Professional Documents
Culture Documents
American Experimental Film
American Experimental Film
by
Carlos Kase
December 2009
Copyright 2009
Carlos Kase
DEDICATION
For My Parents
ii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
During my time at the University of Southern California, I have had the
benefit of learning from a group of scholars whose collective insight into the
American avant-garde cinema is unmatched. Though I was well aware of David
James extraordinary intellect before arriving in Los Angeles, I was pleased to
learn that his warm generosity is its equal. He has given me the unqualified
support that every graduate student desires in a mentor, while nevertheless
providing a model for scholarship that exceeds the grasp of most mortals. I feel
incredibly lucky to have had him as my advisor and dissertation chair.
Akira Lippit is an insurmountable adversary in the realm of unscripted
debate; the scope of his intelligence is boundless, and his advice has been
incredibly helpful, from the very beginnings of this project to its conclusion. In
my interdisciplinary adventures into Art History, Nancy Troy has encouraged my
enthusiasm for expanding my field of reference into the discursive spaces well
beyond cinema. Yet her diligent pedagogy and exacting scholarship have forced
me to keep my ideas grounded in argument. Michael Renov was involved in this
project in its earlier stages, continuously reenergizing my belief that experimental
film is a non-fiction form, engaged in real encounters between people and history.
Though she could not be involved in the final developments of this dissertation,
Anne Friedberg was a steady voice of encouragement and a firm believer in my
interdisciplinary ambitions. I hope that her health soon improves, so that she can
iii
iv
to make this a much better work than it would have been otherwise and her
friendship has kept me sane.
vi
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Dedication
ii
Acknowledgments
iii
Abstract
viii
Chapter 1: Fist Fight and the Intermedial Conditions of AvantGarde Art in the 1960s
76
142
216
288
380
Bibliography
427
vii
ABSTRACT
Contrary to the dominant narratives of art history, experimental cinema
once played a meaningful role in American art. The filmic works discussed in this
dissertation devised fresh modes of authorship and experimentation involving
chance, collaboration, and interpersonal provocation that were as modern and
innovative of those used in any art form. In this project experimental cinema is
thus situated in close conceptual and historical proximity to other kinds of
advanced art practice including performance, video, assemblage, and
installation art that aggravated representational, artistic, ethical, and spectatorial
anxieties, while challenging conventional divisions between art and media forms.
By creating works that were often hostile and aggressive, these filmmakers
attempted to undermine the smooth flows of information and entertainment that
dominated the United States in the waning years of films significance as the
nations dominant mass medium.
Through its consideration of selected works by multi-faceted, multi-media
artists including Robert Breer, Andy Warhol, Shirley Clarke, Nam June Paik,
Bruce Conner, Carolee Schneemann, and Paul Sharits, this study argues that an
interdisciplinary strategy provides the most effective means for understanding the
intermedial art environment that defined avant-garde cultural production in the
wake of Abstract Expressionism. In its aversion to conventional divisions
between artists film, avant-garde film, and non-fiction film, this project thus
attempts to reintegrate celluloid-based, experimental moving image works into the
viii
multifarious cultural, social, and historical networks that produced them and even,
for a brief moment, made them popular. Despite its fleeting presence in the
popular mindset of the late 1960s, experimental cinema never realized its promise
as a transformational influence on the overall field of American art: it did not gain
the economic support of gallery culture or the intellectual esteem of art history.
Because of its interstitial identity, provocative mode of address, and distinctive
ontological challenges to representation, it was an anxious object then, and in
critical hindsight remains so.
This dissertation argues that the anxieties surrounding avant-garde art
related to its function as a mechanism for undermining conventional notions of
pleasure, ethics, and craft are not only central to experimental cinema, but may
in significant ways, define it.
ix
Letter from Stan Brakhage to Annette Michelson, June 7, 1985, collection of the University of
Colorado, Stan Brakhage Papers.
2
Letter from Annette Michelson to Stan Brakhage, June 16, 1985, collection of the University of
Colorado, Stan Brakhage Papers.
independent film, etc. in which they were both deeply involved (albeit in
different capacities). In 1985, Brakhage and Michelson, two of the most avid
supporters of this artistic practice, felt that the narrative of the art form had
reached something of a finis point. Though this exchange evinces a kind of
crisis of faith, it is one that is not concerned with the aesthetic status of the art
form itself, but rather, its position within the social, economic, and cultural sphere
of the arts in the late 20th century. From their exchange it seems that the
retrenchment of filmic resources, as Michelson understands it, corresponds to a
sea change in the artistic context of moving image media art. In their
correspondence, these advocates for non-industrial film suggest that a historical
shift had taken place that was much more significant than the end of a film stock
or a stylistic trend.
In hindsight, this dialogue between Brakhage and Michelson conveys a
profound critical anxiety about the status of the art circa 1985. It also suggests a
larger historical question that may relate to the status of artistic development in
general. In 1966, art critic Harold Rosenberg argued that avant-garde art was an
anxious object, defined by its special ability to be fundamentally indefinite, to
resist the classical social functions of art, and to replace conventional pleasures
with a distressed searching, an anxious interrogation of the limits between art and
other human activities:
The anxiety of art is a philosophical quality perceived by artists to be
inherent in acts of creation in our time. [] Anxiety is thus the form in
which modern art raises itself to the level of human history. It is an
objective reflection on the indefiniteness of the function of art in present3
Harold Rosenberg, Toward an Unanxious Profession in The Anxious Object (Chicago and
London: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 17.
4
Rosenberg, Toward an Unanxious Profession, 16.
roughly the mid-1960s and the mid-70s, it held an anxious promise for a measure
of cultural potency.
In 1966, journalist John Gruen wrote confidently about avant-garde
cinema in New York Magazine, an entirely mainstream, populist publication
(these essays were later collected in his book The New Bohemia):
It is safe to say that of all avant-garde manifestations in the New Bohemia,
the underground film movement, for all its deliberate derangement, is the
most active and the most daring. While the Combine Generations fever
for joint creativity runs rampant in all the arts, it is filmmaking that acts as
the perfect magnetic center for every restless impulse and expression.6
To anyone who is even passingly familiar with the history of avant-garde film, it
is clear that it was never again perceived to be the magnetic center of the
American cultural landscape. Rather than explain the reasons for the failure of
this movement to achieve the transformations that its most ambitious supporters
(including Michelson) at one point envisioned for it, this project aims to identify a
number of its most provocative and remarkable efforts to engage with significant
developments in aesthetics and artistic practice across a range of media and
cultural forms.
In this study I argue that the anxieties surrounding avant-garde art which
Rosenberg located in collective social doubts about its meaning, its value, its
capacity to produce pleasure are not only central to experimental film, but may,
in significant ways, define it. Experimental film, as understood in this project,
represents a liminal art-making praxis that is poised between the plastic and the
John Gruen, The New Bohemia (Pennington, NJ: A Cappella Books, 1966), 93.
temporal arts, between fine art and the entertainment industry, between
handcrafted expression and automated surveillance, and ultimately, between the
histories of art and cinema. As Rosenberg argues, the condition of avant-garde art
is an objective reflection on the indefiniteness of the function of art in presentday society, suggesting that the relationships between all of these terms shift
over time in accordance with social and historical developments.7 This project
will evaluate a set of case studies of experimental film from the period in which,
arguably, its production was most explosive and urgent, while also intertwined
with other significant developments in aesthetics across a range of media. These
trends should all be understood in pragmatic terms as fundamentally social and
contingent upon a variety of unpredictable cultural forces, rather than determined
by any inborn metaphysical purpose.
Though it has always been a minority, outsider practice, for a brief
moment in time, avant-garde film was central to the cultural zeitgeist of the period
and occupied a significant position amongst a range of other media, genres, and
aesthetic strategies. Only when evaluated in relation to these larger artistic trends
and cultural energies can it be effectively historicized and comprehensively
understood as a praxis rather than a set of contained, isolated texts.
Methodology:
Anxiety and music, anxiety and dancing, anxiety and sex, anxiety and art
these are the raw materials for a new Bohemia. In New York, as in other
7
cities throughout the world, these commodities run rife, and if we mean
anxiety to stand for racial tension, poverty, a simple search for something
other than the status quo, or displacement intellectual, emotional, or
aesthetic then it becomes clear that this anxiety, when acted upon, can
release numberless creative and emotional explosions.8 John Gruen, The
New Bohemia, 1966
It is a commonplace notion that during the era after World War II and
particularly in the 1960s, life in the United States reached a condition of
pronounced anxiety. The artistic actions and cultural experiences of this era often
encapsulated the tumultuous sensibility of the time, which had resulted, at least
partially, from a set of major public traumas and conflicts between dominant
institutions and countercultural forces. Intellectuals and critics from diverse
disciplines and philosophical positions argue that this anxiety resulted from a
variety of factors including the fear of extinction associated with the Cold War,
the breakdown of the conventional nuclear family (which was partially a result of
the rise of television), female sexual liberation (associated partially with the
development of the birth control pill and the Kinsey report), race riots and the
implementation of civil rights legislation that drew attention to the prevailing
racism around the country, the gay rights movement, the Chicano movement, the
rise of drug use and the countercultures embrace of psychedelics and later,
narcotics, the escalation of the conflict in Vietnam, and the implementation of a
draft that catalyzed a powerful and aggressive anti-war movement. The social and
perhaps psychological impacts of the conflicts associated with these historical
developments were profound and reflected the extreme cultural conflict and
ideological anxiety of the age.
Specifically, the tumultuous historical casualties of the age concretely
embody its social tensions. The Bay of Pigs invasion, the assassinations of
Medgar Evers, John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Malcolm
X, the shooting of Andy Warhol by militant feminist Valerie Solanas, the murders
at Kent State, the race riots of Los Angeles, Detroit, and Chicago, the Stonewall
riots, the imprisonment of Black Panther Huey P. Newton (as well as
countercultural icons John Sinclair and Timothy Leary), the student revolt at
Columbia University, the bombings and social actions of the Weather
Underground and the associated actions of COINTELPRO, the Watergate
scandal, the violent uprisings at the Democratic National Convention of 1968 (and
the subsequent trial of the Chicago Seven), together symbolically encapsulate the
energies of confrontation and social dissonance that underpinned the age. These
anxious times, with their general sense of social disharmony (exhibited partially
by the numerous manifestations listed above), inscribed their collective energies
of antagonism and conflict on a range of media forms in the period, both popular
and avant-garde. Though this was the age of flower power and free love, it was
also a period marked by extreme violence and social dissonance. Experimental
film of the period expressed these anxious cultural energies and sometimes
directly addressed the historical traumas listed above. However, in a way that is
perhaps more aesthetically urgent to the topic at hand, these historical conditions
also escalated the capacity of the film medium in ways that were formally,
socially, and thematically experimental to induce extreme perceptual,
philosophical, and psychological crises for the array of people who encountered
the work. This anxiogenic use of cinema, like other artistic projects and cultural
energies of the time, directed itself towards a tumultuous, therapeutic
reconditioning of aesthetic experience.
The films that are the subject of this project directly addressed and
showcased a range of aesthetic, cultural, conceptual, and, sometimes, personal
anxieties. In some cases these works challenged particular social forces with
confrontational strategies, in an effort to combat and oppose, for example, the
influence of television on the publics understanding of history, the War in
Vietnam, racial violence, or the exploitation of women by the media industry. In
other cases, these works perfectly represented or embodied these tensions as
documentary actions; and in still other cases, these film projects willfully
provoked anxieties in the social and public spaces of their exhibitions in a kind of
therapeutic effort to undo the perceptual and ideological structures that made the
injustices and public traumas of the era possible. In all these situations, the films
discussed in this study including those of Robert Breer, Andy Warhol, Shirley
Clarke, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Jud Yalkut, Aldo Tambellini, Bruce Conner,
Robert Nelson, Carolee Schneemann, Stan Brakhage, and Paul Sharits
collectively represent modes of encounter between cinema and other forces of
American artistic and social history from roughly 1965 to 1975. The films of
10
Rosenberg, The American Action Painters in The Tradition of the New (New York: Da Capo
Press, 1960), 27.
11
12
The boundaries of this dissertation are porous. The decade of 1965-75 that
is a part of this projects title is only a loose frame of reference, because it is very
difficult to put concrete temporal limits on a concept or a historical trend,
regardless of how finely it is demarcated in rhetorical terms. The project begins
with 1965, months after which Andy Warhol publicly disavowed painting in order
to work in film, and it ends ten years later, when video had become an accepted
technology for experimental work in the art world, effectively displacing film (as
Brakhage and Michelson suggest in their exchange quoted earlier). A few works
will be discussed that either precede or follow this period. The same flexibility
concerns the limits of American as presented in the title. Since the national
identity of a media artwork is subject to a flow of people, technologies,
economics, and tastes that defies any countrys borders, all of the films discussed
herein are inscribed, to greater or lesser degrees, in an international artistic
landscape. For example, such artists as Nam June Paik and Yoko Ono have
complex histories as artists born in East Asia who lived and worked in both
Europe and the United States in the period at hand, and who interacted vigorously
with the international community of Fluxus artists. Because of this complex
network of historical, geographical, and cultural determinations, it would be very
difficult to define either of these artists according to any particular national
identity. In a very real sense, Ono and Paik are international artists. That being
said, this project accepts their filmic output as relevant to the discourses and
trends of American experimental filmmaking.
13
He wrote, there is a sense in which avant-garde Co-op film-making in Europe is closer to New
York than Californian film-making is, and the leading New York critics and tastemakers Sitney,
Michelson, etc. are not appreciated in San Francisco any more than they are in London. Peter
Wollen, The Two Avant-Gardes, Studio International: Journal of Modern Art 190
(November/December 1975), 171.
14
canonical. Each chapter considers between one and three films in detail, and it
does so in relation to a set of aesthetic concerns that often connect the work of
two or three filmmakers to each other and to other trends in the arts. Moreover, all
of the films that are discussed in this project demonstrate unusual cases for the
consideration of the relationship between a film text and the historical conditions
of its production. As Rosenberg suggested, in his influential formulation of 1960,
an artwork can be understood both as a textual object and an extra-textual event.
Like the Abstract Expressionist works that were his subject, the films described
herein all demonstrate provocative ontological relationships between their
materially contained textual spaces, the contexts of their mediation, and the
extratextual conditions of their aesthetic and social functions, and in so doing,
challenge the conventional understanding of the American avant-garde cinema as
an expressive, romantic endeavor of controlled and contained authorship. All of
the films presented here, from Robert Breers Fist Fight (which was presented as
a part of Karlheinz Stockhausens theatrical experiment, Originale), to Paul
Sharits Epileptic Seizure Comparison (which has been screened both as a single
film projection and as a looped two-screen installation) function both as texts and
events, as frozen artifacts and contingent performances.11 In a sense, this study is
a historical, conceptual, and perhaps theoretical investigation into the way in
which American experimental film engaged with the ontological challenges of
both presence and plasticity, by redefining the textual and extratextual spaces of
11
The notion that experimental films have a dual status as artifact and performance is an idea
borrowed from film critic and historian Paul Arthur. See Arthur, Structural Film: Revisions, New
Versions, and the Artifact, Millennium Film Journal 1, no.2 (Spring 1978), 513.
15
16
According to Victor Bockris, only half of these profits went to Warhol due to poor business
decisions on his part. Bockris, Warhol: The Biography (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo, 2003), 259.
17
Quoted by Arthur in Films the Color of Blood in The Film-makers Cooperative Catalogue,
no. 7 (New York: Film-makers Cooperative, 1989), vi.
18
place in experimental film practice that deserved much greater critical attention
than it had been given. For her, something was happening that was so fresh and
aesthetically urgent that it begged to be understood, in actuality, as a massive
transformation, not only in cinema, but in contemporary art in general. In her
thinking, this work demanded the urgency of recognition for an achievement
whose importance will eventually be seen as comparable to that of American
painting in the 1950s and onwards.14 Yet, within mid-century America, as well
as today, these developments in experimental film were largely ignored by the art
world establishment. To Michelson, in 1971, this amounted to a crisis of sorts in
that neither professional art nor film critics were quite up to the task at hand.
Specifically describing this circumstance, she wrote, if most ART critics have
not been trying very hard, most FILM critics now at work are simply not, nor
ever will be, equipped for the critical task on the level which the present
flowering of cinema in this country demands.15 The September 1971 issue of
Artforum featured Michelson as its guest-editor and she took the opportunity to
stage a noteworthy critical intervention on behalf of these neglected works,
including the presentation of a number of articles featuring extended discussions
of a range of experimental films (including work by Warhol, Ken Jacobs, Joyce
Wieland, and Paul Sharits). As a provocation, this issue of Artforum seemed to
ask a question: why was a film such as Michael Snows Wavelength (1967)
14
15
Annette Michelson, Foreword in Three Letters Artforum 10, no. 1 (September 1971), 9.
Ibid.
19
16
Manny Farber took an interest in Snows film and was in fact the only mainstream film critic
that wrote anything interesting in the period about the avant-garde cinema.
17
Michelson, Foreword in Three Letters, 9.
18
See for example, Robert Hugues, Shock of the New, revised ed. (New York: Knopf, 1991);
Thomas Crow, Rise of the Sixties (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996). Perhaps the
most egregious example of this historical neglect is the recent textbook by Hal Foster, Rosalind
Krauss, Yves Alain-Bois, and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Art Since 1900: Vol. 2 1945 to the
Present (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2004). The amply illustrated and researched work
features countless references and illustrations of video art and artists film but only mentions
two or three contributors to the American avant-garde cinema by name.
The notable exception is the provocative American Art Since 1945 (London: Thames &
Hudson, 2003) by David Joselit, though his presentation is far from authoritative: he only
20
discusses one filmmaker (Stan Brakhage), despite the ample attention that he gives to other forms
of media and video art.
19
David E. James, Introduction in To Free the Cinema: Jonas Mekas and the New York
Underground, ed. David E. James (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 34.
21
understanding and generally fail to draw the interest of the public, critics,
academics, and art historians.
Chrissie Iles quoted in Malcolm Turvey, Ken Jacobs, Annette Michelson, Paul Arthur, Brian
Frye, Iles, Obsolescence and American Avant-Garde Film October 100 (Spring 2002), 119.
22
cultural force (even discussing the clothes that he wore). When she does analyze
one of Warhols films, it is clear, because of a number of massive errors in
description, that she has not seen the work in question.21 Jones thus fails to take
Warhols cinema seriously. It might be presumed that her descriptive and
interpretative errors result from the fact that Warhols cinema does not satisfy the
particular rhetorical role in which she has cast the artist: as efficient businessman
and industrialist. Jones evaluation of Warhols work instrumentalizes it in a way
that occludes the complexities and ambivalences of his multipart multi-media
artistic practice. The rhetorical and disciplinary blinders that guarantee such an
interpretative error are a major hindrance to the comprehensive understanding of
Warhols work. However, what such circumstances also demonstrate is that
Warhols cinema remains enigmatic and undigested in general, particularly in
relation to his artistic output in other media. Though Warhols fine art has
produced one of the largest bibliographies in recent art historical scholarship, his
film work remains largely unseen. This is a function of the fact that most art
historians have not been particularly cognizant of developments in moving image
21
Caroline A. Jones, Andy Warhols Factory, Commonism, and the Business Art Business in
Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar American Artist (Chicago & London: University
of Chicago Press, 1996), 256. She describes the opening of Blow Job (1964): the film opens with
a slightly wider shot that takes in the glimpse of a leather-jacketed shoulder of a figure bending
down in front of the subject, before the camera closes in on the subjects face. As anyone who
has seen the film knows, this description is entirely inaccurate: the camera never shows a second
onscreen figure; there is no camera movement; the different shots of the film are all taken from
precisely the same camera position and placement (on a tripod). Despite her imprecise and
uniformed description of Warhols film, she still feels capable of making summary judgments
about large swaths of the artists filmography: I believe the pre-1969 films are, above all,
exemplars of Warhols management style (Ibid., 236). Such bold claims should depend on some
degree of close analysis and actual exposure to the work being described. Errors such as Jones
description of Blowjob go unnoticed because of the collective disciplinary aversion that art
historians demonstrate towards experimental cinema.
23
art, and as Iles suggests above, they simply dont know how to approach it. If
art historians and curators are unaware of the moving image work of perhaps the
most significant artist of the second half of the 20th century, then it is no surprise
that they have largely ignored the work of lesser known filmmakers as well.
In the 1960s, before the critical histories were written, the divide between
fine art and filmmaking was also inscribed in the cultural climate of the era.
Filmmaker and photographer Hollis Frampton distilled the critical and economic
details of the situation (in a succinct comment made in retrospect in 1977), as a
function of differing institutional assumptions about what defines art:
We move now, we take you now to the year 1969, and to lower
Manhattan, and the confluence of a set of circumstances. One, of course,
was that at that time and in that place film was still (and still is, but one
felt it very acutely there) film was absolutely embattled. To make films,
to attempt to make films, at that time was to be certainly an outcast, and in
those circumstances a pariah. Art was painting and sculpture that was it.
Yes, there was dance, yes indeed, because it was undeniable there was
music, and very strong and adventurous work was going on. Nevertheless
there were a few pariahs, a few benighted and degenerate scumbags, who
persisted in making films. And Warhol of course had become fashionable
long before he ever made films anyway, but the rest of us mostly were, as
it were, huddled together for protection against the icy blast from Castelli,
the sort of boyars of the New York art world.22
In the quotation above, Frampton makes a number of important claims that help to
explain why experimental cinema has been omitted largely from art history
surveys and textbooks. His first point relates to the critical perception that art was
defined exclusively as painting and sculpture. Thus other kinds of art-making,
including cinema and performance and video as well were not of primary
22
Hollis Frampton, Hollis Frampton in San Francisco, from a lecture at the San Francisco Art
Institute, April 21, 1977. Reprinted in Scott MacDonald, Canyon Cinema: The Life and Times of
an Independent Film Distributor (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 267.
24
interest within the art world of the time. (However, performance and video,
though they may have been neglected initially, have now found their way into the
accepted art history narratives.) Secondly, for Frampton, this embattlement of
film with various other cultural forces was partially a result of their differing
economic specificities. As he suggests above, a powerful art dealer such as Leo
Castelli made artists careers by selling their work for lucrative sums, a situation
that insured significant financial comfort and cultural recognition for all parties
involved. These support systems were lacking for American experimental cinema,
and as a result, it depended on its own independent organizations and
cooperatives to distribute work and collect minor rental fees.23 Lastly, it is also
implicit in the filmmakers statement that he feels that the use of film to make art
should be understood, despite protestations to the contrary, as an acceptable and
respected medium, as a part of a whole, complex, yet integrated artistic landscape.
As suggested earlier, there was some interest in experimental cinema
amongst a variety of established artists in the mid-1960s to mid-1970s, however,
that interest did not in fact compel any additional economic or critical support for
that movement, as described by Frampton above. Film critic and historian Paul
Arthur has distilled this circumstance as follows:
The occasional forays into film by established artists such as Richard
Serra, Robert Morris, and Dan Graham, despite obvious correspondences
with structural work [in avant-garde film], never resulted in reciprocal
opportunities or additional interest from art journals or gallery owners; nor
23
Though many of filmmakers of Framptons generation found their ways into academia in the
1970s, the two-fold critical and economic neglect of experimental filmmakers by the art world has
had undeniable and marked effects on the history and historiography of this cultural practice.
25
24
Paul Arthur, A Line of Sight: American Avant-Garde Film Since 1965 (Minneapolis and
London: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 78.
26
25
Though a number of the artists mentioned above showed their films in established galleries, as
distinct from the fly-by-night film venues of the Filmmakers Cinematheque, both Smithson and
Serra were known to be frequent attendees of the screenings of the so-called American
underground (authors conversation with Annette Michelson, fall 2007, New York City). It should
also be noted that a number of the filmmakers described in this project including Breer, Warhol,
Conner, Schneemann, and Sharits screened their films at galleries during this period as well.
27
Tambellini, Bruce Conner, Robert Nelson, Carolee Schneemann, and Paul Sharits,
all had some significant aesthetic connections to other trends in the arts. In fact,
the Filmmakers Cinematheque, a venue devoted to the exhibition of experimental
and independent film and organized by filmmaker Jonas Mekas, was perhaps one
of the most significant venues and social spaces for the presentation of
performance art, happenings, experimental dance, and video art in the period. The
close social and historical proximity of these developments in expanded art forms
serves to further emphasize the social overlap and interaction between these
diverse, but related cultural trends in art-making.
In the 1960s, most experimental filmmakers were amateurs, and the fact
that they reaped little to no profit from their work was a fact that they often
celebrated as a mark of practical and political independence (despite the fact that
as a result these artists were forced to live under the conditions of poverty that
generally accompanied such an outsider status). This understanding of avantgarde film, as an amateurs practice, has been well established and convincingly
discussed by a number of artists and critics, including Brakhage and one of his
major influences, Maya Deren. She argued, in 1965, that the etymology of
amateur was in fact related to the Latin term for lover, and that, independent
filmmaking, because of its commercial freedom from conventional, industrial
cinema, could be free of the structural constraints of plot, dialogue, and star
actors. She writes, Artistic freedom means that the amateur film-maker is never
forced to sacrifice visual drama and beauty to a stream of words, words, words,
28
words, to the relentless activity and explanations of plot, or to the display of a star
or sponsors product. 26 For her, this amateur status differentiated independent
and avant-garde film practices from those of the commercial film industry.
More recently, in 2002, Ken Jacobs, a filmmaker who has been making
experimental work since the early 1960s, claimed that the non-commercial status
of the independent filmmaking mode was in fact a major triumph, not only over
Hollywood cinema, but over the art market as well: I love the idea of making
work that cant work into the art market. [] I think its a real
accomplishment.27 The distance of the independent cinema from the realm of
professional artists was seen by many (as Jacobs suggests) to be a mark of its
independence, yet as Frampton explains above, it was an autonomy that was won
at the expense of a more widespread cultural recognition. This institutional and
economic framing of experimental cinema as an amateurs practice has separated
this group of artists philosophically and historically from both successful postwar
painters (and their economic support system of galleries and critical tastemakers)
as well as Hollywood filmmakers (and the infrastructural support of the studio
system). Though experimental filmmakers shared similar aesthetic aspirations
with their contemporaries in other arts, they also shared an apparatus with an
industrial entertainment medium, and thus found themselves, in Framptons
words, absolutely embattled. The historical relationships between film and the
other arts evidenced real cultural anxieties of critical, social, and economic
26
Maya Deren, Amateur Versus Professional Film Culture 39 (Winter 1965), 4546.
Jacobs in Malcolm Turvey, et al., Round Table: Obsolescence and American Avant-Garde
Film, 124.
27
29
tensions that, in some degree, continue to the present. These tensions between
different modes of artistic and cultural production are inscribed in the works, both
in their tendencies to demonstrate the poverty of their means and to utilize a range
of confrontational strategies in a variety of artistic registers.
In accordance with the legacy of medium-specific in modernist art
criticism (most often associated with Clement Greenberg), it might be argued that
experimental film has no place within texts that present histories of painting and
sculpture. It could be claimed that film is an altogether different medium, with
distinctive attributes, aesthetic strategies, and significatory properties. (This is the
position that art historian Caroline Jones takes in her discussion of film in relation
to postwar studio art.)28 However, most survey histories of 20th-century art also
consider practices in performance, conceptual art, or dematerialized art,
including those that reflect on earlier intermedial movements (such as Futurism or
Constructivism, for example). More importantly, for many artists of the postwar
period, despite the famous protestations by Greenberg and other art critics to the
contrary, not all significant advances in art foregrounded the supposedly essential
attributes of any single medium. Instead, it might be argued that the most
significant advances of the post World War II era were very much involved in
combinatory, impure modes of medial hybrids, including assemblage, combines,
happenings, performance art, conceptual art, and expanded cinema. In terms of
contemporary practice, this legacy remains massively important. It must be
28
See Caroline Joness critique of Annette Michelson in conversation with Richard Serra in The
Machine in the Studio, 390, n.13.
30
recognized that the projected moving image is now, more than ever, a major
medium for artists, and these strategies must, for the sake of responsible criticism
and scholarship, be connected to their historical precedents in experimental film
art. In 2008, film and video curator John Hanhardt addressed the neglect of
moving image art in contemporary curatorial practice:
The presence of the moving imagewhether projected, seen on a monitor
or a flat screen, or constituting part of a CD-ROM or websiteintroduces
complex historical and interpretative questions. Yet the rush by curators
and historians to embrace emerging media artists occurs too often at the
expense of earlier generations of artists working in similar genres and
forms. Although the significance of film and video artists of the 1960s and
1970s is generally acknowledged, for example, curators and historians
frequently fail to make connections between these earlier works and what
is being created today. This oversight isolates contemporary artists and
relegates curators to championing new art without being sufficiently aware
of its potential historical links.29
As Hanhardt suggests, the origins of popular, contemporary multi-media
practices, including the work of Douglas Gordon, Paul McCarthy, Matthew
Barney, Pierre Huyghe, and others, must be connected to the historical precedents
of other experimental work in moving image media. Though this project does not
explicitly address contemporary video, film, and multi-media art, it nevertheless
argues that, if this work is to be understood in any meaningful way (in the context
of responsible curatorial or scholarly practice), then it requires more thorough
investigations of the place of film within earlier American art history.
29
John Hanhardt, From Screen to Gallery: Cinema, Video, and Installation Art Practices,
American Art 22, no.2 (Summer 2008), 2.
31
Pure/Impure Forms:
Within the history of art criticism Clement Greenberg was perhaps the
most influential voice of his generation, if not the entire 20th century. And though
he did not explicitly address cinema, his intellectual authority was a determining
influence on the entire timbre of post World War II aesthetics, influencing a range
of critics and scholars who interacted with painting, sculpture, and even film.
Greenbergs thinking thus needs to be understood as the philosophical
underpinning of any significant historical consideration of the relationship
between media in 20th century avant-garde art.
Greenberg famously argued for a teleological art history, a version of the
20th century art narrative that privileged a seemingly natural and logical progress
towards forms of greater aesthetic purity. According to Greenberg, as art forms
evolved, their most significant works would more forcefully address the precise
conditions of their own materiality. As he saw it, the most significant innovations
in advanced art would necessarily progress towards the more thorough revelation
of the essential characteristics of their medium. In short, it was the project of
advanced painting to become more immersed in opticality, the nonrepresentational use of paint, and the recognition of the canvass non-illusory
flatness. It was Greenbergs position (and that of his most influential follower,
Michael Fried) that art had a kind of teleological destiny to fulfill, to strip away
that which was extraneous to its essential purpose. (This was an argument that
Greenberg derived, to a significant extent, from Immanuel Kants metaphysics).
32
30
Clement Greenberg, American-Type Painting in Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1961), 208.
31
Leo Steinberg, Other Criteria, 77.
32
Two astute, but sympathetic critiques of Greenberg can be found in the work of philosopher and
art critic Arthur Danto and art historian Thomas Crow. Arthur Danto, After the End of Art:
Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). Thomas
Crow, Modernism and Mass Culture in the Visual Arts in Modern Art in the Common Culture
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996).
33
to recognize that some of the most significant developments in art would take
alternative paths, as they moved away from the flat canvas and into the space that
surrounded it.
In both his writing and his art practice, artist and theorist Allan Kaprow
provided a meaningful counterpoint to Greenbergs predictions. In 1958 Kaprow
argued that the gestural innovations of Jackson Pollock, the most famous of
Abstract Expressionists, would point the way toward new directions, not into the
essence of the painted medium, but off the canvas beyond its traditional material
limits.
What we have, then, is art that tends to lose itself out of bounds, tends to
fill our world with itself, art that in meaning, looks, impulse seems to
break fairly sharply with the traditions of painters [] to give up the
making of paintings entirely [] Pollock as I see him, left us at the point
where we must become preoccupied with and even dazzled by the space
and objects of our everyday life, either our bodies, clothes, rooms, or if
need be, the vastness of Forty-second street.33
For Greenberg, Pollocks work was fundamentally significant because of its
unique visual content. But for Kaprow, Pollocks painting depended on a variety
of gesture that strived to escape the physical limits of the very same frame. (This
sensibility is perfectly congruent with Harold Rosenbergs theorizations of
painting-as-act, which are quoted earlier in this introduction.) The new directions
and major developments of advanced art in the 1960s and 70s demonstrated that
Kaprows premonitions would prove accurate while Greenbergs criticism would
seem more and more incapable of adapting to noteworthy changes in artistic
33
Allan Kaprow, The Legacy of Jackson Pollock in Essays on the Blurring Between Art and
Life, ed. Jeff Kelley (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 67.
34
34
35
and Chandler argued that artists would necessarily move their work away from
pure plasticity and visual abstraction by emphasizing bodily contingency and
presence, through performance and mixed forms in response to the gestural
developments of Abstract Expressionism. This art emphasized interpersonal
interaction, process, and the social spaces of art practice in which they come in
contact with each other. It is significant that for Kaprow, a major catalyst for the
intermedial energies of the 1960s, as well as Lippard and Chandler, early
observers of these developments, film was indeed part of this multi-media cultural
atmosphere.
Like Kaprow, Lippard, and Chandler, theater critic and theorist of
Happenings, Michael Kirby, observed similar trends towards temporal
experimentation, interpersonal interaction, and impure, intermedial projects. He
wrote in 1968 that there had been an alternative development to what Greenberg
had predicted:
While Greenberg sees history as purifying forms, I see it as breaking down
the autonomy of formal definitions. One of the strongest tendencies in
avant-garde art has been toward what Dick Higgins has called
intermedia art that exists between prevalent definitions or makes use
of materials and concepts from two different disciplines [] it is primarily
the impure.37
Kirby was direct in his efforts to divide the critical history of art between the
purist teleology of Greenbergs interest in medium specificity and a fresh hybrid
practice that voluntarily challenged the differences between disciplines. The art
37
Michael Kirby, The Art of Time: Essays on the Avant-Garde (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co,
1969), 13.
36
form in which Kirby was primarily interested was the semi-theatrical brand of
public art known as happenings, in which artists would stage events that featured
a variety of performers in interactive, semi-dramatic settings. This variety of
interactive work often incorporated devices and structures from other art forms
including dance, music, drama, and cinema. The totalizing social space of the
happening was a frame in which a variety of media could meet. Sometimes the
projected film image took part in these experiments.
As Kirby writes in the passage quoted above, Fluxus artist Dick Higgins
coined the term intermedia (in 1966). Higgins argued convincingly for a
counter-narrative of art criticism that challenged the dominant modernist model. It
was his position that the nature of art production in the post World War II period
tended more and more towards hybrid forms, in which a variety of media were
consciously blended and interwoven in practice. Significantly, Higgins credits this
artistic shift towards interactive, multi-media practices to the mass media. In this
regard, he makes a suggestion that is entirely harmonious with the ideas of
influential 60s media theorist Marshall McLuhan. Higgins writes in his
Statement on Intermedia:
due to the spread of mass literacy, to television and the transistor radio,
our sensitivities have changed. [...] As with the cubists, we are asking for a
new way of looking at things, but more totally, since we are more
impatient and more anxious to go to the basic images. This explains the
impact of Happenings, event pieces, mixed media films [...] For the last
ten years or so, artists have changed their media to suit this situation, to
the point where the media have broken down in their traditional forms.38
38
Dick Higgins, Statement on Intermedia reprinted in In the Spirit of Fluxus, ed. Elizabeth
Armstrong (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1993), 17273.
37
The shift in forms described by Higgins, which includes mixed media films
accompanied a social and aesthetic anxiety about representation itself, about the
capacity of any medium to contain a meaning that is purely its own. Many artists
of this intermedial milieu opposed Greenbergs enthusiasm for medium-based
purity, taking it to be an intellectual quagmire, a critical model that was made
inoperable by the most noteworthy varieties of mixed media art-making practice
in their era. As Higgins suggests, it is indisputable that the changing nature of art
practice in the 1960s, which emphasized process, presence, chance, and hybrid
forms, was significantly influenced by changes in mass media technologies,
including the proliferation of television. Experimental cinema of the 1960s and
70s incorporates the energies described above, including an encounter with the
materials and technologies of mass culture, as well as a new, cross-medial
emphasis on more theatrical, performative modes of art making. In this sense, a
reconsideration of the interaction of cinema with these other trends in
experimental art may help to explain why journalist John Gruen described the
avant-garde cinema as the perfect magnetic center for every restless impulse and
expression of the artistic milieu of the mid-1960s.39
38
Fried, 141.
Ibid., 142.
39
above). Though there may have been an increase in the popularity of hybrid
experiments in hybrid forms of art like the happenings of Kaprow, the
performances of Jim Dine, the multi-media events of Warhols Exploding Plastic
Inevitable this trend was not indicative, as Fried saw it, of any improvement in
the overall quality of contemporary art. To him, such work posed a problem.
In contradistinction to the suppositions of modernist art criticism,
composer John Cage embraced an openness toward theatrical forms that was also
profoundly influential. In the 1957 essay, Experimental Music, Cage proudly
welcomed a shift in music and art-making practices away from controlled
structures of classical authorship and discrete artistic structures towards a greater
openness in form, to the chance-based processes of nature and the conditions of
contingency. Towards the end of the essay he writes, Where do we go from
here? Towards theatre. That art more than music resembles nature.42 To Fried,
the messy and open-ended experiments of the 1960s blended the interests of
various media and thus undermined the most powerful and significant possibilities
that these forms offered individually. In a sense, the semi-theatrical projects
described above (with which film should be included) comprised a kind of
assemblage art in which a range of both plastic and temporal structures blended,
and in which the interests of diverse technologies, representational traditions, and
cultural phenomena melded in order to create projects that at times aspired to the
ambitious scope of the multi-sensorial, operatic, Wagnerian gestamtkunstwerk. To
42
John Cage, Experimental Music in Silence: Lectures and Writings (Middletown, CT:
Wesleyan University Press, 1961), 12.
40
43
Fried, 141.
Susan Sontag, One Culture and the New Sensibility in Against Interpretation and Other
Essays (New York: Picador, 1966), 300. It is also implicit in her argument that the most relevant
artistic experimentation of the era will be immersive, rather than textually remote and isolated.
44
41
clear, from the following passage, which was quoted by Fried, exactly why
Sontags catholic perspective on avant-garde culture would aggravate him so
thoroughly:
All kinds of conventionally accepted boundaries have thereby been
challenged: not jut the one between the scientific and the literaryartistic cultures, or the one between art and non-art; but also many
established distinctions within the world of culture itself that between
form and content, the frivolous and the serious, and (a favorite of literary
intellectuals) high and low culture.45
Sontag argues that new trends in art practice of the mid-1960s share a tendency to
challenge the established cultural hierarchies that had previously provided stable
criteria for critical evaluation. Though she mentions few artists by name, she
argues that Cage, Warhol, and Stockhausen all embodied new forms of authorship
and cultural engagement that dramatically differed from the closed forms that
were favored by literary intellectuals. From her writing in One Culture and the
New Sensibility, it is clear that Sontag has a contemporary observers
appreciation for the strategies and intentions of experimental art in the 1960s. Her
critical sensibility astutely responded to the changing conditions of culture across
a range of disciplines and evaluated it based on its own terms, within the overall
landscape of the avant-garde. It is thus clear why the logic of Fried, and in a
sense, Greenberg too, was simply incapable of adapting to the artistic
developments of the 1960s and the work of happenings, multi-media art,
expanded cinema, Fluxus, Robert Rauschenberg, and John Cage. It is no surprise
that Fried does not even mention experimental cinema in his writing.
45
Ibid., 297.
42
46
Ibid., 304.
43
44
48
Sitney, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, 1943-2000, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2002), 370.
45
Despite the fact that his film descriptions and analyses are largely
unmatched in their detail and intelligence within the published scholarship on the
topic, there are aspects of his overall strategy that still seem somewhat
incongruous with the subject at hand. In one sense, Sitneys continual return to
literary devices including metaphor, metonymy, symbolism, mythopoesis, etc.
might be understood as an effort to legitimize new experiments in moving image
art, by using language from another discipline, in order to demonstrate some
isomorphic relationship to previous traditions that may have shared some basic
similar spirit. He writes,
Whenever possible, both in my interpretation of films and discussion of
theory, I have attempted to trace the heritage of Romanticism. I have
found this approach consistently more useful and more generative than the
Freudian hermeneutics and sexual analyses which have dominated much
previous criticism of the American avant-garde film.49
Sitney is perhaps right to suggest that a model of film interpretation based on the
heritage of Romantic poetics is more appropriate for the work of the American
avant-garde cinema than the Freudian hermeneutics and sexual analyses (of
critics like Parker Tyler) that he mentions. Nevertheless, his argument depends
upon the imposition of another privileged and historically removed critical
nomenclature and philosophical system that is, in some sense, an arbitrary
imposition upon the work. As a result, Sitney converts the films into series of
symbols that comprise a textual field through which he can distill them into
literary, anecdotal formulations perfectly contained artistic rituals of symbolic
49
46
and expressive imagination. His strategy depends on the highly refined, precise,
and persuasive reduction of film texts into semi-narrative networks of characters
and symbols. This method is entirely based upon his study of literature. As Hollis
Frampton argues, Visionary Film was derived largely from an undergraduate
seminar in romantic poetry with Harold Bloom at Yale. That makes something of
a procrustean bed. [] But that was the extent of the intellectual tool kit that he
had to tinker and unlock this strange device. It worked a little.50
From what has been described of Sitneys project in Visionary Film, it
should be clear that he presents a somewhat conservative argument and associated
interpretative methodology that, however internally coherent it may be, is entirely
incongruous with the sensibility presented by Sontag and other cultural critics
who felt that there was something markedly novel and fresh about new
experiments in the arts during the period at hand. She argued that contemporary
developments in the avant-garde arts begged to be understood in relation to each
other, not to the history of literature. In her essay of 1965, Sontag indirectly
provides a preemptive dismissal of a critical model of the avant-garde that
privileges literature as an interpretative apparatus: Simply ignorant of the vital
and enthralling (so called avant-garde) developments in the other arts, and
blinded by their personal investment in the perpetuation of the older notion of
culture, they [literary intellectuals] continue to cling to literature as the model
50
47
for creative statement.51 Sitney was far from ignorant about new developments in
the other arts, but he was nonetheless unconvinced that there was anything
particularly novel about new trends in artistic practice in the period. To him, it
seemed more appropriate to relate the work of the filmmakers that he discusses to
artists of an entirely different cultural context than it did to consider the
relationship that film had to contemporaneous experiments in other media, like
performance or avant-garde music. In her critique of interpretation derived from
literary criticism, Sontag writes,
But the model arts of our time are actually those with much less content,
and a much cooler mode of moral judgment like music, films, dance,
architecture, painting, sculpture. The practice of these arts all of which
draw profusely, naturally, and without embarrassment, upon science and
technology are the locus of the new sensibility.52
Here Sontag suggests that in fact, the most urgent forms of fresh artistic
production expand beyond the textual limits of any one medium, into the
expanded spaces of immersive artistic experience. Interestingly, in Sitneys
project, there is little-to-no discussion of new technology, experimental music,
expanded cinema, happenings, or other developments in the temporal or theatrical
arts of the period. Similarly, Annette Michelson differed with Sitney concerning
the use of a literary precedent as a critical model for the interpretation of cinema,
as she argued in 1966 that it would be better understood as part of an artistic
network: The extraordinary advantage of American cinema today does lie partly
in the possibilities of these convergences and cross-fertilizations. [] One thinks
51
52
48
of its already established, though still embryonic, contacts with a new music,
dance, theater, painting, and sculpture.53 As various media forms expanded into
the aesthetic, formal, and social space of others, a number of critics argued that
this cultural cross-pollination should stimulate new modes of critical practice.
