This past weekend, I attended what the New York Times has called the “holy grail of film screenings.” Out 1, a 1971 film by French New Wave director Jacques Rivette, screened at the Gene Siskel Film Center on May 26 and 27. This twelve-hour film is comprised of eight “episodes,” originally created for French television. After its rejection, however, Rivette explained that the ideal viewing situation would be one such as that which I experienced: two days, a few breaks, complete immersion.
Not surprisingly, the event drew a number of enthusiastic cinephiles, notable film critics, and New Wave addicts. This was the big league. The Chicago premiere: only the second event of its kind in the United States. For me, attending this screening had far less to do with the movie than those next to whom I would be noshing my overpriced popcorn.
A scene-nobody myself, I am lucky enough to know some people who know some people, allowing me to silently infiltrate the thrilling world of film critics. (Hey – to each her own…) Between the two dinner breaks and the quite necessary post-epic-screening-drinks, I had the pleasure of joining a group of fairly notable writers, once including Mr. Jonathan Rosenbaum himself, arguably the Rivette critic, though I doubt he noticed me at the end of the table, wide eyed, ears perked, if silently recovering from the events past two days.
The conversations were blissful, agitated, ecstatic, frustrated, confused. These are pros. We compare notes about character affiliations, double names, and possible future plot points. “I think we learn more about the Juliet Berto character tomorrow.” Everyone keeps score in his or her head. Because, though I’ve come to see this film for my own communal reasons, we’re all here to movie-go. That’s the bottom line. And we’re serious.
For twelve hours, give or take about 30 minutes, depending on slight changes in projection frame rate, hundreds of people gather from across the country to stare straight ahead, entering into a social situation removed from our shared presence by time, place, and narrative. It felt like we’d gone to Paris 1971 for the weekend, spending time with friends of friends, getting wrapped up in a story that, for lack of conventional editing, seemed to almost be presented in real time.
***
Though I liked the film as a whole, I think all viewers would admit that there were, in fact, “boring parts.” At one point, we saw a 45-minute scene of a theatre troupe rehearsing. They do not speak, but crawl, moan, and rub paint on one another. Forty-five minutes. After scenes such as this, the audience was delighted by the comic relief brought by Colin, or “le jeune sourd-muet” played by the dreamy Jean-Pierre Léaud (New Wave fans know him from Truffaut’s The 400 Blows and scores of films thereafter).
For the first couple of episodes, we see humorously placed scenes of Colin entering a café and making the rounds, delivering to each table an envelope reading: “I am deaf and mute. I bring you a message of destiny. Thanks!” Each envelope is also stuffed with a randomly torn page from a book. Colin then revisits each table, playing an obnoxious blast on his harmonica until the café patrons pay attention and give him a few francs. Along with these interactions, we see Colin’s solitary life in his apartment, silently stuffing and stamping envelopes, refusing to communicate with even his landlady.
As the film progresses, a mysterious character hands Colin a note that sends him on a strange chase for information. Throughout the following episodes, Colin attempts to uncover the secrets of an underground conspiratorial group: the Thirteen. The event acts as a bridge between Colin’s daily hustling and the stacks of books he keeps in his tiny room. His clues are literary. The group, as well as the film itself, refers to a Balzac novel.
Through his amateur detective work, Colin transforms from a false deaf-mute to a wannabe conspirator, memorably chanting: EQUIPAGE! EQUIPAGE! EQUIPAGE! (French for “crew”) down the street as he nears the end of his search. Through an unspoken, deaf-mute-comprehensible message, Colin is brought from his little room to community. Notably, his entrance is made through specific goals: he wants to learn of the Thirteen, he courts one of its members, he attempts to gain press credentials in order to obtain more information.
We all sat for 12 hours, watching other people interact, watching this story, theatrical rehearsals, and amusing interludes of Jean-Pierre Léaud addressing the camera, wagging his finger, announcing to the audience which way he will go next.
***
Upon reflection, Colin’s function in Out 1 illuminates the paradoxical social quality of these screenings and modern life in general. We have all decided to unite in one place, at one time, to see one print of one very long film. Though this screening can be called a social event, we spend most of our time concentrating on images of people who enacted a story 36 years ago, and delighting in the shorter scenes of a young, curious man who wants to become a deeply socially entrenched conspirator.
