Making Together Together

NOT TO MAKE SOMETHING ABOUT SOMETHING, BUT TO MAKE SOMETHING

First Introduction: Perhaps you are thinking, "I don't want to make work with everyone, I want to get on with my own work!" Well, I sympathize with that, but I would insist that this type of experimental project will have a positive effect on your own work. To work with other people (at any stage in the development of ones art) can be a profound method for shifting habitual responses, ways of working etc. Further, the impetus for this interlude/project is not only to work together, or to posit a necessarily higher moral value to working together, but to use this production format to questions specifics of the video medium and practice.

We have discussed the "Narcissism " of video, most obvious in its ability to feed present time back into itself, and the relation of the performer/artist to themselves on the monitor. These are the ways that Rosalind Krauss posits that video works as a mirror (self reflective) rather than a (properly) modernist self "reflexive" medium. However, more recent video, our example was Steve McQueen but there are many others, also exploits video's documentary tendencies. (It may also be worth noting that several of our readings have positied the term the "projected image", rather than "video", the emphasis on projection itself, shifts emaphasis from the mirror aspects of the camera/monitor configuration.)

The potential for documentary's supposed "objectivity" to be an obverse for a more personal video's mirrored "subjectivity" has been discussed as a similarly problematic (although not "wrong" or unproductive or uninteresting) relation to the world around us. This is where TJ Demos on talking about Steve McQueen and Jean Luc Godard (in the readings we addressed in class) are very instructive for us. They both discuss the vitality of straddling this documentary/personal, or real/fictional divide.

Annette Michelson says, for Godard, his analysis of how a particular type of shot he defines as excessive to the narrative, for instance a concentrated gaze on Henry Fonda's eyelids was the example, can be "an entire program, as it were, for film making, one in which the "documentary" shot transpires through the "fictional" ground, and the "subjective shot" is assigned its proper place of subordination within the syntagmatic chain [the shot by shot way meaning proceeds.]" (Michelson ix) But further, and more interestingly she finds in Godard's work of the late 60's "the integration of the two descriptive modes, towards the discovery of more general forms..."(xi) She quotes an excerpt from Godard's 3rd paragraph on his "approach" to film making. Here is that first paragraph in it's entirety.

Perhaps we can also see how this way of considering video (and of course it is just one way among many others) has an implication for considering relations between the individual and the social. These thoughts are combined in our current studio work with an impetus to do more in-class shooting/work to deal with the actual situation we are in, and actualize it through video, perhaps even finding a way to consider the total practice "video"or "art" without separating only the final product as "the work".

But, by and large the most salient reason to participate in this in class, intra class discussion and production, is that what I hope we can do, without it sounding flaky, is to "trust the process". No, not "trust"! Not trust like one trusts the parents or police, but to commit to a critical yet full engagement with the acts and energy of production. And a commitment to art, not as a general category but as an active question, can not just be a commitment to one's "own" art, as art itself exists in a field of practice.

Not starting with "a theory of the object"

The starting point for the artist, and perhaps especially the university student artist (familiar with writing essays, choosing "subjects" and arguing thesis), is often a decision in regard to what the work is "about". But, prepositions are presuppositions. This relation presupposes that the object of representation/inquiry preexists the work of art. This may be something we want to consider in greater depth.

Foucault says that a "historical awareness of our present circumstances" rather than a "theory of the object" should not be the basis for analysis. In this quote his example is "a theory of power" but we could transfer the argument to a "theory of whatever my artwork is about":

We have had some mention of Dialectics as a mode of questioning presuppositions (what are sometimes called "received ideas," as one thinks them, without every having considered them) and critical thinking. Yet dialectics should not calcify to a rule. I find the related critique of "Identity thinking" quite helpful.