However, such a historically situated model of interpretation has not been the
dominant one in the study of experimental cinema.
Though Sitney does draw frequent parallels between avant-garde film,
Romantic poetics, and the sensibility of abstract expressionism (a movement that
was basically extinct by the time of his book), he neglects the overall influential
force of the cultural field of the 1960s upon avant-garde film practice. Art
historian Liz Kotz has recently critiqued this interpretative tendency that connects
experimental cinema to painting, but neglects its interrelations with other trends in
the arts including performance, theater, happenings, etc. She writes, It is ironic
that so many efforts to locate experimental cinema in the history of visual art tend
to situate it in emphatically pictorial or object-based lineages that themselves
sever modernist painting and sculpture from wider contexts of avant-garde
experimentation.54 Despite its erudition, Visionary Film helped to decisively
isolate the American avant-garde from the rest of art-making in post World War II
America. There remains a need, as Kotz implicitly suggests, to responsibly
53
Michelson, Film and the Radical Aspiration in Film Culture Reader, ed. P. Adams Sitney
(New York: Cooper Square Press, 1970), 420.
54
Liz Kotz, Disciplining Expanded Cinema in X-Screen: Film Installations and Actions in the
1960s and 1970s, ed. Matthias Michalka (Koln: Walther Konig, 2004), 47.
49
reconstitute a history of the ways in which experimental film both influenced and
responded to, in her words, wider contexts of avant-garde experimentation.
Since its original publication, there have been significant challenges to
Visionary Film. However, most of them have been primarily concerned with
criticisms of Sitneys politics and his influence as a canon-building critic. (A
number of these critiques, including those of Janet Bergstrom, Constance Penley,
Lauren Rabinovitz, and Patricia Mellencamp, for example, were motivated by a
desire to reconsider the American avant-garde in feminist terms.)55 But there have
been also been a small number of more wide-ranging historical interventions into
the interpretation of the American avant-garde film since the publication of
Sitneys volume. The most significant survey of the American avant-garde to
follow his project is undoubtedly David James Allegories of Cinema, published
in 1989, in which the author situates this artistic tradition, including its Romantic
aspects, within its material, industrial, and political contexts. Towards the end of
that volume, at the conclusion of a political investigation of the American avantgarde of the 1960s, the author writes, The termination of films social urgency
bequeaths to the historian the task of preparing an account of films position
among other mediums.56 The project of this dissertation is to initiate an at least
55
See Lauren Rabinovitz, Points of Resistance: Women, Power & Politics in the New York Avantgarde Cinema, 1943-71 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003); Patricia Mellencamp,
Indiscretions: Avant-Garde Film, Video & Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1990); Constance Penley and Janet Bergstrom, The Avant-Garde History and Theories in
Movies and Methods, Volume 1, ed. Bill Nichols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985):
287-300 and Penley, The Avant-Garde and its Imaginary, Ibid., 576-602.
56
James, Allegories of Cinema: American Film in the Sixties (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1989), 348.
50
51
52
influential and widely read book on the American avant-garde, and as such,
demands the critical intervention of counterarguments and supplementary
histories. This project does not propose a revision of his sensibility as much it
disputes the intensified Romantic inwardness that he felt dominated the avantgarde cinema.59 Instead of conveying an introspective, reflective, meditative
meeting with sensuous forms of symbolism and myth, the films that are the
subject of this project embody aggressive, agitated, anxious, and contingent
encounters with formally, philosophically, and socially hostile forces.
59
53
textual limits of the film and the extratexual space of its exhibition, Fist Fight
forces the expectations of the art form into uncomfortable spaces of confrontation.
Breers performative presentation of the film, as part of a theatrical work, also
suggests that the film experiments of the mid-1960s should be considered in
relation, more generally, to the interactive climate of the avant-garde arts in the
period. In its presentation within Stockhausens intermedial experiment, Fist
Fight functioned as one component of a multi-faceted event that meaningfully
summarized contemporary trends in avant-garde culture.
***
Many of the most celebrated performance and Happenings artists of the
postwar era worked in a diverse variety of media that often included film.
(Richard Kostelanetz has described this particular overlap of performance and
visual art as The Theatre of Mixed Means.)60 In these contexts, historically
speaking, film often functioned as one component of a mixed media environment.
It has been argued by many critics, including Michael Kirby, that these mixed
means performances grew out of gestural painting and the impure mixed forms
of collage and assemblage. So, one can see in this cultural moment a remarkable
synthesis of the materials and concerns of a number of art forms including
painting, performance, and film.
Within film studies, this intermediary episode described above poses a
significant difficulty to historical assimilation, because in many cases these artists
60
54
The term paracinema has been attributed to either Ed Emshwiller or Jonas Mekas. There was
an extended argument on the genesis of this topic at the Society of Cinema and Media Studies
conference in 2007 in Chicago, during the panel titled Cinema by Other Means.
55
Cage is generally considered to be the progenitor of happenings, due to an untitled work that he
organized in 1952 at Black Mountain College together with Merce Cunningham, as well as his
influence on the happenings generation as a teacher at The New School for Social Research.
63
Liz Kotz, Disciplining Expanded Cinema in X-Screen: Film Installations and Actions in the
1960s and 1970s.
56
57
58
Fist Fight:
The film begins with a short prologue featuring images of the artists who
contributed to the performance of Originale, including its composer, Stockhausen,
its director, Kaprow, as well as Paik, Moorman, and Tenney. Like all of the
images in the film, they pass quickly, and would not likely be recognizable upon a
single viewing; these images are still photographs that Breer has shot on his
animation stand. At times, the photos are upside down as with the films
opening shot which is an extremely brief, flipped image of Stockhausen and
occasionally, there is also camera movement across them, which creates the
illusion of movement despite the fact that the basic materials of this section are
still photographs. In addition to the photographs of these recognizable and wellknown artists, this prologue section also includes a number of their baby pictures,
which were provided to Breer for inclusion in the film. These playfully
juxtaposed images, of both the adult and infant artists, are punctuated by sections
of black leader. The soundtrack features a choppy blend of fragments of the
performance of Originale (separated by abrupt fades), that includes musical
59
60
61
64
62
some ways, just by the environment of the movie house, robbed some of
the mystery of film from itself.65
In his efforts to challenge both illusionism (of the film text) and the theatrical
spectacle (of its exhibition), Breer experimented with variations on the filmic
apparatus, creating loops for gallery screening, showing his films in atypical
venues (as in the happenings context of Originale), and by experimenting with
moving image devices that eschew projection entirely, including mutoscopes and
early proto-cinematic devices, which in their relative simplicity, more clearly
display the apparatus of their visual trickery. These strategies in composition and
assemblage can be located in Fist Fight as well. It is a work that, because of its
severe single-frame, visually heterogeneous composition, calls attention to the
constructedness of the filmic illusion as it jerks aggressively and rapidly between
radically different representational spaces. However, in this film Breer also deftly
utilizes hand-drawn, single-frame animation to break down the continuity of
illusionist cinema by utilizing the very same apparatical conceit cinemas rapid
sequential advance of discrete still photographs that creates the imaginary
impression of movement. To most filmmakers (and a number of viewers), this
variety of film, because of its feverish, staccato visual pace, would be considered
unwatchable. Against the conventional pleasures of narrative and visual
continuity, Breer devised a cinema of extreme restlessness, montagic disruption,
and unrelenting assault. Breers work in cinema, like that of many postwar
65
Breer in An Interview with Robert Breer, Conducted by Charles Levine at Breers Home,
Palisades, N.Y., Approximate Date, July 1970, Film Culture 56 57 (Spring 1973), 5859 .
63
64
watching a series of visual objects that have simply been linked through the
plastic resources of film montage.
In an essay on filmic illusionism, published in 1972, Annette Michelson
identifies what she believes to be the philosophical force of this modernist
gesture:
Central to that sense of renewal in American cinema of independent
persuasion was the formal evidence of the manner in which it was
nourished and sustained, as in the work of Robert Breer, by a tradition
extending from the Bauhaus and Dadaism and, as in the work of Stan
Brakhage, by Abstract Expressionism. The guarantee of success seemed,
from film to film, to lie in both artists attempt to rethink the nature of
cinematic illusionism, and in doing so to propose new structural modes.66
Michelson goes on to argue, in a way that was congruent with the English
structuralist filmmakers and theorists of the early-to-mid 1970s, that there was
something fundamentally political about this desire to expose the material
conditions that underpin the production of filmic illusionism. As derived in a
general sense from Marxist thought, this sensibility was extremely popular in the
1960s, and in fact corresponded with Clement Greenbergs claims about medium
specificity and the significance of artistic materials as determining influences
upon artistic practice. However, Breer challenges the reductiveness of this
interpretative model, through his use of animation and its open and playful
complicity with the most artificial of illusions that film can create. In this regard,
Fist Fight might best be understood as a filmic realization of the perfect tension
between materiality and illusionism that is always inherent in the film apparatus
66
65
itself (as well as in its social history). In concert with many of the other most
significant experimental films of the period, Fist Fight functions simultaneously
in a number of seemingly contradictory registers.
Again, for this rhetorical formulation see Arthur, Structural Film: Revisions, New Versions,
and the Artifact.
68
Authors conversation with Breer, spring 2008, Los Angeles
66
Portraits for the most part.)69 As described above, Breers film does not actually
include any documentary footage of the rehearsals, as the score would suggest.
(However, Breer did make an effort to respond to this aspect of the score by
adding the prologue as described above.) In this regard, Breer, like the other
contributors to the project was given significant artistic leeway.
The structure of Stockhausens piece was based on a set of dramatic
actions conceived in musical terms.70 Biographer Robin Maconie explains, In
part the exercise is designed to acquaint the composer with the techniques of a
related art in which such collaboration is taken for granted, namely theater, and in
part to accustom his musicians to the new style of collaboration. The project
blends simple role-playing with spontaneous invention on stage.71 The works
seemingly chaotic blend of actions was in some ways carefully controlled by
specific, arbitrary temporal limits that corral the kinetic diversity of visual and
sonic actions into contained, modular performance units.
It has been described as follows:
It consists of eighteen scenes in the form of instructions for the dramatis
personae carefully placed in timeboxes. Each characters actions, in other
words, must take a specified number of seconds or minutes. These scenes
are grouped into seven structures which may be performed successively
as normal, or simultaneously (up to three at once), or both.72
69
67
Each of these dramatic units featured an artist who would perform as him or
herself, in the typical style and approach for which he or she had become known,
performing a series of gestures or acts which were associated with his or her
particular artistic discipline and stylistic approach: a poet recites poetry, a
musician plays his instrument, a woman of fashion tries on different outfits, a
camera man films the performance, etc. In this regard, the piece was meant to
feature originals, people recognized for their own unique art-making
approaches, rather than actors. So, the stage was populated by well-known artists
of the early and mid-sixties avant-garde: Allen Ginsberg and Jackson MacLow
read poetry. James Tenney and Charlotte Moorman played piano and cello
respectively. Nam June Paik was allowed to devise his own idiosyncratic
contributions that continued the experiments in eccentric performance that he had
begun in Cologne in the early years of that decade.
Nam June Paik had performed in the German debut of Originale in 1961.
By special request of the composer, Paik returned for the 1964 restaging of the
work, playing action music with his body, a piano, and various props, which
often included somewhat absurdist gestures (including drinking water from a
shoe).73 Paiks performances were significantly less predictable than those of the
other artists in Originale. As a result of his particularly chaotic actions, on one
evening some audience members actually handcuffed him to the scaffolding on
73
This phrase action music is written on the English score to describe Paiks contributions, as
translated by Mary Baumeister (Getty Museum Special Collections, Allan Kaprow Papers).
It was through this performance that Moorman met Paik, forming a bond that would produce some
of the most interesting and controversial avant-garde performance collaborations of the decade.
68
stage, a fact that attests to the wild, interactive atmosphere in which this variety of
performance was encountered in the 1960s. In addition to Paiks eccentric
gestural contributions, Originale also featured a number of other unusual
performance components. Kaprows son played with blocks onstage; scantily clad
women tried on clothes; a number of animals milled about (including two German
Shepherds, a chimpanzee, a cage of chickens); Ginsberg read some sexually
explicit poetry; eggs were dropped and apples were thrown; there were extended
monologues from ancient Greek literature and Shakespeare. The sonic and
structural background to the work was a pre-recorded electronic piece of music
titled Kontakte. At the end of the event, all of the performers photographed the
audience with still cameras and flash bulbs.74
Near the end of the performance of Originale Robert Breer projected Fist
Fight within the dramatic space of the stage, in the center of large scaffolding.
The structure of Originale dictated that each performers contribution occupy
only a finite, pre-determined length of time; for this reason the set featured a
number of clocks distributed throughout it. These conditions applied to Breers
film as well. Breer describes the unusual performative projection of his film
within Originale:
At a certain point I walked over to the scaffolding where a projector was
sitting and turned on the projector. There was a movie screen on the stage.
And the stage was overridden by all the activities taking place. The film
just started up at a certain time. We had an enormous clock, like the clock
in Grand Central Station, in the middle of the acting space that everyone
74
Information taken from Kaprows original score (Getty Museum Special Collections, Allan
Kaprow Papers) and Harold C. Schonburg, Music: Stockhausens Originale Given at Judson
New York Times, September 9, 1964: 46.
69
had to refer to on the second, for the cue to start. So the film had to start
up, continue to x amount of time and then end, about halfway through the
film. So, the film never got shown in its entirety which pleased me
because I had made it too long (with the idea of Cages, to really obliterate
the audience!). [] As the film started up, lights died down on cue and it
became the center of focus. Actors had all just expired and were lying on
the floor. As the film went on for a certain amount of time, I walked up to
the screen and I made myself a hoop of paper on a metal frame, like a
butterfly net, big enough to cover the whole screen, and I took that and I
walked back to the projector with it. And as I remember I had someone
following focus. So I took the image, I took the screen and moved it up to
the projector and the image got smaller and smaller. And went right back
into the projector. It was very nice. And I had to step over the actors to do
it.75
As the quotation above explains, Breer controlled the actual projection of the film
in terms of its performance and its dramatic presentation within the theatrical
space of Originale. Its presentation was entirely dependent on his physical, bodily
presence in the space of the films projection. (In addition, it should also be noted
that in other parts of the work, Breer moved around the set shooting video of the
other artists, while the images were transmitted to a number of closed-circuit
video monitors around the stage.) In this semi-theatrical context, Breers
presentation of Fist Fight was flexible, performative, and spontaneous. The
projection of his film was subject to the real-time, in-person modifications of its
creator, and functioned, like the other elements of the performance, as a
contingent component of the works realization within the social space and time
of its public presentation. In this sense, Breers pliable, moving, performative
75
Lois Mendelson, Robert Breer: A Study of his Work in the Context of the Modernist
Tradition (New York University: PhD Dissertation, 1978), 194.
70
71
76
Kotz, 45.
72
77
This performance catalyzed another art event, in the form of a protest from another faction of
the New York avant-garde in the period. Involved in this protest were George Maciunas, Tony
Conrad, and Henry Flynt. See Branden W. Joseph, Beyond the Dream Syndicate: Tony Conrad
and the Arts After Cage (New York: Zone, 2008), 153212.
73
74
75
76
77
78
described as semi-documentary psychodrama, a generic subset of the semitheatrical mode that featured Andy Warhol as its most significant filmic
practitioner.78
Warhol, as a filmmaker, is probably best known for his earliest group of
somewhat notorious film experiments. These projects tested audience stamina in
their use of extended duration as well as silence; included in this group of works
are Sleep (1963) (almost five-and-one-half hours) and Empire (eight hours), both
silent. However his semi-dramatic sound films of the mid 1960s, including The
Chelsea Girls (1966) may ultimately prove to be more historically significant in
their capacity to represent the performative and cultural tensions of the age, the
historical idiosyncrasies of the subculture in which he worked, and the significant
and under recognized aesthetic continuities that Warhols cinema shared with
other modes of artistic production of the era. In short, Warhols sound films of the
mid-60s may be determined by history to be as significant as, if not more so than,
his earlier critically established efforts within the medium.
In 1964, Warhol made the shift from silent, minimalist cinema to semidramatic sound films. Historically speaking, the changes that he made to his
filmmaking mode in this period were truly significant: his move to sync-sound
technology marked a major shift in his cinema. When Warhol was preparing to
78
Andy Warhols earlier silent films, including Sleep and Empire were both described as
precursors to the structural film movement by Sitney in his Visionary Film, 349. This category
is a highly disputed one, and will be discussed in detail in chapter four of this study. However, for
the purposes of the discussion above, this term serves as a functional shorthand for many different
modes of filmmaking that were rigorously pre-determined, carefully executed, and structurally
deliberate all details that are markedly different from the semi-dramatic mode described herein.
79
shoot with sound, he decided that he would need dramatic content in order to
generate audience interest. To this end Warhol recruited poet and playwright
Ronald Tavel to provide loose scenarios and minimally scripted dialogue for his
new experiments in filmed drama. The screenplays that Tavel produced were not
terribly elaborate in terms of dramatic action, but they did serve fairly specific
aesthetic purposes for the filmmaker. In fact, Warhol, a man known for his
extremely limited explanations of his artistic intentions, was particularly
forthcoming and precise when he asked Tavel to construct not plot, but
incident.79 It was Tavels job to catalyze reactions in the performers through his
semi-scripted scenarios by using relatively simple set-ups of interpersonal
provocation that were designed to psychologically unsettle the unstable people
that were their principal subjects.
In his telling preparatory suggestions to his collaborator, Warhol asked
Tavel to set up situations of extreme psychic pressure, something that would
resemble, in the artists words, an inquisition.80 Interpersonal conflicts were
central to a number of Warhol-Tavel collaborations, including, most significantly,
the series of Screen Test features, including Screen Test #1 (1965), Screen Test 2
79
On this piece of guidance, Tavel claimed that, It must have been the most specific statement he
ever made to me (Stephen Koch, Stargazer: Andy Warhols World and His Films (New York and
Washington: Praeger Publishers, 1973), 63). Art historian Douglas Crimp has concisely identified
the tensions that catalyze the unusual interaction between Warhols filmmaking strategies and
Tavels scriptwriting in the production contexts in which these films were made. Douglas Crimp,
The Rise of Coming Together: Ronald Tavels Screenplays for Andy Warhols Film in The
Aesthetics of Risk, Volume 3 of the SoCCAS, ed. John C. Welchman (Zurich: JRP-Ringier, 2008),
113134.
80
In first describing his ideas for the early sound films, Warhol, according to Tavel, told him to,
go home and devise an inquisition. (Patrick S. Smith, Andy Warhols Art and Films (Ann Arbor:
UMI Research Press, 1981), 481.
80
(1965), Screen Test (aka Suicide) (1965).81 (A related aesthetic strategy was
utilized in Kitchen, Vinyl (1965), and Horse (1965), though these films were more
reliant on scripted dialogue.) In the Screen Test series of sound films, Warhol
directed his unmoving camera towards a single subject whom Tavel interrogated
from offscreen. It was Tavels assignment to catalyze reactions in the performers
using psychodramatic set-ups that exposed their insecurities. In this performance
context, Tavel would often intersperse insults regarding the sexual attitudes of the
films queer subjects. He would devise interactions between either an off-screen
interrogator (himself) and a subject, or a number of on-screen performers. The
results often featured emotionally explosive or physically violent episodes in
which profilmic tensions were intentionally and willfully escalated for the sake of
producing a reaction. For example, though it was a scripted film, Horse, presents
a series of somewhat absurdist bits of sadistic homoerotic sexual dialogue that
repeatedly culminate in unplanned violent encounters in which most of the
performers assault one of their collaborators, beating his head against the floor of
the Factory. Conflictual strategies served as the determining structures for much
of Warhols film work in this period. These conflicts within the profilmic were
forcefully heightened by the pressure that Warhols unblinking camera placed
upon its performers.
Though they were partially the result of some degree of planning, the
filmed results of these collaborations were often unpredictable and spontaneous.
81
These three films from 1965 were feature length, sync sound works that were entirely different
from Warhols ambitious series of silent, three minute single-roll Screen Tests, which number
almost five hundred in total.
81
Warhols collaborator described the particulars of this situation: [I]f you want to
capture spontaneity, improvisation, the accident, and so forth, you must set up an
environment in which the spontaneous, the accidental, the improvisational, the
unexpected, will take place.82 This quotation suggests that Warhol and Tavel
were interested in capturing spontaneity and improvisation, artistic attributes
associated with Abstract Expressionism rather than the Pop Art and
postmodernism that are usually linked to the artist.83 Tavels description thus
provides an interesting and telling link between the supposedly cold distance of
Warhols art and a present, but submerged layer of emotive subjectivity that is
realized through spontaneous encounters between people and technologies.84
In their application to Warhols cinema, Tavels dramatic set-ups
functioned less like screenplays that provided character motivation or acting cues
and more as framing structures that defined a demarcated performance space.
Tavel has described this dramatic space as an environment of action, in which
the dialogue has a secondary function that did not, unlike its role in Hollywood
cinema, provide any psychologically believable character motivation.85 Tavels
semi-dramatic set-ups provided the conceptual arena in which the performers
82
James, The Warhol Screenplays: An Interview With Ronald Tavel, Persistence of Vision: The
Journal of the Film Faculty of the City University of New York 11 (1995), 49.
83
This seeming conflict in cultural values between a beat infused aesthetic of emotional
expressivity and a more postmodern detachment is addressed by James in his interview with Tavel
(Ibid.).
84
Tavel does not consider these philosophical registers to be mutually exclusive, and thus
contradicts the many short-sighted critics who have ignored Warhols film output in order to
create simple oppositions between his pop art and the Abstract Expressionist milieu which
preceded it (Ibid.).
85
I prepared a script, understanding that it had to allow for accident and the unknown. I fully
understood what the script had to allow to happen, allow to become. And it was an environment
(Ibid., 52).
82
would interact, and thus partially defined the space in which the profilmic event
would take place. In a sense, these scenarios, as well as their realizations in front
of Warhols camera, demarcate performance spaces that function differently from
those of most other types of cinema. In fact, these films embody a performance
sensibility that, in its neglect of conventional character direction and motivation,
is more akin to the embodied non-fiction performance that one might encounter in
the happenings, performance art, and radical theater of the era.
Like the orchestrators of happenings and other varieties of experimental
theater, Tavel and Warhol created an open-ended, but tense, pressurized
environment in which something could, and probably would, happen. They set up
these encounters by interviewing the performers beforehand in order to learn their
insecurities. Tavel has said that in order to evoke the most dramatic responses
from the performers he would literally torture the performance out of them by
being as cruel as possible.86 This taunting of on-screen performers continued
through Warhols collaborations with Chuck Wein, Tavels replacement
following his voluntary departure from the Factory, though Wein did not write
scripts or provide dialogue for the films performers. The Warhol-Wein
collaboration culminated in a legendary onscreen skirmish between Wein and
Edie Sedgwick Warhols most well known and perhaps most tragic superstar
in Beauty #2 (1965). In an effort to provoke an emotional response from the
films subject, Wein, a former lover of Sedgwicks, slings a variety of
86
Tavel in the BBC documentary Warhols Cinema: A Mirror for the Sixties (1989).
83
psychosexual insults at her concerning her intelligence, her sexuality, and her
authenticity as a performer. Because Wein knows her intimately, these attacks are
particularly pointed. As she feigns an unconvincing sexual interest in Gino
Piserchio, her companion in the film, she seems like an uninterested high school
girl taking a dare, as she rolls around dispassionately in bed with a boy that does
not excite her in the least. Wein plays the role of a Hollywood director who is
jealous of his leading lady, criticizing the lack of feeling and authenticity of her
performance as he provokes her saying, Do better than that, Edie, cmon. Do it
like you couldve thought of it. In response, she drops her faade of coolness and
throws two ashtrays (one of which is of the heavy glass variety) at her offscreen
provocateur.
These Warholian collaborations hinged on a particular performance
pattern. The films begin with a playful, performative environment that turns tense
and progressively more volatile, followed by insults and berating, and finally
climaxes in some kind of emotional outburst (often tears) on the part of the
subject. This dramatic structure underpinned much of Warhols work in the mid
1960s, and was adopted subsequently by a number of other underground
filmmakers working in the period as a resource for semi-sadistic, semidocumentary film encounters.
In Warhols films this combative approach reached its apex in the summer
of 1966, as the filmmaker and his co-director, Paul Morrissey, shot a number of
one- and two-reel sequences that would eventually become the three-and-one-half
84
hour film known as The Chelsea Girls.87 These sequences generally featured the
Warhol superstars acting-out in moments of liminal experience, including
violent arguments, confessional episodes, psycho-sexual play, and drug-induced
confessionals. In short, The Chelsea Girls was a film that showcased the taboo
behaviors and experiences of the subcultures that produced it. It was primarily a
performance vehicle for the queer amphetamine users who dominated the social
and aesthetic spaces of Warhols Factory in this period, both in public and
onscreen. In this regard, to mainstream sensibilities of 1966, The Chelsea Girls
was a rather threatening cultural object. Formally, it too was a rather uncommon
spectacle. The film was composed entirely of uninterrupted thirty-three-minute
reels shown side-by-side in double-screen projection. Mostly filmed in black &
white, with three reels in color, all of the encounters were shot indoors, in
enclosed spaces, a formal detail that naturally heightens the interpersonal and
aesthetic tensions at work within the dramatic space of the film. In its early stages
of public exhibition, The Chelsea Girls was once (as its title suggests) conceived
of as a kind of voyeuristic cinematic compilation of peepholes into the fugitive
lifestyles of the legendary bohemian enclave of the Chelsea Hotel in New York
City.88
87
By the time Warhol began shooting the material that would later become The Chelsea Girls,
Paul Morrissey had replaced Ronald Tavel and Chuck Wein as Warhols most significant film
collaborator and assistant-provocateurs.
88
In actuality, the film was shot in various locales around New York City, including Warhols
Factory (at its first location on 231-41 East 47th Street), the Chelsea Hotel, and a variety of private
apartments (one of which was the living quarters for the Velvet Underground).
85
89
This practice is a significant extra-textual and conceptual component of the work, something
that should be central to how we understand performance in Warhols films.
90
Stephen Koch, Stargazer: Andy Warhols World and His Films (New York: Praeger Publishers,
1973), 68.
91
Smith, 430. Ondine was the stage name taken by Robert Olivo, a major figure in Warhols circle
of the mid-to-late 1960s and early 1970s.
92
Quoted in Bockris, 258.
93
Sontag, One Culture, 302.
86
87
Towards the beginning of the film, about three hours earlier, Ondine first
showcased his loudly outspoken, willfully cruel character of The Pope whom he
reprises here towards its conclusion. At the beginning of this later appearance,
Ondine injects amphetamine intravenously. Then, following an extended
extemporaneous monologue from the performer, a young woman walks onscreen
and sits next to him on the Factory couch; a dramatic exchange is initiated. In his
earlier appearance in the film, Ondine forcefully insulted and berated a pair of
women, as he demanded sexual confessions while engaging in a feigned
psychoanalytic performance. He asks, What was your first sexual experience?
He insults one woman, saying, Youre hardly a human youre a subspecies,
my dear. Youre not even a vegetable. So, when The Pope reappears in reel
eleven, we have some idea of what to expect. However, what results from this
encounter on the couch could hardly have been predicted. To many viewers and
participants, it remains the most shocking in Warhols entire cinema.
Ondine suggests to this young woman, in a statement of subcultural
authority performed in a patriarchal, mock-papal tone, that she confess her sins to
him: My dear, there is nothing that you cannot say to me. Nothing. The
relatively ingenuous young woman responds to this challenge by playfully
questioning the legitimacy of his performance as this fictive character of The
Pope. She explains: I cannot confess to you, because youre such a phony. Im
not trying to be anyone. She does not accept Ondines playful, campish posture
of Pope-hood: in her criticism and behavior, she deems him inauthentic. She then
88
taunts him more actively, repeatedly calling him a phony. The profilmic
tensions escalate and Ondine lashes out verbally at this seemingly innocent
participant in Warhols film project. He responds to young womans charges of
phoniness with an extremely violent outburst: Well, let me tell you something,
my dear little Miss Phony. You are a phony. Youre a disgusting phony. May God
forgive you you Goddamned phony. Get the hell off this set! Get out! As the
force of his verbal tirade escalates, he then reaches forward and slaps her in the
face, repeatedly, all the while continuing his deluge of insults, as he yells,
Whore! Whore! He is now screaming in an uncontrollable rabid fit of anger.
The woman runs out of the cameras range and the people who are operating the
film and sound equipment probably Morrissey and Gerard Malanga attempt to
follow the action (as the performers voices are heard offscreen). Ondine then
returns to the couch where the scene began, appearing befuddled by his own
actions. Onscreen, he claims to have been overwhelmed spontaneously, as if
seized by some kind of paroxysm. He then makes a number of exclamations in
dire seriousness, as he shouts, How dare she! Who does she think she is? Who is
she to challenge The Pope? It is made clear by his explanatory monologue that,
for him, the legitimacy of his performance is not subject to the questioning of
some outsider from the straight world whose notion of authenticity is markedly
different from his own openly queer performative attitude. In Stargazer, Stephen
Kochs exceptional book length study of Warhols cinema, he agrees that the
challenge of sincere performance interpenetrates the film at every level. He
89
Koch, 94.
Ondine supports this theory as well. See Smith, 445.
96
Mary Woronov, Swimming Underground: My Years in the Warhol Factory (London: Serpents
Tail, 1995), 39.
97
Smith, 445.
95
90
projects. In response to the sadism and violence of this episode, the filmmaker
claimed to have been so surprised and frightened by this confrontation that he ran
off of the set. He wrote that when Ondine slapped the young woman,
it was so for real that I got upset and had to leave the room but I made
sure that I left the camera running. This was something new. Up until this,
when people had gotten violent during any of the filmings, Id always
turned the camera off. [....] But now I decided to get it all down on film,
even if I had to leave the room.98
Because of the real hostility and violence that it documents, it is a difficult scene
to watch. In this sense, with The Chelsea Girls Warhol had gone about as far as he
could in saying that, in his work, everything is permitted.
His dramatic, semi-documentary film work of the mid-sixties willfully
created an arena for brutal interpersonal conflicts within the shared social space in
front of the camera. In an essay that may be the most concise critical summation
of Warhols cinema to date, curator and historian Callie Angell described his
unique production method as one that depended upon the presence of
interpersonal tensions and destabilizing elements.99 In her explanation of his
rather unsettling approach, Angell suggests that Warhols work (because of this
tendency) shares methods with the historical lineage of performance and
performance art. 100 In a related sense, Warhol and a number of his collaborators
have described the dramatic atmosphere of these works as being indebted to a
98
Andy Warhol, Popism: The Warhol 60s (New York: Harper & Row, 1980), 181.
Callie Angell, Andy Warhol, Filmmaker in The Andy Warhol Museum (New York:
Distributed Art Publishers, 1994), 131.
100
Albees play, Whos Afraid of Virginia Woolfe, a dramatic study in sadism, is widely
rumored to be based on the fiery relationship of filmmakers and Factory regulars, Marie Menken
and Willard Maas. Menken appeared in a number of Warhol films including The Chelsea Girls,
and Maas is likely the man who performs offscreen fellatio in Blowjob (1964).
99
91
variety of often unrecognized influences from theater and drama, including the
hostile dramas of playwright Edward Albee and the experimental Theater of the
Ridiculous (to which Tavel was the principal contributor).101 The connections
between Warhols cinema and the theatrical and performance art developments of
the 1960s have been largely neglected in the critical and historical evaluations of
his work. However, an awareness of those overlapping tendencies in
performance-based arts may help us to better understand the unsettling and
idiosyncratic nature of Warhols work in cinema.
In terms of the ethical concerns of this films somewhat sadistic approach,
Warhol argued that its emotional severity was actually a tribute to its humanism,
when he wrote, The Chelsea Girls is an experimental film which deals in human
emotion and human life, [] anything to do with the human person, I feel is all
right.102 In their emphasis on the uncritical observation of peoples actions,
Warhols films incorporate a degree of unpredictability that is conditioned by
human behavior. This is to say, his cinema of this period is largely determined by
the contingencies and whims of volatile individuals as they act and react
spontaneously, in real time in front of his camera. Paul Arthur has argued that
Warhols cinema calls attention to certain attributes of his art that, in their
emphasis on human presence, are significantly different from the supposedly
101
Warhol was an acquaintance of Edward Albee, and in an interview in from 1966 with Gerard
Malanga, he cites the Mike Nichols film, released during the same summer in which he shot The
Chelsea Girls, as a major influence on his film (Gerard Malanga, My Favorite Superstar: Notes
on My Epic, Chelsea Girls in Ill Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews, 19621987, ed. Kenneth Goldsmith (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2004), 129).
102
Ibid.
92
post-modern replicating machine who was responsible for the Campbells soup
cans and the Brillo Boxes of his pop art production. Playing his own devils
advocate, Arthur asks, Why on earth, one might ask, do we need a humanist
Warhol, a tender purveyor of individual autonomy (minus interiority) and social
significance? He answers his question by suggesting simply that this is the
Warhol that these films present, and thus a corrective is needed for the popular
critical approach in which Warhol is being paraded as the father of
postmodernism (a mantle tirelessly promoted by Peter Wollen, Barbara Kruger,
and others). 103 As Arthur suggests, Warhol, the filmmaker, might be best
understood as an artist obsessed with presence and authenticity, in short, concepts
that relate directly towards humans and their social, performative identities. Film
scholar Patricia Mellencamp shares Arthurs opinion of Warhols films. She
writes, The art historical interpretations of Warhol as the critic/celebrator of the
pleasures of consumer culture become ludicrous in front of many of his films.104
As he unflinchingly directed his camera towards the interpersonal space in
front of it, he attempted to engage with an ontological and representational
question that goes back to the earliest theoretical considerations of cinema: Is film
actually capable of inscribing human presence within its textual limits? Film
historian David James suggests that this is one of the most fundamental concerns
of Warhols film art. He writes, that Warhols cinema is thus a meta-cinema, an
103
Arthur, Flesh of Absence: Resighting the Warhol Catechism in Andy Warhol Film Factory,
ed. Michael OPray (London: British Film Institute, 1992), 152.
104
Patricia Mellencamp, Indiscretions: Avant-Garde Film, Video, and Feminism (Bloomington
and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990), 197.
93
inquiry into the mechanisms of the inscription of the individual into the apparatus
and into the way such inscription has been historically organized.105 As James
suggests, Warhols cinema devised a series of mediations on the possibility of
etching subjectivity into the cinematic apparatus. In almost all of his six hundred
films the human face is of central significance.106 (As in his painting, human
portraiture is perhaps his central generic frame.) When Warhol famously claimed
that he wanted to be a machine, his statement was not so much an utterance of a
sincere fantasy as an acknowledgment of the sheer impossibility of such a
prospect.107 In such statements and in his cinema more generally Warhol
presents his art as a conceptual riddle concerning the ambivalent and complex
interaction of the artists volition and the mechanicity of technological mediation.
He thus draws our attention, rather paradoxically perhaps, to the ontological
potency of presence and the limits of arts capacity to represent it.
As he turned his camera on the band of tortured extroverts that peopled the
Factory, what he revealed in his new medium of choice was not the post-modern
cynicism of the machine that he is so often credited with, but a series of semidocumentary encounters featuring an uncomfortable variety of profilmic
performance art that he set up, catalyzed, and provoked into being a kind of
street theater for the cameras benefit, that eagerly engages with all the
contingencies of the uncontrollable world that it records. In this sense Warhols
105
106
94
films share more with the concerns of performance art, happenings, and
documentary filmmaking than they do with an abstract or plastic film practice. It
is for this reason that film historian and critic P. Adams Sitney wrote, in 1974,
that Warhols cinema makes the rest of American avant-garde films all look
incredibly similar.108
In this astute observation, Sitney also implicitly admits the limits of his own historical
interpretation of the American avant-garde cinema in his Visionary Film, a text that describes the
work of Stan Brakhage as its most significant achievement, while largely omitting the films of
Warhol because of their fundamental incompatibility with the romantic paradigm that he
celebrates (Sitney, Visionary Film, 350).
109
She said, In The Chelsea Girls I found three of the most extraordinary sequences of the
cinema Ive ever seen. Since seeing it, Ive been continuously haunted by the movies beauty and
power. Anyone seriously interested in films must see Warhols new movie because it goes into a
whole new dimension (Bockris, 258). For Portrait of Jason, Clarke used her apartment in the
Chelsea Hotel as her set, thus situating her film in the same space of production in which portions
of The Chelsea Girls was made. And, to further extend the extratextual determinants that Portrait
of Jason shares with The Chelsea Girls, Clarke and Warhol both used the same unusual variety of
film camera: an Auricon single-system camera that was designed primarily for sit-down television
interviews. It is a heavy camera that is intended to be used only on a tripod.
95
111
96
position that he holds both psychologically and socially: He performs in drag and
openly discusses his sexual encounters with a candor that is both rare and
extremely brave for a gay man on film in the mid-to-late 1960s.112
Throughout the filmmaking process, Holiday willfully engages in the
destabilizing psychodramatic inquisition that Clarke has set up for him. He openly
drinks alcohol and smokes cigarettes and pot continuously, and in the process he
does not dodge any of the faux-psychiatric questions that are presented from
offscreen by Clarke and Lee, as they command him: Tell me about your
mother. Or when they ask, Have you ever made it with a chick?113 Yet, there is
something in Holidays demeanor, like that of Pope Ondine, which is a put-on, a
performed identity that cannot quite be equated with that of the person on screen.
Both of these films also feature a significant semantic slippage: When should the
performer in The Chelsea Girls be called Pope Ondine (the character) vs. Ondine
(his most common title) vs. Robert Olivo (his birth name)? Similarly, when
discussing Portrait of Jason, when are we referring to Jason Holiday (the stage
name of the performer-hustler) vs. Aaron Payne (his birth name)?114 A tangle of
names underpins these works, demonstrating that for both films fluid,
112
Ondine, like Holiday, openly discusses his homosexuality on camera in a number of Warhols
films.
113
There is some evidence to suggest that he may also have taken LSD, an even more potent drug
for the encouragement of unguarded psychic states (Shirley Clarke Papers in the Wisconsin
Historical Archive at the University of Wisconsin, Madison).
114
Because of his frequent references to his jazz musician friends, including Miles Davis, Philly
Joe Jones, Dina Washington, and Carmen McRae, a logical guess would suggest that he likely
assumed the surname of Holiday, because of an affinity and appreciation for Billie Holiday (who
was also bisexual). As an extremely talented black artist, a performer of great emotional weight,
and a tragic victim of racism and sexual and drug abuse, for Aaron Payne, she would have
embodied a whole set of associations that his performance within the film suggests.
97
transgressive, and queer notions of performance and identity frame the social
experiments that they present.
It is clear throughout that part of what we are seeing is a rehearsed
nightclub routine, something that is evidenced by his repeated catchphrases (Ill
never tell), his a capella performances of Broadway songs, and his clearly
practiced impersonations of Mae West and Scarlet OHara, that all blend, in a
manner like Lenny Bruce or Richard Pryor, into a register of performance
between play and critique that undoubtedly contains some detail of true
autobiography. This becomes clearer as Jasons level of intoxication increases and
his performative faade begins to collapse. Though Clarke did indeed compress
the nights events into a feature length film (through the act of editing and
selective shooting) in the final film she maintains a rough historical integrity by
keeping the filmed events in the basic order in which they took place.115
As the film develops, the lines between Jason Holiday (the character,
hustler, performer) and Aaron Payne (the person) become progressively more
compromised as he begins to teeter closer and closer to the dark, drunken,
confessional abyss of his unmediated emotions. Nevertheless, Clarke and her
partner Carl Lee insist, as heard from offscreen, that all the while, Holiday is not
coming down front, is not being real. In their attacks on Holiday, Clarke and
Lee loudly claim that all of his imitations and stories are really only fictive roleplaying. (Like a variety of Warhols film projects, this too is an inquisition.) In
115
This has been claimed by Clarke on a number of occasions, and is confirmed by her lengthy
film logs that document the totality of her footage from the night (Shirley Clarke Papers in the
Wisconsin Historical Archive at the University of Wisconsin, Madison).
98
the films final sequence, Lee even calls Holiday a phony, the same insult that
Rona Page leveled at Pope Ondine a year earlier in The Chelsea Girls. Clearly a
performed phoniness was anathema to the underground artistic subcultures of
the 1960s, yet these conflicts between queer performers and straight provocateurs
also reflected a fundamental incongruity between the performative values of these
differently sexualized communities.
An exchange between Clarke and Holiday tellingly demonstrates the
films complex use of shaded colloquial language to evoke thorny, multi-layered
tensions between race, performance, and sexuality:
Clarke: You lonely?
Holiday: Lonely? Im desperate, but Im cool.
C: You should be lonely.
H: Yeah, I should suffer because I have no rights.
C: Youre not suffering. []
H: I declared insanity. I said I was sick oh, you wont believe this I
said I was a sick queen. []. I got weak and I was humble and I needed
sympathy.