So his initial draw – his cutely enacted le jeune sourd-muet, brings me to a contemporary application. From Walter Benjamin to Rivette’s Colin to our own Julie Rudder, the idea of modern life’s aversion to interpersonal communication in a crowded urban world remains. I think Colin’s transformation is a particularly engaging example of this phenomenon, and a story of how intrigue trumped a desire to be completely uncommunicative.
***
Inspired by this character, this film, and this screening, I decided to experiment with the idea of being verbally closed off from those with whom I interact and simultaneously trying to engage them. I thought of craigslist’s ever popular missed connections. Now, if we see someone who interests us, it would almost be strange to address them directly. We make eye contact, maybe exchange a bit of small talk, and pledge to check the “MCs” when we get home. Missed connections allow us to factor out the same verbal communication as Colin’s con. So why are we so interested in this deaf-mute person we meet in a public space? How do we know he or she is at all engaging? Is it extra communication? Less? A shift in form? Does participation in this non-space online make meeting a stranger seem less intimidating? More? How about dangerous? Most importantly, does it make co-existing with lots of people interesting?
It could be argued that finding someone in a Benjaminian world of too many people to care reclaims the thrill of pre-urban interaction. You two now exist in a space that is separate from the city. Your missed connection occurred in a real place, but what was missed has been found in a very particular theoretical space. It has an address (though it begins with http…) and only you two belong there. It is your posted missed connection.
This may be the appeal. This may be the subconscious appeal. Obviously, a large part of the appeal is that you may again see someone to whom you were attracted and too shy to approach, and you may, at some point in time, have sex with that person, but you can always dig a little deeper with these things.
So, mentally prepared, settling into the psychological shoes of Léaud’s Colin, I hit the El lines, looking for missed connections, armed with messages of destiny.
Results to be posted soon!
Thursday, May 31, 2007
Tuesday, May 22, 2007
Tuesday, May 15, 2007
It's All About Things
Now, I know many of my peers have harshed on Maldonado, but I’d like to take this opportunity to play devil’s advocate a little. I see the incongruities of his shantytown at Three Walls. I see the contradiction inherent in his commentary on the “art world” vs. the way this show operates, but I think there is a lot here that sparks some thought.
“It’s All About Things” was, one could say, an interactive, participatory installation, by Luis Maldonado, an MFA at Purchase College. It showed at the Three Walls gallery in Chicago for the month of March.
Upon my arrival to the gallery, I was greeted by a friendly young woman. She welcomed me to the gallery, briefly explained the gist of the show, and offered her help had I any questions. Continuing through a curtain that separated the nondescript West Loop building from the supposedly culturally significant pith (and the purpose of my visit,) I found a relatively unimpressive space.
“Maldonado’s bartering shantytown,” to me, sounds like a labyrinthian series of small structures, (I’d even allow many separations), breaking up a larger, unaltered space. I was expecting filthy treasures in dusty corners. Art that felt like used pots and pans. The phrase evokes feelings of necessity, use, functionality (dare I use such charged words as “relation” and “practice”?), but the “shantytown” I found felt much more like, well, a small gallery space with mild partitions for the sake of… partitions.
Here, “shantytown” operates in the very form of my personal evocation - in the contrast between my connotations and the reality of the space. In Louis Maldonado’s shantytown, the limited space and awkward quiet shared between a gallery hostess and art-consumer is muted by blaring Jazz and NPR.
From the floors, covered in varied cardboard checkerboard colors, to the blue tarped ceiling, the shantytown space was, in fact, separated from all surfaces of the institutionally ubiquitous white cubed gallery experience. Maldonado achieved this much distinction of his space vs. “theirs.” (The institution? The art marketplace? It wasn’t quite clear, but I don’t think it mattered).
Maldonado’s smaller pieces were scattered around the space. Watercolor sketches hung from a clothesline. Themed paintings filled a small “room” (there were separations, however spatially unimpressive/arguably ineffective). A television connected to a karaoke machine ran images of American pop culture icons with the text: “Welcome to the United States.” Toy soldiers and other figurines filled unmarked commercially charged display boxes. A small pile of miniature protest signs lay next to them, crying, in the loudest voice afforded by a two-inch piece of cardboard: “Say No to the Establishment!” “Question the Economic System!” “What Smells?” “I love you!” from their popsicle sticks.
As is apparently fitting for this era of the art-experience, a neat lounge with muraled walls, folding chairs, and a copy of Art Forum comically demanded a good portion of the limited space in the gallery.
I had the freedom to snigger if I wanted to (as well as to refuse to react if I didn’t want to.) I visited when Maldonado wasn’t there.