In some sense we see a variation of this attempt not to think merely in categories in Godard's recall (in Statement # 114 My Approach in Four Movements) of philsopher Merleau Ponty, and an attempt to preserve a the specificity of the individual, to not subsume this specificity to the general. To not place the character (or place etc) under a "general concept" of a group, or designation…this is what not only capitalism/communism (which assigns us all an "identity" does) but the process of thought, and particularly belief, tends towards. Godard writes, "In other words, having been able to define certain complex phenomena while continuing to describe particular events and emotions, this will eventually bring us closer to life than at the outset. Maybe if the film comes off (I hope it will; if not all the time, at least in certain images and certain sounds), maybe then will be revealed what Merleau-Ponty calls the 'singular existence' of a person—Juliet's in particular."

But remind us why we are talking about this in relation to working with Video and Audio!? Did you forget the topic of the class?

No, no, I didn't, it seems that video cameras (for instance) are a medium which almost by their very design suggests an objective or at least "external" relation to the world/subject. In fact, one of the things we said quite spontaneously was "The subject is whatever is in front of the lens". This would seem to imply that the subject is not what is behind the lens (the artist, etc.). In a way the camera itself resembles a Cartesian consciousness, one in which "a split exists between the human mind and the rest of the world." which is "out here" waiting to be discovered" (Cook 125). This is also often described as an "immanent"—that is present to itself— consciousness, one that assumes to know its own contents, contain them, and be able to present them (through communication and being) to others. The video camera shares some of these characteristics —a little black box consciousness which can be pointed at things, and will internalize/record them.

Much valuable theoretical and artistic work has been done to critique this idea of "objectivity." Much of it has had to do with the idea of "social construction", understanding oneself as specific subject with a necessarily specific/limited perspective and there fore working against claims of universality and objectivity.

"This notion of the [self] composing subject has been massively critiqued by feminist and critical composition pedagogues, who aim to help the self-directed student come to terms with the ways in which her thoughts are always already shaped by her own historical and cultural situatedness. From there, thought, the challenge is typically to help the student writer [artist] become conscious of and then speak from her own radical positioning—that is, to embrace an identity founded on that positioning and to disclose it in writing as the basis for her own arguments and ideas. " (Davis, 121)

However Davis goes on to argue, that even this necessary and political recognition of a degree of (but we hope not total) "social construction" of the subject, can work back to support our habitual deferral to an "immanent" self present (but separate from and looking at) the world (not of the world) subjects. And this works (she claims, using interesting contemporary philosophers Georgio Agamben and Jean-Luc Nancy) against an invigoration of "community." (We may want to return to Krauss' claims about video and narcissism to think them through these tensions.)

She states,

Everyone has a discrete and separate position, people tend to share on the level of "similarities". Yet such communities that form around these categorical similarities, may be questioned for the received nature of the category, as well as the necessity to filter out other aspects of life which don't conform to the identity category as unimportant/un comprehensible "noise."

The problem is not one of "stereotypes" or not only, but of assuming that once sufficiently narrowed down, a person can fill, or represent or speak from, one of these positions, that assumes then that they can access the "woman" "black" etc. "inside" in a pure, and presentable form.

The idea Davis is advancing is an idea of Community, as a kind of radical context , an "outside", not a container of simple togetherness—on the fringe of representability, but perhaps at the center of experience. So with this idea of community (fully, if not easily, elaborated by Jean-Luc Nancy in his book "The Coming Community") perhaps we can return to making a project together, which considers video's tendency to "narcissism" (itself perhaps an aspect of the anxiety of the "immanent subject") at the same time as a tendency to "documentary." And the way that, particularly, our work together, our discussions focused through the short statements by Godard, (and Krauss, and Demos on Steve McQueen) might reconsider/reoperate some of these assumptions.

Where to start? Start with what is important. What IS is important. Start with the very idea of beginning.

DIVISION OF TIME

A conventional production cycle

Don't wait to start. What is impetus behind this continuous the deferral? When is "maturity" "knowledge" "graduation". What of this moment? What erodes the "authority" of experience, our ability to say "I saw that" (Jeff Wall..in Phaidon edition… mentions that he admires this aspect of realism which he finds in the work of Goya who would sometimes inscribe these words (I was this) under an image sketched from life.)

