success of said name; this can be compared to famous athletes etc. ‘All Art Begins With Shopping’ was a similar experience; there were obvious parallels between this crit and the one before but also some fresh opinions. People were more inclined to empathize with the individuals in the film; considering that perhaps we don’t all go to the ‘art supply store’ anymore but we go someone to purchase the things we’re making art from. Someone also deliberated over the idea of capitalism in the arts and how even though we’re supposed to be in this environment where it shouldn’t affect us it still does. This lead to thoughts of categorization and how in a supermarket the beer is never next to the cheese because that’s ‘just-not-how-it-goes’, even though the two compliment each other very well. This is just the same with shops where one is expected to purchase ‘art supplies’, print-making is different to painting which is different to drawing etc. etc.
How things are of organised/unorganised through display or exposition is a huge drive behind this work. In browsing for additional thoughts on the subject we found Lev Manovich writting about the aesthetics of contemporary video owe much to the experiments of the 1920s. He is talking here about the idea of montage. Sergei Eisenstein is the person who he believes carries the most influence here; Eisenstein believed that film montage could create ideas or have an impact beyond the individual images. Two or more images edited together create a third (thing) that makes the whole greater than the sum of its individual parts. Kurt Koffka is often misquoted in saying ‘the whole is greater than the sum of its parts’ when in fact the original quote is ‘the whole is other than the sum of its parts’. One suggests that 1+1=3 but the other is far more ambiguous than that; it’s suggested that whatever the whole is, it cannot be quantified by the elements making it up. Returning to the idea of the montage; Chris Marker’s ‘La Jetee’ creates the illusion of movement through dissolves and fades; Paul Sharits’ ‘Word Movie’ demonstrates how meaning can be created and destroyed; Hollis Frampton’s ‘Nostalgia’ examining time and memory through the asynchrony of film sound and images; and to tie it all up is Robert Bresson’s claim that “an image must be transformed by contact with other images, as is a color by contact with other colors”.
Our point is that the cinematic power of editing seems ubiquitous, phrased far more poetically by Francis Ford Coppola, “the essence of cinema is editing.” So, basically, Sergei Eisenstein was interested in creating new meaning through film editing. This definitely captures a lot of our thoughts when making films of this nature.
John Cage has always been a favorite of ours and so to be presented with an article titled, ‘10 Rules for Students, Teachers, and Life by John Cage and Sister Corita Kent’ was very entertaining. While Cage was quoted directly in Rule 10, after doing some further reading, he was by no means a collaborator of the list. Nevertheless, it was still exciting to see/consider the rules in terms of our art making process. The general consensus of the rules seems to be fairly similar to how most people talk about how to ‘make-it’; the more the do the better you get, period.
Compass Festival, the Leeds biennial festival of live art is something we’re also looking into applying for this year. They seem to have a fairly ‘hands on’ sort of idea; they enjoy the community aspect of the art making. The amazing element is that they award you £1000 if you’re chosen for the festival (obviously the first thought is to just buy 1000 McDonald’s cheese burgers but I’m sure we can resist temptation). We’re still thinking about what our proposal might be but we’re thinking about some kind of game/workshop to do with people. More research needs to be done into previous years in order to establish the ‘feel’ of it.