C: What do you mean by humble?
H: I was phony. Thats what humble means, right? Especially when you
look at a colored boy and say, Youre humble.
This difficult exchange not only further cements the viewers understanding of the
intricate relationship between Holidays outsider social status and his volatile
psychology, but it also explicitly lays out an interesting set of concerns by way of
an unusual linguistic correlation. As Holiday suggests equivalence between
humility and phoniness, he implies that being artificial or inauthentic is
tantamount to being subservient. His statement implies that the conditions of this
99
challenge to be real, to be true to himself, both on film and in life, is all the
more difficult and rife with potential pitfalls for the person of color.
As Portrait of Jason progresses, the interrogators become more combative
as they challenge Holiday to come clean. Eventually Holiday reaches his
breaking point as he collapses into tears and admits the failures and falsities of his
life, and in so doing, he lets down his performative faade. Unlike Ondine,
Holiday eventually admits to being a phony, like a psychiatric patient who has
made a therapeutic breakthrough. Towards the end of the film, he discharges the
following statement, using words that are punctuated with pauses of significant
emotional heft: You only have so much energy. And I just spent too much time
being a nervous wreck. I guess I never really had any fun at all. [] Do you know
how much that hurts? And like the subject of psychoanalysis, his breakthrough is
accompanied by a real moment of catharsis, as he is sobbing uncontrollably now.
He explains his emotional state when he says, It only hurts when you think of it.
And if youre real youll think of it a long, long time. Because of Holidays
emotional frankness, the tears on his face, the anguished expression of his pinched
mouth and eyes, there is a trace of real disturbance here. This moment of pathos
marks the films success as an observational document of interpersonal
interaction, yet it is also the source of great ethical discomfort and anxiety for its
viewers.
Though Clarke claimed to have ceded control to her subject, there is
nevertheless a kind of bullying an act of profilmic aggression that occurs in
100
the film, particularly as it reaches its climax. At the end, Holiday expresses a need
for emotional affirmation from Lee, but he only responds with: I think youre
full of shit. Clarke suggests that this act of aggression was partially planned
before the film even began, as she explains her orchestration of the films
conclusion:
I had every intention of having a climax of something taking place. I knew
that I would have to get Jason to face the truth at some point. But I wasnt
positive how. In other words, I was going to let Jason do whatever he
wanted to as long as I could and then I was going to challenge him to
come clean, tell the truth.116
Despite the seemingly shared improvisatory sentiment and collective authorship
of Holiday, Clarke, and Lee, there is also a deliberate organization, a pre-planned
confrontational plot that catalyzes the filmmaking process and the emotional
breakdown of its subject. The film resembles Angells description of Warhols
cinema in relation to performance art of the period, as something that depends on
interpersonal tensions and destabilizing elements, culminating in a filmic act
of provocation and a presentation of self-effacement.
Clarke, like any viewer, was aware of the fact that some people might
interpret the film as exploitative. In one sense, Holiday is the victim of Clarke and
Lees aggression. He is not the one orchestrating the event, so within the sphere of
production, Holiday is contained within the apparatus as it films him and is later
edited according to Clarkes specifications. However she claimed that she was
ethically justified in her project because, in her mind, Holidays performance was
116
101
a kind of success in the face of hostile threats, and thus demonstrated his survival
and perseverance in the face of social oppression: She explained, I will not allow
people to exploit themselves if they dont win in the end.117 According to Clarke,
Holiday overcomes the exploitative frame in which he appears. However, within
the film there is indeed a sense in which Clarke and Lee are looming over their
subject, like Ronald Tavel in Warhols films, as aggressive interrogators wielding
a sadistic power from behind (or beside) the camera.118 Obviously there are many
ethical issues at stake in this films exchange of power as it confronts issues of
race, class, and sexuality: Holiday, a gay African-American male, is manipulated
(or perhaps directed), at least partially, by Clarke, a heterosexual white woman,
and Lee, a heterosexual black male.
In an interview with Jonas Mekas, published in The Village Voice in
September of 1967, Jason Holiday addressed these topics, as he explained,
I wondered if people would think I was homosexual, bisexual, or
heterosexual. I wondered if I was great enough to convince them that I am
all three. The three-sided figure makes a triangular trisexual. I said: try
anything as long as there is money in it, dig it? Im being told by some
people that Miss Clarke has used me. I think the chick and me are even,
dig it? Thanks to Miss Clarke and Carl Lee, World youre gonna hear
from me.119
It is clear from Holidays commentary that perhaps what may have been most
controversial about the film, in pre-Stonewall era New York, was the subjects
open admission of his own queer sexuality. (The same candidly queer sensibility
117
Ibid.
They are never seen onscreen, though their voices are heard, thus allowing them to partially
penetrate the profilmic space, though in soundtrack only.
119
Mekas, Movie Journal, The Village Voice, September 28, 1967: 31.
118
102
contributed to both the scandal and the popularity of The Chelsea Girls a year
earlier.) In fact, in his quotation above, Holiday plays the part not of a gay man,
but of a pragmatist without sexual preference, perhaps in an effort to retroactively
downplay the sexual candor of his performance in the film.
In the film Holiday frequently refers to himself in sexual terms,
acknowledging his polymorphous sexual identity as well as his occasional work
as a male prostitute who had sex with men. Holiday describes himself as a stone
whore, a male bitch, bonafide freaksville, an experimental queen, and he
discusses in some detail a number of his male sexual partners and queer sex acts
that he has performed. The graphic and frank back-and-forth of the film, both in
its sexual and its racial candor, would likely induce some anxiety and discomfort
in a straight white audience of 1966. In this regard Holidays performative
openness and his candidly queer sexual energy determine the irreverence of the
films content. Towards its end, Lee attempts to provoke an emotional response
from Holiday, as he repeatedly calls him a rotten queen. The hostility is
certainly strategic, yet the emotional sincerity of Holidays response is
undeniable, as he pleads for Lees friendship and love.
In his quotation above, Holiday suggests that though he may have been
used by Clarke, he and she are in fact even because the film gave him some
public exposure. This seems a nave response, and in fact, after the films release,
Holiday hired a lawyer to acquire monetary compensation from Clarke for his
103
involvement in the film.120 (In 1971, Tavel too sued Warhol, also claiming that
the artist did not sufficiently compensate him for his work.) Portrait of Jason is
uncomfortable for many reasons, including the profilmic hostility that Clarke and
Lee produce, the cameras relentless long take documentation, the emotional
severity of Holidays performance, and the criminal and sexual frankness of its
content. Portrait of Jason does not resolve any of the ethical difficulties that it
presents. If anything, it inflames them, revealing its central aesthetic function in
a way related to the work of Warhol described above as the literal embodiment
of social and psychic tensions, as a kind of experiment in psychodrama, in which
the filmmakers and their camera relentlessly probe their subject, as they taunt
him, ask leading questions, and push him, as a psychotherapist might, into a
public reflection upon his lifes experiences.
As Holiday confesses for the camera, he continually affirms its presence,
making it clear that his emotional undressing is being done, at least in part, for its
benefit. Like many documentarians of the cinma vrit and Direct Cinema
movements, Clarke used the camera as a catalyst to trigger a confrontation, and
ultimately a confession. This is a distinctly Warholian strategy. In an interview for
a recent BBC documentary on Warhol, film critic J. Hoberman eloquently
distilled the psychodramatic exchange that was central to Warhols cinema:
120
According to correspondence between Clarke and Holidays lawyer in 1968, the agreement
made between the filmmaker and her subject required that she pay him 10% of the films gross
profits after recouping the production costs (which were $21,500). Despite the fact that Holiday
contracted a lawyer, there is no evidence that she did not fulfill her part of the agreement (Shirley
Clarke Papers, Wisconsin Historical Society, University of Wisconsin, Madison).
104
Hoberman in the BBC documentary Warhols Cinema: A Mirror for the Sixties (1989).
Mekas, Movie Journal, 281. Many projects of the Direct Cinema too made distinct efforts to
expose hidden personalities and private aspects of character; one of the most famous early
examples of this approach is Primary (1960) by Robert Drew Associates, in which the filmmakers
made an effort to disarm the public faade and expose the multi-layered personalities of John F.
Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey, then presidential candidates.
123
Parker Tyler, Underground Film: A Critical History (New York: Da Capo, 1995), 69.
122
105
and a subcultural performance. The profilmic space of Jason provided a forum for
a public investigation of selfhood within certain hyperbolized conditions of
performance and mediation. Clarke has explained that the works greatest value as
a forum for humanistic knowledge and understanding can be traced primarily to
the event of the films production and to the profilmic interaction of its
participants.124 For this reason, it is no surprise that Jason would be her last
completed film before moving into the more immediate, process-based media
formats of interactive and closed circuit video, a medium that loudly proclaims its
preference for presence over plasticity, just as Portrait of Jason does.
Art/Rape:
Clarkes Portrait of Jason was a film that gave a curious, perhaps
voyeuristic public privileged access to the most private thoughts and anxieties of
an outsider and fugitive from bourgeois culture. In one sense, both Portrait of
Jason and The Chelsea Girls paraded a circus of misfits so that a ticket-buying
public could gawk at their marked otherness. Yet there is also a sense in which
these films interrogate the forces of surveillance and voyeurism, as they make
private encounters public by openly engaging with scopic pressures that mimic
the rapidly expanding mediascape as it was becoming more and more dominated
by television cameras and other mechanisms of public recording. In fact,
124
In 1967, she said, For me, the uniquely extraordinary part of making Portrait of
Jason was the shooting experience itself (quoted in Mekas, Movie Journal, 289).
106
throughout a variety of media, much work of the avant-garde from the 1960s and
70s directly tackled a growing awareness of visual technologies in public life.
Yoko Ono and John Lennons 1969 film, Rape, addressed these anxieties in an
almost hyperbolic fashion.125
Yoko Onos involvement with cinema, like that of Warhol, developed out
of her work in other media. For many artists of Ono and Warhols generation, this
work in cinema represented a culmination of activity in various other art forms.
Ono was a prominent contributor to the loose international aggregation of artists
known as Fluxus whose work embodied a particular variety of 1960s anti-art that
was playful, provocative, and anarchic. The experimental work of this group was
often conceptually oriented in its efforts to devise novel ways to challenge public
conventions of the relationship between art and life. It follows that Onos cinema
was inextricably linked to her previous performance pieces and conceptual art
projects. Before being romantically and publicly linked with John Lennon, Ono
was already somewhat notorious as an artist-provocateur. In 1964-65, she
presented a famous performance work, Cut Piece, in Japan, New York, and
125
Because of their international stature as artists and public figures, it is difficult to establish a
national frame for the interpretation of the film projects of Ono and Lennon. Though Rape was
filmed in London, Ono and Lennon moved back and forth between London and New York during
the late 60s and early 70s, permanently relocating to the United States in 1971. In addition, their
artistic milieu was truly international in its well-known connections with a number of artists and
movements in Europe and the United States. Also, Ono was born in Japan, but relocated to the
United States on a number of occasions in childhood and adolescence, and throughout her career,
produced performance based work around the world. (And Lennon was of course English, but
spent significant amounts of time in New York throughout the 1960s and 1970s, before eventually
getting a green card in 1976 and later becoming a citizen; Ono was granted permanent resident
status and remains a long-time resident of the United States.) Though Rape was produced in the
UK, its filmmakers worked in a milieu that was in some sense, extremely international. In
addition, it is significant that the films primary performer was an Austrian national and that the
film premiered on Austrian TV.
107
London. In it, she walked on stage carrying a pair of scissors. She then sat down,
placed the scissors on the floor, and asked the audience to cut off her clothing,
which they did to varying degrees depending on the performance. Ultimately, the
performance of the piece (how the people interacted with Ono) and its final
outcome (how much clothes she was left wearing) were entirely determined by
choices made by the audience. It was a project in which she put her own body at
the risk of public humiliation for politically symbolic purposes by engaging in
performance with the forces of visual and physical violence that frequently
directed their energies towards the bodies of women in everyday life. These
registers of controversy, tension, and scopic violence are closely related to Onos
efforts in cinema as well.
Throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s, Ono and Lennon collaborated
on a number of films including Film #5 (Smile) (1968), Rape (1969), Fly (1970),
Freedom (1970), Apotheosis (1970), and Erection (1971). A number of these
films grew directly out of conceptual projects that Ono had produced as a member
of the Fluxus art group. One of the principal artistic strategies of these artists was
the use of the event-score, a simple script-like framing device that featured sparse
lists of commands and actions to be enacted by an artist or performer. Consider,
for example, Onos strange and provocative City Piece (1961), which has as its
content only the following instruction: Walk all over the city with an empty baby
108
Yoko Ono, Grapefruit: A Book of Instructions by Yoko Ono (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1970), unpaginated.
127
Conner in MacDonald, A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 151.
128
Quoted in Chrissie Iles, Erotic Conceptualism: The Films of Yoko Ono in Yes Yoko Ono
(New York City: Japan Society and Harry N. Abrams, 2000), 216. Also see Screen Writings: Texts
and Scripts From Independent Films, ed. MacDonald (Berkeley: University of California, 1995),
22.
109
129
110
111
manifest on the tortured face of the films assaulted subject, as it registers the
extreme social and interpersonal anxieties of the works production, thus
providing an affective and corporeal index of its sadism and unflinching
aggression.
Like the other two films discussed in this chapter, Rape foregrounds the
actions and statements of its subject by utilizing long takes, minimal editing, and
a variety of cinematography that focuses primarily upon the tense and dramatic
actions and interactions of its subjects. This aesthetic sensibility represented a
significant shift from the hand-crafted, tightly edited work of most avant-garde
filmmakers, and in some ways reflects the style and ontology of live television
and video work. In Rape, for seventy-seven minutes, a film crew (without Ono or
Lennon present) chased and attacked a young woman, using only the motion
picture camera and its related audio-recording apparatus to frighten her, aggravate
her frustrations, and trigger a breakdown, in which ultimately, she is brought to
tears. As in the two other projects discussed in this chapter, the filmmakers
fundamental purpose was to demonstrate the cameras capacity to provoke real
affective breaks in their subjects.
112
131
113
becomes a machine that makes the art.132 In a related fashion, the filmmakers
discussed in this chapter broke from conventional notions of controlled and
virtuosic textual space by privileging profilmic events, and thus foregrounding the
performances that they present as the primary source of their meaning. The
generative idea and the conceptual frames that bind the films executions function
as the artists principal authorial products, as exemplified by Yoko Onos simple
script for her film, or Warhols arbitrary use of thirty-three minute, one-reel units.
In his major essay on the avant-garde aesthetics of the era, The Art of
Time: Aesthetics of the Avant-Garde, artist, theorist, and drama critic Michael
Kirby eloquently distilled the shifting aesthetic sensibilities of vanguard artists, as
he described the principal distinctions between classical values and those of late
modernist practice. In 1969, he wrote,
Craft, technique, and talent are sometimes mistaken for significance. []
But there is no reason that an artist actually has to make the physical work
himself as long as he determines its characteristics. The point is that the
ease with which a work of art is made (or the apparent ease with which it
is made) has nothing to do with the significance of the work.133
Though Kirbys evaluation of art practice was commonly accepted in most
advanced circles of art making in the 1960s, the model of authorship that
privileged a single controlling subject still had significant force within the
American avant-garde cinema, for both aesthetic and practical reasons. Often, the
avant-garde filmmakers poverty of means was taken to be a virtue of the
amateurs dedication. However, as the examples above suggest, it was not the
132
Sol Lewitt, Paragraphs on Conceptual Art, Artforum 5, no. 10 (June 1967), 7983 .
Michael Kirby, The Art of Time: Aesthetics of the Avant-Garde in The Art of Time: Essays
on the Avant-Garde (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1969), 49.
133
114
only sensibility in practice. In fact, in their opening up into the extratextual social
and historical spaces beyond the limits of the controlled film frame, many
filmmakers of the 1960s utilized an observational, semi-documentary mode that
privileged contingent encounters with uncontrolled forces. This trend in
filmmaking reflected other artistic strategies of the era in which the dominant
model of an earlier modernist expressive author had been replaced by experiments
with chance, process, and collective authorship. In their attention to unflinching
observation, extreme performance, and extended duration, these films (by
Warhol, Clarke, and Ono) emphasized the embodied presence of the films
subjects and the contingency and the spontaneity of their thoughts and gestures.
The films described in this chapter (along with much of Warhols other
cinematic output) partially shifted the terms of experimental cinema away from
the plasticity of pure abstraction and the dreamy imaginings of artists toward a
filmmaking approach that emphasized process and contingency. In a sense, these
films of the mid-to-late 1960s predicted what was to come, sharing overlapping
strategies with developments in artists video that emphasized performance,
extended duration, and interactive display. Though the innovations of artists
video have been tied almost exclusively to the new technology and its
documentation of performance, it in fact has an extremely important philosophical
and aesthetic precedent in this semi-documentary undercurrent within the history
of experimental cinema.
115
134
Nol Burch, Theory of Film Practice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), 116.
116
Burch, 115.
117
textual openness that required any real sacrifice of authorial control. In fact, Stan
Brakhage, one of the most meticulous and romantic of all artisanal avant-garde
filmmakers described the philosophical innovations of John Cages as a
conceptual trap, as the greatest aesthetic net of this century. Brakhage
acknowledged the philosophical appeal of Cages thinking but nevertheless
interpreted the authorial or textual openness that the composer encouraged as a
trap of sorts, something that one has to go beyond in order to assert ones own
authorial voice.136 Burch recognized in the work of Warhol and other advanced
filmmakers a blend of chance and aggression that extended beyond the romantic
expectations of an artist like Brakhage, who was more sympathetic to an earlier
aesthetic model derived from Abstract Expressionism, rather than the forms that
followed its formal, performative, and social imperatives into the 1960s. The
cinematic use of chance that was Burchs subject and a resource for the
filmmakers discussed herein, however, was not something that was determined by
aleatory organizational procedures (like those produced through the use of the I
Ching). It was rather a function of unplanned and uncontrollable interactions
between humans, the natural world, and the cinematic apparatus in Burchs
words, a confrontation between camera and contingent reality. In this regard, he
observed that a number of filmmakers and artists were mounting a challenge
against the stilted structures of conventional authorship by what he eloquently
136
Brakhage, Respond Dance in Film Culture Reader, ed. P. Adams Sitney (New York: Cooper
Square Press, 1970), 242243.
118
described as the joyful and lucid abandonment by the composer [or artist] of a
portion of his conscious control over the work.137
Though none of the films described herein actually engage with
indeterminacy as extreme as the music of John Cage, they do represent a
loosening of authorial control, in Burchs words, an abandonment of a portion
of conscious control over the work. In their performative openness, these works
of Warhol, Clarke, and Ono all feature filmic interactions with an unscripted
reality that in some compelling ways maintain the conditions of contingent
encounter that define them as unpredictable and spontaneous.138 For example,
Clarke explained her experience in shooting Portrait of Jason in terms of a set of
spontaneous reactions:
Suddenly it was as if a great weight was lifted, and I could relax and, more
important, respond to the emotions spinning around the room. I finally
became part of the situation myself [] one with Jason and the camera. At
last I found the ability to swing along with what was happening
spontaneously, with no preconceived judgments. I started to trust Jason
and the camera and not insist on being the controller.139
In all of these works, an idea was at least partially conceived before the shooting
a verbal confrontation between two people, a semi-psychoanalytic interview, the
stalking of a stranger but until the end, what would result from these encounters
was unknown to everyone involved (including the filmmakers). In this regard,
these films effectively exemplify the conditions for what might be described as
137
Burch, 106.
Portions of The Chelsea Girls were indeed scripted, albeit in a rather unconventional way, by
Ronald Tavel. Those portions of the film are not central to the argument here.
139
Mekas, Movie Journal, 289.
138
119
120
Cage, Silence, 8.
Ibid., 13.
121
authorship. In their collective shift away from the more individualist, expressive
mode of the avant-garde, Warhol, Clarke, and Ono utilized production processes
that were significantly more collaborative than the work of most avant-garde
filmmakers of the period. The canonical American avant-garde films have
generally been described as the products of lone amateur authors engaged with a
particular set of individual concerns that culminate in work of personal
expression, sensory meditation, or philosophical statement. The films of Warhol,
Clarke, and Ono described above interestingly revise these strategies of the avantgarde. Though most independent and avant-garde filmmakers of the era shot and
meticulously edited their work themselves a situation that made the attribution
of authorship fairly straightforward the films described in this chapter present
alternative models of creative control in the filmmaking process. In fact, all of the
films described above were produced by small crews shooting 16mm synchronous
sound. This format was rather rare for experimental filmmakers in the 1960s,
though it was the preferred method for documentarians (including those
associated with direct cinema, the vanguard of documentary film practice in the
United States).
Though Warhol was certainly behind the camera at some point during the
shooting of The Chelsea Girls, he may or may not have been during the shooting
of the Pope Ondine section, which is described above.142 It is well known that
142
Warhol claimed to have been operating the camera during Ondines spastic episode, though at
one point the performer addresses Paul while looking at the camera. And in fact, after this
moment of extreme drama, we can see Warhol away from the camera in the wings of the factory
(Andy Warhol, Popism, 188).
122
Warhol did not always operate the camera in his films, and in fact it has been
reported that on some occasions, he was not even on set.143 To some critics of his
cinema this posed a problem. For example, though he was an avid supporter of
Warhols work in film, the critic, filmmaker, and spokesperson for the New
American Cinema, Jonas Mekas, articulated this artisanal sensibility when he
stated at a public roundtable at the New York Film Festival in 1967, that no
filmmaker could be considered a contributor to the new cinema, to the mediums
most advanced trends, until he or she picked up his or her own camera.144 This
pride in a personalized, individualistic production process was the standard for
most independent and avant-garde filmmakers of the period.
For Portrait of Jason Clarke utilized a crew that included a camera person
and an editor, such that she worked as a news director might, overseeing the
interview in person and giving direction to the technicians, but not directly
controlling the filmic action.145 The case of Ono and Lennons film is even more
extreme in that they were not even present for its shooting. Their camera person,
Nic Knowland shot footage for the film on the streets of London according to the
143
In Horse, Warhol can be heard engaging in an offscreen telephone conversation while the film
is being shot.
144
Here Mekas was actually explaining the difference between so-called European art cinema and
the more personal filmmaking of The New American Cinema. His exact words were, The day
Godard will pick up the camera and will start shooting his own films he will become a part of the
New Cinema (Is There a New Cinema? roundtable (1967), audio recording in the collection of
The Museum of Modern Art, New York).
145
She did oversee and direct the edit of the footage. It must also be admitted however, that she
made significant modifications to the film in its post-production as she oversaw a number of
changes to it through the use of optically printed zooms and freeze frames. So, her role in the film
was by no means entirely distanced from the creative process. Still, though Clarke oversaw and
directed these changes they were actually done by a lab technician (Shirley Clarke Papers,
Wisconsin Historical Archive, University of Wisconsin, Madison).
123
146
So, neither the filmmaking nor the editing was directly executed by Ono and Lennon. Ono
claims to have closely overseen the editing of each of her films, but as she explained to Scott
MacDonald in 1989 she did not do the cutting, because as she said, I was generally in charge of
the editing I mean I would have a film editor working with me I dont know the technology
(Ono in Scott MacDonald, A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews With Independent Filmmakers
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 151).
124
hundred-foot magazines of 16mm film, which last for thirty-three minutes each.
Because of the absence of editing, the historical integrity of each of the films
half-hour units is always maintained. The films soundtrack is also an unbroken
and evidentiary document because of the unusual conditions of its recording
directly onto the film stock itself, making for an atypical format known as singlesystem sound film. Because of its formal idiosyncrasies that required the
microphone to be directly attached to the camera, this technology was used
primarily for television news in which no post-production mixing would be
necessary. Most sync sound recording in this era allowed the film and sound
equipment to function independently and with greater freedom of movement (and
was thus known as double system sound). Since the sound recording did not need
to be added to the visual footage after the fact, the historical integrity of the
sound-image relationship is maintained in Warhols films in a way that is
strikingly different from Hollywood cinema, independent film production, and
avant-garde film.147 After these scenes were shot, their projection sequence within
the somewhat epic project evolved over time, through various orders and
combinations, into a two-hundred-and-five minute film in which reels were
projected simultaneously side-by-side, for a total of twelve reels. In its earliest
days of exhibition at the Filmmakers Cinematheque in New York City, the
projection conditions of The Chelsea Girls were unusually elastic, such that the
147
In addition, the camera that Warhol used in this period was an Auricon, a heavy, tripod-based
camera that was designed for sit-down television interviews. This camera was designed to be used
with single system sound-on-film recording, such that there would be no need for the postproduction synchronization of sound and image.
125
148
For more details about the films early projection history, see a short essay by Bob Cowan, a
filmmaker who was also the projectionist for The Chelsea Girls first public screenings (Bob
Cowan, My Life and Times With the Chelsea Girls, Take One 3, no. 7 (September/October
1971), 13).
149
For the standardized projection instructions to the film, see Peter Gidals chart in his text,
Materialist Film (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), 87.
126
127
impression that it was only barely mediated. This open exposure of the films
production process creates an illusion of historical integrity and performative
authenticity. A similar false guarantee of faithfulness is included in Onos Rape in
that each segment of the film begins as the filmmakers introduce the slate (or
clapboard) in order to suggest to the viewer that these segments of audio-visual
documentation have not been sutured together by Hollywood style editing or postproduction voiceover, which might disguise their material and historical limits.
However, like Jason, Rape is carefully edited. Though these films are unusual in
their capacity to capture a unique degree of the historical and ontological integrity
of the encounters that they document, they nevertheless function within a
bracketed self-aware, self-reflexive mode that features its own degree of
rhetorical and stylistic manipulation.150
150
128
working in musical and theatrical modes. There is an important sense in which the
performative sensibility of Antonin Artaud, a radical theorist of an almost
impossibly hostile dramatic practice, took hold of the avant-garde arts of New
York in the era that is the subject of this study. As a component of the artistic
landscape of the 1960s and 70s, filmmaking was necessarily involved in the
avant-gardes circulation of creative sensibilities. This branch of filmmaking can
be better understood in relation to its cultural climate, if it is considered in the
context of a range of trends in provocation and pressure in other performance
based arts that drew philosophical inspiration from the principles of Antonin
Artauds Theatre of Cruelty.
***
In his consideration of these new and provocative shifts in film aesthetics,
towards greater degrees of cruelty and hostility, critic Nol Burch drew some
important connections between these works and a range of artistic practices in a
variety of media. One of Burchs most significant observations in his volume
(Theory of Film Practice introduced above) was his recognition that some of these
innovative filmmaking strategies utilized aggression as a powerful and previously
untapped creative resource.151 For him, The Chelsea Girls was the definitive
example of this new mode of filmmaking based on provocation; in his words, this
film used the camera as an instrument of torture.152 In Rape and Portrait of
Jason, the camera is applied towards the same ends as it enacts an unflinching
151
Burchs discussion of these aesthetic devices can be found in the chapters Chance and Its
Functions and Structures of Aggression in Theory of Film Practice, 105135.
152
This is Burchs phrase to describe the use of the camera in The Chelsea Girls (Burch, 118).
129
inquisition, in a way that is similar to, and partially derived from, the strategies
of Warhols cinema. For the artists described above, as well as many other artists
and thinkers of the 1960s, violence and aggression, both profilmic and filmic,
were useful aesthetic tools. As Burch described it, their unpredictability posed a
significant challenge to the controlled, regulated, and mechanized structures of
narrative and ontological containment that were typical of most cinemas, what
Burch described as the mathematics of form.153
Like the filmmakers described above, a number of other drama and
performance-based artists of the era created works in which acts of violence and
provocation were willfully sometimes sadistically or masochistically enacted
in order to trigger a psychological rupture or destabilization in their subjects or
audience. Some of the most aggressive, confrontational, and graphic performance
art of the period, including that of Vito Acconci or Carolee Schneemann, both of
whom incorporated significant doses of explicit sexuality and violent symbolism
into their body art performances in works such as Pryings (1971), Seedbed
(1971), Meat Joy (1964), and Interior Scroll (1975, 1977) shared a
philosophical sensibility with Warhol and other filmmakers who worked in the
mode of profilmic provocation described above. In their aggression and emphasis
on real-time social interaction and conflict, Warhol and his milieu addressed
related cultural and aesthetic registers to those of the interactive radical drama of
the Living Theatre, the social experimentation of Allan Kaprow and the
153
130
happenings movement, the bodily extremes of the Judson Hall dance group, or the
cultural anarchy and danger of Fluxus performance.
Warhol, Clarke, and Ono were all intimately familiar with the most
advanced trends in performance and experimental theater of the period.
According to Tavel, Warhol first communicated his concept for a film approach
based on inquisition during a happening by Yvonne Rainer at the Judson
Church.154 Clarke, a trained modern dancer, had also worked with The Living
Theatre in her production of The Connection (1962). And Ono was perhaps more
experienced as a performance artist than as a filmmaker. Warhol, Clarke, and Ono
shared privileged cultural and artistic connections to the New York based
performance avant-garde of the 1960s (partially because of their social networks),
and though they may not have openly acknowledged this influence, it is clearly
inscribed on all of the works described above. These films, like much art of the
sixties, forcefully confronted and challenged both their subjects and their
audiences, using the controversial structures of psychic and social disorientation.
As such, they represent the filmic apex of a negative sensibility that had pervaded
significant parts of the American counterculture throughout the Vietnam era,
making a counterargument (based primarily in New York) to West Coast
hippiedom and the romantic poetics of self-realization.
In an era well known for its rhetoric of mind-blowing, spiritual
transformation, and social transgression, the aesthetic and philosophical influence
154
131
of French dramatist and theorist Antonin Artaud could not have come into contact
with the New York avant-garde at a more appropriate time. Though he wrote his
best known work in the late 1930s, Artaud arrived in America as a major
influence in the late 1950s and early 60s, largely as a result of a then recent
translation of his writing. Artauds work prescribed an assault on the senses that
was perfectly attuned to the neo-avant-garde of the era. The following statement
from Artauds The Theater of Cruelty (Second Manifesto) could easily have
been uttered by countercultural icon Abbie Hoffman or experimental theater
director Julian Beck: Admittedly or not, conscious or unconscious, the poetic
state, a transcendent experience of life, is what the public is fundamentally
seeking through love, crime, drugs, war, or insurrection. In this massively
influential manifesto, Artaud continues to explain that the purpose of his radical
and confrontational aesthetic project was to restore a passionate and
convulsive conception of life.155 This sentiment, made explicit here by a French
dramatist writing thirty years before the artworks described herein, perfectly
encapsulates the most radical and extreme of artistic strategies of the 1960s and
70s, as it also calls for us, by virtue of its conceptual congruence with this ages
sensibility, to reconsider Artauds influence on the arts in America after World
War II.
Artauds thinking poses a sympathetic model for understanding the
hostility of the art of the late 1960s and early 1970s, both because of its popularity
155
Antonin Artaud, The Theater and its Double (New York: Grove Press, 1958), 122.
132
in that era and its conceptual resonance with the work and the cultural milieu of
the time. Artauds significance for experimental work in that epoch has never
been considered in relation to cinema, partially because his writing bears a
somewhat ambivalent relationship to the medium.156 However, it is the argument
here that for both philosophical and historical reasons, a consideration of Artauds
thinking in relation to the avant-garde performance-based artists of the 1960s can
help us to understand a forgotten artistic legacy of hostility, aggression, and
anxiety. We can better understand the art of this period if we extend our mode of
interpretation past its textual limits, to social and cultural spaces that made it
possible, as well as the intellectual trends that helped to determine its directions.
The work of the filmmakers described above has not been evaluated in
relation to Artauds thinking, yet as has been argued herein, these artists were all
intricately connected to postwar performance, and were very much aware of the
cultural energies of a New York avant-garde that was encouraged by his thinking.
By considering these unsettling film projects in light of Artauds influential
sensibility we can make better sense of their belligerent aggression and hostility.
As has been argued throughout this project, the three films discussed above are
exemplary of an aggressive mode of experimental cinema that shared certain
philosophical, structural, and aesthetic details. On one count they share a
particular openness to reality, as opposed to the predetermined structures of
conventional fiction genre filmmaking. In this sense, as Nol Burch has argued,
156
133
these works contest the mathematics of form upon which industrial cinema is
built. The transformative theatrical actions envisioned by Artaud too challenged
the systematicity of controlled texts based on streamlined cause-and-effect
narratives. He was particularly distrustful of the predictable, almost algorhythmic
nature of conventional filmmaking with its dependence on written language and
generic structure. He wrote that stupid order and habitual clarity are its
[cinemas] enemies.157
***
In 1958, roughly twenty years after its publication in French, Mary
Caroline Richards translated Artauds Le thtre et son double into English,
ushering in a major influence on American performance of the 1960s. John Cage
recommended the text to her while they were both at Black Mountain College, the
legendary experimental intermedial arts school in the mountains of North
Carolina. (Cage had learned of Artaud during his travels in Europe, through
fellow avant-garde composer Pierre Boulez.) The short book proved to be
massively influential, particularly upon a variety of performance-based artists
within the avant-garde community of New York City. Media theorist, literary
critic, and cultural icon Marshall McLuhan, whose own popular influence
trumped that of almost any other public intellectual of the period, argued that a
shift in theatrical sensibility correlated directly with other cultural transitions,
particularly as determined by the changing relations of various media. He
157
Artaud, Sorcery and Cinema in The Shadow and its Shadow: Surrealist Writings on the
Cinema, ed. and trans. Paul Hammond (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2000), 105.
134
explained that the modernist Theater of the Absurd (associated with Beckett and
Ionesco) had lost its cultural relevance, as theatrical trends shifted tone from the
allegorical to more confrontational forms, described by him as the theater of
blood and cruelty which Artaud called for. He explains that Artauds
confrontational and transgressive theater was popularized by dramatists like Peter
Weiss to function as a probe of the violences and dislocations of the
multiconscious global village of 1963 and after.158 The extent to which the artists
of the 1960s actually understood the irrational and contradictory writings of
Artaud has been debated by many, however it is indisputable that certain general
details and rhetorical emphases of Artauds thinking were uncannily congruent
with other artistic trends of the 1960s, having left considerable traces of influence
throughout the expansive and intermedial network of performance based art of the
period.159
In many ways, Artauds radical anarchic vision of social transformation
was entirely congruent with the aesthetic and social attitudes of post World War II
America. His writings on The Theater of Cruelty presented a notion of dramatic
performance intended to cleanse the aesthetic landscape of all mannered and
conventional approaches to constructing art. It would do so by utilizing methods
and manners as extreme as necessary and appropriate to the cultural timbre and
158
Marshall McLuhan with Wilfred Watson, From Clich to Archetype (New York: Viking Press,
1970), 9. Inexplicably, the text repeatedly misspells Artaud as Arnaud. Since it is done three
times in one paragraph, it is possible that this error was not the typesetters, but perhaps that of
McLuhan or his co-author, Watson.
159
See Douglas Kahns essay Artaud in America in which he disputes this claim (Kahn, 100
Years of Cruelty: Essays on Artaud, ed. Edward Scheer (Sydney: Power Publications and
Artspace, 2000), 237262).
135
tone of other aspects of civilization. Artaud argued that, if the times were anxious
and volatile, so too would theater be. He wrote, The Theater of Cruelty will
choose subjects and themes corresponding to the agitation and unrest
characteristic of our epoch.160 In his writings, he encouraged a destabilizing
approach that would combat conventional understandings of art and life by
attacking the desensitized sensibilities of the public with hostile, aggressive, even
cruel form and content. He advocated an anarchic theater of agitation and
aggression, something that would challenge all structures of control and
systematicity. In his Theater of Cruelty Artaud envisioned revolutionary theater as
gestamtkuntswerk, a blending of all other art forms, in order to serve the anarchic
purpose of resisting the economic, utilitarian, and technical streamlining of the
world.161 As he saw it, the theater would be so extreme in its means that it would
upset all conventional understandings of rational behavior and social structure. In
the words of cultural critic Susan Sontag, Artauds approach was not interested
in satisfying either the political or the ludic impulse.162 In this regard, it poses an
unusual model of revolutionary, but apolitical transgression that was not simply
playful or absurdist (as were some trends in postwar art), but was more
compatible with the total transformation of understanding that was suggested by
John Cage. For this reason, though his popularity amongst the happenings artists
(Allan Kaprow), experimental dramatists (Julian and Malina Beck), performance
160
136
artists (Carolee Schneemann), and San Francisco poets (Michael McClure) may
have been well known, some critics have debated the capacity of these often
ideologically committed aesthetes to truly embrace the cultural threat that Artaud
posed to both civilization and art as it had been previously understood.163
Though Artauds vision was one of a transformed experience of the
drama, it had far reaching implications in a variety of other media. In fact, his
notion of theater extended well beyond the limits of any medium. As Sontag
argued in the early 1970s, in a reflection partially on Artauds influence, she
wrote that for him, theater became his supreme metaphor for the self-correcting,
spontaneous, carnal, intelligent life of the mind.164 As Sontag explains in a
thorough and sympathetic summation of Artauds drama, essays, and influence on
American cultural history, he at times also considered cinema as a possible
nomination for his preferred ur-medium, as an art form that could transform and
contain all of the others (however his interest in cinema waned due to his distaste
for the final literary results of film projects in which he was involved, including
The Seashell and the Clergyman (1928)). But eventually, as Cage had done,
Artaud assimilates all art to dramatic performance.165 In fact, in America,
beginning in the late 1950s (or perhaps earlier), an emphasis on theatricality and
163
On this topic, see Sontags introductory essay to Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings, xvii-lix.
On the inassimilable nature of Artaud, she writes: To detach his thought as a portable intellectual
commodity is just what that thought explicitly prohibits. [] One can be scorched, changed by
Artaud. But there is no way of applying Artaud (lvii). All art that expresses a radical discontent
and aims at shattering complacencies of feeling risks being disarmed, neutralized, drained of its
power to disturb by being admired, by being (or seeming to be) too well understood, by
becoming relevant (lviii).
164
Sontag, Introduction in Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings, xxxvi.
165
Ibid., xxix.
137
166
Sally Banes, Greenwich Village 1963: Avant-Garde Performance and the Effervescent Body
(Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1993), 28.
138
Her description above explains both the boom of performance in the 1960s as
well as the overlapping energies that produced surprising and sometimes
unrecognized confluences of attitude and influence, like those that developed
around the hostile and aggressive energies of a variety of performance that is the
heir to Artauds Theater of Cruelty.
In his shift away from textual and dramatic control Artaud advocated an
approach to drama and other temporal arts that would put an end to the
subjugation of the theater to the text, eliminating the dependence of theatrical
events on scripted, pre-determined formulas.167 He envisioned an embodied
performance art that would transgress traditional boundaries between event and
audience. It was for this reason that his aesthetic and philosophical sensibility was
so beloved by Julian Beck and Malina Beck of The Living Theater, a group well
known for their unusual and active interaction between performers and spectators.
Similarly, Artauds writing was celebrated by John Cage as well as happenings
innovator Allan Kaprow, for its willingness to break down the artificial
boundaries that social convention interposed between art and life. In his Second
Manifesto, he writes, between life and the theater there will be no distinct
division, but instead a continuity. He goes on to relate this understanding of a
fluid relation between an artistic event and its surroundings, by explaining it in
relation to the profilmic space of cinema and its environment, when he writes that,
Anyone who has watched a scene of a movie being film will understand exactly
167
139
168
Ibid., 126.
140
paroxysmatic, purgative, and finally, opaque.169 This too was predicted years
earlier by Artauds belief that in Sontags words, art seems to require a more
daring scene, outside the museums and legitimate showplaces, and a new, ruder
form of confrontation with its audience.170 In this total art environment he
encouraged an approach to dramatic action that was capable, in his words, of a
dissociative and vibratory action upon the sensibility.171 This provocative,
almost clinical vision of artistic attack was also congruent with trends of the era in
laser light shows, happenings, and expanded cinema, as in Warhols Exploding
Plastic Inevitable, the Movie Drome of Stan Vanderbeek, or the Vortex Concerts
of Jordan Belson. As the relationships between artists and audiences changed,
there arose a need for new alternative art spaces. During the period of the mid-60s
to the mid-70s, many artists utilized the cinematic apparatus as a device not to
create distraction and coherent stories, as conventional dramatic theater had, but
to disrupt psychology and sensibility with action that was, in Artauds stimulating
words, both dissociative and vibratory. In later chapters, this dissertation will
consider works in cinema that provoke their viewers not with dramatic or ethical
discomfort, but with visual and sonic distress.
169
141
172
McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994),
26.
142
143
144
This is a fact that Annette Michelson has mentioned in her classroom. To my knowledge it has
not been recognized in print, despite the extensive writing that exists on this canonical film.
145
formal opposition. Artist and filmmaker Michael Snow likely expressed the
majority opinion of experimental filmmakers when he once said casually, at a
meeting of The Filmmakers Cooperative Dope is better than TV.174 As
suggested above, many artists working in an array of media and artistic traditions
utilized both the content and technology of television, but did so by creating work
that was directed, in a figurative sense, against the very medium itself and its
associated cultural networks of exchange. By repurposing televisions imagery, its
apparatus, and its means of transmission, media artists made significant efforts to
undermine televisions corporate rhetoric, its one-way information transmission,
its structural apparatus, and its normative ideological system. Yet, a number of
these artists also envisioned for television more utopian possibilities. In the
practices of some, these critical and hopeful sensibilities worked in tandem.
This chapter will address the significance of television by exploring its
influence upon selected case studies of experimental film artists working in the
intermedial artistic landscape of 1960s and 1970s America. This discussion will
consider the ways in which this relatively new medium provided fresh
technological and formal possibilities, and most importantly, mass produced,
mass distributed visual information, while it simultaneously presented a
communication apparatus that was anathema to many media artists and
filmmakers of the period. The works discussed in this chapter were made on film,
but utilized the technology and content of television, demonstrating another
174
Here, of course, Snow is suggesting that drugs and television aspire to the same effect, but that
drugs are more effective (Notes on New American Cinema Group, Filmmakers Distribution
Center, and Filmmakers Coop, papers of Anthology Film Archives, undated).