The production of a work of media art (and particularly commercial products) is usually broken up by specific divisions of time and labour. The time is divided into pre production (script writing, preparation), production (shooting), and post production (editing, etc).

DIVISION OF LABOUR

Here is a conventional and alternative list of tasks/positions.

MONTAGE

"By simply re-presenting the physical and social world to vast numbers of individuals in instantly accessible form, it encouraged--indeed, made almost inevitable--a profound renegotiation of one's place in the world. The novelty, difference and danger of the cinematograph is located in its latent power effortlessly to unleash a mass of popular energy through the revelation of how the world might be perceived and inhabited differently. In a passage again strongly reminiscent of Malraux, Godard conflates the successive 'montages' effected by the cinematograph (within the image, between images, between the viewer and the screen, between the subject and society, and between the individual and the world) as follows:

"When people saw a film, there was something that was at least double, and since someone was watching, it became triple. In other words there was something, something else, which in its technical form became gradually known as montage. It was something that filmed not things, but the relationships between things. In other words, people saw relationships, and first of all they saw a relationship with themselves."

(Michael Witt quoting Godard, in Montage, My Beautiful Care, or Histories of the Cinematograph)

THE FRAME

"I start by reminding myself of the significance of the film frame generally, of the sense in which, as I put it in The World Viewed, it has the opposite significance of the frame in painting. Following Bazin's suggestion that the screen works as much by what it excludes a by what it includes, that it functions less to frame than to mask (which let me to speak of a photograph as a segment of the world as a whole), I interpreted the frame of a film as forming its content not the way borders or lines form, but rather the way looms of molds form?

-Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed

-On Irving Goffman's "Frame Analysis" written in 1974

In his initial and widely quoted definition, Goffman characterized frames as follows:

“I assume that definitions of a situation are built up in accordance with principals of organization which govern events […] and our subjective involvement in them; frame is the word I use to refer to such of these basic elements as I am able to identify” (Goffman 1974: 10f)

In other words, frames are basic cognitive structures which guide the perception and representation of reality. On the whole, frames are not consciously manufactured but are unconsciously adopted in the course of communicative processes. On a very banal level, frames structure, which parts of reality become noticed.

For example, a group of persons lined up in an orderly fashion at the side of a road might evoke the frame "bus queue" in a passer-by. This particular frame structures perception in the way that attention is paid to the orderly arrangement of people in a line, which is one indicator of the "bus queue frame" and might have actually triggered it. The frame also directs attention to other latent frame elements, such as a bus stop sign. At the same time, it deflects attention from clothing style, body shape, or communications among the presumed prospective bus passengers.

The adoption of frames is not immune to real world events. If a cab stops at the curbside in front of the line, chances are, the bus queue frame will become rejected and replaced by the "waiting for a taxi" frame.
Todd Gitlin has summarized these frame elements most eloquently in his widely quoted (e.g., Miller 1997: 367; Miller and Riechert 2001: 115) elaboration of the frame concept:

“Frames are principles of selection, emphasis and presentation composed of little tacit theories about what exists, what happens, and what matters." (Gitlin 1980: 6)

Frame Analysis: A Primer
Thomas König, http://www.lboro.ac.uk/research/mmethods/resources/links/frames_primer.html

N O T E S AND E X T R A

Joseph Kosuth Conceptual Art as an exercise in Categorial thinking about "ART".

Joseph Kosuth from Art After Philosophy (1969)

3 Kosuth

Works of art are analytic propositions. That is, if viewed within their context—as art—they provide no information what-so-ever about any matter of fact. A work of art is a tautology in that it is a presentation of the artist’s intention, that is, he is  saying that a particular work of art is art, which means, is a definition of art. Thus, that it is art is true a priori (which is what Judd means when he states that “if someone calls it art, it’s art”).