I visited the shell of the art event. I did not visit the art. I felt privileged for this, and markedly more able to navigate and interpret the space without a relation-crazed artist breathing down my neck to make me perform some stunt or another. I’m kidding, of course, but I do think my experience with this work was much more comfortable and a bit more personally interpreted having not encountered the entertainer himself – which is, of course, what Maldonado functions as when he hosts karaoke, theatrical trades, and confrontational interactions with all of these… things. (Which would otherwise be nothing but!)
In his statement, Maldonado notes that the “things” which his work is all about are derived from Heidegger’s use of the word “to debunk the phrase ‘a work of art.’” Here, I think the things are things. The work of art is about the things. = IT.
IT is not the things. IT is the work of art. IT is ABOUT the things.
IT is all ABOUT things. Is that a bit better?
I was not allowed to barter without the artist present.
***
So, feeling a bit like an archeologist finding traces of this so-called “art,” I moved through the space, looking for artifacts that would explain what made this shantytown function.
What I gathered was a sense of the effect of “It’s All About Things” as the most forcibly “real” art-space the artist could put together. This, of course, went well with the events that often occupied the space, though they were not occurring during my visit.
Recalling the Kwan essay we read early in the quarter, I interpreted this show as an exemplification of site specificity in all its contemporary glory. “It’s All About Things” functions as an installation – site specific in its installation by the artist himself. It functions as performance when he is there to barter, and it functions as a relational event – significantly more entertaining and performative than Tiravanija’s dinner, while keeping a similar level of participant interaction.
Maldonado’s bartering provides a market structure for the participants in his work. They may meet at a bartering session (a karaoke performance, or whatever). He interacts with them. They may strike up a conversation with one another. Regardless, they coexist. But Maldonado ups the ante Tiravanija lays down. He not only gets people together, but engages them in one of the most universally shared activities that connects us in reality: he creates a platform for trade – a makeshift market – and what could be more real? Site specificity qua time specificity qua event qua stuff. Solid stuff you can hold and put on your coffee table and wear and show people later. Be they Maldonado sketches (these are not his art. They are things.) or someone’s apartment keys.
Now, this may be taking things too far, but is this a new type of specificity for Relational Aesthetics?
Art: site specificity:: Relational Aesthetic pieces: tangible good-based interactions?
***
But I, the archeologist, can only see what’s been left by this artist and his stuff-patrons. I cannot see into his, or Relational Aesthetics’ futures to contextualize these things.
The young woman asks me again if I have any questions. I shake my head, sitting alone in a metal folding chair listening to a story on NPR about the marching of the elephants down 34th street to Madison Square Garden. They’re unloaded off of train cars in Queens and marched through the Midtown tunnel to Manhattan in the middle of the night, when the traffic is tame. Apparently scores of people come to watch the necessary parade. A brief time, weather, and traffic update let me know that this was not an absurd staged recording for the piece, but real time radio. I loved that I questioned this. This was everything specific, and it only happened to me.
Smiling with amusement and appreciation for the connection I had just felt with the elephant watchers, I closed my notebook and went back through the curtain to the symbolically defined real world. I didn’t get to trade my stuff, but I did have the opportunity to see some things as things – and think about what that meant - a unique experience of its own in that particular shantytown.
“It’s All About Things” was, one could say, an interactive, participatory installation, by Luis Maldonado, an MFA at Purchase College. It showed at the Three Walls gallery in Chicago for the month of March.
Upon my arrival to the gallery, I was greeted by a friendly young woman. She welcomed me to the gallery, briefly explained the gist of the show, and offered her help had I any questions. Continuing through a curtain that separated the nondescript West Loop building from the supposedly culturally significant pith (and the purpose of my visit,) I found a relatively unimpressive space.
“Maldonado’s bartering shantytown,” to me, sounds like a labyrinthian series of small structures, (I’d even allow many separations), breaking up a larger, unaltered space. I was expecting filthy treasures in dusty corners. Art that felt like used pots and pans. The phrase evokes feelings of necessity, use, functionality (dare I use such charged words as “relation” and “practice”?), but the “shantytown” I found felt much more like, well, a small gallery space with mild partitions for the sake of… partitions.
Here, “shantytown” operates in the very form of my personal evocation - in the contrast between my connotations and the reality of the space. In Louis Maldonado’s shantytown, the limited space and awkward quiet shared between a gallery hostess and art-consumer is muted by blaring Jazz and NPR.