146
147
148
Frederic Jameson and Peter Wollen both frequently invoke the name of Warhol as a symbolic
representative of the popular tendency to blend the modernist emphasis on formal innovation with
economic strategies of replication that is typical of the period that they describe. See Peter Wollen,
Andy Warhol: Renaissance Man in Who Is Andy Warhol?, eds. Colin MacCabe, Peter Francis,
and Peter Wollen (Pittsburgh: British Film Institute & Andy Warhol Museum, 1997), 1115, and
Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism and Consumer Society in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on
Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Port Townshend, WA: Bay Press, 1983), 111125.
149
176
Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1970), 303.
150
(More literally speaking, it was in fact Jonas Mekas who secured Paiks visa to
come to the United States.) It was Paiks intention to translate some of Cages
philosophical concepts and artistic strategies into other media contexts. And his
landmark performance/film work, Zen for Film, perhaps represents his most
successful effort to coordinate the philosophical mandates of a Cagean aesthetics
with the materials of cinema.
Upon visual examination of the film object as made available in as a Fluxkit in the collection
of the Getty Research Institute, it is evident that the film did not feature white leader, but was
probably made from clear leader (Special Collections, Getty Research Institute).
151
cast shadow images. Various anecdotal descriptions of the work tell of Paik
improvising a series of other simple bodily actions in front of the screen, which
created shadows upon it as he moved in and out of the projectors beam of light.
The film was sometimes accompanied by other varieties of performance, as it was
during the New Cinema Festival in November of 1965. At this event, Paik paired
two screenings of the film, one realized by Fluxus and one dedicated to
Fluxus, with his Etude Platonique, a musical piece in which the two performers
play Beethovens Kreutzer Sonata on a violin without strings and a piano
without hammers, presumably producing a mute musical performance that was
the sonic equivalent to the film projection. This combined work in sound and
image left the framing structures of both cinema and musical performance intact,
while evacuating them of content in an effort to elicit a meditation, in a Platonic
sense (suggested by the title mentioned above), on their very essences.
Though Zen for Film was occasionally realized as a combined work of
cinema and performance, it was also a provocative aesthetic intervention into the
specific aesthetic attributes of film itself: the celluloid strip that is the material
basis of Zen for Film was made without a camera, without photosensitive film,
and featured no visual images. In this regard, it presented an extended interaction
with an empty (and silent) film strip, and thus encouraged a reflective
consideration of the specific sensory experience of cinema through the evacuation
of conventional visual content. In this regard, the film (and its musical
accompaniment of Paiks Etude Platonique) related closely to John Cages
152
famous 433 (1952) in which a pianist performed a piece of music that featured
no actual performed sound. Though it was framed as a piano performance, with
an arbitrary length of four minutes and thirty-three seconds, the work intentionally
forced the concertgoers to focus their attentions upon the other indeterminate
elements of the concert halls soundscape, including the audiences creaking
chairs, coughs, and awkward, sometimes noisy, movements. (Cage himself
explicitly addressed the structural and philosophical relationship that Paiks film
had to his work.)178 Zen for Film contained no content other than the unplanned
visual elements that were produced by the chance interactions of dirt, lint, and
scratches on the strip of motion picture leader (and thus mirrored the open form of
Cages piece in which the unintentional sounds of the theater were its principal
details). The other significant component of the films performance experience
was the physical encounter that it staged between the projectors beam of light
and Paiks moving body (as shown in Peter Moores photograph and described in
other anecdotal renditions of the screening event).179 In this sense, Zen for Film
was realized as a performance framed by the rectangle of light produced by the
16mm film projector. Yet, in significant ways, it was also a film artifact. It is
important, in this regard, that Zen for Film utilized the material basis of cinema as
178
See Cages comments on the film in More on Paik (1982) in John Cage, Writer: Previously
Uncollected Pieces, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (New York: Limelight Editions, 1993), 153157.
179
Paiks Zen for Film was very much inspired by Cages 433 (1952). Similarly, Cage greatly
admired Robert Rauschenbergs Erased De Kooning (1953) in which the artist bought a drawing
from Willem de Kooning and then erased it, leaving only the impressions of the pencil, the traces
of the gestures. This famous piece too shares structural similarities with both Cages 433 and
Paiks Zen for Film as this group of works leaves the framing vessel for the gestures intact while
evacuating it of all referential content. This was a structural similarity between their works that
was also acknowledged by Cage (Ibid.).
153
its structuring apparatus, through its incorporation of a 16mm strip of film leader.
(Other artists had staged pseudo-filmic performances, using only the projectors
light beam, including Claes Oldenburg in his Moviehouse performance piece,
which was also featured at the New Cinema Festival of 1965). Paiks Zen for Film
encouraged an extended reflection on the perceptual structures of cinema and the
framing apparatus of its small gauge, temporally limited technologies.
One could imagine an alternative version of Zen for Film utilizing only the
projector itself, without the 16mm film strip, but such a realization of the work
would have removed a number of its significant structuring components,
including the works material base, which contained its visual content (dust
particles, scratches, etc.), as well as the sound of the projector motor, the flicker
of its shutter, and most importantly, the arbitrary time limit that the film strips
length imposed on the structure of the performance. (These arbitrary limiting
structures were central to much of the work of Cage, as well as Warhol, who in
his film experiments, let the lengths of the works be determined by the available
length of reels of 16mm film stock.) By imposing a limit on the performances
time through the use of a film strip, Paik produced a work in the visual arts that
recognized the significance of temporal structure. As Paiks mentor, John Cage,
demonstrated, there arose a tendency, following the revolutions of abstraction in
the arts, to apply arbitrary durational limits to music and performance in order to
replace the conventional limiting structures that had previously emphasized
classical, Aristotelian notions of dramatic coherence and narrative design. In
154
short, Cages work realized a major break from the traditional musical, literary,
and dramatic values that required cause and effect structures, dramatic
development, and harmonic transition over time. In their place, Cage and the
many artists influenced by him (who of course, included Paik), used isotropic
structures that were non-developmental and non-morphological, emphasizing
continuous duration and serial forms. In a discussion of composer Erik Satie (a
major influence on him), Cage dismisses the classical values of structure and
expressivity when he writes that artists need to give up ideas of order,
expressions of sentiment, and all the rest of our inherited aesthetic claptrap.180 As
Cage acknowledged, Zen for Film stressed this non-developmental duration as a
function of both performance and reception, encouraging its viewers to recognize
the significance of time as a major determining factor in the reception of art.181 It
functioned as a clear instantiation literally and figuratively of the fact that
cinema is both a plastic and a temporal art.
In his 1965 presentation of Zen for Film, Paik screened it on a program of
the New Cinema Festival, which featured works by a number of other filmmakers
and composers. For this film screening/ performance event, Paik was aided by
four other live contributors who were listed as Charlotte Moorman, cello soloist;
Takehisa Kosugi, assisting composer; Robert Helmboldt Dunham & Linda
Sampson, assistants.182 In addition to a video installation of his own titled Video
180
181
155
Tape Essay No 1 (perhaps his legendary first videotape), and his presentation of
Zen for Film, Paik included one work by filmmaker Robert Breer and two by Stan
Vanderbeek. His incorporation of these films by other artists, like that of his own
piece described above, was flexible and performative, in that the film screenings
were accompanied by live visual and sonic modifications to the film texts. His
transformation of Breers Fist Fight (described in the first chapter of this
dissertation) was titled Variations on a Theme by Robert Breer, and featured a
cello performance by Charlotte Moorman.183 In some presentations of this piece,
Paik himself intervened significantly in the projection of the work, making
shadow puppets in front of the projectors beam, and thus blocking and
transforming Breers original film visually as well as sonically.184 Some images of
the work alternatively show the shadow of Moormans performing body as
projected against a film screen. Similarly, Paiks presentation of Variations on a
Theme by Stan Vanderbeek also featured major modifications to the original film
imagery in which he made changes to the film through a range of visual and sonic
interventions. The program explains their interventions as follows: Stan
Vanderbeeks film where everything is changed by Moorman, Paik, & Sampson
and Kosugis Anima No 2 performed simultaneously by Kosugi.185 As this
screening series demonstrates, Paik was interested in breaking the textual limits of
the film frame through a variety of interruptive and transformative gestures.
183
Ibid.
Hanhardt, The Worlds of Nam June Paik (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 2000), 85.
185
Program from the collection of Anthology Film Archives.
184
156
On his program for this event, after listing the various components, he
writes:
Leitmotiv
How to make film without filming?
How to convert the film to live performing art
from canned art to cooked food?
As his program caption indicates, Paik was interested in conducting a public
experiment into the exhibition conditions of cinema, particularly as they related to
performance in what he playfully describes as a cooking of previously canned
ingredients. As Paiks language indicates, this performative cinema practice was
playful, spontaneous, and inquisitive. In this spirit, his program includes a brief
asterisked preemptive apology at the bottom as he explains that, If IV
[Variations on a Theme by Robert Breer] & VI [Variations on a Theme by Stan
Vanderbeek] go well, credits go to Breer & Vanderbeek, and, if bad, blame comes
to me N J Paik.186
Though Zen for Film was integrally determined by the specific
characteristics of the film medium, it was also a hybrid intermedial work of both
cinema and performance, realized in a variety of exhibition contexts that might
appropriately be understood as expanded cinema.187 Like moving image works
produced by a number of artists of the era including Stan Vanderbeek, Anthony
McCall, and Robert Whitman it was an intermedial project in which filmic
material was utilized as one aesthetic component of the social performance spaces
186
Ibid.
It was also distributed as part of a Fluxkit collection of various objects produced by other
Fluxus artists. In this regard, it also has another unusual history as a reproduced multiple that was
available as a saleable art object.
187
157
of performance art and happenings, which blended a variety of art forms and
media. Yet Zen for Film was also, as its title might suggest, a minimalist
investigation, in a manner well-suited to Fluxus sensibilities, into the most basic
essence of cinema itself. In this sense, it is a meditation on the determinant
materials of cinema, and specifically, of film projection. Though Peter Kubelka
and Tony Conrad both made films utilizing only black and white frames and
featuring no representational visual content in Arnulf Rainer (1960) and The
Flicker (1965), respectively Paiks experiment should be understood as a
cinematic innovation of a largely different sort. Zen for Film was both more
austere and more playful than the works of Kubelka and Conrad. Their projects in
minimalist cinema each featured the careful and meticulous rhythmic sequencing
of black and white frames, which were entirely dependent on a rigorous and
carefully choreographed visual manipulation of sensory experience through the
uniquely and specifically filmic resource of mechanized, rhythmic montage (on
the level of twenty-four shifts per second). Paiks work was a simpler, perhaps
less assuming investigation into the basic theatrical experience of projected light
itself as it traveled through an unmodified strip of plastic that was subject to the
indeterminate material influences of dirt and dust. In this regard, it featured a
blend of childlike simplicity and intense conceptual reflection that was typical of
the Fluxus group.
Paiks Zen for Film was the first Fluxus film or Fluxfilm and thus serves
an interesting function in the creation myth of the groups work in cinema. In its
158
188
Bruce Jenkins, Flux Films in. Three False Starts in In The Spirit of Fluxus, ed. Elizabeth
Armstrong (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1993), 137.
189
Koch, Stargazer, 39.
190
Koch, Stargazer, 39.
159
reception of the work was also perfectly congruent with the Cagean aesthetics that
had exerted such a profound influence on all of Paiks work. In 1966, Warhol
described the strategy of his early minimalist films along similar terms, explaining
that they were intended to help the audiences get more acquainted with
themselves. Usually, when you go to the movies, you sit in a fantasy world, but
his early films, like that of Paik described above, were meant to provoke a
different response, in which, perhaps, you see something that disturbs you, [and]
you get more involved with the people next to you.191 In the work of both
Warhol and Cage, there exists a remarkable high-modernist blending of the
energies of a hypostasized quietude (produced by extended durations and minimal
content) with the hysteria of confrontational and anarchic performance.
In a way related to Kochs sentiments on Warhol (as well as the artists
own comments), Jenkins suggests in his evaluation of Paiks work, that Zen for
Film could both invite intensive scrutiny and elicit absolute boredom, implying
that what many of these works shared was a desire to undermine conventional
viewing experiences through spectatorial encounters with stripped-down,
minimalist investigations into their very conditions of both filmmaking and
exhibition. 192 As George Maciunas has argued, these experiments were
influenced by other trends in the arts, and particularly, in minimalist music. These
strategies were exemplified by other Fluxus artists, including, most notably,
LaMonte Young, and thus demonstrate a perhaps differing chain of influence
191
Gretchen Berg, Andy Warhol: My True Story in Ill Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy
Warhol Interviews, 92.
192
Jenkins, 137.
160
from the expressive, personal painting and poetry that motivated other trends in
the American avant-garde cinema.193 Paiks Zen for Film, because of its embrace
of Cagean indeterminacy, its open-ended tone, and its sheer simplicity, is an
originary cinematic object for both the artists own filmography and that of his
Fluxus compatriots. (It also relates to the hyper-stripped-down or extremely
ambitious filmmaking that Paul Arthur described as the first film/last film
syndrome that includes work like Ernie Gehrs History (1970) and Peter
Kubelkas Arnulf Rainer.194) In very simple and straightforward terms, it also
reminds us that in the history of media art in the 1960s and 70s, intermedial
experiments did not always overload the senses with overwhelming stimuli. In
fact, as Paiks Zen for Film demonstrates, these projects were sometimes simple
and playful while still being austere and rigorous. Paiks unique experiment
incorporated formal strategies borrowed from both experimental music and
underground cinema, while provoking productive considerations of the
relationships between media within a range of art-making movements and
traditions.
In the 1964 and 1965 presentations of Zen for Film, Paik staged
encounters between performance and specifically filmic technologies. The film
events foregrounded light, unplanned sonic elements, the performers body, and
193
George Maciunas, Some Comments on Structural Film by P. Adams Sitney, Film Culture
Reader, 349.
194
Paul Arthur discusses this most ambitious strain of 1970s experimental cinema in an essay for a
forthcoming volume of writings on Harry Smith. Arthur, The Onus of Representation: Harry
Smith, Mahagonny, and Avant-Garde Film in the 1970s in Harry Smith: The Avant-Garde in the
American Vernacular, eds., Andrew Perchuck, Rani Singh (Getty Publications, forthcoming).
161
the chance interaction of the film apparatus and the physical space of its
projection. Though it had performative components, visually, it represented a
severe distillation of cinema into its barest essence. The work was a rather striking
allegory of the medium specific qualities that are unique to the medium. Video
artist Frank Gillettes description of film and video media may help us to
understand the structural premise of Paiks piece. He writes, Part of it [video and
TV] is that you look into the source of light, with film you look with the source of
light.195 In Zen for Film, Paik performs the looking that Gillette describes. The
piece is a performed literalization of the mediums specific formal and theatrical
properties.
Though Paik would spend most of his career working with video images,
his one non-collaborative gesture in celluloid was rather remarkable on a number
of counts; in short, the work served as a meaningful historical bridge between his
experiments in live performance and later work in moving image media. Though
he had been experimenting with television since 1960, shortly after the first public
presentation of Zen for Film, Paik decided to entirely shift his artistic emphasis to
its associated technologies of video recording, moving image broadcast, and
electronic signal modification. During this transition to a greater artistic emphasis
on this new medium, he famously rid his apartment of all his books and further
immersed himself in the technologies of video production, robotics, television,
and video synthesis.
195
Quoted in David Antin, Video: The Distinctive Features of the Medium in Video Culture: A
Critical Investigation, ed. John Hanhardt (Rochester: Visual Studies Workshop, 1986), 148.
162
Nam June Paik, accompanying brochure for TV as a Creative Medium exhibition at the
Howard Wise Gallery, May 17June 14, 1969. Reprinted in Nam June Paik, Videa/Videology,
1959-1973 (Syracuse: Everson Museum of Art, 1974), 47. [emphasis original]
163
installation of these works, Paik often devised presentations that encouraged user
interface and interactivity. One example of this interactive work in modified
television sculpture is Participation TV (1963), in which Paik rebuilt and
reconfigured a television set so that it could translate audio information into an
abstract visual representation on the television screen. By plugging a microphone
into an electronically modified television set, the gallery attendee could have his
or her words and sounds converted into an abstract televisual equivalent. Like his
sound experiments, these works promoted an interaction within gallery spaces
that was markedly dissimilar from the one-way transmission that was typical of
the information flow from corporate television conglomerates to private homes.
In 1965, Paik famously bought his first Sony Portapak video recording
device and began making original tapes. This technological development allowed
him to actually produce his own original audio-visual material, and as such, was
something of a revelation for the artist. In a way that foreshadowed some of the
more nave utopian sentiments expressed in present day literature on new media
and interactivity, Paik felt that the publics capacity to generate its own content
represented a kind of revolution in the means of production. He frequently
described the technological novelty of video as a means of self-defense against
the televisual institution: Television has been attacking us all our lives. Now we
can attack it back.197 Like many early practitioners of video art, Paik felt that
broadcast television was a medium of control that allowed little space for creative
197
164
use. With video, Paik could now work in the language of television but, in a way
that allowed him to produce his own original material, using cameras and later,
image processors. The video equipment allowed him to actually record content
from either television or the phenomenal world that he could then reconfigure in
his performances and installations. However, in its early days, the technology of
consumer video was famously inflexible, in that it lacked color, was difficult to
edit, had a washed out appearance, and could not yet allow an artist such as Paik
to capture his image processing on videotape. In filmmaker Jud Yalkut, Paik
encountered a visual artist with whom he could collaborate on a truly unique
blend of hybrid works that incorporated the visual possibilities of television,
video, and film. They described their hybrid intermedial experiments as
videofilms.
The year after Paik debuted Zen for Film, the artist had his first two
American solo art openings, both of which were held in New York. The first was
titled Cybernetics, Art, and Music and took place at the New School for Social
Research. Galeria Bonino hosted the artists second one-man show, titled simply
Electronic Art, that marked his complete shift to a new singular medium of
choice, the modified television set. In his review of the exhibition, the New York
Times staff art critic John Canaday described its contents as follows:
Mr. Paik is exhibiting a dozen or so TV sets, each one violated by its own
electronic attachment to deform the image beyond anything you can
imagine, no matter how bad your reception is. Mr. Paik is in constant
attendance at his show, to demonstrate the operation of these attachments.
[] The screen becomes a field of operation for totally abstract images.
165
John Canaday, Paiks TV Sets on View at Galeria Bonino, New York Times, December 4,
1965: 27.
199
Ibid.
166
encounter between the two media that opened up a range of creative possibilities
not previously available to either medium independently.
When he met Paik, Yalkut was fairly new to 16mm filmmaking, having
gotten his first camera only a year earlier. However, he had previous experience
in 8mm, and early in 1965 started working regularly with USCO an intermedial
artists collective in upstate New York as their in-house filmmaker. The group
emphasized collective authorship, as its name USCO, as in a company of us
suggests. A countercultural arts commune, USCO represented a utopian spirit in
media that intended to use new technologies for the benefit of both social and
psychic transformation. Their works emphasized the integration of various media
forms into happenings, group performance, and social actions. A number of
Yalkuts early films documented the collective socio-cultural experiments of this
group, including Us Down By The Riverside (1966) (which shows a group exhibit
at the Riverside Museum in New York) and Aquarian Rushes (1969-70) (which
witnesses USCOs involvement with the Woodstock Festival of Music and Art, as
represented in more aggressively psychedelic terms than the well known
theatrically released, commercial documentary of the event). Some of Yalkuts
other early films provided material to be integrated visually into the groups
intermedial events, including Diffraction Film (1965) and D. M. T. (1966), which
showcase the lightshows of Gerd Stern, the poetry of Timothy Leary, and the
artistic contributions of other members of the collective. Yalkuts experimental
visual sensibility blended distinctively with a desire to document the most urgent
167
social and artistic experiments of his era. Effectively, Yalkut was as an amateur
filmmaker whose cultural associations and social network provided him the
opportunity to become a kind of psychedelic documentarian. Working within the
visual culture of American psychedelia, he devised a set of fluid and expressive
visual techniques for 16mm film that reflected an interest in kinesthetic
experience, multi-layered superimposition, and swirling abstraction.
In Paiks work Yalkut encountered two significant resources to augment
his alternative media practice, one of which was plastic and one ideological. Paik
presented electronic manipulations of broadcast imagery that were a televisual
equivalent to the psychedelic visual culture of underground film and light shows,
as well as a fresh and provocative symbolic, perhaps political, intervention into
the mediascape of 1960s America. What Yalkut provided for Paik was knowledge
of a medium that could capture the television artists ephemeral, real-time
modifications of the broadcast images of mass media, and modify them through
the significantly more agile visual resources of film. Formally speaking, at that
point in the historical interaction of the two audio-visual media, film was more
flexible than video: it had the capacity for a greater visual plasticity, a more
luminous color palette, a much larger scale in projection, and a more significant
structural flexibility, which was offered by the mediums unique capacity for
montage. In their collaborations the two artists documented Paiks original
modifications to the televisual signal and reconfigured them by using the versatile
audio-visual post-production technologies of film.
168
200
Sabrina Gschwandtner, Between Film and Video the Intermedia Art of Jud Yalkut: An
Interview with Jud Yalkut, Millennium Film Journal 42 (Fall 2004), 75.
169
201
Martha Rosler, Video: Shedding the Utopian Moment in Illuminating Video, eds. Doug Hall,
Sally Jo Fifer (New York: Aperture, 1990), 44.
170
Overall, the videofilms of Paik and Yalkut range significantly in tone and
sensibility, from a rigorous and delicate impressionistic abstraction a kind of
televisual evocation of a visual language like that of Stan Brakhage or Bruce
Baillie to a more straightforward recontextualization of TV content that is closer
to Pop Art. Electronic Moon #2 (1969) and Electronic Yoga (1972) represent the
lyrical, expressive register of their collaborations by presenting atmospheric
psychedelic works that feature sweeping blends and abstract ribbons of television
imagery, as well as figurative content that shifts in and out of visual legibility.
These works encourage a reflective and meditative sensuality that relates to the
embodied reflection of Zen for Film. The sensuous repurposing of the televisual
signal that is performed by Paik and Yalkut is significantly closer to the aesthetic
sensibility of abstract, lyrical filmmaking than it is to the content of its originary
broadcast technology, and thus represents an unlikely conversion of the most
common and banal imagery of mid-century mass culture into an artistic register
that is significantly more precious and expressive. The two films described above
share a basic abstract iconography and an aesthetic sensibility with both the
psychedelic underground cinema and the lyrical, expressive cinema of the lineage
of so-called lyrical avant-garde film. However, Paik and Yalkut also produced
collaborative works that, in ways that were less fluid and expressive, more
directly interrogated the social and cultural basis of the televisual image.
171
202
172
173
This work appeared in the aforementioned Electronic Art exhibition, held at the Galeria
Bonino in 1965.
174
capacities to work together to create new forms. He writes, The hybrid or the
meeting of two media is a moment of truth and revelation from which new form is
born.204 To McLuhan, hybrid media projects functioned as limit-testing
experiments capable of challenging the established social and experiential
patterns of perception and thought. Interestingly, Yalkut explained his
collaboration with Paik in precisely such terms:
I was very much into the McLuhanistic idea that you can isolate the effect
of the media from the content of media, and often from the package. So
you get inside a television set and you film whats going on and you
transmute it through editing, superimposition, and any other filmic
experience. [] You make use of the imperfections of the medium and
you become more aware of what the limits of the medium are. I use the
limit of the medium to define it.205
In some ways, all the Paik/Yalkut experiments in television, video, and film are
direct and conscious attempts to demonstrate McLuhans theories concerning the
aesthetic, social, and philosophical possibilities of intermedial encounters.
Waiting for Commercials is perhaps their most rhetorically direct effort to
philosophically interrogate the cultural and historical functions of these media
through an experiment in artistic practice.
In an openly self-referential gesture, Waiting for Commercials includes a
segment in which McLuhan explains his theory that the content of any new
medium is that which it displaces. In their promiscuous exchanges between the
forms of film and video, Paik and Yalkut engage McLuhans thesis concerning
the ways in which new media forms remediate the concerns of older ones.
204
175
206
In this regard, Yalkuts film documentation of Paiks experiments shares a common historical
function to Warhols film Outer and Inner Space (1965) in which he used the apparatus of 16mm
film to record his experiments with the new video technologies of Norelco, open-reel, inch
video. In fact, because of the obsolescence and obscurity of these early video technologies,
Warhols original video materials are no longer watchable. They can only be experienced through
their happenstance preservation through the much older medium of photosensitive film. This
example also poses an interesting challenge to McLuhans teleological, media determinism. Both
cases demonstrate that older media often provide much more reliable archival possibilities than
newer, less tested technologies, and in this regard, complicate the technophilia of McLuhan and
other varieties of nave new media euphoria.
176
purchased by Paik, along with their rights for use.)207 In Waiting for Commercials
these advertising vignettes are left intact and unmodified, functioning as found
media bracketed by plastically modified presentations of Marshall McLuhans
spoken presentations.
The last two advertisements in the film present the same line of Japanese
womens clothing. The first ad for this brand features a number of women who
masquerade and dance in outfits that resemble the typical garb of the female love
interest in a 60s-era James Bond film. Their go-go dance routines are tightly
choreographed and spotlight a central trope in which the dancers outfits all
simultaneously change color in a flash of profilmic special effects derived from
the originary stop-replacement techniques of early silent cinema into new
ensembles of matching hue. The song that accompanies the visual fantasy of the
advertisement has the up-tempo lilt and melodic signification of musical
underscore from an action film of the era. In the Japanese songs chorus, one
word is emphasized, as all the performers exuberantly sing, simultaneously, and
in English, Coordinate! The refrain repeats a number of times and the
commercials dynamic color and fanciful use of space blend with animated,
colored, geometric shapes and a cartoon depiction of a Samurai (a ridiculous
symbolic distillation of Japanese identity). After another Paikean transformation
of Marshall McLuhan, a second advertisement for this Japanese clothing line
207
As far as Waiting for Commercials, Paik had purchased the right to use several of these ads
from Japanese television and he had used them in other video pieces and manifestations later
(Authors email communication with Yalkut, December 8, 2008).
177
follows. In it the women are now carrying tommy guns, and again their clothes
spontaneously transform both style and color spontaneously. After some dancing,
they then grow animated butterfly wings, as the visuals fluidly blend live action
photography with animation. The entire mise-en-scene of the commercial then
shifts to a wildly colorful cartoon as fuzz soaked guitars overwhelm the
soundtrack in a psychedelic bubblegum phantasmagoria of dancing go-go girls,
gangster film iconography, and hippie era butterfly patterns.
The commercials function multivalently by illustrating the theoretical
content which abuts them by incorporating an outrageous televisual dynamism
and simultaneously demarcating a strikingly divergent language of representation
from that employed by Paik and Yalkut. Most significantly, perhaps, because of
the fact that they are Japanese commercials, they express the global penetration of
Western codes of audio-visual marketing as described by McLuhan. However,
they do so with a different philosophical emphasis, one less concerned with the
international movement of capital, than with the power of information to travel
instantaneously through new media channels. In one of his most utopian and
heavily quoted statements from the period, McLuhan famously claimed that new
media forms (including, most significantly, television) were effectively
transcending geographic distances and national borders because of the rapid and
efficient proliferation of their broadcast technologies. In 1964, he wrote, As
electrically contracted, the globe is not more than a village.208 And throughout
208
178
209
179
180
Beatles Electroniques:
Made roughly three years before Waiting for Commercials, Beatles
Electroniques (1966-69) is in some ways a more formally and philosophically
dramatic intervention into the ecologies of televisual materials. For its base
materials the work used filmed footage of live television broadcasts
(photographed off of the TV screen) and prerecorded video footage as
181
210
Youngblood, 330.
182
Ken Werner using methods related to those that were employed by the filmmakers
in their radical reconfiguration of its visual content. The composer transformed
selected, brief fragments of the Beatles pre-recorded music by altering their
speed and distorting their sound. In this regard, he treated the original sonic
source material as musique concret or found sound to be experienced abstractly
and texturally, in a way that disavowed or undermined its melodic energy, cultural
familiarity, and sonic legibility. Primarily utilizing the tools of sound editing to
produce this breakdown of meaning, Werner changed the significatory function of
this music in a way similar to other contemporaneous experiments in sound art
and experimental music.211 As a result, when one listens to the soundtrack it is not
obvious that the piece is in fact composed exclusively of four repeated, looped
musical fragments from the Beatles discography. Therefore, the films sonic and
visual components both utilize a variety of creative strategies and technological
tools to distort and disguise well-known cultural content derived from the mass
media in order to transmute it into unrecognizable noise.
Beatles Electroniques exemplifies a disruptive model of audio-visual
image production that directly interrogates the technologies and ideological
functions of mass media. By aggressively reconfiguring the most familiar
signifiers of popular culture, Paik and Yalkut perform a modification of
mainstream audio-visual culture using the tools and creative strategies of the
avant-garde. Recently, in a book that reflects on a variety of transgressive and
211
In this sense, the soundtrack resembles the tape experiments of a number of minimalist
composers, including Steve Reich, whose pieces, Its Gonna Rain (1965) and Come Out
(1966) similarly reconfigure human speech into abstract rhythmic and textural patterns.
183
transformative uses of television within art and culture, art historian David Joselit
has argued that this disruptive sensibility is Nam June Paiks major
accomplishment within media of the television age. He writes that Paiks
fundamental contribution was the invention of formal models for disrupting
image ecologies.212 Images in mass media are trafficked for specific social and
material functions, within ecologies and economies that depend on their capacity
to accrue cultural value and capital. It is the smooth and direct iconicity of
television advertising that cues viewers to associate specific material symbols (the
Coca-Cola logo, or a clean, shiny countertop) with abstract emotional sensations
(happiness, comfort, etc.). Paiks intervention into televisions flow of
information and image, like the most provocative media art of the period, was
fundamentally disruptive. What the artist pioneered, again in Joselits words, were
malignant procedures by which a video signal was distorted or degraded into
mere noise.213 These antagonistic, aggressive, and disruptive strategies were
central to the most urgent and significant experimental media art of the era; Paiks
work symbolically enacts one of the most powerful versions of this practice.
Gene Youngblood described the film as an eerie portrait of the Beatles
not as pop stars but rather as entities that exist solely in the world of electronic
media.214 In this sense Beatles Electroniques is an experimental investigation
into the processes of televisual mediation and the means by which contemporary
communication technologies attempt to transmit the unique auras of star
212
David Joselit, Feedback: Television Against Democracy (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), 48.
Ibid.
214
Youngblood, 330.
213
184
personalities and icons across the reproductive circuits of mass media. Like Andy
Warhols silkscreen portraits of Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley, Paik and
Yalkuts film breaks down these pop culture symbols, these signifiers of absolute
uniqueness, into their underlying material basis as mediated representations of
electronic dots and scanning lines. In his modification of the technology and
content of the television signal Paik devised specialized techniques and tools that
would allow him to intervene into the electronic, audio-visual system of
television, by transforming its broadcast signal, something that he considered to
be the most variable optical and semantical event of the era.215
Though much of the media art of the 1960s, including those works
described above, was entirely congruent with the ideas and language of
McLuhans influential thought, there were occasional points of disjunction in this
exchange of artistic and intellectual energies. Marshall McLuhan famously
claimed that the content of any medium is always another medium.216 It was
McLuhans argument that this transformation of one medium into the content of
another produced a teleological media history in which radio replaced the written
word, film replaced radio, television replaced film, etc. He argued that because of
their continuously evolving, specifically technological natures, all media are in a
continual process of reconstituting past forms through progressively newer and
faster communication technologies. For example, of early film, he writes, The
215
216
185
217
Ibid., 18.
186
previous decade by the British artist, Richard Hamilton, which directly referenced
the contemporary languages of visual and text advertising in Just what is it that
makes todays homes so different, so appealing? (1956). Such works were early
indicators of the expanding influence of television within the aesthetic register of
fine art. In the 1960s a number of other artists responded to the rapidly expanding
presence of television in all aspects of life; some artists, including Rauschenberg
and Warhol, responded to the media in their painterly work as well as their
performance and media projects, while others developed new forms that directly
utilized the concrete structure of the television set itself.
The first large scale public recognition of televisions significance as a
concrete medium for fine art was the pioneering exhibit TV as a Creative
Medium, held in May 1969 at the Howard Wise gallery in New York City. The
show featured work by twelve artists, many of whom, including Frank Gillette,
Ira Schneider, Eric Siegel, and Nam June Paik, used modified television sets as
their principal medium. In much of their work, these artists devised novel ways of
rebuilding and restructuring television sets and their signals, utilizing modified
cathode ray tubes, closed circuit video cameras, or the new technologies of
videotape. In this early stage of television art, many artists converted the flow of
the television signal from a representational figurative form of information and
entertainment into abstract, sometimes psychedelic visual patterns. Aldo
Tambellini, another New York based media artist, whose work was also exhibited
in the show, similarly spanned television, film, and performance. The shared
187
218
188
other hand, considered the relationship between media to be a fluid one in which
elements of electronic media, music, film, and performance could be productively
integrated into the shared social spaces of avant-garde art-making and
countercultural actions with the intention of producing an event that was greater
in scope and impression than the sum of its parts. In their efforts to pioneer, not
only new formal relations between the arts, but fresh social structures as well,
these artists often incorporated their media works into happenings and group
performance environments.
Throughout the 1960s Tambellini was the director of a number of
experimental art collectives and theatrical venues for the exhibition of new forms
of media art. In 1959, he founded The Group Center, a collective that encouraged
interaction between a range of artists working in a number of different media
forms and traditions (like USCO, the arts collective with which Yalkut was
associated, and with which Tambellini toured in the traveling exhibition
Intermedia 68). In addition to his experiments in multi-media forms, Tambellini
also operated a film screening venue, The Gate Theatre, as an experimental
exhibition space on 2nd Avenue, in New York City that was extraordinary for its
continuous around-the-clock screenings of avant-garde film, as well as
lecture/screenings (such as the Psychedelia Tune-In in 1966, and Erotica
Neuratica) and experimental theater (from members of the Theater of the
Ridiculous and the Living Theatre). Upstairs from The Gate Theatre, in the same
building, Tambellini and collaborator, Otto Piene, established the Black Gate in
189
1967, a striking and unusual experimental art venue that was painted entirely
black with no built-in lighting or seating in order to facilitate the presentation of
electromedia art and live media forms. Some of the events at this venue
featured performances utilizing video elements by artists such as Nam June Paik
and Charlotte Moorman, USCO (with Gerd Stern and Jud Yalkut), as well as
experimental theater/group performance by Yayoi Kusama. Tambellini also
directed his own multi-media events at the Black Gate and organized group
protests and social events related to the activities and spaces of his theatrical
venues.219
Tambellinis efforts to transform the social contexts for art-making in the
period were related to the collective authorial strategies of USCO, the radical
process-based works of Fluxus, and more specifically, the collaborative
multidisciplinary strategies of Paik and Yalkut, all of which emphasized the
drastic repurposing of contemporary communication technologies for artistic
purposes and socio-political commentary. These efforts demonstrated a shared
interest in challenging a model of artistic production that privileged the singleauthored, expressive works, produced in clearly defined singular media e.g.
Abstract Expressionist painting as celebrated by the most established modernist
critics. Tambellinis efforts spanned a range of technologies and cultural practices
including television, video, film, live music, light shows, and performance.
219
Some of these career details are outlined in Aldo Tambellini, A Syracuse Rebel in New York
in Captured: A Film/Video History of the Lower East Side, ed. Clayton Patterson (New York: 7
Stories Press, 2005), 4156. Others were gathered from conversation with the author on December
29, 2008.
190
Though many artists of this multi-media community drew openly from the
materials of popular music and mass culture in a sense closely related to
Warhols Pop Art aesthetics Tambellinis multi-media projects, including Black
Zero (a semi-theatrical project that featured live music, dance, video, projected
light and film) were more directly oppositional and aggressively antagonistic
towards the conventionalized pleasures and commercial standards of
entertainment. He described these events as not theater, not happenings, but a
clash between a variety of specific art forms. Tambellini was perhaps the only
artist of this milieu to incorporate live avant-garde jazz rather than rock and roll as
the principal musical component of his multi-media presentations.220
In his earliest film work, Tambellini, like a number of other artists in the
era, including Robert Whitman, Robert Rauschenberg, E.A.T. (Experiments in
Art and Technology, a group led by Billy Klver) and Stan Vanderbeek, blended
filmic elements into theatrical, multi-media experiences that privileged the totality
of the event over the textual cohesion or spectatorial interest of any single film.
He explained this relationship between film and other media in his work as
follows: Since my interest is in multimedia and mixed-media live events, and in
experimental television, I think of film as a material to work with, part of the
communications media rather than an end in itself.221 Tambellinis multi-media
projects initially subsumed the integrity of singular film texts within the theatrical
220
Tambellini worked with Bill Dixon, Archie Shepp, Alan Silva, and other major figures of New
Yorks avant-garde jazz community. His collaboration with the remarkable cellist, Calo Scott, was
one of his most extensive creative partnerships.
221
Youngblood, 311.
191
space of art events that utilized a number of media sources, including film and
slide projectors, strobe lights, and makeshift generators of abstract imagery.
However, as his experiments with film became more intricate and detailed, his
specifically filmic language became more complex and, as such, his efforts in this
medium attained a double status as event and artifact (as did the example of
Robert Breers Fist Fight, which was discussed in the first chapter of this study.)
His most accomplished films, including Black TV, functioned both as an
integrated audio-visual detail within larger multi-media projects, and an
autonomous film text. In this sense his films, like a number of other filmic works
described in this project, including those by Andy Warhol, Carolee Schneemann,
Robert Breer, Jud Yalkut, and others, had the dual status of raw material for
multi-media and expanded cinema presentations, and fully realized, self-contained
single film texts. The twofold identity of these works differentiates them from
films that only functioned as either the source material for expanded cinema
performance or traditionally exhibited, theatrically screened films. A number of
these dual-status films exist in multiple forms as single screen works, double
screen projections, or components of performances.
With Black TV, Tambellini produced an extremely elaborate, dense, and
fully realized artistic encounter with the material conditions of American culture
of the late 1960s as specifically mediated through the communication apparatus of
television. Like the works of Paik and Yalkut, Black TV achieved a sophisticated
192
Black TV:
The culmination of Tambellinis film practice is the work Black TV. Like
Beatles Electroniques, Tambellinis 1969 film powerfully encapsulated certain
timely sensibilities concerning the function of television in everyday life. His
work staged literal and symbolic encounters between the specific technologies,
aesthetic possibilities, and social referents of television and film. In creating this
collision between media and their social significations, Tambellini directly drew
attention to the different registers of historical reference and social signification of
these discrete media.
The single screen version of the 16mm film Black TV begins with an
abrasive, loud visual and sonic barrage, featuring televisual white noise (or
snow).222 Both the image and sound tracks for the film begin as busy, frenetic,
and strident assaults on the senses, and they continue relentlessly as such. From
the outset of the work, because of its rapid and aggressive sonic and visual
textures, it is difficult for the viewer to determine exactly what it is that is being
seen or heard; the images move so quickly and feature such visual distortion, that
222
The film has been projected as both a two-screen piece, with different image tracks side-byside, and as a single-screen film. Though Tambellini now prefers to show the work as a two screen
video, it circulated for some time as a single screen film. This is the version that was in
distribution through Grove Press for some time. It is also the version that won an award at the
Oberhausen short film festival and that was purchased for the permanent collection of the Museum
of Modern Art in New York.
193
The soundtrack of the film functions somewhat differently: Though the films soundtrack
emphasizes language and sound from television news broadcasts, it does however include
significant, additional, non-television material, in the form of abstract sonic elements, including
experimental electronic ambient sound produced by sound generators and wave oscillators (Aldo
Tambellini, conversation with the author, December 29, 2008).
194
Over this chaotic blend of network news tragedy, there are filmic
superimpositions of televisual materials, including jostled television scan lines
and the squirm of television grain, all of which are less fluid and substantially
rougher than Paiks flowing, plastic, abstractions. In its aesthetics, Black TV is a
more aggressive and insistent work that those of Paik and Yalkut described above.
It proceeds at a breakneck pace of montage in both sound and image and displays
a different tonal strategy from the more meditative style of Paik and Yalkut.
Tambellinis film integrates an aggressive assault of visual and sonic noise that
blends aesthetic strategies of disruption and dissonance with emotionally
symbolic footage. The rhetorical social force of this television news material is
modified and heightened by its incorporation into an audio-visual battlefield of
rapid montage, busy superimposition, and back-and-forth zooms that punctuate its
rhythmic presentation.
After this visual deluge of American historical crises, the films tone shifts
somewhat. The clamor of screams and reporters commentary is temporarily
replaced by a more ambient and rhythmic soundtrack of electronic sounds,
featuring machinic timbres. The film then displays the familiar brand icons of the
major television stations ABC, NBC, and CBS followed by footage of boxing
matches, skiing, rodeos, and car races. After this brief interlude of sport and speed
the film quickly returns to its previous register of reference as it cuts to more
serious acts of public violence, including scenes of policemen hitting protestors
and the explosions of mushroom clouds produced by atomic bomb tests.
195
224
196
Kennedy, the race riots of the late 1960s, the Vietnam War, poverty, and urban
decay. Perhaps most importantly, it also draws our attention to the ways in which
the visual and sonic representations of these historical problems were
communicated to the countrys population through the mediating language of
television. In a sense, the film argues that television determines Americas
understanding of its own experiences of social crisis, physical trauma, and public
upheaval. As it stages a violent encounter between a distinctively televisual,
electronic abstraction and the historically specific, figurative representation of
social traumas, Black TV demonstrates that television, like the history that it
illustrates, is noisy, intangible, and subject to a range of violent manipulations.
With a parade of images that shift in and out of visual legibility, the film presents
a wildly distorted kaleidoscopic view of contemporary social events in which the
eras most traumatic social events are made fuzzy, blurred, fractured, and even
more violent as a result of these transformations. As the viewer struggles to
comprehend the quickly shifting parade of non-fiction images, he or she
inevitably becomes aware simultaneously of the violence of American life in the
1960s and the centrality of television to the publics awareness, comprehension,
and understanding of that very brutality.
As it overloads the senses and overdetermines the force of its social and
historical iconography, Black TV argues, by way of example, that this interaction
between contemporary events and the mediascape of the countrys most
ubiquitous technology is one that necessarily provokes a severe anxiety about
197
both human history and our capacity to understand it through the reproductive
technologies of mass media. The crises that the film represents are also realized
metaphorically through the violent breakdown of its own imagery and its
mechanisms for communicating meaning. The film argues that television a
technology then dependent on an ephemeral electronic signal passing through the
air is an imperfect and volatile medium that encapsulates the philosophical and
social crises of its age through the irrational and inexplicable breakdown of its
capacity to mediate history to its viewers.
Black TV is a semi-abstract essay film that suggests that the social
violence of the era was also somehow implicit in its primary mass medium. To
effectively critique and break down the visual and sonic material of television,
Black TV uses the exceptionally plastic resources of experimental film (and its
capacity to create entirely independent and equally flexible soundtracks, as Paik
and Yalkut had in their collaborations). The result is a work that, though little
seen now, was a culturally, historically, and aesthetically urgent work closely
attuned to the zeitgeist of the era and its somewhat forgotten aesthetics of sensory
assault and psychic tumult.
198
225
199
Art historian, Branden Joseph has produced a major critical study of artist, musician, and
filmmaker, Tony Conrad that is an exception to this neglect. See Branden Joseph, Beyond the
Dream Syndicate: Tony Conrad and the Arts After Cage (Cambridge, MA: Zone Books, 2008).
200
media event by Tambellini, explaining that the members of the audience are
blitzed by such devices as eye-searing strobe lights, wailing sirens, the jumpy play
of images on a screen, and a huge balloon that bursts with the clap of a
thunderbolt.227 These events (organized by Tambellini and featuring a number of
collaborators) included live music, slide projectors, films, video installations,
performance elements, and theatrical effects (like the exploding balloon described
above), and like Warhols Exploding Plastic Inevitable, utilized extremely loud
and dissonant sonic elements that heightened the works efforts to challenge
conventional understandings of audio-visual pleasure.228
As the tone of the New York Times article suggests, these experiments in
multimedia sensory assault were often met with dismay. Tambellini explained the
experimental frontiers of his work with a terminology that emphasized the
expansion of consciousness: We are the primitives of a new era. With
multimedia you create an effect that is not based on previous experience. You
saturate the audience with images. It happens now it has a live quality. Its a
227
Grace Glueck, Multimedia: Massaging Senses for the Message, New York Times, September
16, 1967: 35, 37.
228
A related, collaborative, intermedial experiment in this history is the 1964 collaboration of
Warhol and LaMonte Young, in which the filmmaker commissioned the composer to provide
music to accompany excerpts of his films, Kiss, Eat, Haircut, and Sleep, which had been
transferred onto 8mm cartridges for continuous rear projection, using Fairchild 400 screening
devices (that resembled TV monitors) at Lincoln Center in New York. Young provided a newly
recorded version of his piece, Composition 1960 #9 (1960) that may have been used for all four
excerpts. (The performances featured the voice of Marian Zarzeela and Young bowing a brass
mortar or bowl.) The three-minute looped sections of the films were played in the lobby of the
Philharmonic Hall during the New York Film Festival, however, because of Youngs demand that
they be played at extreme volume, the management demanded that they be made quieter, and as a
result, the composer withdrew his approval to use his music. As a result the films were shown
silent for the remainder of their exhibition at the festival. See Branden Joseph, My Mind Split
Open: Andy Warhols Exploding Plastic Inevitable, Grey Room 1, no. 8, 8486; Eugene Archer,
Festival Bringing Pop Artists Films to Lincoln Center, New York Times, September 12, 1964:
15.
201
229
230
202
203
Paik quoted in Manifestos in Great Bear Pamphlet, originally published by Something Else
Press (1966) (and republished by Ubu.com, ubclassics imprint, 2004), 25.
204
205
He argued that a range of social anxieties were visited upon the space of cultural
experimentation, through the activities of a group of young people he described as
the combine generation. Within this multi-media landscape of the period, he
argued that cinema in particular had a unique force as a tool for derangement
that made it a central and powerful component of the cultural atmosphere of the
era: Its all-encompassing artistic drives and its all-out assault on the senses stand
as symbols of a movement bent on aggressively reevaluating and redefining every
artistic precept it can lay its hands on.232 (Here Gruen could easily be describing
the multimedia events of Tambellini.) The experiments in viral aesthetics by
artists in this chapter need to be repositioned in historical analysis as part of this
widespread cultural action, rooted in the medium of film, that embraced the
aesthetics of assault as cathartic and transformative social experimentation.
As has been suggested elsewhere in this chapter, these artists and
filmmakers described above were heavily influenced by Marshall McLuhans
argument that new media forms fundamentally transform the basic conditions of
thought and experience. In his new media cosmology, the artist acts as a seer of
sorts and defuses the potentially destructive power of these technologies through
acts of experimental violence. For McLuhan, the privileged sites of this
aggressive assault on established forms are the frontiers between discrete media.
He writes that,
The hybrid or the meeting of two media is a moment of truth and
revelation from which new form is born. For the parallel between two
232
Gruen, 112.
206
media holds us on the frontiers between forms that snap us out of the
Narcissus-narcosis. The moment of the meeting of media is a moment of
freedom and release from the ordinary trance and numbness imposed by
them on our senses.233
According to McLuhans influential position, this encounter between distinct
media forms (and their associated perceptual expectations) creates an aperture for
artists to end the narcissistic and numbing influence of television and other media
forms. In fact, at the end of Understanding Media, he writes that all media can be
used as weapons, as tools for undermining established forms of control. In this
sense, McLuhan argued, in concert with a number of other thinkers going back
to Dadaism and futurism perhaps that art could, and should have, a combative
function. This counterattack, which repurposes media technologies in order to
undermine their conventions and established ecologies, was directed towards the
destabilization of the television mediums smooth flow of information, and might
be therefore described, again using the contemporaneous language of McLuhan,
as an aesthetic counter-irritant. For McLuhan, this variety of directed
intermedial assault had a therapeutic function for society that could be uniquely
applied by artists. This idea was extremely influential for many filmmakers and
intermedial artists discussed in this project.234
The philosophical underpinnings and rhetorical framings of these
anxiogenic and combative strategies differed or artist to the next. Susan Sontag, in
her seminal essay, One Culture and the New Sensibility, considered the shifting
233
234
207
art forms of the 1960s, and argued that the developing trends of the era radically
undermined the social function of art as it had come to be understood in previous
historical moments. In these new works (that according to her, were produced by
artists like Stockhausen, Cage, and Warhol), the critic observed a sensibility,
which was literally experimental, in which art was used as a new kind of tool for
reconfiguring established notions of pleasure and aesthetic meaning, by
intervening into social space, and unhinging normative thought through
provocative challenges to sensory expectations. She argues that, the most
interesting works of contemporary art [] are adventures in sensation, new
sensory mixes. Such art is, in principle, experimental not out of an elitist
disdain for what is accessible to the majority, but precisely in the sense that
science is experimental.235 Art, in this context, was understood to serve the social
and psychic function of undoing established patterns of behavior and thinking.
This art-based obliteration of traditional aesthetic strategies was not only enacted
upon the media forms themselves, but was also directed towards the space of their
reception as they bombarded music audiences, gallery attendees, and film
spectators with different varieties of sensory overload. In her efforts to clarify
precisely what was new about experimental art in the period, Sontag explained it
as follows: What we are getting is not the demise of art, but a transformation of
the function of art. [] Art today is a new kind of instrument, an instrument for
235
208
236
Ibid., 296.
209
understood as the romantic spirit dominates most of the interesting art of today.
She continued, Todays art, with its insistence on coolness, its refusal of what it
considers to be sentimentality, its spirit of exactness, its sense of research and
problems, is closer to the spirit of science than of art in the old-fashioned
sense.237 In fact, Paik and Tambellini, like their colleagues in E.A.T. (and many
others) did in fact collaborate with scientists and engineers (from Bell Labs and
other scientific research institutions) to produce new television and broadcast
technologies. As Cage and Kaprow, spokespersons for the new aesthetics, were
arguing that the boundaries between art and life were eroding, a number of media
artists were also demonstrating the breakdown of a mutual exclusivity between art
and science in the spirit of research.
With the new sensibility, discussed by Sontag and others, there was a
sense that art could function as an investigative instrument, quite literally, for
experimentation, as an instrument for social, humanistic research. In this regard,
video, as an epistemological tool, presented distinctive possibilities from those of
film. Some filmmakers perceived these differing artistic and ontological attributes
as potential threats to their hard fought philosophical battles concerning film as a
medium for the production of significant advanced art. As suggested at the
opening of this project, in the correspondence between Stan Brakhage and
Annette Michelson, there was evidence of a marked ambivalence, or perhaps,
even a disdain, for the artistic practices associated with video, particularly as they
237
Ibid., 279.
210
were felt to be eclipsing the aesthetic, historic, and social potency of this older,
still under recognized medium for the production of art. In his letter to Michelson,
Brakhage mentioned that he had long resisted the crows of video makers238 and
she responded by writing that one begins, caught in the wave of retrenchment of
filmic resources and the onrush of video, to feel like a dinosaur, thrashing about in
a hostile landscape.239 By 1985, when their quoted exchange took place, video
had been firmly ensconced in the art world for some time, having achieved a
place in the gallery and museum establishment that would never, even today, be
available to experimental film. In fact, in 1975, video art was officially
incorporated into the Whitney Museums biennial exhibition, a major show for
gauging significant trends in the American art scene. Film would not be included
in Biennial exhibitions until 1979, even though it was a much older medium with
a rich and long history of experimental work by established artists. This situation
was indicative of wider trends in art criticism and curatorial practice that
demonstrate the differing treatment of film versus video in the institutional
contexts of the art world. This, perhaps, is the hostile landscape to which
Michelson was referring in her letter to Brakhage, a die-hard film devotee.
238
Letter from Stan Brakhage to Annette Michelson, June 7, 1985, collection of the University of
Colorado, Stan Brakhage Papers.
239
Letter from Annette Michelson to Stan Brakhage, June 16, 1985, collection of the University of
Colorado, Stan Brakhage Papers.
211
240
212
figuratively turned his back on the live model as a source of subject matter, he
directed his energies away from nature and towards the representation of already
mediated images, by incorporating images from newspapers, magazine ads, and
pieces of comic books into his paintings, collages, and combine works. Steinberg
argued that Rauschenbergs meditations on mediation embodied the most radical
shift in the subject matter of art, the shift from nature to culture.242 He described
this transitional strategy of representation as the foundation of an artistic
language that would deal with a different order of experience.243 In this regard,
Rauschenbergs reflections on media and mediation marked a transition that was
wholly congruent with the changing experiences of America in the age of
television. Steinberg poetically articulated the way in which Rauschenbergs
aesthetic shift from illusionism to media documentary aligned with larger cultural
changes:
What he [Rauschenberg] invented above all was, I think, a pictorial
surface that let the world in again. Not the world of the Renaissance man
who looked for his weather clues out of the window; but the world of men
who turn knobs to hear a taped message, precipitation probability ten
percent tonight, electronically transmitted from some windowless
booth.244
As these quotations above demonstrate, Steinberg located in Rauschenbergs floor
bound combines a major shift in the values of painting, however he suggests
earlier in his essay that the stakes of such claims extend well beyond the limits of
Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1968. The part of the essay concerned with Rauschenberg
and the shift from nature to culture was first published in Artforum in 1972.
242
Steinberg, 84.
243
Ibid., 85.
244
Ibid., 90.
213
214
Beatles Electroniques and Black TV utilize the source materials of mass culture
rather those of nature because in the age of mass media, television has replaced
nature as the publics immediate referent. Though artists would continue to make
personal, expressive works throughout the history of the medium, such efforts
must necessarily be understood and evaluated in relation to the effects and
functions of popular media forms that provide the historical context for the
production and reception of such projects. The efforts of Paik, Yalkut, and
Tambellini demarcate a concerted effort by experimental filmmakers, not
precisely to distance themselves from commercial modes of mass cultural
communication, but to engage directly with them, using their native materials and
technologies. By reconfiguring these objects and technologies using strategies of
disruption and distortion (in ways that were particular to the medium of film),
these artists dramatized the breakdown of televisions normativity as a
determinant of the structure and content of the popular history of the United
States.
215
In the years after World War II, the dominant philosophical and
representational imperatives of avant-garde art in the United States shifted away
from an expressive practice associated with the energies of abstract expressionism
towards alternative representational tactics that often engaged directly with the
audio-visual materials of mass culture. In concert with the experiments in
television and film discussed in the last chapter, other more well known,
established artistic movements and trends incorporated the materials of
industrially produced, commercial culture. For example, the painters associated
with pop art including Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and James Rosenquist
openly imitated the iconography and tonal palette of commercial advertising,
cartoons, and corporate logos in their work. Similarly, in a more direct mode of
citation, a number of collage artists, like Ray Johnson, Jess (Collins), and Wallace
Berman, utilized elements of mass produced commercial catalogues and pulp
magazines in their two-dimensional constructions. The semi-sculptural medium of
assemblage expanded the logic of collage into three dimensional spaces. As
practiced by artists like Robert Rauschenberg, George Herms, and Bruce Conner,
245
216
Lucy Lippard, Pop Art (London: Thames & Hudson, 1970), 72.
It should be noted that French theorists were also radically revising the understanding of
authorship and textual construction in roughly the same era as the artists described above. See
Michel Foucault, What is an Author? (1969) in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, trans.
Donald F. Bouchard, Sherry Simon (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 124127; Roland
Barthes, The Death of the Author (1968) in Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New
York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 142148.
247
217
218
the supposed division between the precious domain of fine art and the
commercialized media space that surrounded it. His varied and heterogeneous
work forged new relationships between the artist and his environment. He
demonstrated that any medium be it painting, performance, conceptual art, rock
& roll light shows, collaborations with Hollywood filmmakers, photography, jug
band music, assemblage, collage, video, or film was an appropriate platform for
his particular breed of cultural intervention. Conners shift from nature to culture
was so direct, in a sense, that he often made films without a camera, instead
making the juxtaposition of commercially produced imagery his sole artistic
strategy for the production of new film works. Conner often said, I only own the
splices, suggesting that many of his films were, in a sense, the product of a range
of industrial labor that greatly exceeded the authors editorial contributions.
Conner consciously undermined categories of artistic signification through a
strategic dismantling of their structures of value. This aspect of his work was so
continuous and forceful that, regardless of medium, it begs to be understood as
such, as part of an artistic practice whose philosophical purpose, critically
speaking, overcomes the differing material conditions of his chosen media.
Like the work of other artists discussed in this project, Conners films
catalyze an anxious interpretative experience in which the cultural crosstalk and
iconographic oversaturation of the works multiple messages overwhelms the
possibility of a single coherent understanding of its rhetorical or symbolic
219
220
221
222
a multi-media practice not by its media and its materials, but by its method of
production as well as, most importantly, its mode of cultural reference.
Through his historical analysis of art and poetry from the late 19th century
to the early 1960s, Seitz created a sturdy rhetorical support for the extremely
diverse range of work that he displayed. Central to his argument, and perhaps one
of its most novel aspects, is the idea that assemblage art represents a new type of
artistic collaboration, founded on the interaction of a singular, unique fine artist
with a diffuse, undifferentiated commercial media environment produced by an
anonymous, non-descript blend of corporate and industrial forces. He writes that,
The artist must cede a measure of his control, and hence of his ego, to the
materials and what transpires between them, placing himself partially in the role
of discoverer or spectator as well as that of originator.248 Seitz identifies a new
trend in art in which the artists practice becomes refigured as a semi-curatorial,
organizational undertaking rather than as demiurgic practice of pure creative
origination. Seitz writes, that purely plastic, professional art materials such as
paint, plastic, stone, bronze, etc., are formless and, in the Platonic sense, are pure
essences of redness, hardness, ductility. Found materials are works already in
progress: prepared for the artist by the outside world, previously formed, textured,
colored.249 In this regard, it can be argued that in fact assemblage artists, like the
media artists discussed in the last chapter, are intervening and interacting with
processes of image production and circulation that are already in progress, and
248
249
Seitz, 39.
Ibid., 85.
223
It might be suggested that, contrary to my position above, collage and assemblage artists were
not collaborating with a diverse range of cultural forces so much as they were transposing them
(and their associated material detritus) into the elitist spaces of museum culture, thus instantly
valorizing them as precious, rarefied art objects that could be marketed and sold. However, at least
with Conner, such an evaluation would prove inappropriate for both economical and critical
reasons; his work neither gained the material support nor the cultural esteem of genuine, elitist
museum culture. In addition, it was not easy to contain or collect. In fact, he did not sign his works
and often said that he intended for them to simply fall apart and decompose (something that often
happened to the instability and organic nature of many of his materials).
224
251
Ibid., 23.
225
252
Lawrence Alloway, Junk Culture, Architectural Design 31, no. 3 (March 1961), 122.
It could also be argued that social reference is negatively present in Greenberg and Fried,
through its glaring omission, as a result of the historical conditions in bourgeois society that have
defined the avant-garde as an autonomous realm of cultural practice. (I thank David James for this
critical observation.) For a more thorough, though polemical, theoretical discussion of the way in
which the history of bourgeois culture has conditioned the avant-garde, see, Peter Brger, Theory
of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).
253
226
For many of critics of the time, one of the most salient and provocative
aspects of appropriation was the way in which it suggested a new understanding
of the artists identity. For Alloway the definition of the artist had been
transformed to such a significant extent that it became functionally deprofessionalized. In his words, the ideas behind assemblage combine to subvert
the compact, professional image of the artist as the possessor and exponent of
unique skills. This implies that there is no specialized labor or rarified set of
talents that were exclusive to the domain of the professional, trained artist. He
continues, As a result, the reach of the artist has been increased and the area that
could be claimed as art has expanded. The definition of art has dilated, like
cinema screens in the Big Screen revolution of the 1950s.254
This trend towards a more democratic definition of the artist aligned
interestingly with the widespread impulse of the period in which all kinds of
creative people (as described in the introduction to this dissertation), felt that, as
Amy Taubin did, anyone could and should make films.255 So, to echo Alloways
statement above, when relatively untrained artists like Andy Warhol produced
films that they did not shoot, write, or edit, the filmmakers community was upset
by the lack of labor, specialized or otherwise, that these amateur auteurs
contributed to their work.256 Conners found footage cinema, in which he often
254
Ibid.
Quoted by Arthur in Films the Color of Blood in The Film-makers Cooperative Catalogue
no. 7, vi..
256
Annette Michelson addresses this problem in passing in her essay on Warhols interdisciplinary
practice. See Michelson, Where Is Your Rupture? Mass Culture and the Gestamtkunstwerk in
Andy Warhol, ed. Michelson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 91110.
255
227
made films without lifting a camera or exposing any celluloid, could also pose
provocative interpretative and philosophical issues for the definition of a filmspecific authorship that did not actually include original motion picture
photography.
William C. Wees, Recycled Images: The Art and Politics of Found Footage Films (New York:
Anthology Film Archives, 1993), 79.
258
Brian ODoherty, Conner and His Films: The Artist as Director, Performer, and
Occasionally as Artist, New York Times, April 26, 1964: 21.
228
that these are mutually exclusive identities. Throughout Conners career, this
assumption has heavily influenced the historicization of his oeuvre, leaving a
legacy of interpretation that has cleaved, perhaps inappropriately, along mediumspecific boundaries inherited from modernist art criticism.
Nine years after the exhibition, Conner described this high profile review
and its effects on the reception of his work, in an interview with Paul Cummings
for the Smithsonian Archives of American Art:
The review came out and it was spectacular. It was like one-third of a
page, on Sunday. Three-quarters of it was about the movies. People came
to the gallery and said, Where are the movies? What is this junk on the
walls? I was very proud of the show. I wanted people to see what I had
done. This kind of notice was something that I had always wanted. It
meant some attention was going to be paid. But it was totally diverted and
twisted around. The gallery sold two things out of the show. Didnt make
enough money to pay for the announcements. I decided to make a movie
to ruin my reputation as a filmmaker.259
Conner did not want to be defined as a filmmaker. To him the appellation artist
was more catholic, open-ended, and appropriate to his range of work. Despite
Conners frustrations with the review, and in particular, its emphasis on him as a
filmmaker, in fact this New York Times piece attempts to connect the artists
filmic and non filmic works, and seemingly unrelated disciplines, within a shared
interpretative matrix: one can look at Bruce Conners new exhibition at the Alan
Gallery, 766 Madison Avenue, and his two films [] as expressions of the same
attitude and fundamentally the same technique applied to different media. At the
moment, assemblage as a technique is permiating [sic] all the arts with
259
Cummings Interview, Smithsonian Archives of American Art, April 16, 1973, 2526.
229
ODoherty, 21.
ODoherty, 21.
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and film as being potentially integrated or even related artistic undertakings. Yet,
at the same time, it seems that the reviewer is trying to challenge this popular
supposition of mutual exclusivity by suggesting that this conceptual opposition
between discrete media is not necessarily productive in the analysis of an artists
entire practice, and thus could be overcome, philosophically speaking, through the
careful scrutiny of multi-faceted components of an artists output.
Certainly, Conner thought of his films as art, though he may not have
defined himself as a filmmaker (and certainly not exclusively or predominately as
such). The reviewer concludes the essay dramatically, in an effort to group the
artists different materials within one cohesive project: Conner clarifies the
artistic usage of reality objects and photographs and film clips in a new way
of coping with the environment. His films are revolutionary.262 This final
rhetorical gesture helps to solidify ODohertys overall picture of Conners
practice in summary, as a way of coming to terms with a material environment,
suggesting that its multi-media mix of objects, photographs, and films, is an
appropriate and perhaps revolutionary response to a diverse cultural network of
media, material objects, and social history that display related values and
processes of signification. In this regard, the 1964 New York Times review of
Conners work initiated a mode of intermedial interpretation of the artists work
that remains largely unrealized in the subsequent literature.263 After a bit more
262
ODoherty, 21.
There are a few exceptions to this segregation of media within the interpretation of Conners
work. One recent effort to situate various strands of the artists work in relation to each other can
be found in a relatively short, but excellent introductory book titled Secret Exhibition: Six
263
231
California Artists of the Cold War Era (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1990), in which
Rebecca Solnit situates a range of Conners projects within the geographic and social milieu of
beat and post-beat art production in California. More recently, the catalog for the last major oneman show of Conners work, organized by the Walker Art Center, attempted to address a range of
the artists media projects. However, most of the essays, though they make reference to the artists
other practices, segregate his output according to medium, with one essay on assemblage,
drawing, and photography; one essay on conceptual and performative projects; and one essay on
film, all of which are strong summaries of Conners interests and methods. See 2000 BC: The
Bruce Conner Story Part II, eds. Peter Boswell, Bruce Jenkins, and Joan Rothfuss (Minneapolis:
Walker Art Center, 2000). Most recently, Kevin Hatch a doctoral candidate in the department of
Art History at Princeton, completed a dissertation that addresses a range of Conners projects, in a
number of media from 1957 to 1967 (Kevin Hatch. Looking for Bruce Conner, 1957-67 (PhD
Dissertation: Princeton University, 2008).
232
one medium. [] This confused a lot of people, and they couldnt see any
connection between the various bodies of work Ive done. For me, however,
theres a clear relationship between all these forms.264 Not all reviewers
overlooked these connections, but many were influenced by the limits of their
own disciplinary, professional, and social networks, as well as the legacy of
Greenbergian modernism.
In one of the most significant early essays about Conner in an art
publication, Artforum editor Philip Leider eloquently described the uneasy and
unsettling blend of sexuality and violence that interacted complexly in the artists
assemblage work. In this essay, Leider takes a somewhat defensive tact because
so many reviewers took offense to the artists debased materials (taken from trash
heaps and exploitation magazines), their collective defiance of classical notions of
beauty, and their disturbing social and historical referents. Leider attempted to
justify the formal idiosyncrasies, thematic negativity, and disarming iconography
of the work in order to counter the reviews that simply dismissed the work as ugly
and nihilistic. For example, in 1960, one reviewer described Conners work as a
sampler in the cult of ugly265 and in the same month, in a different journal,
another critic wrote that the artists work represents the high speed conversion of
264
Quoted in Kristine McKenna, Bruce Conner in the Cultural Breach: Decades of Antagonizing
the Status Quo Has Brought Critical Acclaim for the Brilliant yet Eccentric Multimedia Pioneer,
Los Angeles Times, June 10, 1990, 4.
265
Sidney Tillim, Arts 34, no. 6 (March 1960), 59.
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Yet, in his basic assertion that Conners work demonstrated a fresh sensibility
and a provocative response to social phenomena, he, like most art critics of the
age (with the notable exception of ODoherty), did not mention the artists film
work at all. This critical silence serves as evidence of an interpretative myopia in
the art world that prevented, and generally continues to prevent, the full
appreciation of a field of practice extending beyond the traditionally understood
limits of its privileged media. (In this regard, ODohertys review was truly
anomalous.) Unfortunately this medial hierarchy affected some of the most astute
critics of the day, including Leider. Few art historians and critics had the
appropriate range of cultural awareness to properly understand the total breadth of
an artist as multi-faceted as Conner. Even as late as 1974, after Conner had been
266
267
234
exhibiting art publicly for almost twenty years, Paul Karlstrom, an historian
conducting an oral history for the Smithsonian Museum, had not seen most (or
perhaps any) of Conners films before conducting an extensive career
retrospective interview for the institutions Archives of American Art program.268
While art critics, with the exception of ODoherty, restricted their
discussion of Conner to his assemblages, some contemporary film critics had a
surprisingly more informed and holistic comprehension of his work. One can find
traces in writing in journals like Film Culture and Film Quarterly of efforts to
interpolate Conners rather idiosyncratic films into the scope of a wider, artistic,
intermediary discourse (though this trend was perhaps abandoned by the mid1970s). In 1966, in a short discussion of Conners Report (1963-67) in Film
Culture (the principal literary mouthpiece of the cinematic avant-garde), David
Mosen discussed the artists films in relation to other media forms: the films
offer a convenient parallel to Conners other art work of the past ten years: his
physical assemblages of clearly recognizable everyday junk such as old couches,
suitcases, and womens underwear. The films are also an extension of Conners
welding of death and comedy.269 Then, in 1967, in one of the most ambitious
contemporaneous reviews of the artists films, Carl I. Belz astutely drew the
readers attention to themes in Conners films that related to the context of
contemporary art more generally.
268
Interview with Bruce Conner, Conducted by Paul Karlstrom, San Francisco, August 12, 1974,
Smithsonian Archives of American Art.
269
David Mosen, Short Films: Report, Film Quarterly 19, no. 3 (Spring 1966), 54.
235
At the beginning of his essay, Belz explains that the underground cinema
in America was achieving a remarkable level of public attention; he felt, rightly,
that a newfound popularity would pose fresh interpretative problems. He writes,
this growing recognition of an avant-garde cinema will undoubtedly be
accompanied by growing problems of an historical and critical nature as well. The
relationship between contemporary painting and sculpture and cinema is such a
problem. Specifically, the problem to which Selz addresses his statement is the
challenge that experimental film posed to conventional art criticism, at a moment
when there were few cultural critics capable of truly comprehending the complex
interaction of diverse media forms. He continues, The relationship [between film
and the other arts] is actually suggested by the artists themselves, especially
individuals like Bruce Conner who, during the past five years, has made
contributions of dramatic significance in both media [visual art and film].270 This
quotation is fascinating for its unusually prophetic understanding of the changing
cultural status of the cinematic avant-garde, at the point of its perhaps greatest
public recognition, before it eventually receded back into the cultural peripheries
of an underground social and aesthetic practice. In his review of Conners early
films, Belz was also savvy enough to recognize that his cinematic works were
somehow more modern, more congruous with other developments in fine art, than
those of his contemporaries within the avant-garde film world. He writes, Unlike
other experimental film artists for instance Kenneth Anger or Stan Brakhage
270
Carl I. Belz, Three Films by Bruce Conner, Film Culture 44 (Spring 1967), 57.
236
As Selz suggests, Conner had a markedly different social and artistic agenda from many of the
artists that P. Adams Sitney would later group within his moniker of visionary filmmakers
(Ibid., 58).
237
272
Conner preferred that the orthography for the titles of his works be written in all capital letters.
238
culture had to offer. Because of his compulsion to comment upon and intervene
into his media environment, Conner was drawn to some of the most potent visual
signifiers of commercialism and sexuality in Hollywood, from Jean Harlow to
Marilyn Monroe.
Conners work engages with femininity and sexuality, in ways that are
often refracted through and mediated by the most exploitative of mass culture
sources, including moving image pornography, television advertising, and a
variety of popular photographic images and magazines. His assemblage,
LOOKING GLASS (1964) and his film, MARILYN TIMES FIVE (1968-73), both
feature semi-pornographic content and express persuasive, though sometimes
ambivalent, critical statements of these modes of representation. The overlap and
exchange between these works provides a productive case study of the ways in
which postwar intermedial art practice engaged a variety of provocative, debased,
and at times, puerile energies within its exchanges of information and imagery in
which avant-garde art and mass culture drew from the same sources of popular
erotic imagery.
LOOKING GLASS (1964) is an assemblage work that explicitly
foregrounds both sexual imagery and the popular act of looking at it. In its
rectangular shape and vertical orientation, it featured a slightly more conventional
vertical picture plane than that of some of his more structurally sculptural work,
like HOMAGE TO JEAN HARLOW, for example. However, it has a number of
structural and thematic similarities to his other work as well. LOOKING GLASS is
239
clearly divided into two sections. The top half features a densely crowded,
overpacked amalgam of materials including a womans shoe, a beaded purse,
pieces of cloth, silk, a stuffed blowfish (wrapped in pantyhose), womens silk
undergarments, costume feathers, dangling tassels, and two centrally placed
female mannequin arms and hands adorned with bright red nail polish. In its use
of mannequin parts, this assemblage includes anthropomorphic sculptural details
that directly present a life-size display of false femininity. Beneath this dense
display of feminine finery and inexplicable exotica (a stuffed blowfish?) there is a
white shelf upon which the mannequin arms rest, as if sitting atop a womans
dressing table. Within this crowded array of female finery, there are a few
commercially produced pin-up photo reproductions (or glamour shots) likely
taken from popular mens magazines, including the legendary Playboy spread of
an ivory skinned, nude Marilyn Monroe on an iridescent red background.273 In a
sense, the top portion of the work resembles a disheveled version of a nightclub
dancer or actresss dressing room, in which a variety of clothes and scarves have
been draped across the mirror, and next to which, she has pasted a photograph of
the icon whom she aspires to emulate.
Beneath the assortment of female clothing and jewelry, there is a tasseled
wooden shelf, and beneath it, dozens of torn and fragmentary images of female
nudes. They were likely taken from semi-pornographic magazines of the 1950s
273
In a suggestive conflation of identities, which would be replayed almost a decade later, Arline
Hunter the star of Apple Knockers and the Coke (and the subject of Conners MARILYN TIMES
FIVE) imitated the very same photo spread of Monroe for a later issue of Playboy. From the
visible evidence, it is difficult to tell which one is in fact included in Conners assemblage.
240
and 60s, and feature an array of women posing, vamping, and splaying
themselves out before a still camera in clichd poses typical of so-called girlie
magazines. The images are torn, scratched, often incomplete, covered with
staples, or partially occluded by fabric dangling from above; these ripped and torn
photographic fragments display disembodied legs, segments of torsos, and
incomplete faces and bodies. The images have been defaced in a sense, and
communicate a compositional encounter between violent decollage and an
adolescents slapdash locker room shrine to his sex idols. In this sense, the bottom
half of the work communicates the repressed, libidinal alter ego of the
hyperfeminized, debased glamour of the works upper section.
On one level, the pieces title suggests how it works rhetorically. If it is
meant to be seen literally, as a looking glass or mirror, then it might be suggested
that the piece presents some kind of reflected image of either its viewer or its
maker. In this sense, Conner implies that the work is an ideological mirror of the
average American psyche, as it showcases semi-pornographic imagery and
clichd signifiers of commercialized femininity pertaining to shared unconscious
associations. On the other hand, we could also understand the work as a kind of
window-on-the-world, something not dissimilar from Joseph Cornells surrealistic
and libidinally infused boxes.274 In LOOKING GLASS, we find something
altogether different from Cornell: a plain, grungy compendium of girlie photos
pasted together sloppily and serially below a shelf holding three-dimensional
274
Though Cornells art also often featured Hollywood starlets as its central sources of visual
interest, they were involved in an imagined fantasy world motivated by enraptured personal and
affective associations in an entirely different emotional register from that of Conner.
241
icons of the most conventional and trivialized notion of the feminine. This was the
last of Conners works to use these materials pantyhose, womens
undergarments, costume jewelry, etc. that were typical of his assemblage work
in the late 1950s and early 1960s. It was consciously intended as his final
statement on this phase of his career, as a summary of his work thus far. Its
fetishistic and sexual associations are loudly inscribed throughout the entirety of
its visual space, presenting an obsessive sexual energy has boiled over from his
earlier work in which such energies were more restrained.
LOOKING GLASS is persistent in its formal repetition as it features
photographic elements that are not configured in order to create a structured
picture logic of illusionistic space. In this sense, the collage component of the
work differs markedly from the dominant representational strategies of this mode,
as one would find in the work of a range of well-known collagists including, for
example, Pablo Picasso in a cubist mode, Max Ernst in a surrealist vein, or
Richard Hamilton working with the visual language of pop art. Instead, Conners
photographic fragments of nude women, which are the works principal visual
content, are organized serially, without any effort to incorporate them into an
atmospheric configuration like that of narrative or diegetic space, thus relating the
work to a variety of composition that is more typical of decollage. Conner has
addressed this formal distinction between his work and the precious,
compositionally deliberate work of other collage artists in terms of painting:
There are an awful lot of predominately painterly attitudes towards collages. The
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attitudes that I had were much less painterly.275 As Conner pastes these images
together without modification, he draws the viewers attention to their nature as
popular photographs and their materiality as magazine cutouts. As a result, most
viewers of the work would be consciously aware of the sources of the images, and
thus be implicated explicitly in the basic conditions of viewing a kind of
pornographic assembly line of commodified, stereotyped femininity.
275
Karlstrom, 19.
It might be argued that Conners work relates conceptually to that of Warhol, in which the artist
conveyed an interest in seriality and repetition in general terms that were not solely applicable to
his film art.
277
Peter Boswell, Bruce Conner: Theater of Light and Shadow in 2000 BC: The Bruce Conner
Story, Part II, 32.
276
243
Monroe is purported by some to have made a few unseen striptease movies herself before
beginning her legitimate film career. This widely circulated myth likely fueled speculation
concerning the identity of the performer in Apple Knockers.
244
and a half minutes, more than half feature a black screen, a condition that openly
frustrates any puerile expectations that the films viewers may have Conner, like
the actress of Apple Knockers and Coke, teases the viewer as he shows and hides
and shows and hides the increasingly naked female body, reminding us, in an
openly self-reflexive way, that we are looking at a woman who is taking off her
clothes in order to be looked at. Like LOOKING GLASS, MARILYN TIMES FIVE
is a meta-peep show. The thematic crossovers, shared philosophical promises, and
overlapping artistic strategies of these works demonstrate that Conners artistic
practice exceeds the material differences of his chosen media.
The rhetorical consciousness of Conners work relates directly to the
characteristic content of cinema (and popular culture in general) as well as its
apparatus and mode of production: Hollywood cinema is a machine for looking
and exploiting, and Conners work in assemblage and film draws the viewers
attention to this ideological function of the medium. Conner was certainly not the
first film artist to foreground this fact. As many critics have indicated, filmmakers
including Josef Von Sternberg, Alfred Hitchcock, and Brian De Palma have
repeatedly utilized and referenced these voyeuristic tropes of Hollywood film
language, in the context of commercial filmmaking. And in experimental cinema,
filmmakers including Cornell, Warhol, Jack Smith, and the Kuchar Bros. have
played on Hollywoods techniques of the sexualization of a glamorized,
exaggerated female body. However, in MARILYN TIMES FIVE, Conner
forcefully estranges the apparatus of cinema from its conventional methods for
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246
camera. This tension between a simple pleasure of sexual curiosity and a rigid,
almost mathematical structure of continued and systematic repetition frustrates
simple Hollywood-style identification with the objects that cinema normally
shows us. Like the film work of Andy Warhol, MARILYN TIMES FIVE utilizes a
variety of hyperextended duration in which standard temporal expectations are
frustrated. In this sense Conners visual approach complicates the transparency of
Hollywoods visual and rhetorical strategies as it makes its viewers aware of the
meaning of these images as signifiers of repression and exploitation, while it also
forcibly reminds them of their own processes of looking.
279
Letter from Bruce Conner to Ed Janss, November 24, 1972, Smithsonian Collection of Bruce
Conner Papers.
247
280
Letter dated December 3, 1974, copy in the collection of Pacific Film Archives, Berkeley, CA.
248
Letter dated January 18, 1975, copy in the collection of Pacific Film Archives, Berkeley, CA.
249
250
Conner has often been at the center of controversy, even within the avantgarde. I remember a radio interview between Jonas Mekas and Ken Jacobs
in the early 1970s, broadcast over WNYC in New York, in which Mekas
attacked MARILYN TIMES FIVE as being exploitative; Jacobs defended
the film, as did others soon after MARILYN TIMES FIVE was released.282
An ideological anxiety often results from situations like that of Conner in which
seemingly enlightened, well-intentioned artists attempt to criticize retrograde and
destructive social forces, while still trafficking in some of the corrosive energy of
their targets of critique.
By their very natures, works like these often provoke people to ask, is it
exploitation or is it art? Before considering such an ethical question, one must ask
an ontological one: Even if it were Conners desire to create a critical, politically
progressive work, how could a striptease film of Marilyn Monroe ever be truly
evacuated of its exploitative force? Its history of exploitation is embedded in the
work like an index. It might even be suggested that the grain of the film itself is
complicit in the exploitative action that it represents. Like so many artists who
developed their mature voices in the commodity saturated landscape of the mid20th century, divisions such as these would often prove trivial like that between
life and art and thus demand complex and philosophically provocative artistic
investigations into the spaces of moral and artistic anxiety and ambivalence.
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to interrogate them in both visual and philosophical terms. Yet something about
the significatory and rhetorical functions of these pieces remains rhetorically
unstable, regardless of the medium in use. In 1989, art critic Anne Ayres
described the complexity of reading tone in Conners work.283 She writes, An
interpretative unease (which has always plagued the reception of Conners work)
arises from the questionable line between Conners expos of hypocrisy and his
delight in eroticism and the seamy side of contemporary popular culture.284 In
fact, this provocative artistic strategy was not only clear to academics and critics
who make professions of such observations; it was also a common response from
a range of viewers. In 1962, a reader of Artforum wrote a letter to the editor
expressing a similar sentiment of distaste and revulsion. She writes,
I consider Mr. Conner an evil genius with fantastic power for
expression. My admiration for his work is as great as my revulsion
for it and I only wish that someone, not excluding Mr. Conner
himself, could convince me that his work is prompted more by a
desire of exposing a degenerated, suicidal generation, than an
actual sadistic sexual involvement with the work itself.285
This tension between critique and a seemingly complicit visual pleasure is
not easily resolved in Conners art. This is a fact recognized and embraced by
Conner himself. He openly describes his own work in such terms, by suggesting
that, for the art to have its full meaning it should have a certain amount of
wonder to it. The reactions to it, or what it is, shouldnt be programmed at the
283
To my mind, this is a problem for all found image formats, because authorial traces are largely
limited to editorial choices, rather than representational style.
284
Anne Ayres, Forty Years of California Assemblage (Los Angeles: UCLA Art Council Annual
Exhibition, 1989), 130.
285
Silvan Simone, Letters in issue after Artforum 1, no. 6 (November 1962). The letter was
written by gallerist Silvan Simone.
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time. That stands in the way of any kind of direct relationship.286 He was
consciously aware of the mixed messages and responses that his work produced,
such that this ideological anxiety is built intentionally into the work. He has
explained that this diversity of possible responses is an indication of the works
openness, a condition that connects his rhetorical strategies in cinema to his works
in assemblage in which gallery and museum visitors are forced on occasion to
confront rather simple repurposed objects without a clear ideological frame. It is
Conners belief that the totemic icons of 20th century commerce, like religious
icons of the past, are capable of provoking a diverse range of associative and
affective responses: Things that have the most power are those that have the
widest variety of responses.287 This significatory ambivalence or tonal ambiguity
is in fact, in some sense, the conceptual engine that drives the artists work.
Conner interview with Paul Karlstrom, San Francisco, August 12, 1974, (Smithsonian Archives
of American Art), 27.
287
Joan Rothfuss, Escape Artist in 2000 BC: The Bruce Conner Story Part II, 183.
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254
COSMIC RAY, BREAKAWAY, and VIVIAN. The filmmaker who most powerfully
exhibits Conners influence in this regard is Robert Nelson, another moving
image artist whose foundational work was produced in the same social and
geographic milieu of the San Francisco Bay area as Conner.
Nelson, like many experimental filmmakers, began as a painter. Through
his exposure to the movement known as San Francisco Funk at the San Francisco
Art Institute (then known as The California School of Fine Arts), he formulated
an understanding of creative authorship that was substantially more collaborative
and anti-authoritarian than earlier artistic conventions dictated. Similarly, as
someone who came to the arts during the bohemian transition between the beat
era and the counterculture of the 1960s, Nelson was drawn to varied intermedial
interactions that defied the clean divisions between artistic forms that were of a
function, in part, of classical disciplinary education. From their very beginnings,
his efforts in cinema emphasized collaborative undertakings with a range of Bay
Area artists, including painters William T. Wiley and William Allan, theatrical
director of the San Francisco Mime Troupe Ron Davis, rock and roll group the
Grateful Dead, poet-playwright Michael McClure, multi-media artist Bruce
Nauman, and minimalist composer Steve Reich, among others. Due to Nelsons
interest in the expanded field of art production during the 1960s, he naturally
found his way to cinema, a medium that served as a model of totalizing,
immersive art in the period. But, it was largely Conners influence that led him
there. In an interview of the late 1970s, Nelson explains:
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I wanted to be won over if there was anything there, but I didnt see
anything. Until I ran into COSMIC RAY. And that was the first one, that
did it, and that was what really made me realize that somehow it was
possible. Obviously it didnt cost any money, relatively speaking,
compared to what movies are supposed to cost and it was the first one that
really made me realize that some amazing power could generate from
images that you put together at home.288
What Nelson found in Conners work was an accessible, inexpensive, amateur
production model that impressed him with the conditions of artistic possibility
that it seemed to suggest. Nelsons subsequent work in the medium was varied in
format, tone, and representational strategy much more so than Conners in fact
but it exhibited the same aversion to artistic and intellectual pretension. Conner
once explained his overall attitude towards experimental film in such terms: He
writes, Ive always known that I was outside the main, mercantile stream. I have
been placed in an environment that would have its name change now and again:
avant-garde film, experimental film, underground film, independent film, etc. I
have tried to create film work so that it is capable of communicating to people
outside of a limited dialogue within an esoteric, avant-garde or cultish social
form. Jargon I dont like.289 Following Conner, Nelson pioneered his own
irreverent representational strategies that experimented with more idiosyncratic
and playful forms, carefully avoiding the sin of pride that is so typical of self
important film artists who often proclaimed their aesthetic pretensions rather
loudly. By engaging with conditions of chance and collaboration, which were
drawn partially from the open-ended creative and social strategies of the
288
289
256
257
explained that some of his films were barely authored at all.290 As suggested
throughout this study, such works posed major challenges to filmmakers and
critics who were still proudly holding onto classical notions of film craft, personal
expressivity, and controlled authorship.