From the floors, covered in varied cardboard checkerboard colors, to the blue tarped ceiling, the shantytown space was, in fact, separated from all surfaces of the institutionally ubiquitous white cubed gallery experience. Maldonado achieved this much distinction of his space vs. “theirs.” (The institution? The art marketplace? It wasn’t quite clear, but I don’t think it mattered).
Maldonado’s smaller pieces were scattered around the space. Watercolor sketches hung from a clothesline. Themed paintings filled a small “room” (there were separations, however spatially unimpressive/arguably ineffective). A television connected to a karaoke machine ran images of American pop culture icons with the text: “Welcome to the United States.” Toy soldiers and other figurines filled unmarked commercially charged display boxes. A small pile of miniature protest signs lay next to them, crying, in the loudest voice afforded by a two-inch piece of cardboard: “Say No to the Establishment!” “Question the Economic System!” “What Smells?” “I love you!” from their popsicle sticks.
As is apparently fitting for this era of the art-experience, a neat lounge with muraled walls, folding chairs, and a copy of Art Forum comically demanded a good portion of the limited space in the gallery.
I had the freedom to snigger if I wanted to (as well as to refuse to react if I didn’t want to.) I visited when Maldonado wasn’t there.
I visited the shell of the art event. I did not visit the art. I felt privileged for this, and markedly more able to navigate and interpret the space without a relation-crazed artist breathing down my neck to make me perform some stunt or another. I’m kidding, of course, but I do think my experience with this work was much more comfortable and a bit more personally interpreted having not encountered the entertainer himself – which is, of course, what Maldonado functions as when he hosts karaoke, theatrical trades, and confrontational interactions with all of these… things. (Which would otherwise be nothing but!)
In his statement, Maldonado notes that the “things” which his work is all about are derived from Heidegger’s use of the word “to debunk the phrase ‘a work of art.’” Here, I think the things are things. The work of art is about the things. = IT.
IT is not the things. IT is the work of art. IT is ABOUT the things.
IT is all ABOUT things. Is that a bit better?
I was not allowed to barter without the artist present.
***
So, feeling a bit like an archeologist finding traces of this so-called “art,” I moved through the space, looking for artifacts that would explain what made this shantytown function.
What I gathered was a sense of the effect of “It’s All About Things” as the most forcibly “real” art-space the artist could put together. This, of course, went well with the events that often occupied the space, though they were not occurring during my visit.
Recalling the Kwan essay we read early in the quarter, I interpreted this show as an exemplification of site specificity in all its contemporary glory. “It’s All About Things” functions as an installation – site specific in its installation by the artist himself. It functions as performance when he is there to barter, and it functions as a relational event – significantly more entertaining and performative than Tiravanija’s dinner, while keeping a similar level of participant interaction.
Maldonado’s bartering provides a market structure for the participants in his work. They may meet at a bartering session (a karaoke performance, or whatever). He interacts with them. They may strike up a conversation with one another. Regardless, they coexist. But Maldonado ups the ante Tiravanija lays down. He not only gets people together, but engages them in one of the most universally shared activities that connects us in reality: he creates a platform for trade – a makeshift market – and what could be more real? Site specificity qua time specificity qua event qua stuff. Solid stuff you can hold and put on your coffee table and wear and show people later. Be they Maldonado sketches (these are not his art. They are things.) or someone’s apartment keys.
Now, this may be taking things too far, but is this a new type of specificity for Relational Aesthetics?
Art: site specificity:: Relational Aesthetic pieces: tangible good-based interactions?
***
But I, the archeologist, can only see what’s been left by this artist and his stuff-patrons. I cannot see into his, or Relational Aesthetics’ futures to contextualize these things.
The young woman asks me again if I have any questions. I shake my head, sitting alone in a metal folding chair listening to a story on NPR about the marching of the elephants down 34th street to Madison Square Garden. They’re unloaded off of train cars in Queens and marched through the Midtown tunnel to Manhattan in the middle of the night, when the traffic is tame. Apparently scores of people come to watch the necessary parade. A brief time, weather, and traffic update let me know that this was not an absurd staged recording for the piece, but real time radio. I loved that I questioned this. This was everything specific, and it only happened to me.
Smiling with amusement and appreciation for the connection I had just felt with the elephant watchers, I closed my notebook and went back through the curtain to the symbolically defined real world. I didn’t get to trade my stuff, but I did have the opportunity to see some things as things – and think about what that meant - a unique experience of its own in that particular shantytown.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