With The Great Blondino (1967), Nelson began his artistic partnership
with William T. Wiley, a like minded painter drawn to conceptual gags,
wordplay, and irrational, performative experiments in the illogical and absurd.
Blondino continued the semi-dramatic, improvisatory mode of Nelsons earlier
works and reflected the same formally eclectic sense of bricolage and
heterogeneous composition. With The Off-Handed Jape (1967) and Bleu Shut
(1970), Nelson and Wiley continued their collaborative enterprise with a spirit of
revelry and wild play that inevitably spills off the screen into the spaces of film
spectatorship. Each of these films features a kind of inexplicable riddle as its
generative subject. In the first, the performers attempt to enact a variety of
gestural non sequiturs, including the elusive off-handed jape. After filming
spontaneous, unscripted attempts by each of the artists to display an array of
ridiculous facial expressions and bodily exercises, the artists then quickly
recorded a simple voiceover in which they commented on their performances, e.g.
that was a good one, that was quite a jape, etc. Their back-and-forth banter is
simultaneously natural and absurd, like an in-joke between two friends. Bleu Shut
follows a similar strategy, though the subject of the films enigmatic riddle is a
290
258
Robert Nelson, Robert Nelson on Robert Nelson, Film Culture 48-49 (Winter/Spring 1970),
23.
259
work, The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends is the Highest Form of Art
(1970). Nelsons films openly parade their irreverence for the avant-garde
filmmaking tradition that emphasizes craft, labor, and training. In fact, Nelsons
irreverent and iconoclastic artistic sensibility had a significant influence upon the
filmmakers cohort and the Bay Area arts community.
In 1966, three artists collaboratively produced a playful pseudodocumentary titled Fishing for Asian Carp. Multi-media artist Bruce Nauman met
painter William Allan at UC-Davis, and they conceived of a number of extremely
simple films together. Their projects were all shot silent and documented basic
actions. For this unpretentious fishing film, they enlisted the help of Robert
Nelson to aid with the soundtrack. He narrated the film with Allan in a casual
voiceover conversation, like that of the Off-Handed Jape, which was recorded
spontaneously, in an off-the-cuff manner after the film was shot. Though the idea
for the film is generally credited to Nauman (who conceived of it and shot it),
Fishing for Asian Carp serves as a curious historical bridge between the art and
experimental film communities of the Bay Area in the mid 1960s. This little seen
film clearly displays Nelsons auteurist imprint while it also serves as an unusual,
minor footnote in the filmographies of all the artists involved.
Fishing for Asian Carp has the feel of a student film in its unabashed
disregard for conventional craft and its ludic embrace of the most basic
collaborative aspects of non-industrial filmmaking. The film suggests an
260
261
262
292
Though I have used an example from the San Francisco Bay area to make a point about the
false divisions between so-called artists films and experimental cinema (and the overlapping
social communities of these groups), I could have just as easily have discussed an entirely
different group of filmmakers and artists who were working in concert or in some kind of
conceptual proximity. For example, in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 70s, one finds a vibrant
community of filmmakers and artists experimenting with the moving image and applying the
strategies of conceptual art to cinema, including John Baldessari, Ed Ruscha, Morgan Fisher,
Thom Andersen, and Jack Goldstein, to name a few.
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circulation. However, there were aspects of the project that he later felt were
worthy of reconsideration. For this reason, the filmmaker has recently returned his
attentions to this film, reconfigured parts of the footage, in order to whittle it into
smaller, more artistically and tonally manageable new works. (Like Conner,
Nelson has often re-edited his films, destroyed old versions, or entirely reorganized fragments of unfinished projects.) In his continuing experiment with
authorial strategies, he basically excised one of the more unusual sections of the
film and considered it a new, autonomous work, which he titled, More.
After its excision from the longer, sprawling No More, and two or three
minor edits, in 1998 More was simply declared a new work. In its original
construction as a collaborative, democratically conceived project and in its new
state as a kind of filmic readymade, the work functions as an ongoing experiment
in novel approaches to film authorship. In its current form, the film is about
fifteen minutes in length, and features three sections or episodes. The first portion
of the film is an observational documentary shot with multiple cameras and
featuring live sound (unusual technical opportunities for experimental cinema)
that follows an amateur softball game and the social rituals that surround it. The
sync-sound, handheld-camera presentation of the sports event features no
voiceover and no clear rhetorical frame to guide the viewer. With the look of a
cinema a Direct Cinema project it is an observational documentation of a typical
American ritual. Yet, in the context of experimental cinema and fine art of the
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266
The camerawork is entirely handheld, but the movements and pans are all
extremely fluid and even. The overall organization of the footage displays a visual
economy related to that of television sports coverage, through its excited editing,
its occasional insert shots of player close-ups, and its extended displays of the
fans excited faces. The energy builds as the games action becomes more
frenzied, and the films cutting and camera movement accelerate in order to
match the profilmic energy of the social event. People cheer excitedly as it
becomes clear that the team from Trucking Steves Records has won. All the
players run together and pile into a group, enthusiastically celebrating their
victory by jumping up and down in an exuberant huddle. Briefly, the word
SPORTS is superimposed over the image of the jubilant team in extremely
understated, small white lettering. It is an eccentric and unexpected authorial
intervention over the diegetic world of the sports event. It is a hyperbolically brief
modification of the films visual texture, but because of its strangeness it suggests
that the film may not be the simple observational object that it initially seems.
After the game, the players and fans review their score sheets, and then celebrate
their success by sharing a joint. Firecrackers explode while the athletes and their
friends guzzle together from a large jug of wine. In the midst of all the
excitement, the films sound drops out. In capital letters, in relatively small print
towards the bottom of the screen, some superimposed text briefly fades in again,
reading, AUDIO LOST NO SCORE. Then in much smaller print, the original
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films title immediately follows, reading, NO-MORE, as the first portion of the
film comes to an end.
There is an abrupt cut to the second section of the work, an atypical,
homespun advertisement for an old car. It begins with a medium shot of the
automobile, seen from the side, in front of a large Tudor mansion. An attractive
young woman opens the car door and superimposed text rolls over the screen. It
reads as follows: This 1951 Chevy in good working order will be given away
free to the first person to call the following phone number after Sept. 1, 1971: 607
273 5818 / (people associated with the making of this film not eligible).
Filmed in a more tightly edited fashion than the previous section, this
short mock advertisement is shot largely with a wide angle lens to exaggerate
perspective. It also features a blend of rather extreme camera angles, including a
long shot from directly above the automobile (taken from the roof of the large
house behind it), and a number of tight close-up insert shots, which are typical of
television advertising emphasizing the luxurious details of high end cars. In this
context, these close-ups teasingly draw the viewers attention to the somewhat
ramshackle nature of the cars interior. The same young woman showcases the
cars features, calling attention to the lighter and the radio console with her
gestures, which are punctuated with close-up insert shots of these details. She then
opens the hood of the car and we see a close-up of the engine accompanied by the
sound of its warm purr. A series of highly stylized shots follow: a rapid, clean,
and dramatic three-hundred-and-sixty degree tracking shot demonstrates an
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269
is festive, mischievous, and irreverent. The softball players are joined by many of
their friends and the diverse crowd seems to grow as the film progresses. There
are a number of young men and women present, teenagers, younger children, and
the crowd features white, black, and Latino celebrants. The scene gives the
impression of a spontaneous street festival for the young adults of the town.
Following some public celebration, the police show up, but seem to be
assuaged of their concerns, perhaps because the group appears peaceful and in
good spirits. People play bongos and tambourines; there is chanting and much of
the film foreground the ebullient dancing of the towns young men and women. A
gyrating, entranced man fixes his eyes on his two hands as he twiddles his fingers
in front of his eyes, likely the effect of an experience with some variety of
hallucinogen. (This sequence seems intentionally to mimic the crowd scenes from
Woodstock (1970).) The camera and boom operators move throughout the large
public gathering in an agile fashion, providing visual and sonic access to many of
the different social groups while demonstrating textbook control of the films
fluidly moving, observational camera. The sound is entirely synchronized, though
there are insert shots that punctuate the smooth visual representation of the social
activity that is the central subject of this collective auto-ethnographic drama.
At one point in the films action an older man becomes engaged in a
conversation with one of the main softball players (who we saw in the first section
of the film); he is likely the team captain. It appears that the older man may be a
local business owner or perhaps a neighbor who is concerned about the gathering
270
of such a large crowd of young people. (We later find out that he may work for
the fire department, though he is not wearing any uniform to indicate this fact.)
We overhear their conversation and witness it from a slight distance. It is clear
that our softball playing protagonist is pleading with the man to allow them to
continue with their festivities. Twice in their conversation, seemingly at random,
the filmmakers add brief superimposed text over the profilmic action. In an
authorial gesture that perhaps mocks the traditional methods through which
conventional documentaries introduce people, text appears over the middle of the
screen that reads CHARLES W. WEAVER. Then in smaller text, the
filmmakers introduce the title MR. WEAVER at the exact moment when the
young softball player says his name. It is a strange moment of synchronicity that
announces the coordination of this unusual textual component with the films
soundtrack. Eventually it becomes clear that Mr. Weaver is willing to let the
young people celebrate. The long-haired softball player proudly proclaims to the
older man and the crowd that has gathered around, You dont have to worry.
God bless Mr. Weaver, Fire Department. Hes a good man! Then in a simple
gesture of pride and excitement he exclaims, Look how happy we are!
The conversation described above continues, but the sound blends with
some muffled, up-tempo music, and the camera cuts to dancing woman. (We saw
her in a number of shots in the first part of the film; she might be described as the
films co-star.) The camera follows her exuberant, kinetic body closely. Again,
superimposed white titles appear over the profilmic action, which in their brevity
271
and small scale give the impression of an offscreen comment, perhaps a whisper
of extreme irony, made by the filmmaker. This title reads: CINEMA VERITE.
It quickly fades away. At his point, it is later in the evening and the screen has
become much darker. People are frolicking more wildly now, as a new song
begins and a man in a tie-dyed t-shirt does a rowdily ecstatic full-body dance that
is reminiscent of Joe Cockers performance at Woodstock. At the conclusion of
this section of the film, the filmmakers engage with this changing mood through
quicker cutting and panning that recognize the collective profilmic energy of the
experience. We see another man flailing wildly it is the teams captain again
as he lifts his shirt, drops his pants and rhythmically flaps his now exposed penis
in the middle of a dance circle. The camera pans away from the action, as if
embarrassed. There is a cut, and the final superimposed titles appear over the
crowd. They read ADULT SHORT SUBJECT. As before, they flash on and off
the screen very briefly, again providing an understated, brief, and unusual
authorial commentary on the genre of the film and its various types of content and
filmmaking modes. It then ends abruptly with a cut to black and a truncation of
the soundtrack.
The first and third sections of More comprise a two part auto-ethnography
presenting a pair of related public social events that display the extroverted
tendencies of young Americans who play sports, drink beer, consume recreational
drugs, dance, and loudly celebrate their youth. Their exuberance is clearly
spontaneous and sincere, and the films improvisational style perfectly captures
272
this energy. Considering these filming conditions, it is all the more telling that the
filmmakers chose to add these occasional and incredibly brief asides to the
audience in the form of small superimposed text that briefly flashes over the
films action. The statements that these interventions provide are incredibly
simple, SPORTS, MR. WEAVER, CINEMA VERITE, ADULT SHORT
SUBJECT. They are declarative, but entirely unnecessary as information. They
provide a jocular commentary on the interaction between film form and the
spontaneous flow of life that the apparatus records. They also mock the
conventions of non-fiction filmmaking, or perhaps film genre more generally. In
some sense, they are so absurd that they are entirely inexplicable and challenge
the significatory potential of the entire film text. These interventions are
extraordinarily sparse, a fact that further causes the viewer to feel that they are
carefully chosen and perhaps significant in some rhetorical sense. But at the point
of the softball games climax, in a particularly understated fashion, amid a roar of
cheering and physically expressed excitement, the simple word SPORTS
appears over the action, in very small letters, for only a few seconds. What could
such an unusual rhetorical intrusion aim to convey?
Nelsons sense of humor, like that of Bruce Conner, is subtle and
disruptive as it destabilizes ever so slightly the textual cohesion of established
audio-visual codes. As it divides this spontaneous non-fiction portrait of small
town revelry with a visually and thematically unrelated mock car advertisement, it
undermines the rhetorical force of both representational strategies. As Yalkut and
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Paik had done with Waiting for Commercials, Nelson and his students draw
attention to the markedly different modes of address that are associated with
distinct filmmaking genres, be they informational, commercial, or fictional.
Nelsons use of text in More, like his choice to incorporate a highly stylized
advertisement for a free car, is certainly mischievous; it undermines both the
sobriety of documentary filmmaking and the commodity fetishism of television
advertising. Though there has been little consideration of the significance of both
observational documentary and television advertising in relation to experimental
film, Nelsons film demonstrates that these two languages are always looming
somewhere in American visual culture, in the background of even experimental
film work. More is an unusual, idiosyncratic engagement with both the visual
language of documentary and that of television advertising that juxtaposes them
against one another within a ribald, irreverent frenzy of youth and excess. This
eccentric amalgam of styles and tone allegorizes the unusual production
conditions of this unruly experiment in collective authorship.
World War II America revolved around the gravitational center of New York
City. (This is particularly true of the gallery culture of fine art that depended on a
market-based economic structure with ties to the affluence and industry of the
urban upper class and its social milieu.) However, the experimental art and film
practices that are the subject of this dissertation were not exclusively localized
around New York City. Because of its grass roots, low budget models of
production and distribution, experimental film cannot be convincingly restricted
to any one city or geographic locale in the United States. In fact, in the period
discussed herein, lively experimental film communities existed in Pittsburgh, Los
Angeles, Buffalo, San Francisco, and Boston, among other cities.293 Between
these areas of creative activity, there were productive dialogues, however these
exchanges were limited by both physical distance and the scant material means
that were available to most of these filmmakers, factors that reinforced the
relative isolation between these spatially localized communities. Due to the
geographic, material, and social differences between these areas of experimental
film practice, significant aesthetic and thematic distinctions interpenetrate their
histories. Therefore, alternative regional histories of non-industrial cinema
deserve more consideration, such that they can provide historical perspective on
293
There have been a number of significant recent considerations of local experimental film
cultures in a range of cities. Robert Haller has edited Crossroads: Avant-Garde Film in Pittsburgh
in the 1970s (New York: Anthology Film Archives, 2005). Scott MacDonald edited Canyon
Cinema: The Life and Times of an Independent Film Distributor (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2008). There is a large forthcoming volume on San Francisco Cinema, to be
produced in part by the Pacific Film Archive. Undoubtedly, the most ambitious effort to challenge
the absolute centrality of New York in the history of experimental cinema is David Jamess The
Most Typical Avant-Garde: History of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2005).
275
the dominant practices of New York, while demonstrating that the trends,
sensibilities, and modes of production that were typical of the East Coast art
capital were by no means the only possibilities that the medium offered.
In understanding Conners work, a consideration of his Bay Area, West
Coast social milieu helps to explain a number of the most significant contextual
factors of his career, including his outsider status in relation to New York art of
the 1960s (the primary locus of the art market) and his semi-insider status within
the Hollywood film community. The relation between the New York art world
and the sphere of Hollywood film culture is an extreme instantiation of the
polarity between the aesthetic discrimination, cliquishness, and the elitist
presumptions of the New York art world, on one hand, and the mass-produced,
populist, formulaic productions of Hollywood film, on the other. To Conner, both
forces represented the most crass kind of consumerist, capitalist, market-based
economics. He once dismissed the entire notion of the gallery circuit as a bankers
exercise, saying, The only reason the art world exists is because the check has
been cashed.294 Nevertheless, Conners work intervenes within these two
different cultural registers by being simultaneously implicated in both of them, in
material terms, while willfully distancing itself from them through its ambivalent
ideological and philosophical stance.
The bohemian communities of the West Coast provided alternative
cultural contexts for the exhibition and marketing of fine art. Though there were
294
Rothfuss, 173.
276
277
297
Rebecca Solnit, Secret Exhibition: Six California Artists of the Cold War Era (San Francisco:
City Lights Books, 1990), 60.
278
298
Thomas Kent Alexander, San Franciscos Hipster Cinema, Film Culture 44 (Spring 1967),
70.
279
phenomenon whose direction was toward a new view of film and its
place.299
The humble production conditions and independent sensibility of the work
continually surface in anecdotal descriptions of experimental filmmaking in the
Bay Area, and should necessarily frame any historical consideration of the
relationship between artistic practice and its social determinants in the region.
Canyon Cinema, founded by Baillie in 1960 as an itinerant, community
experiment in public film exhibition, had grown by 1967 into an independent,
artist founded collective, like the Filmmakers Cooperative of New York,
dedicated to the distribution of work by experimental and independent
filmmakers. (Robert Nelson and Bruce Conner were both involved in the early
organization and development of Canyon Cinema.) Both of these cooperatives
initially began as shared, communal projects run by artists that also functioned as
social organizations through which filmmakers met, socialized, and exchanged
ideas. However, by all accounts, the social atmosphere of Canyon Cinema and the
San Francisco film community was substantially more similar to a commune in its
day-to-day social operations than was the more serious, manifesto-minded work
of the New York-based experimental film group. These social values permeate the
areas experimental film culture in terms of its extratextual production histories as
well as its subjects, themes, and overall content. The works of Bruce Conner and
299
Mitch Tuchman, Bruce Conner Interviewed by Mitch Tuchman, Film Comment 17, no. 5
(September/October 1981), 75.
280
Robert Nelson exemplify these factors through their social contexts and their
dependence on collaborative modes of artistic practice.
Though Conner made many of his found footage films and recycled
material assemblages largely by himself, he often collaborated with other artists.
For example, a number of his films either depended on the assistance of his social
circle or showcased their talents. Dancer and singer Toni Basil; actor, director,
photographer Hopper; painter Jay De Feo; minimalist composer Terry Riley;
painter Joann Brown; and actor, filmmaker Dean Stockwell, all assisted or
contributed to Conners films. The filmmaker also interacted with the Semina
group of the Los Angeles area who were involved in an art movement that has
sometimes been described as early Funk art. Included in this group were wellknown assemblage and collage artists Wallace Berman and George Herms, as
well as a number of the Hollywood actors and celebrities mentioned above. The
interests that Conner, the Semina artists, and the Hollywood circle shared in
assemblage art, collage, celebrity culture, popular music, hallucinogenic drugs,
and cinema produced an unusual and fascinating blend of experimental media and
popular art activities of the 1960s. (Bermans image was even included on the
cover of the Beatles Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band LP.) These social,
extratextual details are important determining influences upon the historical
conditions in which Conners work was produced. In terms of his basic social and
material activities of the mid-to-late 1960s, Conner made few films and publicly
281
300
In fact, Conner performed the actors wedding ceremony to Michelle Phillips of the Mamas and
the Papas in New Mexico in 1970 (letter from Conner to Universal Life Church, November 6,
1970, Bruce Conner Papers, Smithsonian Archives of American Art).
301
In a letter to Shirley Clarke, the artist reflects on some details of popular culture and his place
in that sphere, presenting a short resume of his associations. He excitedly outlines his pop culture
pedigree: I was in THE TRIP by Roger Corman [] The producer of THE MONKEES has
proposed that I travel with the next Monkee tour and make a movie of them [] Richard Lester
[director of the Beatles film A Hard Days Night (1964)] is making a movie here which I will try
to get in (Shirley Clarke Papers, Wisconsin Historical Society, University of Wisconsin,
Madison).
282
Thomas Albright, the art critic for The San Francisco Examiner describes
both the social and thematic fixations of this group (and its relation to
developments on the East Coast):
But the day broke more quickly on the East Coast, and the balance
of forces there was fundamentally different. Conner, Berman, and
other funk artists on the West Coast developed their work
organically from a core of personal and social experience which
remained central to it. They leaned more toward absurd and savage
comedy than the first-generation Abstract Expressionists, but in
their own way they were just as impassioned, uncompromising,
and morally concerned.302
The social history of groups like these represents the interpenetration of influence,
happenstance, friendship, artistic authority, social trends, and the flow of capital
within a specific historical moment. This socio-historical context should help us
better to understand and interpret the cultural contingencies that underpin works
of art such as those described in this study.303
Like Conner, Robert Nelson was part of a social enclave in which he
interacted with a variety of artists from a range of disciplines, many of whom
served as collaborators at some point in time. One of Nelsons collaborations with
these artists has been described above, with the intention of suggesting that the
social landscape of the arts in the Bay Area in the mid-1960s was one that
302
Thomas Albrigh, Art in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945-1980 (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1985), 109.
303
In a similar sense, it is often also reasonable and productive to be aware of the ways in which
different intellectual and artistic histories have influenced specific developments within, for
example, the Semina group. Consider the appearance in Bermans mimeographed, handassembled literary and artistic journal Semina, of translations of Antonin Artaud. The dramatists
theories likely reached the group through McClure and demonstrate an unusual moment of
intellectual synchronicity between the artists and filmmakers of the West and East Coasts.
283
284
Nelsons statement, quoted above, that these artists all knew about art (namely,
that it had something to do with having a good time).304 Much of this fun was of
course, conceptual. Wiley explains his relation to the seriousness of this earlier art
movement: Abstract Expressionism was revolutionary in its way, but it became a
heavy moral trip. If you drew a line it had to be grounded to Gods tongue or the
core of the earth to justify putting it there. In opposition to the serious
metaphysical and philosophical imperatives of Abstract Expressionism (and its
entrenchment within modernist critical history), Wiley explains, I was struck by
what an incredible concept art was [. . .] nothing moral, no good or bad.305 Wiley
was a massively important figure in Bay area art, and like Nelson with whom he
shared an artistic practice and a philosophical sensibility, he had a significance as
both an example and an influence needs that needs to be taken into consideration
in subsequent histories of the areas overlapping experiments in art and cinema.306
The mood in Bay Area art had obviously shifted between the murky
tableaus of Conners earlier assemblages and the later jocular, conceptual
experiments of Nelson and Wiley. This change in artistic tone also resonated
across the overlapping cultural field of experimental cinema. The darker
thematics of Conners art (and that of his social circle) were replaced in the mid1960s to early 1970s by the work of Wiley, Nauman, Nelson, and others that in
304
285
both art and film embodied a ludic notion of arts social function. Albright
writes that, The hip, flippant parody of [Wileys] Funk art, the ingratiating
outrageousness of its adolescent iconoclasm and sophomoric humor, appealed to
an audience that was increasingly won over by the growing youth culture of the
1960s.307 With their iconoclastic tone of play Nelsons films communicate much
of the same energy as the Funk art in which he was schooled, as well as the
philosophical imperatives of the Bay Area counterculture, which included
communities dedicated to fine art, experimental cinema, street theater, and
conceptual art.
In the early-to-mid 1970s, when Nelson brought his films to New York, he
was exposed to the markedly dissimilar conceptual direction that local avantgarde cinema had taken. Nelson immediately realized that the East Coast
experimental film community had embraced a severity of form that was entirely
distinct from his own work and that of his West Coast cohort:
I think New York, it reminded me of what I imagined Egypt to be like at
the height of some majestic dynasty. Because, the artistic formalism, the
formalism everywhere, in every expression, even on TV, was very
exciting. And to come with a film [. . .] once I got there, the film [of mine]
looked to me in the context of that formalism in New York, it looked to
me like something a gypsy brought in a blanket and rolled out on the sand,
like a bunch of hairy handmade objects that were all sort of laying there.
That was the reaction I had to the film, in New York. That it looked very
hairy.308
It is precisely this hairiness that defines Nelsons cinema as well as that of
Conner and other Bay Area filmmakers whose film experiments developed in
307
308
Albright, 128.
Macdonald, Canyon Cinema, 307.
286
tandem with the Funk art of mid-1950s to the early 1970s and which
distinguishes it from New York film culture. California-based critic Peter Plagens
reiterates this basic aesthetic distinction: But Los Angeles art [] at least
acknowledges New York art issues, while the Bay Area goes its own way. As
Plagens defines it, assemblage art was an artistic development with markedly San
Franciscan roots: Ultimately, assemblage is the product of a Bay Area bric-abrac sensibility.309 As both Nelson and Plagens explain, in the San Francisco
area, there existed a localized aesthetic sensibility, marked by a hairiness and a
bric-a-brac sensibility that differed significantly from the severe forms and
aesthetic systematicity of New Yorks art trends, including Information Art and
Structural Film, which valorized rational structures, mechanized actions, and gridlike constructions. The formalism that Nelson observed in New York cinema of
the early-to-mid 1970s, showed signs of a shift in the principal aesthetic modes of
experimental film. But Nelson was not the only filmmaker who was caught offguard by these developments in filmic systematicity and formulaic structures. The
next chapter will consider other philosophical and aesthetic developments that
challenged the dominance of the mathematical precision and extreme formalism
of New York experimental cinema of the early 1970s, while also resonating with
lingering artistic problems concerning presence and its mediation through media
art.
309
Peter Plagens, Sunshine Muse: Art on the West Coast 19451970 (New York: Praeger, 1974),
94.
287
In the age of commodity conscious art movements like Pop Art and
assemblage, the legacy of Abstract Expressionism continued to exert a surprising
influence over artistic production. As Kaprow and others suggested at the end of
the 1950s, the bodily contingencies that underpinned Abstract Expressionism, as
ontologically and historically integrated functions of artistic, gestural, somatic
activity, continued to wield some degree of authority. In happenings, radical
theater, avant-garde dance, performance art, and experimental film, the personal
imperatives of abstract expressionism, which were powerfully contingent upon
the forces of human presence and bodily action, found new material and social
territories for their inscription. In the 1960s and 70s, this somatic energy was
partially revitalized by artists whose sensibilities reflected a range of political
projects including feminist, anti-war, and minority liberation movements. In their
inheritance of certain humanist attitudes, these movements emphasized the human
body, its capacity to register suffering, and its role in representing cultural
difference. Projects like those of Vito Acconci, Hanna Wilke, Chris Burden, Yoko
Ono, and Carolee Schneemann foregrounded conceptual and ideological anxieties
in the realm of bodily performance.
288
289
290
between the material of film and the historical real that mediates. Kitchs Last
Meal (197376) by Carolee Schneemann and Brakhages Act of Seeing With
Ones Own Eyes (1971) are both efforts by experimental film artists to balance
the seemingly contradictory observational impulses of the documentarian and the
imperatives of a personal art practice conceived in the wake of Abstract
Expressionism and the rise of performance. This chapter will consider this nexus
of concerns as it reflects on the aesthetic, historical, and philosophical challenges
of an experimental non-fiction as practiced by Schneemann and Brakhage. The
works discussed herein challenge the conventional understanding of a plastic,
abstract, oneiric, demiurgic, heroic, visionary film practice which is, according
to the dominant narratives of film history, essentially Brakhagean and
encourage a recognition of an alternative, observational aesthetics of experimental
film (practiced by both Brakhage and Schneemann) that, rooted in the particulars
of everyday experience, represents a profound innovation in the ontology of
cinema while also challenging the conventional expectations of expressive film
art.
291
Amelia Jones, Body Art / Performing the Subject (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press,
1998), 61.
311
As suggested earlier in this dissertation, Stephen Koch once argued that the representation of
human presence was Warhols greatest concern. Perhaps it was for this reason that Warhol was so
enthused about the possibility of making a biopic about Pollock. Supposedly, Warhol also had at
least one painting by Pollock in his collection.
312
Joselit, American Art Since 1945, 34.
292
forces were not mutually exclusive, but instead were often realized in the spaces
of the same works.
293
294
Brooklyn Academy of Music, New Poets Theater, and then in the 1970s, The
Kitchen and Anthology Film Archives. Throughout these spaces, Schneemann led
a number of events that famously showcased her own body (often nude) in the
context of work that she described as kinetic theater. These projects put bodies
in motion, and emphasized a range of somatic interactions between performers,
the physical spaces that they occupied, their audiences, and the representational
limits of various media (including painting, music, and cinema). Perhaps the most
famous work produced by Schneemann, in any medium, was one of her first, a
project titled Meat Joy.
Performed in Paris, London, and lastly, New York, in 1964, Meat Joy was
a landmark work of body art (which took place in the same year as another major
feminist achievement in performance, Onos Cut Piece, discussed in Chapter 2 of
this project). Like the Happenings of Kaprow, Oldenburg, and Robert Morris (a
number of which featured Schneemann as performer), it was a partially scripted
work. In many ways, a number of semi-clothed male and female performers
interacted with dance-like motions, in contact with one another, as they rolled on
the floor with raw meat, painted each others bodies, and staged a kind of
Dionysian contact performance, while short rock-and-roll and pop songs era
played over speakers within the venue. The work began with an edited tape
recording of the artist herself reading her notes for the work in a sonic montage,
cut together with a French language primer and street noises from Paris. Lights
were carefully choreographed and the overall dramatic structure of the work was
295
well established before the performances took place. Schneemann rehearsed Meat
Joy, but also welcomed unplanned, performative divergences. She explains that
certain parameters of the piece function consistently. Sequence, light, sound,
materials these were planned and coordinated in rehearsal. Yet, she clarifies
that other details, specifically those related to bodily actions, could and should
vary. She continues, Attitude, gesture, phrasing, duration, relationship between
performers (between performers and objects) became loosely structured in
rehearsal and were expected to evolve.313 Overall, Meat Joy emphasized the
performative presence of its contributors, foregrounding their gestures as its
central aesthetic determinations.
As its title suggests, the tone of Meat Joy was lively and celebratory. Its
performers shuffled around and rolled on the floor in piles of meat and paper,
semi-clothed and splattered with paint, as they smiled and laughed to the sounds
of Elvis Presley, The Beatles, and The Supremes. Though Schneemanns work
would grow more rhetorically and ideologically severe in the following years, at
this point, it presented a kind of excited, somatic optimism about gestural art and
its capacity to advance a vision of sexual equality. In this regard, the work
presented a ludic study of bodily experience, gender, sexuality, and physical
pleasure, in the context of semi-theatrical public performances. Schneemann
describes it as follows:
313
Carolee Schneemann, Imagining her Erotics: Essays, Interviews, Projects (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 2003), 62.
296
314
Schneemann, More Than Meat Joy: Complete Performance Works and Selected Writings, ed.
Bruce McPherson (New Palz, NY: Documentext, 1979), 63.
297
298
twenties), the artist claimed to have followed them around like a shadow.315
(She was particularly interested in the blend of portraiture and abstraction that
was practiced by De Kooning, and her early work including a 1958 portrait of
Jane Brakhage clearly demonstrates this influence.) However, the male bravado
of this group, with its drunken fistfights and raucous arguments, represented a
kind of artistic and intellectual pissing contest that was largely, if not exclusively,
masculine. (As Schneemann saw it, the Cedar Bars legacy of a largely male
clique of self-appointed art world royalty loomed over the generation that
followed and caused significant rifts between her and her peers.) To many artists
of the period, including Schneemann and Warhol, the Abstract Expressionist
group exuded a heterosexist misogyny that influenced their arts extratextual
social history. The critical language that surrounded much of the work was also
controlled by domineering male voices (like that of Greenberg). In her painting,
performance, and films, Schneemann attempted to wrestle the heroic, muscular,
dancing gestures of Pollocks painting away from its sexist associations and
determinations, and make it personal to her own experience as a woman.
Few artists of the early to mid 1960s were schooled in the history of
feminist philosophy and female art history; in this regard Schneemann was a
notable exception. While in college and in her early twenties, Schneemann
studied the writings of Simone de Beauvoir as well as the histories of neglected
female artists and painters. These studies would provide the theoretical
315
299
groundwork for her artistic innovations of the 1960s, which represented major
feminist achievements well before the mainstream womens movement gained
public recognition. In terms of the explicit expression of her sexuality,
Schneemann found intellectual and artistic inspiration in her studies of
psychology and aesthetics, particularly in the works of Wilhelm Reich and
Antonin Artaud, two thinkers in whom she located a particular license to break
from the repressed and misogynistic attitudes of previous generations of male
artists. Reich was a German psychiatrist who had created international
controversy in his endorsement of a liberated attitude towards human sexuality
divorced from the structures of guilt and ownership and removed from
conventional, patriarchal value systems. In the 1960s, Reichs work was partially
responsible for a shift away from the sexual repression of the previous era. As has
been suggested earlier in this study, the writing of Antonin Artaud was one of the
most powerful influences upon avant-garde performance in the 1960s. In her
efforts to undermine the material and philosophical limits of conventional
theatrical performance and dance, Schneemann found a catalyzing influence in
the philosophy of Artaud, because of his absolute emphasis on the body as both
an artistic resource and a target of aesthetic aggression.
In 1960, the actress Liz Hiller gave Schneemann a copy of The Theater
and its Double. It was a work that encouraged a return to primitive structures,
social ritual, and the pleasures and pains of bodily experience. The notion of an
intellectualized, abstracted theater like that practiced by modernist playwrights
300
like Ionesco, Brecht, and Beckett was anathema to Artauds project, as it would
be to Schneemanns. Artauds emphasis on bodily presence and somatic theater
was precipitously synchronous with the lingering influence of Abstract
Expressionism and its emphasis upon contingent, physical expression as a mode
of mapping psychic activity. The precise significance of the body in Artauds
writing has been recently described by Allen S. Weiss in a way that suggests an
interesting compatibility between these historically remote artistic developments:
For Artaud, the pure presence of the body was both the absolute site of
contingency and the source of psychic energy.316 In this sense, Artaud located
the spirit and the mind in the body, and for Schneemann, perfectly drew an
intellectual connection between the physical action of artistic gesture and the
sexual identity of the artist herself. In her notes from the 1960s, she made it clear
that she had digested Artaud, when she wrote, I decided my genital was my
soul.317 As has been suggested earlier in this dissertation, Artauds writing as it
was interpreted and popularized amongst the New York avant-garde of the late
1950s and 60s bolstered a range of artistic developments that encouraged social
provocation, aggressive action against established values, the triggering of
discomfort, and the overload of the spectators sensoria.
Like a number of other artists of her generation, Schneemann would take
up a 1960s version of the aesthetic and social challenge that Artauds theories
implied. Her work aimed to confront conventional value systems and aesthetic
316
Allen S. Weiss, Artauds Anatomy in The Senses of Performance, ed. Sally Banes, Andre
Lepecki (New York and London: Routledge, 2007), 201.
317
Schneemann, More Than Meat Joy, 55.
301
318
302
was the register of erotic representation, which she would use to overwhelm the
predilections of her viewers and the social and textual limits of her chosen media.
319
Schneemann met Tenney in May 1955 and encountered Brakhage for the first time only a few
months later. She was introduced to Brakhage, in her words, in a 42nd Street spaghetti restaurant
where we shared one bowl. Stan was going to 42nd Street films afternoon and evenings
(Schneemann email correspondence with the author, July 13, 2009).
320
Schneemann quoted in Women of Vision: Histories in Feminist Film and Video, ed. Alexandra
Juhasz (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 70.
303
Jim and me. [] But I felt that Loving failed to capture our central eroticism, and
I wanted to set that right.321 She continues, explaining that she felt a need to be
the constructor of the images and not simply their subject. When she appears in
other peoples films, she explains, I always feel a tremendous distortion has been
enacted on me, despite my hope that some coherent self will come through.322
After her experiences with Brakhage and other filmmakers, Schneemann decided
that she would attempt to define her visual representation according to her own
terms.323
The first film experiment that Schneemann began was Fuses, a project that
would achieve some cultural notoriety and eventually become her most famous
work in the medium. Begun in 1964 and not completed for three more years, the
film was a diaristic account of lovemaking between Schneemann and Tenney in
the space of their home that, in its final state, shares the seemingly paradoxical
functions of filmic documentation and painterly expression. Partially modeled on
the form and content of Brakhages films, it would eventually reflect his influence
while challenging his mode of vision and overall representational strategies. In a
number of his films, including Wedlock House: An Intercourse (1959), Flesh of
Morning (1956/1986), and Window Water Baby Moving (1962), Brakhage
321
In addition, Schneemann has often cited Window Water Baby Moving (1959), Brakhages film
of his wifes experience in childbirth, as a work that powerfully catalyzed her own desire to learn
the craft of filmmaking and produce her own self-authored works in the medium.
322
Schneemann in MacDonald, A Critical Cinema: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers, Vol.
1, 142. She also appeared in films by Stan Vanderbeek, Bill Brand, and Stephen Dwoskin.
323
Hollis Frampton describes Brakhages particular directorial stance in relation to his subjects:
hed like to be on both ends [of the camera]: hed like to be seen and at the same time he would
like to be in control of the way in which he is seen (Frampton in MacDonald, A Critical Cinema,
Vol. 1, 75).
304
305
324
306
325
Ibid., 320.
Schneemann is not mentioned in Patricia Mellencamps Indiscretions: Avant-Garde Film,
Video, & Feminism (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990); nor is she
considered in any of Laura Mulveys writing. (Mulvey is the most influential feminist film
theorist; her most well known essay is Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema in Film Theory
and Criticism 7th edition, ed. Leo Braudy, Marshall Cohen (New York and Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2009), 711722.) As Schneemann once said, Mulvey talked to me about the
rupture Fuses made in pornography how important Fuses was as an erotic vision. It was going to
change the whole argument and discussion of filmic representation of sexuality and then she
couldnt touch it. Mulvey has never mentioned my films (Schneemann in Interview with Kate
Haug in Imagining her Erotics, 27).
326
307
source material for MARILYN TIMES FIVE.327 Yet, it must still be recognized that
the film was quite provocative and confrontational in its attack on well
entrenched, commonly held beliefs concerning the representation of sex on
screen. In 1968, during a public presentation at Cannes, the film caused a near riot
in which people tore up seats and created a rather massive public disturbance.
(Schneemann has suggested that the crowds reaction at this screening was the
result of the fact that they expected Fuses to be more sexually explicit and puerile
than it actually was.) Still, there were precedents for sexually explicit work in
experimental film, including the films of Stan Brakhage, Andy Warhol, and
Barbara Rubin. The 1963 project, Christmas on Earth, was an experiment by a
teenage Rubin in the representation and exhibition of polymorphous sexuality, in
which homosexual and heterosexual acts were blended together visually, through
a novel experiment in film projection. In its exhibition, Rubins film presented a
spectatorial experience of expanded cinema in which the films sexual openness
was reflected in its screening context. In public presentations, two different reels
of the film was shown simultaneously on two projectors in which two
independent streams of imagery were superimposed on top of each other, on the
same screen, while a radio played the popular music of the day. Like
Schneemanns Meat Joy, Rubins film was a playful bodily romp set to the sounds
of mass media, but it was a work that, because of its explicit display of
homosexual behavior, was more challenging to normative sexual sensibilities. In
327
David Thompson., Black and White and Blue: Adult Cinema From the Victorian Age to the
VCR (Toronto: ECW Press, 2007), 169.
308
this sense, Rubins work was less susceptible to cooptation by the sensibilities of
heterosexist pornographic exploitation.
Some critics have argued that through her use of her own body,
Schneemann created works that played into heterosexual male fantasy. In her
essay, European and American Womens Body Art, first published in 1976,
Lucy Lippard compared the perceptions of male and female body art. She argued
that the sexual acting out and exhibitionist tendencies of artists like Vito Acconci
and Lucas Samaras were considered acceptable by the critical male establishment
while the efforts of Hanna Wilke, Carolee Schneemann, and Lynda Benglis were
met with much less approving responses. To her, this was largely due to the
sexism of the art world, but there were other considerations as well, particularly
when the women involved, like Wilke and Schneemann, were a glamour girl or
a body beautiful, respectively.328 She writes, Men can use beautiful, sexy
women as neutral objects or surfaces, but when women use their own faces and
bodies, they are immediately accused of narcissism. [] Because women are
considered sex objects, it is taken for granted that any woman who presents her
nude body in public is doing so because she thinks she is beautiful. She is a
narcissist, and Acconci, with his less romantic image and pimply back, is an
artist.329 Lippard mocks the simplicity of the rhetorically reductive formulations
of art criticism that, in their analysis of body art of the 1960s and 70s, conflate
ugliness with artistry and beauty with self-exploitation. Still, she agrees that at
328
329
Lippard, European and American Womens Body Art in From the Center, 126
Ibid., 125.
309
times the use of the nude body provokes a necessary consideration of the
ideological stakes of self-representation. In discussing Wilke, an artist who courts
the conditions of self-exploitation and who described her own work as
seduction, Lippard also draws a connection to Schneemann. She explains that
Wilkes own confusion of her roles as beautiful woman and artist, as flirt and
feminist, has resulted at times in politically ambiguous manifestations that have
exposed her to criticism on a personal as well as on an artistic level. Another case
in point is Carolee Schneemann.330 Lippards criticism suggests that even when
one is aware of the political intention of such work, it can create results that,
textually speaking, are politically ambiguous and thus, like the work of Conner
discussed in the last chapter, engage a potentially anxiogenic ethical ambivalence
concerning the interplay of authorship and exploitation.
Ibid., 126.
Mekas, Movie Journal, 281.
310
311
312
Ibid.
She explained, Anyway, film as part of performance remained something that was in the
studio along with all the other rough materials being tried out (Schneemann in MacDonald, A
Critical Cinema, Vol. 1, 137).
337
313
Throughout the rest of the 1960s and early 1970s, Schneemann continued
to integrate film into her performances, often, but not exclusively, using materials
filmed and created by herself. Apart from Fuses, her other major film works of
the period, Viet Flakes (1965), Plumb Line (196871), and Kitchs Last Meal
would be screened both as independent, self-contained works, and as integrated
components of kinetic theater projects. The dual condition of these works echoes
that of her contemporaries who were active both within the world of the
experimental film community (or the coop avant-garde as Peter Wollen
described it) and in the performance art network (that overlapped with the social
circles of dance and happenings). Schneemanns film works functioned
simultaneously as part of the conventional register of single-screen film
exhibition, generally associated with the avant-garde film community, and one of
open-ended semi-theatrical conditions, which was more closely connected to
traditions of performance and visual art.
338
339
315
documented the quotidian experiences of her life in rural New York with
filmmaker Anthony McCall and their cat Kitch. She explains that the film was
based on the continuous textures of a shared daily life of a couple both artists
living in the country. The film engages with the ways in which art and life
intertwine: The visual imagery touches on the practical efforts which actually
surround art practice in this case: gardening, chopping wood, cleaning, grounds
work, cooking, typing, jobs, reading, travels, the appearance of friends, the
movements of the cat through the center of the home and grounds, and the
recurrent passage of a train which runs close behind the house.340 It is a film
project that continues the autobiographical trajectory of her work, while shifting
its emphasis towards a more unrestricted, open-ended diaristic mode of
filmmaking.
Produced on Super-8mm with a separate soundtrack on tape, Kitch is a
work of remarkable scale and formal complexity for this extremely inflexible
small gauge film that had been initially intended as an amateur, home-movie
format for hobbyists. To have produced a five hour super-8 epic is an unusual, if
not unprecedented feat.341 She explains that, Kitchs Last Meal took its form due
to the nature of Super 8: close to the body, compact, cheap film, three minute
cartridges immediacy and simplicity, fixed durations.342 However,
Schneemanns Super 8 epic was somewhat atypical in form, because unlike many
340
Ibid., 225.
The materials of Kitch Super-8 film are extremely difficult to edit due to the tiny size of its
frames and the thin, spidery quality of its film stock.
342
Schneemann, More Than Meat Joy, 225.
341
316
other works originally produced in this format, hers was a tightly edited and
carefully orchestrated work.
In its exhibitions over time, different portions of the work have been
screened, in varying length from twenty minutes to almost five hours. After the
films completion in 1976, Schneemanns preferred mode for exhibiting the work
has been in a vertically oriented, two-screen film, with the top image slightly
larger than the one below. She has also shown Kitchs Last Meal with live
voiceover accompaniment or as part of a performance work titled Up to and
Including Her Own Limits (1973-76). It is now available only in composite twoscreen versions on both 16mm and video, both of which are fifty-four minutes
long.343
In structure, the film is ostensibly based on the last days of an elderly
female cat who was seventeen years old when Schneemann began the project of
documenting the animals twilight years. The artist assumed that Kitch would not
live much longer and thus planned to organize the film around a series of the cats
meals, filming one every week as a record of the animals life. At the time of the
projects beginning Schneemann could not have known that her cat would live to
be twenty years old, well beyond the life expectancy of the species.
Each section of the film features a handwritten title that introduces us to
the historical period included in each reel. The first reel of the restored version
343
These versions are slightly different because of their differing sound formats. For the exhibition
of the film, Schneemann chooses to circulate the soundtrack as a separate, independent source.
The result is a less rigid registration of sound and image synchronicity in exhibition.
317
(which is the top image of the works two-screen vertical orientation) begins with
the following text:
Kitchs Last Meal
18 years old
Reels 9 and 10, 1974
By Carolee Schneemann
The text is painted on a panel of glass; behind it, we see a train moving in the
distant landscape, as the filmmaker prepares a makeshift profilmic
superimposition of text over action. The soundtrack is atmospheric, beginning
with the rhythmic rumbling of the train. Like its visual representation, this sonic
icon of modernity and movement functions throughout the film as an auditory
leitmotif that bridges and joins disparate materials through its rhythmic evocation
of a rural landscape. Schneemanns figure then enters the film, as she is seen
sweeping the front porch of her home in the saturated color of this small gauge
film. Behind Schneemann is the verdant expanse of her front yard. The bottom
projector then begins and the second image now enters and introduces the films
protagonist, a cat who relaxes outside while Schneemann continues her domestic
labors in the top section of the projection.
We are then introduced to the disheveled, tousled interior of the house,
which is covered with scattered papers and boxes strewn across the floor. (This
disarray was the result of a theft by a previous tenant to whom she had sublet her
home.) Schneemann continues to labor outdoors, and the frequent footage of her
suggests that, like Fuses, the filmmaker and her partner shared the responsibilities
of operating the camera. The top and bottom panels often show related, tightly
318
345
319
charming, but dont ask us to look at your films. We cannot. There are
certain films we cannot look at, the personal clutter, the persistence of
feelings, the hand-touched sensibility, the diaristic indulgence, the
painterly mess, the dense gestalt, the primitive technique.
During the above voiceover, we see images of Schneemann petting Kitch, giving
her medicine with an eyedropper, picking beans, and preparing food in the
kitchen. We also see dirty dishes in the sink, a clear instantiation, in literal terms,
of the aesthetic attributes described in her voiceover, including the personal
clutter, painterly mess, and diaristic indulgence of her art. In this section of
the film, the register of Schneemanns personal, quotidian experience and that of
her artistic enterprise are fluidly melded by both her sardonic voiceover and its
ironic interaction with the films image track. The visual components of this
section also clearly evoke the gendered implications of a conventional sexist
division of labor that relates to the space of the kitchen versus that of the art
studio. We see mason jars and the smiling face of McCall, a structuralist
filmmaker, though he is not the one that is the target of her commentary. (This
will be discussed in greater detail later.)
Schneemanns voiceover continues:
I dont take the advice of men. They only talk to themselves. Pay
attention to critical and practical film language. It exists for and in
only one gender. I said to him, You have slithered out of excesses
and vitalities of the sixties.
He said, You can do as I do too. Take one clear process, follow its
strictest implication, intellectually establish a system of
permutations, establish their visual set.
I said, My film is concerned with diet and digestion.
320
321
accompany a mlange of imagery featuring her cat, her home, and her quotidian
interactions with her partner. At times, there are additional fragmentary
pronouncements on the soundtrack, though none as long or as detailed as the one
described above. In one case, Schneemann draws critical attention to a quotation
from Sitney, suggesting an implicit sexism in his writing, which she demonstrates
by reading his printed text aloud. She quotes an excerpt of something that had
written about a film still from Maya Derens Meshes of the Afternoon, in which
she is shown looking reflectively out of a window. Schneemann quotes the
section in which Sitney describes the film still, writing, it is a calm image, it is
practically an icon of a person looking into himself. These brief observations
concerning sexism and language punctuate the observational texture of the rest of
the work as it shifts registers between conversation, personal reflection, and
feminist commentary. In all, the soundtrack to the film is a blend of feminist
critique (which, like Schneemanns quotation of Sitney, is aphoristic), personal
and diaristic reflection upon the artists own life, some meditation on the
conditions of filmmaking, and observational, atmospheric sound of the artist and
her partner in conversation, blended with the sounds of passing trains and their
purring cat. (The films sonic montage of first person diaristic commentary with
casual, fragmentary sound, muddled conversation, and synchronized sound/image
commentary relates to the films of Jonas Mekas in both tone and overall artistic
strategy, including for example, Walden or Reminiscences of a Journey to
Lithuania.)
323
Throughout the film, the cat is generally present; she is seen frolicking,
interacting with the couple, tending to herself, and perhaps most often eating. At
one point, she rides in the front seat of the car with Schneemann and McCall as
the artist films the landscape through the window of the moving vehicle. On the
soundtrack Schneemann tells a story about Fuses and complains about a recent
robbery in which some of her films and much of her correspondence were stolen.
(Though she does not explicitly indicate it in the film, Schneemann lost all of her
lengthy and intense written correspondence with Brakhage to this theft). She
includes a range of tonal registers in her commentary, blending personal
comments, like, In December, Jim [Tenney]s father killed himself with
discussions of her artistic working methods, demonstrating that within her artistic
practice, even her relationship to the specific technologies of film are personal,
tactile, and somatic. In her voiceover, she describes two recent conversations with
moving image artists:
A video expert asked me, How did you get into sound recording? The
question was bewildering. If I need a medium, I go and teach myself to
use it. The forms are in my mind. I go to find what the materials can do.
I said, I teach myself, so long as I can get my hands on it.
Of course, he said, access. I meant touch.
A super-8 filmmaker from Europe called to talk shop. He asked, What is
the most important piece of super-8 equipment you have?
I said, Ive been waiting for someone to ask me that. Its a clothespin.
As this portion of voiceover suggests, Schneemann conceived of her relationship
to her materials in organic terms, as extensions of her musculature and her bodily
324
Such a claim has likely never been made in reference to a human, unless it maybe referred to
one of Brakhages children.
325
attention to composition. The rapid edits and image shifts between the top and
bottom panels create an unusual, unsettling optical flicker that shuttles in a
rhythmical fashion along the vertical axis of the works two-screen projection.
In this winter footage, Schneemann demonstrates the dramatic range of
color and luminosity that super-8 film can produce. In one overwhelming shot,
she shows a dazzling bright pink sunset behind a trail of slowly moving clouds.
Through her careful editing of the film, Schneemann blends this footage of nature
with images of her own body in motion, as she had in Fuses where she visually
melded the act of sexual intercourse with the landscape outside of the couples
window. This section of the film also shows the pleasure and jubilance of
Schneemanns family life, as she dances while the cat plays on the floor and
McCall calmly drinks coffee. The soundtrack includes an atmospheric
combination of largely indecipherable, seemingly commonplace, everyday
conversation, to accompany footage of the two artists feeding their cat a variety of
unlikely foods (including an avocado and a fried egg). The top and bottom panels
of the film often achieve a remarkable geometric patterning; in one sequence the
top screen shows a train as it passes by the window of their home while the
bottom image features an artfully framed, synchronous shadow of the living cat.
This juxtaposition achieves a kind of spontaneous visual symmetry that is
partially created through happenstance. As camera movements within the two
sections push the visual momentum of the diptych in opposite directions, the film
creates interaction between the upper and lower panels that, though carefully
326
The same could be said of the both planned and happenstance parallelism of Warhols kinetic
imagery in The Chelsea Girls.
327
intangible shapes, as the camera moves more rapidly and the films plastic texture
becomes more vibrant. This outburst of dynamic visual energy precedes long
sections of black leader in both panels of the film. This intentional breakdown in
the films optical field introduces a major change. As we will learn in the films
next reel, the cat whose life gave the film its basic structure has passed away. This
abstract shift in the films rhythms and visual texture, followed by long expanses
of an empty black screen, mark the cats transition from life into death. Of the
many topics upon which Kitchs Last Meal meditates, death is one of the most
central: it is prefigured even in the films title.348 The abstract flashes of light and
color that precede the dark portion of the film correspond to the cats last flickers
of life. On the soundtrack, Schneemann tells a story of bringing the cat into the
city to be embalmed, as she prepares us for images of her dead pet.
Following this non-figurative visual symbolization of death, Schneemann
gives the viewers concrete representations of the cats fatality in the last two reels
of the film. Like the others they are labeled with text in Schneemanns hand, here
painted in blue on a white background:
Final Reels
The cat Kitch is 19 yrs old
1976
It is now spring, life is rejuvenated, and the next reels begin with images of the
lovers in bed together. There is footage of the cat playing, as if it had been reborn,
shifting the temporal expectations of the films seemingly linear diary structure.
348
328
329
now filled with tears. During this dramatic and transitional section of the film, the
lower panel explodes with flashes of color, scratches, and bits of illegible text, in
a last gasp of expressive energy, which as before, visually evokes the films
subject matter and the fragility of its own cellular material. The film then returns
to where it started, with images of a train passing in front of a window and
rhythmic sounds of its movement on the soundtrack. There is snow outside; the
seasons have changed again.
With Kitchs Last Meal, Schneemann produced a work that blends the
imperatives of a first-person diaristic cinema (influenced by both Brakhage and
Mekas) with a more essayistic style (like that practiced by political and feminist
filmmakers). In its visual texture, in its mode of rhetorical address, in its
comprehensive representation of the grain of everyday life, Kitch is an
impressionistic survey of an artists quotidian experience. It documents her
chores, her art works, her interactions with her lover, the cycles of nature, and in
its unassuming simplicity, the calm passing of time. Kitch has a personal
intimacy, expressed in both visual and sonic terms, that seems unguarded,
uncensored, and natural in its frankness. The films intimacy is partially a
function of Schneemanns openness towards the discussion of her own
experiences in which records her life without restraint. But it also results from the
flexibility of the amateur filmmaking mode of Super-8 that allows a tiny camera
to be introduced into almost any setting. Like surveillance technologies, light,
330
handheld film equipment allows the artist to create a sensation of closeness and
intimacy that is achieved by limiting the imposition of the apparatus. Schneemann
explained the filming process as being fundamentally transformed by her
encounter with a new technology and her related, new working sensibility: This
camera was a very straightforward, domestic, simple partner to work with, and I
wanted to be more and more accepting of the obviousness and ordinariness of
things.349 Like Kitch the cat, Schneemanns camera lived with the artist and her
partner, observing the most banal or remarkable moments that they shared,
without discretion. This openness to plain, everyday experience frames
Schneemanns project in autobiographical terms, and the lack of extreme filmic
intervention like the painting, scratching, and multiple superimpositions of
Fuses allows the profilmic space of the work to communicate content more
directly to the viewer, in a way that, as Schneemann suggests, is both more
obvious and ordinary.
Autobiography is infused throughout Schneemanns work. In her various
projects she often describes her own personal experiences, making her life her
principal subject. Kitchs Last Meal has been described by Scott MacDonald as
the third film in Schneemanns autobiographical trilogy, which also includes
Fuses and Plumb Line.350 As autobiography, all three of these films partially
chronicle the demise of romantic relationships, and thus frame the experiences of
romantic love, eroticism, and domestic partnership as inextricably connected with
349
350
331
loss and suffering. Kitchs Last Meal is an artists film about her own home life as
well as a domestic meditation on art itself. As she described it in a quotation
above, the film presents the ways in which art is always integrated into the texture
and labor of daily experience, such that the films visual imagery touches on the
practical efforts which actually surround art practice.351 In this sense,
Schneemanns film is an unusual documentary manifestation of the cultural
sensibility of the time that stressed the irreducible integration of lifes experiences
with those of artistic creation. Throughout Kitch, the filmmaker continually
returns to images of landscapes, greenery, and scenes of her country home in its
verdant natural surroundings, presenting a small space of domesticity within the
remarkable visual expanse of nature. The film argues, by example, that it is
impossible to properly understand an artists practice without considering the
extratextual determinations that frame it philosophically and historically.
Schneemanns film is a personal document of her own efforts to integrate her life
and art into the landscape of nature, and as such, represents a heterogeneously
textured interweaving of the social, artistic, and phenomenal realms of her
experience.
Kitchs Last Meal presents an idealistic, perhaps utopian vision of an
artistic practice integrated with nature, creating an audio-visual instantiation of
the artists desire to blend the conceptual developments of avant-garde and
feminist art with a somatic, personal, artistic presence. In its visual and historical
351
332
352
Ibid., 226.
The film materials produced in Kitchs Last Meal were integrated into a performance piece of
hers titled Up to and Including her Own Limits (1973-76). The historical evolution of the
performance closely paralleled that of the film. It featured Schneemann, nude, suspended in the air
with a series of ropes and harnesses. Throughout the work, she swung sometimes forcefully,
sometimes slowly, around the space of the gallery, with crayons in hand, marking the walls with
long abstract streaks while the film elements of Kitchs Last Meal were projected in an area that
overlapped with her performance space. The work also featured sculptural and video elements.
Schneemann explained some of the history that led to the production of this work: The
works of Pollock, de Kooning, could only be viewed with optical muscularity the entire body
was active. Up to and Including her Limits was the direct result of Pollocks physicalized painting
process (Schneemann, Statement for Texte Zure Kunst (1999) in Imagining Her Erotics, 164
65). In its expressionistic streaking of the gallerys walls and floor with painterly marks, the
353
333
performance clearly references Pollocks gestural abstraction, however in the context of an art
event, these actions become exaggerated and more dramatically self-reflexive. In addition, in its
integration of Schneemanns own naked body and her personal filmic portrait of her domestic life,
it adds extra layers of feminist self-consciousness and intermedial reference that forcefully cast the
work further into the register of artistic autobiography. In her performances of the work in
February 1976, Schneemann included the body of her dead cat Kitch, as a part of its mise-enscene. Like Kitchs Last Meal, such a performative gesture shows the lengths to which
Schneemann was willing to go in order to present a vision of life and art as inextricably
indivisible.
334
brochure for the Festival that featured a flasher in a raincoat with the words
Fourth Telluride Film Festival written on his chest. She felt compelled to
respond to the circumstances of the screening with a second performance of
Interior Scroll. She explains her compulsion:
The last thing I wanted to do at the Telluride Film Festival was an
action. I was looking forward to seeing films, old friends, to being in
Colorado again. [] Then the troublesome voice started nagging at me the
day before the film program [...] I was saying leave me alone I just want
to have a nice time; She was saying: live body action steps into area of
discrepancy.354
In her reflection on the event, she presents an aphoristic string of proclamations
intended to describe the motivational voice of conscience that compelled her to
respond to the conditions of her film screening with an act of feminist
performance. In her impressionistic catalogue of her feelings at the time of the
event, she poetically describes her anxiety concerning the conflict between film
and performance and the need that she felt at that moment to distinguish the
passive experience of film viewing from something more unpredictable and
uncontrolled:
step into the fissure between live action and filmic images / the tension is
there between distancing of audience perception and fixity of projection /
an actual reality triggering filmic reality as coherent present / the lens
standing between us and the material embodiment / a live action beside
illusionistic actions / images an antagonistic field where the spectators
must find their move / and to see it has to make sense and move
thoroughly not just in twenty minute film segments for an evenings
viewing / as filmmaker you must stand out step out of your frame355
354
355
335
336
356
337
357
P. Adams Sitney, Structural Film, in Film Culture Reader, 326. The version included in the
Film Culture Reader was slightly revised in the winter of 1969 from its previous version published
in the summer of that same year. The description of structural film that Sitney included in his
Visionary Film was further modified.
358
Sitney, Structural Film, 327.
359
Ibid. See also Sitney, The Idea of Morphology, Film Culture 53/54/55 (Spring 1972), 124.
338
spokesperson for the avant-garde that proved most problematic, both then and
today.
Almost immediately upon the publication of Sitneys polemical essay,
filmmakers went to great lengths to differentiate themselves from his taxonomic
classification of the avant-garde. Perhaps the most dramatic public retort which
was both philosophically concise and rhetorically inflammatory was George
Maciunas visual chart, published in Film Culture, in which he described Sitneys
essay as being founded upon 3 ERRORS: (wrong terminology, wrong exampleschronology and wrong sources of origins).360 Maciunas claimed that Sitneys
explanatory and historical missteps in the explanation of structural film were
the results of at least four distinct problems: Misplaced dictionary, ignorance
of art-philosophy such as definitions of Concept-art and Structure-art,
Cliquishness and ignorance of film-makers outside the Coop. or Cinematheque
circle, and Ignorance of precursory monomorphic examples in other art forms,
such as music, events and even film.361 For the purposes of our considerations
here, it is worth recognizing Maciunas insights on at least two counts. First,
Sitneys model of the avant-garde, as suggested earlier in this dissertation, was
derived from a study of literature, not the visual art, experimental music,
performance art, events, and happenings that Maciunas felt were most influential
upon experimental film in the period. In fact, Sitneys attempt to assimilate artists
like Conrad and Warhol into his definition of structural film showed signs of an
360
George Maciunas, Some Comments on Structural Film by P. Adams Sitney in Film Culture
Reader, 349.
361
Maciunas, 349.
339
340
362
341
within Kitchs Last Meal (and later Interior Scroll) might serve as a more
appropriate definition of the tendency that Sitney observed: Take one clear
process, follow its strictest implication, intellectually establish a system of
permutations, establish their visual set.
Films like Peter Kubelkas Arnulf Rainer (1960), Hollis Framptons Zorns
Lemma (1970), Paul Sharits Ray Gun Virus (1966), Michael Snows Back and
Forth (1969), Ernie Gehrs Serene Velocity (1970), all basically fulfilled
Schneemanns description of structural film as carefully plotted work with origins
in formulaic systems and controlled structures. Many of these films were based on
mathematical or geometric charts that achieved the trademark aesthetic severity of
the so-called structural film, which was based, at least partially, on the
unflinchingly systematic execution of some basic organizational principle. Here,
one could consider, for example, the graphic, geometric organization of black and
white frames in either Kubelkas Arnulf Rainer or Tony Conrads The Flicker,
each of which could have been executed by any film technician from the simple
optical scores upon which each film was based. To Brakhage and Schneemann,
such work, however rigorous and conceptually interesting, defied some of the
basic principles that their mature work shared, and which Abstract Expressionism
had layered across mid-century art by redefining the horizons of personal
possibility and somatic gesture within cultural practice.
342
Taste, personality, and the ebb and flow of social history played
significant roles in the historical conceptualization of Sitneys structural film.
For example, because Sitneys teleology of the avant-garde was also a kind of
personalized reflection of his tastes, he managed, through a bit of rhetorical slight
of hand, to slip the work of Brakhage into the unlikely category of Structural
Filmmaker. On the contrary, Brakhages work was painterly, impressionistic,
associative, organic, personal, and lacking in any overt form of a priori structure.
Hollis Frampton describes Sitneys problematic incorporation of Brakhage into
his teleology of structural film when he says, Sitney made one of those
wonderful valiant efforts to tie it all into the tradition so that the grandpappy of us
all became [sarcastically] that kindly and fatherly figure, Andy Warhol [...], and
poor Stan hog-tied lassoed and branded, clothes-lined and sandbagged got My
Mountain made into a structural film.363 To Brakhage Sitneys reduction of his
artistic process to a structural principle seemed a profound disservice to his
philosophical purpose. As described in the second chapter of this dissertation,
Brakhage argued that the most valuable of the parts of the process of creativity
were the spontaneous, personal choices wherein the maker is called upon to
work with what he or she doesnt know at every frames existence. Whether it
shall be or whether it shall not be [] as an act of absolute urgency.364 In 1978,
Paul Arthur precisely described the philosophical and aesthetic presuppositions of
structural film that directly contradicted the sensibilities of Brakhage and
363
Hollis Frampton in San Francisco, in Canyon Cinema: The Life and Times of an Independent
Film Distributor, ed. MacDonald, 269.
364
Brakhage, Some Arguments: Stan Brakhage at Millennium, November 4, 1977, 67.
343
365
Arthur, Structural Film: Revisions, New Versions and the Artifact, Part 2, Millennium Film
Journal 45 (Summer/Fall 1979), 125.
366
Stan Brakhage, Some Arguments: Stan Brakhage at the Millennium, November 4, 1977, 67,
73.
344
outdated idea that defined artistic craft as specialized labor, a position that in
1977, at the time of this public debate at Millennium in New York, would have
seemed reactionary and ignorant of other trends in the arts, including for example,
the conceptual art of Sol Lewitt or the simple, streamlined forms of minimalist
sculpture.
Annette Michelson responded to Brakhages comments which celebrated
craft, personal expression, virtuosic control, etc. with an attempt to
contextualize them in relation to advanced painting and sculpture despite
differences in both the formal and social histories of the distinct media that she
was discussing. She said to Brakhage:
There are other ways of thinking and feeling which arent predicated on
the constant intervention of the artist from moment to moment, or that
sense of risk. And you could say, as I think by now some of us have said
in the past, that if you look at the history of filmmaking in this country
over the last, say, twenty years, it does have certain parallels in the history
of painting. One heard some ten or fifteen years ago, Franz Kline and the
members of his generation of painters saying the kinds of things youre
saying about people called the structuralists but about painters whose
names were Stella, sculptors whose names were Robert Morris, and so on.
[] We understand that this is not your kind of filmmaking, that you have
a very different conception of filmic structure, of filmic purpose, and so
on. But I dont think that youre fighting a current battle. [] The young
filmmakers [] arent really thinking in terms of that old opposition.367
As Michelson suggests, Brakhage often had a tendency as did Sitney, his most
sympathetic critic to define his aesthetics in conditions and terms rooted outside
of history. In his flippant response to Michelson, he claims that the artistic
changes that she observed simply had not penetrated the provinces in which he
367
345
lived and worked, saying maybe the happy news has not yet arrived to
Colorado.368 As this exchange implies, the 1970s were difficult years for Stan
Brakhages art. Though he was often defensive and bombastic in his rhetoric, he
was never monolithic or simplistic in his cinema. Like any relevant experimental
artist, he continually challenged the limits of his own philosophical suppositions.
Before art practice in the 1970s imposed intolerable pressures upon his work
which pushed it to the limits of interpersonal and philosophical crisis described
above Brakhage established a mode of artistic production that deserves to be
understood as integral to the overall direction of American art in the period at
hand.
Brakhages hard won achievements as a film artist were not realized in a
vacuum. In the section that follows, the intense interrelationship between
Brakhage and Schneemann will be presented as a model for understanding their
shared antimony to the structuralism described above. Hopefully, it will also
help to situate Brakhages work more closely to other developments in the arts
and further from the caricature of the lone heroic artist that has overly influenced
both the historiography of Brakhages cinema and that of the American avantgarde more generally.
368
346
347
369
348
and Tower House (films that he shot as commissions for Cornell).370 These
projects had no stories, performers, or pre-determined literary structures, and thus
encouraged a shift in filmmaking strategy towards a non-fiction approach that,
according to Sitney, was achieved almost by accident.371 From the chronology,
it does seem that Brakhages first film experiments in documentary may have
been the result of an almost happenstance request for commissioned non-fiction
material.
Around roughly the same time that Brakhage was producing his first
experiments in a purely non-fictive, spontaneous filmic observation, he developed
a friendship with Carolee Schneemann. She was the romantic partner of his
childhood friend, the musician James Tenney. Beginning in 1955 they spent
extended lengths of time together (often in the countryside), traveling to visit each
other (from New York to Denver), living in close proximity (in Vermont), and
most importantly, collaborating on art and discussing their sometimes shared,
sometimes contradictory aesthetic sensibilities. Sitney describes Brakhages
transition from psychodrama to his mature style as being gradual:
The encounter with Joseph Cornell opened a new direction for Brakhages
work. [] In his works of the following two years, we see side-by-side
the purging of the black-and-white trance film Flesh of Morning (1956),
Daybreak and Whiteye (1957) [originally conceived as two separate films]
and the growth of a more abstract color form Nightcats (1956) and
Loving (1957).372
370
After these films were shot, Cornell edited materials that Brakhage had given him and made
new films from either the outtakes (used in Gnir Rednow (1955 )) or the original footage (as in
Centuries of June (1955)).
371
Sitney, Visionary Film, 159.
372
Ibid.
349
373
Schneemann situates this exchange historically: This discussion would have taken place after I
saw Stans B&W early films and he would have come to stay with us in South Shaftsbury,
Vermont where I was painting from landscape. She also recalled that WONDER RING was
underway when I met Stan; his friendship with Cornell was much discussed between us
(Schneemann email correspondence with the author, July 13, 2009).
350
wondering if Stan Brakhage had a lot of influence there in the ideas you were
following. She responds with a declarative statement:
Check the dates. I guided him towards an organic visual universe. When I
met him, he was doing psychodrama films and working with invented
situations. One of our early arguments sprang from my feeling that a
visual artist had to be able to build a vocabulary with nature in order to
break with inherited theories. He went into that.374
The chronology and social history of the interaction between Brakhage and
Schneemann perfectly fits her description. Despite Sitneys claim that Brakhages
move towards a simultaneously more observational and more expressive cinema
was simply the function of accident, it seems clear that the shift to his mature
style was, to a significant degree, determined by Schneemanns influence, her
sense of aesthetics, and her knowledge of the history, not of film, but of painting.
It was she who first engaged Brakhage in extended conversations concerning
Abstract Expressionism, a movement that would have a profound impact on both
of their creative legacies. In 2003, Schneemann published an open letter to the
recently deceased filmmaker in which she reflects on a long, productive, and often
trying artistic and personal relationship with him: There I open DeKooning,
Pollock, and Cezanne books. I would tell you, your psycho dramas will be a
dead-end. You must look at painting, visual history and nature!375
She explains this interaction in more detail, in an unpublished letter from
1975 to critic and filmmaker Wanda Bershon:
374
375
351
376
Letter from Schneemann to Wanda Bershon, 24 July 1975, Collection of Carolee Schneemann
Papers, Getty Research Institute, Special Collections.
377
This history of influence is omitted from Sitneys comprehensive and sympathetic reading of
Brakhages work for at least three reasons: Brakhage did not publicly offer this history because he
was not always supportive of Schneemanns film projects and likely wanted to distance himself
352
from them; Sitney was not particularly impressed with Schneemanns films; and finally, as a
student of English language poetry his nourishments, like those of Brakhage, were also poetic,
surreal, symbolic.
378
Kristine Stiles, The Painter as an Instrument of Real Time in Imagining her Erotics, 11.
353
Brakhage, GEOMETRIC versus MEAT-INEFFABLE (1994), The Chicago Review 47, no. 4
(September 21, 2001), 47.
380
Ibid, 49.
381
Brakhage, Eight Questions in Brakhage Scrapbook, ed. Robert Haller (New York:
Documentext, 1982), 116.
354
355
states precedes their transposition into approximating images. The emphasis, then,
is less on an immediate seeing a quality Sitney points to in the lyrical film
than on re-constructing the seen.384 However, with the film that is the subject
of this section, Brakhage attempted to reconfigure his ontological relationship to
the real in terms of a hyperbolically contingent experience in which the conditions
of historical encounter would be undeniably indexed in the texture of the filmic
medium.
In Metaphors on Vision, Brakhage formulated a poetic film aesthetics that
sought to reclaim sensory experience from what he considered to be the tyranny
of language, socially imposed, controlling, thought structures, and Cartesian
subject-object divisions. For Brakhage, mankind became alienated from its
environment as soon as it became too dependent on these abstract and geometric
systems of understanding. Most importantly, the imposition of intellectual and
philosophical systems upon the visual flux of nature including the naming of
colors or the systematization of representational space (as achieved in
Renaissance perspective) was an act of disservice to humanitys experience of
perception. The filmmaker famously wrote that there is no one color green in
nature. Instead, the natural landscape of the planet is filled with an infinitude of
different gradations of color, so that the imposition of any one single word on that
limitless eyescape of varying pigment would be an act of violence. In the opening
to Metaphors, he asks, How many colors are there in a field of grass to the
384
Arthur, Structural Film: Revisions, New Versions, and the Artifact, 10.
356
crawling baby unaware of Green?385 This question was a simple and effective
instantiation of his overall interest in demonstrating how we have become
alienated from the terrain that we inhabit by imposing inappropriate linguistic and
conceptual structures upon nature. So, Brakhages work involves an attempt,
through the analogue of cinema, to return to that prelapserian moment when
vision and thought can be reconstituted as innocent and untainted by the
geometric controls of language, those controlling structures from without.
In a number of his films, including The Act of Seeing With Ones Own
Eyes, we can find evidence of another working method in which Brakhage
directed himself toward nature and the external, phenomenal universe, and thus
devised an artistic experiment intended to bridge the experiential space between
the phenomenal world and the perceiving self of the artist. Contrary to the most
basic shorthand understanding of Brakhages artistic enterprise, some of his most
remarkable work represents an effort to overcome the Cartesian anxieties
concerning the perceiving self and its relation to the external world. In this regard
Brakhage attempted through his art, to integrate himself following the lessons of
Schneemann into the world around him, in order to avoid becoming trapped in
the spaces of narcissism and solipsism by conceiving an ambitious film practice in
which self, other, and nature would be inseparable parts of the same shared
experience of perception and immanence.
385
357
386
358
387
Willie Varela, Program Notes for Lumiere/Brakhage Films: February 14, 1979, Southwestern
Alternate Media Project (Collection of Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, CA).
359
Stan Brakhage letter to Jane Brakhage, 2nd Tues in Pittsburgh Sept. 1971 (perhaps September
14 ). From Brakhages writing, it is unclear if he is writing on his second Tuesday in Pittsburgh,
in September 1971 or on the second Tuesday of September 1971 (Stan Brakhage Papers,
University of Colorado, Boulder).
th
360
spectacle of death as his subject, he was also testing the limits of the mediums
capacity to register subjectivity and affect without the imposition of a guiding
rhetorical directive.
Stan Brakhage, letter to Robert Creeley, November 22, 1971. Stan Brakhage Papers, University
of Colorado Boulder; Also quoted in Nesthus, The Document Correspondence of Stan Brakhage
in The Chicago Review 47, no. 4 (September 21, 2001), 144.
361
Brakhage, letter to Ed Dorn, November 24, 1971 (Stan Brakhage Papers, University of
Colorado, Boulder; also quoted in Nesthus, 148.)
391
Sitney, Visionary Film, 388.
362
363
364
carefully controlled the exposures and fades in this film through the careful use of
his cameras aperture rather than through the post-production modifications that
are much more flexible, in their allowance for the controlled re-calibration of light
and color. In this sense, Brakhages work is an index of his own visual and
temporally contingent encounter with the bodies in the Pittsburgh morgue as
experienced by his bodies own interaction with the physical apparatus of his
motion picture camera. Like Warhols use of entire unedited camera reels,
Brakhages emphasis on in-camera edits and real-time image modification is
evidence of a method dedicated to conserving the historical conditions of
encounter between an artist and the phenomenal world.392
Visually, this film is substantially different from the style that we
generally associate with Brakhage. For example, it is significant that almost every
single shot in this film is made in very crisp focus. In most of his films, Brakhage
presents images that are at the threshold of visual intelligibility due to his
extremely plastic sense of framing, focus, and exposure. Generally in his work, it
is light and texture that are most important. (His 1974 film, Text of Light is over
an hour long and features only one source of visual content, light refracted
through a glass ashtray.) This need to make cinematography abstract and visually
indecipherable is directly connected to his efforts to simulate consciousness,
moving visual thinking, through abstract cinematic techniques. In The Act of
392
There observations were made through the slow frame-by-frame analysis of the reversal,
camera-positive original film that Brakhage shot in 1971. I thank Mark Toscano at the Academy
Film Archive for allowing me to joint him for his inspection of Brakhages original elements for
The Act of Seeing With Ones Own Eyes.
365
366
393
Brakhage, letter to Robert Creeley, November 22, 1971 (Stan Brakhage Papers, University of
Colorado, Boulder; also quoted in Nesthus, 140141).
394
However, it should also be noted that this film is not a purely clinical undertaking that aspires
to some nave version of observational objectivity. Brakhage acknowledges the cameras role in
mediation. For example, he intentionally chose to use four different film stocks for this project,
each of which features a particular speed, color temperature, and granular appearance. (Such
choices were rarely casual for Brakhage.) In this sense, though the filmmaker has limited the
usually extreme range of his plastic modifications to the photographic image, he nevertheless
openly creates a film that foregrounds its own process of mediation through its willful use of
markedly different representational materials. (Again, I thank Mark Toscano for identifying the
different film stocks used by Brakhage in this film.)
367
396
368
though they do shade it. The filmmakers editing choices, as stated above, related
primarily to tone and rhythm as he edited according to real historical sequence,
in which he would not try to thicken the plot. The drama of this film is meant to
be derived largely from the real conditions of the filming circumstance, not from
the artists manipulation of those events. In this sense, it was a profoundly
experimental work for Brakhage, in which he attempted to come to terms with the
tragedy of death through a real world encounter with it, within a visual language
that was substantially dissimilar from the one that he had pioneered and fought so
hard to perfect and legitimize.
397
Of course, most people who discuss such topics in the contemporary moment, under the sway
of postmodernisms license for total relativism, respond cynically to the idea that film has the
capacity to show us anything true or real from the phenomenal world. However, although many of
Brakhages comments about the film suggest that he tried to make a particular kind of work that
lacks ideology, superimposed drama, identificatory manipulation, etc., he acknowledges that the
role that he plays as recorder is always inscribed with a viewing subjectivity and with the material
conditions of the works construction. At no point does he ever equate his film with the historical
real that it represents. As he himself frequently argues, any non-fiction film is always an
approximation of that historical real. (As mentioned in an earlier footnote, his intentional use of
four distinctive film stocks in this work demonstrates his awareness of the films unique
characteristics as a form of mechanical representation.)
369
Brakhage, Stan and Jane Brakhage (and Hollis Frampton) Talking in Brakhage Scrapbook,
188.
399
Stan Brakhage, Interview With Richard Gossinger in Ibid., 200.
370
argues, although Brakhage was initially interested in seeking to chart the depths
of his own psyche,400 he would occasionally move towards a model which,
drawing on various influences from poetry, including Charles Olsons
objectivism, was concerned with the reintegration of man as continuous with
reality rather than discrete from it, the dynamic experience of what is
phenomenally present, the engagement of consciousness by nature, and a desire
to go beyond imagination to unmediated perception.401 Brakhages move into
the world out there (in the words of Jane Wodening Brakhage), is the primary
subject of this consideration of the filmmaker.402 And it should be understood as a
historical function of Brakhages relationship and dialogue with Carolee
Schneemann.
371
372
Brakhage connected his work with the original Latin meaning of the word
that gave us documentary: he writes that, I am hoping to get the Latins
documentum sense of example in the first place.404 What is significant about
Brakhages choice of words is that it indicates his desire to create an open text,
rather than the complex weave of meanings and reference that was typical of his
earlier, more literary-minded works. Nothing inside of the frame stands for
anything else; there is no symbolism or consciously imposed ideology. (In this
regard, though it shares a sense of witness with Kitchs Last Meal, The Act of
Seeing lacks the explicit overarching rhetoric of Schneemanns work.) The Act of
Seeing is a collection of visual indexes, an assemblage of images of the dead,
traced delicately in celluloid. Following his poetic inspiration, Brakhage aspired
to make a work that reflected William Carlos Williams mantra: no ideas but in
things.
Like all non-fiction The Act of Seeing displays contingency through its
inherent dependence on a spatio-temporally inscribed, historical real. This film,
forces us to see the greatest contingency of all, the limit of bodily presence, the
material boundaries of life itself. Our consciousness, our self-awareness, our
selfhood are all contingent upon the body in which they are housed, and the work
of Brakhage, like that of Schneemann reminds us of this somatic truth. Our
capacity to think is contingent upon the bodily presence that is the main concern
of this film. Clearly, The Act of Seeing tests certain taboos of filmic representation
404
Brakhage, letter to Frampton, November 22, 1971, collection of Stan Brakhage papers,
University of Colorado, Boulder; also quoted in Nesthus, 145.
373
through its display of blood, death, and dismemberment. However much it aspires
to be factual, this film then is far from neutral in terms of affective meaning.
There are no topics more riddled with emotional and personal association than
death.
If this film brings the audience into closer contact with the basic visual
facts of death, then it does so as part of a conceptual program in which Brakhage
had been involved for many years. Since early on in his life as a filmmaker, he
had documented the most intimate details of his personal life, including
intercourse with his wife, the birth of his children, and masturbation. For the
filmmaker, nothing was taboo. More precisely, from his point of view, it is the job
of the artist to show and investigate the limit cases of both the human condition
and his or her chosen medium. As he wrote famously in Metaphors on Vision, his
work, like that of any serious artist, is essentially preoccupied by and deal[s]
imagistically with birth, sex, death, and the search for God.405 (These were also
central concerns of Schneemann.) In Wedlock House: An Intercourse (1959), he
films him and his wife having sex and arguing. In Window Water Baby Moving
(1959) and Thin Line Lyre Triangular (1961), Brakhage films the births of two of
his children. In Sirius Remembered (1959), the family dog dies and we watch its
body decompose over the winter months. Like The Act of Seeing, all of these
films show us unique spectacles of somatic contingency. They are singular events
that cannot quite be repeated in exactly the same way. It is the unrepeatability of
405
374
birth, sex, and death that make them particularly interesting as topics for cinema,
a medium that has the capacity to do something that almost no other art can really
do: it can repeat the singular event ad infinitum. Something that happened once
and lasted an instant can be shown again and again and again.
Finally, The Act of Seeing With Ones Own Eyes is an open,
underdetermined film. It is an almost perfect instantiation of Susan Sontags
thinking on the text that resists interpretation, (something that according to that
critic is particularly unique to the medium of film):
Ideally, it is possible to elude the interpreters in another way, by making
works of art whose surface is so unified and clean, whose momentum is so
rapid, whose address is so direct that the work can be [...] just what it is. Is
this possible now? It does happen in films I believe.406
The Act of Seeing comes as close to this ideal as any film. It tells us little or
nothing about how to read it. It does not announce its purpose in rhetorical terms.
The film aspires to be like the death that it records, something inexplicable and
horrific whose meaning is derived from the simple fact of its existence. In this
sense much of Brakhages most compelling work performs an unscripted,
anxious, and experimental encounter with the world itself, something that was
first engaged by Brakhage as a result, perhaps, of the influence of Carolee
Schneemann (though this artistic strategy was hyperbolized and pushed to its
limits in The Act of Seeing With Ones Own Eyes). The meaning of this type of art
is necessarily different from that of other more systematic, rhetorical varieties
406
Sontag, Against Interpretation in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Dell,
1966), 21.
375
Seeing with Ones Own Eyes: Artistic Agency in the Films of Schneemann and
Brakhage:
In Kitchs Last Meal and The Act of Seeing With Ones Own Eyes,
Schneemann and Brakhage presented the world visually in fundamentally
different terms from their previous work. At the juncture between world and artist
is an encounter, and that meeting is the place in which act and text, event and
transcription, exist. Schneemanns and Brakhages work shows its viewers that
between self and world, visual meaning is co-constituted; it is a product of this
encounter between subjectivity (or subjectivities) and phenomenal detail. In this
sense, the observational use of cinema represents an attempt at overcoming, at
achieving a kind of union with nature (in its most horrific manifestation), a
breaking away from the solipsism of alienated modern and postmodern
subjectivity. This is the function of both Fuses and The Act of Seeing, two
rhetorically and ideologically dissimilar films that share and foreground
ontological conditions of somatically defined subjectivity through its inscription
upon a cinematic index. These works aim at an overcoming alienation by way of a
376
visual object that shares space with both an authoring subjectivity and an
historical real.
The Act of Seeing With Ones Own Eyes represents a transitional phase in
Brakhages filmography to a mode of filmmaking (along with the other films of
The Pittsburgh Trilogy) that is more observational than expressive, and as such,
corresponds to perhaps related transformations in Schneemanns non-fiction film
practice of the early-to-mid 1970s. In both The Act of Seeing and Kitchs Last
Meal, Brakhage and Schneemann two artists who had obsessively concerned
themselves with the inscription of their own authorial subjectivities embraced
an observational mode of filmic encounter and directed their cameras towards the
outside world. In their considerations of mortality, death, and the somatic
contingencies of consciousness, these artists shifted away from their own stylistic
obsessions and directed their cameras towards the outside world and the bodies of
others, in order to transform the obsessive egocentrism of their earlier work. Yet,
the stakes of artistic agency were never abandoned by either artist.
The challenge of meaningful ontological and cultural representation
loomed over the entirety of art in the 1960s and early 70s. In the art history of the
period, there has been substantial consideration of the relationship between
subjectivity and technology. The writings of Rosalind Krauss, Hal Foster, and
Anne Wagner (amongst others) have attempted to explain and evaluate the
relationships between representation and indexical inscription in the mediated
377
performance works of artists like Joan Jonas, Bruce Nauman, and Dan Graham.407
Because of the institutional limits and intellectual trends of the past thirty years, it
is no surprise that these critics do not mention film in any of their considerations
(though the artists listed above (Jonas, Nauman, Graham) produced important,
relevant work in that medium).
One of the major questions of the critical writings on subjectivity and
media art in the early 1970s concerns the relationship of selfhood and bodily
presence to their material transcription. As Wagner wrote in 2000, much of this
art confronts the basic ontological conflict between the self and its representation
by dramatizing the ways in which these media keep the gears of selfhood from
being able to engage.408 The works of Brakhage and Schneemann discussed in
this chapter foreground precisely the same themes and challenges that dominate
critical writings on video and performance art from the 1970s to the present.409
Their films powerfully dramatize this historical anxiety concerning the
relationship between individual, embodied experiences of artists and the
powerfully unsettling limits of their subjectivities, through the use of the specific
technologies of cinema. Partially because of the ascendancy of identity politics
407
See Krauss, Notes on the Index: Part 1 in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other
Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 196209; Hal Foster, The Return of the
Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996); and Anne
Wagner, Performance, Video, and the Rhetoric of Presence, October 91 (2000), 5980.
408
Wagner, Performance, Video, and the Rhetoric of Presence, 80.
409
David Joselit could have been discussing Schneemann and Brakhage when he recently wrote,
One of the deepest and most unsettling legacies of the 1960s is the sometimes violent, sometimes
ecstatic revelation that the ostensibly private arena of the self has become a public
battleground.409 (Of course, he was not discussing these filmmakers here; Joselit, like the critics
described above, generally avoids discussing film, presumably like most art historians, he has an
institutionally inscribed and historically determined aversion to it.)
378
and video in the 1970s, Brakhage has been entirely omitted from dominant
narratives of American art, even though his work directly addresses the same
conflict between subjectivity and its technological mediations as the more
celebrated artists listed above. Similarly, Schneemanns experimental film work
has not received much attention in art historical narratives, though her visionary
feminist approach has made her more popular as an object of study that that of her
close friend. Nevertheless both artists produced film-based experiments that
determined, transcribed, and provoked extreme encounters of somatic tension and
ontological crisis in order to reveal the fault lines between contingent human
bodies, their registrations of affect and identity, and the technologies that
circumscribe them in art.
379
380
academia, few felt any degree of true cultural esteem. The anxieties that had
plagued experimental cinema persisted into the mid 1970s and, in the work of
artists like Paul Sharits, reached a fever pitch of philosophical distress.
By the time Sharits completed his film experiment, Epileptic Seizure
Comparison (1976), the innocent exuberance of the cinema of the late 50s and
early 60s had petered out and had been transposed into darker registers of cultural
association. On the one hand, the systematicity of the so-called structural film
was evidence of a new filmic epistemology, but it also represented a death knell
for the humanist and utopian promise that the art form pursued in the previous
decade. Though experimental film was always cloistered from both art and
popular culture by the transgressive threat that it posed to normative cinema, this
alienation was felt even more profoundly by the mid-1970s. In fact, the anxious
cultural position of experimental film was inscribed not only in its social history
as evidenced in anecdotes, correspondence, and communications from these
filmmakers but, as Epileptic Seizure Comparison demonstrates, it is also loudly
inscribed within the textual limits of the film objects themselves.
381
frame-by-frame fashion. However, though they are assembled using the same
technological principles as animated films, they are not, strictly speaking, part of
the same artistic genus, because of their general aversion to the illusion of
movement, the convention that guides the totality of industrial cinema. Almost all
written commentary on Sharits describes his work as profoundly anti-illusionistic,
because of its eschewal of both a manufactured temporal continuity and figurative
or representational imagery.410 However, such descriptions are overly simplistic.
In general, the films of Sharits feature either pure fields of color (photographed on
an animation stand) or selective, often sparse representational, non-moving, still
images. In many of his films, Sharits rapidly alternates these frames of pure color
and photographic imagery in order to achieve a synthesis of visual tone and
rhythm that approximates the experience of music. However, Sharits was entirely
opposed to the notion that his films were abstract. Because of their attention to
their own materiality and their open thematicization of cinema as a mechanical
apparatus, he often argued that his work was about cinema itself; it was the
apparatus itself that was his subject. In this sense, Sharits work can be
understood as a kind of meta-cinema. As one might expect, it was rather common
for critics to connect these film efforts to the processes of modernist self-
410
See, for example, Krauss, Paul Sharits in Paul Sharits, ed. Jan Beauvais (Dijon: Les Presses
du reel, 2008) 4755; and Michelson, Screen / Surface: The Politics of Illusionism, Artforum 9,
no. 1 (September 1972), 5862. Sharits respectfully disputes Krausss evaluation of his work as
purely abstract and non-representational: Actually its an interplay between purely abstract
imagery, if such a thing exists, and highly representational imagery. I like to slide between those
barriers (Sharits in Gary Garrels, Interview, October 1982 in Mediums of Language
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1952), not paginated.
382
411
See, for example, Stuart Liebman, Paul Sharits (St. Paul, MN: Film in the Cities, 1981), 7.
Also see Regina Cornwell, Paul Sharits: Illusion and Object, Artforum 10, no. 1 (September
1971), 57. She connects Sharits to Frieds notion of deductive structure.
412
Sharits letter to Brakhage, April 18, 1968, Collection of Anthology Film Archives.
383
Paul Sharits, Notes on Films, 19661968, Film Culture 47 (Summer 1969), 14.
384
414
Krauss, Paul Sharits in Paul Sharits, ed. Jan Beauvais (Dijon: Les presses du reel, 2008), 53.
385
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markedly in its use of photographic content. There are three different still images
used in the film that are repeated frequently. These images feature Sharits
performing cunnilingus on his wife, the same couple engaged in a kiss (with their
bodies shifted across the visual axis from the other sexual image), and a shot of
Sharits facing the camera in a medium close-up with a gun to his head (as in a
mock suicide). Visually, all of these images have been heavily modified using
filters in order to bring out a vivid and saturated color palette that closely matches
the bright hues of the films frames of pure color. In its use of representational
imagery, this early Sharits work powerfully foregrounds some of the artists most
significant thematic interests, personal obsessions, and affective associations.
On one level, Piece Mandala is a work about violence. As its intentionally
misspelled title suggests, it aims to imitate the meditative form of a mandala, a
sensuous, symmetrical visual vehicle for meditation; it is a peace mandala
intended to illustrate, at least partially, the pleasurable, somatic alternatives to
war. In its explicit representation of male and female nudity and the act of
cunnilingus, it links its formal structure with the rhythms of sexual intercourse.
Though this work does communicate an anti-war ideology, it is also incredibly
aggressive in its rapid pace and relentless sensorial assault, and as the image of a
suicidal Sharits shows, it is also concerned with darker associations and
connections between sex and death (as were Conners films, like Cosmic Ray,
which foregrounded cultural connections between militarism and sexuality).
387
In an episode typical of the era, Piece Mandala was withheld by the film
lab that was processing it, due to some concern that it contained illegal,
pornographic content. Sharits wrote to the lab in 1967:
First I want to say that PIECE MANDALA is a work of art and not
pornography; it is a political statement and has strong socially redeeming
values.[] Being an aesthetic, moral, social and political document, I
believe it is protected by our Federal Constitution; as a practicing artistfilmmaker and a college educator I would never sanction the destruction
of my art and so I am ready to take the issue to court if that is
necessary.415
This amazing conflict between Sharits and a Texas film lab demonstrates the
cultural context in which his work was being materially produced. (In fact, Sharits
requested letters of support from Jonas Mekas and other influential and well
known artists to encourage the lab to release his print.) Most importantly perhaps,
this anecdote draws attention to the social function of the work, a massively
neglected component of both Sharits filmography and that of so-called structural
film. (The film was initially produced to be part of a traveling film series
presented by the New York Filmmakers Cooperative titled, For Life, Against
the War.) Though he made a number of films that had no referential content and
no use of language, when he did choose to incorporate such elements, as his letter
indicates, Sharits did so for both ideological and aesthetic reasons. Though Piece
Mandala is not a polemical, didactic essay film, featuring, for example, a
prescriptive voiceover, describing the atrocities of the Vietnam War, it is
nevertheless the product of an ethically committed artist who transposed the real
415
Letter from Sharits to Color Processing Station, Dallas, Texas, February 27, 1967, Collection
of Anthology Film Archives.
388
416
David James argues that the structural film, because of its formal severity and its seeming lack
of cultural awareness, constructed a complex, possibly repressed relationship to the spaces of
political and social reference in the age of Vietnam. In such work, the social and the cinematic
were internalized as questions of film and by implication, form (James, Allegories of Cinema,
275276). Thus, James suggests, perhaps implicitly, that this systematic, rigid approach to the
moving image transposed social trauma into the realm of form. Such a translation of social
violence into sensorial violence is entirely operative in the work of Sharits. However, it might
also be added that in his cinema this transposition is not entirely structural (nor is it situated
exclusively in the space of the apparatus), but is in fact an explicit part of the works visual
iconography, which occasionally explodes into images of bodily trauma and sex.
389
beautiful, lyrical work with a strong sense of social sense.417 His interest in the
mandala as a meditative form underpinned many of his films in this period, and
represented in his mind an alternative to destructive acts of violence like those
inherent in war and suicide.
Piece Mandala is a work dedicated to the symbolic demonstration, in
Sharits words, of the viability of sexual dynamics as an alternative to
destructive violence.418 He describes these connections in his published notes on
the film: Color structure is linear-directional but implies a larger infinite cycle;
light-energy and image frequencies induce rhythms related to the psychophysical
experience of the creative act of cunnilingus. He then suggests that the films
aggressive tempo and conflictual elements make more cosmic sense as conflict
models than do the destructive orgasms the United States is presently having in
Vietnam.419 The sensorial aggression of Sharits work like that of Paik,
Tambellini, and others mentioned earlier in this study manifested the energies of
a counterculture directed against dominant mechanisms of social violence through
its use confrontational artistic actions and spectatorial feedback.
Made two years later, T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G, is a project related to both of
those described above. However, in it Sharits made an overwhelmingly more
intense, violent, and disturbing work. The first thing one notices upon an initial
viewing this film is that it has a soundtrack, which like its visual component, is
extremely repetitive and unrelenting in its delivery. Throughout the twelve minute
417
390
film, one word is repeated over and over: destroy. The same utterance of the
word is mechanically reproduced, replayed, and edited slightly differently, such
that it is sonically transformed and made to sound robotic because of the
mechanicity and abruptness of edits that sometimes cut off parts of letters or make
others blend together. For the spectator of the film, this process results in an
experience of a word losing meaning through overexposure and an almost autistic
repetition. Through this process of semantic transformation, viewers of the film
naturally hear variants of the word destroy, including non-denotative fragments.
Regina Cornwell reports hearing phrases like, its off, its cut, his straw,
history, and others.420 Through this unprecedented use of film soundtrack,
Sharits performs an unsettling experiment in auditory processing and the
perception of linguistic cues. In its sonic content, the film powerfully distills its
thematic associations into a single verbal command, an imperative issued from an
assertive, indiscernible offscreen authority, as if from god on high.
Of all Sharits early flicker films, T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G has the most
referential visual content. Throughout the film the poet David Franks (who is also
the man who utters destroy on the soundtrack) is shown facing the camera, in
medium-close-up, in a variety of poses that appear in quickly flashing single still
frames. In one image he stares aggressively into the camera, in another his mouth
is covered by a womans hand, in another he holds a pair of scissors up to his
tongue as if preparing to cut it off, and in another the womans hand scratches his
420
391
face with her fingernails and draws blood. Like the photographs in Piece
Mandala, each of these single frame images is heavily modified using color filters
and chromatic processing, giving them an abstracted, artificial look. This effect
exaggerates the saturated color palette of the womans bright green fingernail
polish and the blood that her nails draw out. The film also includes two additional
images likely taken from sources of entirely different origin. One features a closeup of male and female genitalia in the act of intercourse, and the other shows a
close-up of a surgical operation upon a human eye.
Because each of these images appears only for 1/24th of a second, they
flash by quickly and are basically indiscernible to the viewer. Likely taken from a
scientific and a pornographic film, they are associatively potent images that the
filmmaker intersperses sparingly. They uncannily punctuate the experience of
film viewing by arousing the subconscious and indescribable associations that,
like the films use of sound, encourage connections between materials and ideas
that would not normally seem natural or logical. Visually, the film utilizes a vivid
range of colors that flash and flow in rapid fire, machine gun rhythms of montage.
In T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G, Sharits also makes extensive use of optical reprocessing by
presenting the images described above in both positive and negative exposure.
The result is a previously untried variety of flicker that makes the images
themselves more strikingly weighty in their potential references and more
astringent in their visual assault. In a sense, Sharits has taken the color palette and
392
393
394
locations) by existing in spaces whose shapes and scales of possible sound and
image sizes are part of the wholistic [sic] piece.422 It was during this period that
Sharits began to become disgruntled with the conventional limitations, both
formal and ontological, of the projected motion picture. He wanted to expand his
practice in a sense, to open it up to different social and artistic possibilities.
Sharits described this new tendency as a move towards the
democratization of his work:
I believe that cinema can manifest democratic ideals in several ways: (1) if
it exists in an open, free, public location [] (2) if the form of the
presentation does not prescribe a definite duration of respondents
observation [] (3) if the structure of the composition is nondevelopmental [] (4) if the content does not disguise itself but rather
makes a specimen of itself.423
For Sharits, the first three of these requirements marked a break from the
dominant tendencies of the experimental cinema, which was generally shown in
darkened movie theaters, with specific exhibition times, and temporally shifting,
evolutionary structures. However, the expansion of his practice beyond these
limits did not produce a clean break with the traditions and exhibition strategies of
his earlier work. Instead, many of his locational film installations were also made
available through the standard avenues of independent film rental (through the
Film-makers Cooperative) and could also be shown in conventionally projected,
linear, single-screen exhibition.424 A number of these films then exist in at least
422
395
installation using 8-mm viewing monitors (for significantly modified silent reduction prints of
COSMIC RAY). However, he also continued distributing the single-screen, black-and-white,
sound version of the film for exhibition in conventional theaters; in addition, he also presented his
work in rock-and-roll light shows and performance-based contexts, demonstrating that he too
envisioned an expanded range of exhibition possibilities that extended well beyond those
traditionally associated with film viewing.
396
pure abstract color. In this sense, the work continues Sharits experiments with
cinematic flicker while also activating considerations of psychology and
neurology through the use of representational non-fiction medical footage. As
Conner, Jacobs, Gehr, and others had done, Sharits turned to pre-existing
institutionally produced film footage as a resource for creative experiment.
Epileptic Seizure Comparison utilizes two different segments of repurposed film
material, each of which records, without any camera movement or visual trickery,
the physical manifestations of two seizures in adult patients. In their simple, noninvasive visual styles, the industrial films were likely produced for medical study.
Sharits project carefully and systematically transforms these historical documents
by modifying their speeds, adding freeze frames, and blending them visually
through superimposition with a range of flickering colored patterns. In its
locational installation, the two film elements are screened simultaneously, in a
vertically projected fashion with one image above the other (as in Tambellinis
Black TV and Schneemanns Kitchs Last Meal). Each projector features a
separate soundtrack that includes two registers of information, one of which is the
actual physical sound emitted by the patient during his seizure and the other is an
auditory approximation, made with a synthesizer, of the changing frequency of an
epileptics brain waves as recorded by an electroencephalograph (or EEG). In its
locational incarnation, Sharits carefully specifies how it should be installed and
exhibited. The vertically oriented screen upon which the images are projected is
an elongated rectangle. It is surrounded by two walls that extend diagonally from
397
the space of the screen and thus creates a trapezoidal shape in which the images
are projected and the viewer is physically situated. The walls of the exhibition
space are covered by reflective silver material that enhances the luminous flicker
emitted by the films two streams of visual projection. The result is a chamber of
extreme polyphotic and polyphonic sensory overload that is saturated with a range
of audio-visual synchronicities and collisions.
In order to be precise about the films content, the following description
will relate to the single-screen version of the film rather than attempting to
describe two image streams simultaneously. (The single screen film is thirty-four
minutes long, while the two-screen edition presents the first and second reels of
the film simultaneously [rather than in series] and is thus of course half the
length.)
The film begins with onscreen text that dryly and precisely presents its
content and organizing principles:
I.
The film follows the exact structure introduced by the text. Part IA begins with an
array of flashing pure color frames of red, yellow, and green. This introductory
398
section of the film is akin to the visual strategy of Ray Gun Virus. The tonal
palette changes as Sharits introduces blue, black, and grey frames. There seems to
be an underlying pattern to the color rhythms, though it is not discernible. These
visuals are accompanied by a looped documentary recording of the patients
grunts, heavy breathing, and bodily noises. In its juxtaposition of pure color
frames with historical audio recordings of the seizure episode, this section
combines the films most abstract visual content with indexical sonic materials.
In section IIB, the soundtrack changes to an abstract register that features
a slowly shifting, sometimes climbing hum in which a synthesizer approximates
the basic tonality of a wave generator. Simultaneous with this abstract, semimusical sonic content, we see black and white footage of a man entering an
epileptic frenzy. He has electrodes on his head and we know, because of the
introductory title, that these devices are being used to trigger his epileptic episode
through electrical stimulation. He is framed in medium close-up and sits on a bed.
He is of average build with tightly shorn hair and is wearing a white shirt. In its
incorporation into Epileptic Seizure Comparison, the medical footage of the
patient has been modified carefully and subtly by Sharits. Through postproduction modifications on an optical printer, Sharits reprints the original
medical footage and shifts it in and out of slow motion; he also punctuates his
reconfigured visual track with dramatic freeze frames, often at moments when the
patients face exhibits extreme physical distress. Like all of his films, this work is
treated by Sharits in a frame-by-frame fashion, and thus, his controlling
399
intervention into the films composition is noticeable with every frame. Images of
the patients body in motion are also combined with black frames and short
sections of continuous black leader. Throughout this section the indexical material
of the film is repeated a number of times with different temporal and rhythmic
modifications that formally and ontologically match the looping of the soundtrack
in the films first section. In addition to modifying the temporality of the profilmic
event through judicious, tightly controlled transformations of the frame rate of the
footage, Sharits also adjusts the composition of the image through subtle
reframings using the optical printers zoom mechanism. The result is a careful
resquencing and rephotographing of the experimental medical footage in which
Sharits subtly orchestrates new dramatic effects through his plastic treatment of
found materials. Over the course of at least one of these repetitions, Sharits slowly
moves from a medium close-up of the patient in distress to a much tighter shot, as
a documentarian might, for dramatic effect, at the height of his or her subjects
medical crisis. The soundtracks modulations function independently of these
short, looped episodes of paroxysmic visual medical testimony.
In section IC, the two previous sequences have been combined through the
post-production process of A/B rolling, and thus both of the layers described are
synthesized and made to unfold simultaneously in time. (In the two-screen
version, this simultaneity of stimuli is even more pronounced, because of the use
of two projectors, and thus twice as dense in both image and sound.) One of the
effects of this synthesis of visual materials is that at times the black and white
400
footage becomes dramatically tinted with a flashing color frame, creating a fresh
effect in which pure color intervenes in the space of sober, documentary medical
footage. The drama of the patients extreme physical distress is magnified by
Sharits plastic modifications through temporal, compositional, and chromatic
means to this real-life documentation of a physical convulsion. At one point,
near the end of the roll, the artist chooses to move in to a close-up and a freeze
frame at a moment of extreme distress, and the effect demonstrates Sharits rarely
exhibited control of photographic drama.
The next reel (II) begins in much the same fashion as the first, with a
range of flickering color frames dominated by reds and yellows. The soundtrack
is markedly different for this mans photically induced seizure than it was for the
patient in the previous reel. The second subjects growls are more guttural, and
the overall effect is substantially more visceral, even though there are no images
yet with which to associate their effects. The result is a strange, unsettling blend
of groans, burps, sighs, and the sound of the patients body rubbing against the
hospital furniture on which it sits. Overall, this soundtrack more closely resembles
human vocalizations than the previous section, though in neither cases are words
discernible.
In section IIB, a new patient appears. He is framed in a much tighter
composition than the previous subject. He is stockier, and in a strange kind of
levity produced by happenstance, is wearing a pajama shirt of black polka dots on
white. The second patients convulsions are markedly more extreme and
401
402
freeze frame of the films subject with his teeth clenched and eyes rolled back into
his head. This is an unsettling image and the filmmaker purposefully draws the
viewers attention to it. Throughout Epileptic Seizure Comparison, the thematic
and affective range of the work is carefully controlled by the director behind the
proverbial curtain. Through his plastic manipulations of these visual indexes of
patient trauma, Sharits amplifies the exaggerates the drama of their bodily anguish
by manipulating the temporal structure of these filmic transcriptions, magnifying
the scale of photographic composition, and carefully interweaving these
documentary materials with more abstract musical and visual elements that
punctuate and accentuate the affective force of the historical events being
represented. This authorial bracketing heightens the power of this medical footage
to unsettle and disturb the viewers sense of ethics, as Sharits continual artistic
intervention adds the sense that there is another witness to the convulsive events
that we are seeing. This interaction of artistry and observation reminds the viewer,
through its formal methods, that we are voyeurs witnessing the suffering of
disabled humans. Our awareness of their subjectivities is not minimized or
instrumentalized by their incorporation into this art work. On the contrary, it is
heightened by this framing within a plasticized media presentation.
There is clearly a careful orchestrator behind the artistic spectacle of this
film, but it is uncertain if his intention is to create an impression of perfect
lockstep synchronicity between these four streams of information (or eight in the
two-screen version) or if he wants to achieve a sensation of wildly interweaving
403
fields of distress. Though its patterns were carefully mapped out in advance (as
Sharits extensive notes indicate) it is unclear if its structure is meant to
communicate happenstance interactions or careful dramatic deliberation.
Regardless of intent, these overlapping fields of disparate sound and image
components combine to blistering effect. There is a sense in which the audiovisual patterning of the work mimics the oscillating and unpredictable electrical
rhythms of a patient in the throes of an epileptic episode. The film represents an
unprecedented attempt to simultaneously simulate and represent an extreme
neurological event. Through his transposition of a patients neurological distress
into the realms of visual, ethical, and aesthetic overload, Sharits created a work of
sensory excess that literally and figuratively frustrates notions of conventional
audio-visual pleasure by assimilating the viewer into an aesthetic analogue to the
sensorial overload experiences by the patients that are the works true subjects.
In Sharits words, he is,
interested in creating a sound-image-space situation wherein sympathetic
observers may begin to identify with the convulsive epileptic. []
Seizure Comparison is an attempt to orchestrate sound and light rhythms
in an intimate and proportional space, an ongoing location wherein nonepileptic persons may begin to experience, under controlled conditions,
what Dr. Walter calls the majestic potentials of convulsive seizure.425
Sharits description suggests that his intentions are humanist in origin; the films
careful treatment of the somatic traumas of these patients evidences this state of
affairs. Still, the work is one of extreme distress and its registers of anxiety and
anguish are inscribed throughout its textual and spectatorial spaces.
425
404
405
repurposed for another kind of psychic trauma imposed upon the viewer in
order to achieve a complex effect that is both aesthetic and scientific, both
sensuous and epistemological. He describes the work as directed towards an
experience of empathy and understanding of the patients suffering, in which the
viewer is enmeshed with the visible trauma of the patient as well as his unseen
psychic distress, such that he or she is seized as it were, in a convulsive space,
and can thus become one with the two images of paroxysm.426
In profound and sometimes troubling ways, the film engages with the
same ontological registers and corporeal limits as the bodies and deaths within
Kitchs Last Meal and The Act of Seeing With Ones Own Eyes. The affective
power that is contained within the spectacle of a human seizure is communicated
to the viewer with a powerful directness that exceeds the textual space of the
installation or film work, because though the physical platform for both works
may be celluloid, the actual medium of the liminal event is the human body.
426
Ibid., 124.
406
407
many of the figures discussed in this text, he was fully committed to the idea that
film and art were unified enterprises. In a letter to a museum director in Germany,
he expressed his distaste concerning the institutional segregation of artists films
from those of experimental filmmakers. Because of its rather precise articulation
of the historical conditions that isolated the filmmakers community from the art
world, it deserves to be quoted at length:
I find something objectionable above and beyond the normative criticisms:
the condescending humiliating discrimination between films by artists
and films by filmmakers which most of these exhibitions are so fond of
making, in terms of categorization and financial supportiveness. This
seems to me to be an (art world) political posture and not a valid semantic
or esthetic determination; it is based on the crumbling fact that works of
art in film are not saleable as paintings and sculpture in galleries and that
so-called filmmakers are not supported-represented by important
galleries. This gallery representation aspect of the problem is changing
rapidly and so should the terms of agreement given by large mixed
exhibitions in museums change. Flatly, all work shown in art museums
should be regarded as art and the makers of these works regarded as artists
and not filmmakers, et al.427
In this letter, Sharits expresses a position held by many filmmakers: though they
distrusted the superficiality and trendiness of the art world they also felt that they
deserved the same cultural esteem and monetary compensation as gallery artists.
(It should be mentioned that Sharits also produced work in other media and was
an active contributor to intermedial and conceptual experiments of the Fluxus
group.) As Sharits letter indicates, and as David James argues in Allegories of
Cinema, one of the major determinations of this historical bifurcation between
427
It continues, To begin with, I would like to know why Michael Snow is listed (and treated as)
a filmmaker while Jack Smith is listed as an artist. [] In my opinion both men are artists,
very fine artists indeed, and this distinction appears meaningless (Letter to Marlis Gruterich,
Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Koln, July 7, 1974, Collection of Anthology Film Archives).
408
film and art was the basic absence of a saleable commodity in experimental
cinema.428 Though this is an important and perhaps overwhelming aspect of the
material, historical, and institutional interaction between film and art, it still does
not explain the continued absence of this medium from historical accounts of art
that include conceptual art, video art, and performance. Nor does it explain the
differing treatments of filmmakers versus artists who make films, for which the
material conditions of the objects being presented are, for all intents and purposes,
identical. This strange dualism was identified concretely by Sharits in his
continuation of the letter quoted above: I have learned that artists showing their
films are receiving gallery sale prices for prints while filmmakers are receiving a
mere 3DM per minute for rental of their works.429 In this sense, it must be
admitted that the alienation of film art from art history is not simply a function of
economics or the flow of capital, but is also a result of a simple ignorance to the
most advanced experiments in cinema (which in fact foregrounded precisely the
same concerns as so many canonized art movements) and a structure of
valorization that revolves around some strange, ineffable notion of celebrity. Still,
the economic segregation of artists from filmmakers always works to the
detriment of the latter. In fact, for the most part, the material conditions that
separate filmmakers and artists films in the museum circuit continue to this day.
Despite the ignorance that museums exhibited towards the treatment of
film as an art form something that was manifested partially by their refusal to
428
409
430
The filmmakers community was divided on Warhol. A number of them openly distrusted his
success and his lack of traditional craft, which emphasized careful composition and rigorous
framing. Amongst others, Brakhage, Frampton, and Markopolous spoke out against Warhol and
his films. In Annette Michelsons words, Brakhage uttered a howl of rage at the emergence of
Warhols film work largely, one surmises because it seemed not to be work (Michelson,
Where Is Your Rupture?: Mass Culture and the Gestamtkunstwerk, 106). [emphasis in
original] On the contrary, some filmmakers embraced Warhols work, particularly when it first
appeared: both Jonas Mekas and Jack Smith were close associates of Warhols during the early
years of his experimentation with the film medium. However, Smith would later openly dismiss
Warhol as an opportunist and a fraud. Such an opinion was not uncommon amongst Warhols
filmmaking contemporaries.
410
many of the coop filmmakers held with pronounced stubbornness seemed both
overstated and reactionary.
It must be admitted that the inability of filmmakers to gain the kind of
support and exposure that was eventually received by Sharits was, at least
partially, a function of their own obstinacy and proud provincialism. For example,
Sharits initiated an effort to bring filmmakers some kind of economic support by
creating saleable super-8 prints, in order to produce an artistic commodity that
might function as a filmic analogue to the lithograph in fine art. In the mid-1970s,
he mailed a survey to a variety of filmmakers in order to determine who would be
interested in creating reduction prints of their films for such an endeavor. To his
surprise, almost no filmmakers responded. (He wrote Brakhage, Jacobs, Mekas,
Gehr, Frampton, Joyce Weiland, and others.) To him this was both a personal
frustration and evidence of a stubbornness that partially doomed these filmmakers
to a degree of material isolation from the larger currents of art.
In a lengthy letter to Stan Brakhage in 1974, Paul Sharits described his
frustrations with this aspect of the filmmakers community (of which Brakhage
was a proud member, ironically signing one of his letters to Sharits as Filmmaker
Stan):
I have been hassled and hassled and hassled about my work in the art
world; I am raw nerve endings over it. You mean a lot to me (you only
hurt the ones you love the rest you can forget about) & it freaked me
that I was picking up more of those anti-art world vibes from you. Jonas is
hassling me, Hollis is hassling me like Im some traitor to the cinema
art cause. [] when my long time friends all seem to be inferring that I
am a traitor & that my little loops up on the wall are stupid, then I get
very deeply upset. And Im on edge. [] I dont think Im blind to the
411
negative factors operating on the executive levels of the art world; but Ive
been lucky enough, so far, to find some very helpful and kind person in
that scene [] It has been a long time coming but more and more the art
world is recognizing that I am an artist, despite the fact that my medium is
film, and I expect that my financial & thereby creative future has a lot
to do with that world.431
Though Sharits thought that he had managed to carefully negotiate the anxious
waters that separated filmmakers from the art world, he proved mistaken in his
belief that new forms for film exhibition including film installation and saleable
super-8 prints could bring experimental film the cultural esteem of fine art. If
one recalls the correspondence between Brakhage and Michelson, cited at the
beginning of this study, by the 1980s, the idea had basically been vanquished that
experimental cinema held any kind of profoundly transformative possibilities for
art in general. It was video art that found its way into art history textbooks and
museums, not experimental film. Not until very recently, has there been any
significant scholarship or research from academics within art history departments
on avant-garde film. The medium-based factionalism discussed by Sharits has
continued to loom over all disciplinary and institutional boundaries between art
and experimental cinema. Though there have been singular efforts by a few
scholars and museum curators, experimental film still remains largely
uninteresting to art historians, critics, and curators. On one level, their disciplinary
myopia is a function of the simple fact that industrial, commercial film controls
and defines the aesthetic standards of any and all spectators, to the point of
basically making it impossible for almost anyone including the most educated
431
Sharits letter to Brakhage, January 14, 1974, Collection of Anthology Film Archives.
412
art historians to expect, appreciate, and understand any kind of truly nonnormative, non-identificatory film experience.
432
Bruce Jenkins, Out of the Dark, Artforum 47, no. 10 (Summer 2009), 111.
413
Jack Smiths, was one of the first artists to incorporate film as an element of
performance, had an image from one of his films on the cover of Artforum in
1973, etc. he continues to work in relative obscurity compared to the Hollywood
treatment received by Barney. This simple opposition is a function of the basic
fact that the artistic significance of the American experimental film was simply
not then nor is it now recognized by the power structure of the art world. This
is, at least to some extent, a function of Hollywoods dominance over the field of
American culture: it conditions viewer expectations and encourages a model of
patronage (the star system) that permeates the other arts as well. Similarly, it
might be suggested that the dominant mode of creating and conditioning spectator
experience has changed very little since the days of D.W. Griffith, despite minor
shifts achieved by European art cinema and other varieties of narrative pseudodifferentiation.
414
work of art and art public is renewed within the social organization of art
or in opposition to it.433
In this study, it has been argued that the tensions between different realms of
cultural production, including experimental cinema, fine art, and mass culture,
created different kinds of historical frictions as they shifted against one another
and thus generated new varieties of aesthetic experience. As Rosenberg suggests,
the intrinsic tension between these different cultural registers creates an anxiety
that is palpable and real; he even argues that this anxiety is perhaps the engine
within modern art that creates meaning, excitement, and social urgency. Whether
or not experimental film collapsed, in a sense, under the pressures of this urgency,
remains an open question. The contemporary conditions for the production of
non-industrial and non-story cinemas have changed.
The concept of postmodernism has been judiciously avoided throughout
this dissertation; it is simply too vague to prove generative to the topics at hand.
Still, it must be admitted that there is something fundamentally different about the
context in which non-commercial film forms now exist and function. There is still
so-called avant-garde film, but this descriptor is basically inoperative.
Nevertheless, there is significant and remarkable non-story, non-industrial film art
being made in this country, and this fact should be emphasized. In its historicism,
the argument of this project has forthrightly been concerned with the cultural
conditions, practices, and experiences of an art form realized in the past. As such,
some of the arguments included here may be perceived as nostalgic. That is not
433
415
the authors intention. Still, it must be admitted that the aesthetic and ontological
stakes of experimental cinema in the years between 1965 and 1975 were very
different than they are now. In a response to questions about changes in
technology, filmmaker and educator Pat ONeil recently critiqued the openness of
postmodern field of artistic production when he said, There used to be arguments
about film and there was an anxiety about it. But now everything is possible and
there are no arguments.434 There is no doubt that these anxieties concerning the
meaning, merit, and pleasure of experimental film were inscribed in the profilmic,
filmic, social, institutional, and aesthetic spaces of the works that have been
discussed throughout this text. If now, in the current moment of artistic
production these tensions have been tempered, it is a function of the basic
historical fact that the stakes have changed. Or, as ONeil suggests, some defining
anxiety and sense of urgency have dissipated, and with it the spirit of argument
has been replaced with a dull cheeriness.
In 1966 Harold Rosenberg prefigured the no-stakes openness and
historical irreverence of postmodern art when he wrote that,
the quieting of arts anxiety is bound to suggest the cheerfulness of
a sick room. It is a renunciation of that intellectual and emotional
ingredient in twentieth-century art that arises from facing the
reality of its situation. The anxiety of modern art is the measure of
its historical consciousness and its appreciation of the stature of the
past.435
434
Pat ONeil, Restoring the Los Angeles Avant-Garde panel discussion, hosted by Mark
Toscano, May 29, 2009, UCLA Film & Television Archive, Los Angeles, CA.
435
Rosenberg, Toward an Unanxious Profession in The Anxious Object, 19.
416
If this anxiety has indeed quieted, as ONeil suggests, let it be recognized that the
fundamental conditions of the production of art of any type have simply
changed since the period that is the subject of this study. (Or as Paul Arthur put it
in 1989: the realities of contemporary film and video production make the
urgent spirit of the 1960s and 70s seem like a faded Eastmancolor dream.)436 In
this project, I do not claim to evaluate the contemporary landscape of film art;
however, it is indisputable that the historical conditions have shifted, and with
them, the philosophical and cultural contexts of the practice described herein.
Such is the nature of culture; to consider any art form at an extreme conceptual
remove from the context of its cultural production would be the act of an
irresponsible historian.
Much work remains to be done, in terms of both research and critical
analysis, on the history of the American experimental film. Though this project
has analyzed a handful of works by a small number of filmmakers, there were in
fact hundreds, if not thousands of film artists working independently in this
period, such that forgotten filmmakers are being continuously rediscovered. Even
relatively well known figures, like Robert Nelson for example, are returning to
exhibition venues due to new restorations of their work and critical reappraisals of
their historical and aesthetic significance. So, it must be admitted that this project,
like any scholarly undertaking, is by nature, a selective endeavor. There were
many other artist filmmakers who could have provided generative examples for
436
417
this critical study. For example the works of Robert Frank, Michael Snow,
Yvonne Rainer, Dan Graham, Red Grooms, Dick Higgins, Robert Watts, Stan
Vanderbeek, Charles Ray, Charles Eames, Morgan Fisher, Tony Conrad, Richard
Serra, Robert Smithson, Hollis Frampton, or Jack Smith would have all provided
productive case studies for related discussions of the relationship between
experimental film and fine art from roughly 1965-75. Luckily, many of these
names are now receiving scholarly attention by young academics and graduate
students. So, as the locational installations of Paul Sharits are slowly being
restored by enterprising and ambitious young archivists, hopefully the history and
aesthetic sphere surrounding this variety of interstitial, intermedial practice will
continue to attract increasing degrees of scholarly interest. Yet the disciplinary
groupings of avant-garde film, artists film, and non-fiction film continue to
commit discursive violence upon the unruly, indefinable artistic experiments
produced in this period.
As historical artifacts, the films described within this text performed some
kind of action in relation to the historical challenge of artistically inscribing
subjectivity within the mediascape of post World War II America. The films,
cinematic gestures, and proto-cinematic objects described herein intervened into
the intermedial landscape of the arts through their uses of cinemas novel
technologies. By considering both the possibilities and limits of the apparatuses
that mediate human experience and fundamentally transform its aesthetic, social,
418
437
419
420
testing the patience of its audience. This register of distress and psycho-aesthetic
provocation is something that is clearly inscribed in the work of the artists
discussed throughout this project; yet this assaultive displeasure, which is a
fundamental artistic and philosophical resource for this work, has been largely
omitted from critical considerations of avant-garde media practice.
In Sharits words, his films were directed towards the temporary
assassination of the viewers normative consciousness.439 Sharits cinema should
be understood as a psychological, social, and scientific experiment, a testing
ground for staging different types of confrontation, in a way closely linked to
other experiments in a range of art forms including the interpersonal
provocations of The Living Theater, the politically confrontational textual
experimental of Hans Haackes conceptual art, or the somatic traumas of Chris
Burdens body art rather than a playful and controlled manipulation of symbols
to be read within the contained limits of a controlled textual space. If
experimental cinema is understood in these terms, as a set of actions that inscribe
historical events and enact spectatorial encounters, then its interpretation should
break the discursive limits that it has inherited from both literary criticism and
modernist art criticism, and thus allow space for a simultaneous recognition of
form and historical context through a pragmatic consideration of their interaction.
Like the most significant developments of avant-garde art in the 1960s and 70s,
the film-based works described in this project embody acute aesthetic encounters
439
421
Vivian Sobchack, The Charge of the Real: Embodied Knowledge and Cinematic
Consciousness in Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2004), 258285.
422
his discussion of Conners found footage works, The movie is split open again
and again by real life hurtling through it.441 Many of the films discussed in this
study devise experimental conditions in which they create new forms of
ontological interaction with the histories that they represent. These films delineate
artistic frameworks in which experimental encounters are staged between artists,
profilmic subjects, filmic materials, and spectatorial conditions; in all of these
works, the force of the past charges through the celluloid, from the other side of
history, like the paroxysms of Ondine in The Chelsea Girls or the bodily spasms
of the patients in Epileptic Seizure Comparison. In this sense, these idiosyncratic
works represent efforts to reconstitute the cinematic apparatus with each of their
experimental encounters between the contingencies of the historical real, the
textual limits of the art object, and the authors volition. In this sense, all of these
works stress contingency and the complex interplay between plasticity and
presence that defines the unique ontological conditions of motion pictures. As
such, all of these films are non-fiction works.
In a significant sense, the majority of these works (if not all) engage
directly with the problem of filmic reference. To what does the word film refer?
Is it a physical object of exposed celluloid, is it a projection event, is it the act of
spectatorial interaction with a particular apparatus in a particular space? This
film-based, experimental media art tests these questions, treating them as
hypotheses to be considered and experimented upon. In addition, many of these
441
ODoherty, 21.
423
424
influence, collective art practices, open form, indexicality, and performance, this
project has made provisional efforts at addressing the complex ontological,
aesthetic, social, and generally speaking, philosophical, functions of the American
experimental cinema in the period at hand. Any reasonable reconsideration of this
work needs to address itself, pragmatically and provisionally perhaps, to the
central philosophical concerns of the medium, to the core questions of ontology,
observation, and entertainment, while also reflecting on the historiographical and
disciplinary limits that have been imposed upon it.
The explicit and implicit disciplinary imperatives of various scholarly and
critical traditions have all done some degree of disservice to this cultural practice
by imposing certain institutional and ideological limits on their understanding of
experimental cinema: Film Studies has sometimes celebrated the filmic avantgarde as a kind of artistic practice not subject to the historical influence of capital
at the expense of understanding the ways in which it actually embodied some of
the most common cultural sensibilities of the era, particularly in relation to the
technologies of mass media; Cultural Studies has ghettoized the work of film
artists because of its seemingly elitist artistic intentions without recognizing its
tendencies to intervene in some of the most central philosophical and political
questions of mass media and popular history; Art History has generally ignored it
due to its technological connections to the commercial medium of industrial
cinema, and thus has dismissed any possibility for understanding its fundamental
exchanges with the most profound and urgent aesthetic innovations of the era.
425
426
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