dsmith's blog

Stan Brakhage, "Mothlight" (1963)

dsmith — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 19:17:45 +0000

Here, the great film artist Stan Brakhage has pressed insect parts and other organic debris onto film for this quickly animated art house classic. I like these sorts of image environments, wherein rhetorical theory is challenged by formalist values. As a rhetorician films such as this force me to consider how authorial vision, technology, and media collude to create vivid commentary or statements, in this case about the temporality of life.

No More Kings

dsmith — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 19:26:26 +0000

For your Thanksgiving pleasure—Pavement's cover of the Schoolhouse Rock classic, "No More Kings."

And here's Gillian Welch's version of Neil Young's "Pochahantas."

And who doesn't love Iggy Popp, circa 1979, taking you home from Grandma's house with a renewed "Lust for Life"? Yum!

Wyndham Lewis - Vorticist

dsmith — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 18:41:39 +0000

Happy Birthday, Percy Wyndham Lewis (November 18, 1882 - March 7, 1957).

Tom Raworth's "Hands"

dsmith — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 19:18:33 +0000

Tom Raworth, a British poet who is often associated with American Black Mountain and New York School traditions of writing, created this compelling visual document some months ago. I find it visually provocative, the extended hand leading viewers through diverse environments around the U. K. I showed this last spring, however, to a poetry class I was teaching, and most of my students responded with a more polite version of, “what the fuck?”

I pointed out that there was very little visual mediation in the video, and that viewers were therefore asked to think about the potential arguments therein. I also pointed out that “Hands” documented visual space by framing the author’s hand, thereby establishing a narrative device by which meaning could be generated, and thereby argued.

In a poem called “Tracking (notes)” Raworth argues for a vision of art that is generative, expansive—linked as interlinear environments wherein thought and sensation commingle. Art, if I understand him correctly, let’s us make connections, expanding capacities of perception to include diverse modalities of public and private experience. “[T]hings of your time,” he writes, “are influenced by the past. the artist can / only go on from there and use the situation as it is: anything /else is distortion.” This attention to “the situation as it is” brings art into a rhetorical realm, for in it Raworth attends the phenomenal event as dramatic aperture—an experience of time and of being is elaborated in the details of the world around us. “[I] stick with deKooning saying 'i influence the past,’” continues Raworth, “and it is / not important for the work of a time to be available in the / mass media of its time: think of dickens on film, dostoevsky / on radio.”

It is curious to note, however, similarities between Raworth’s “Hands” and a McDonald’s commercial that came out over the summer. Here’s the ad:

I doubt my students would drop their jaws with “WTF” comments if I presented them with these commercial images, although they are weirdly similar to Raworth’s. Perhaps we can accept avant-garde imagery and technique if mediated by forces of technology that reinforce our understanding of a visual commonplace. Work like Raworth’s, by contrast, challenges the stock assumptions we hold, asking us to look at the world with new eyes—and to see ourselves in it through other perspectives. McDonald’s, by contrast, wants to limit perspective, and thereby increase control, if briefly, over our sense of things. It’s not news that commercials work as propaganda—limiting perspectives in order to orient attention to products. But there is a kind of violent invasion into the trove of our collective symbolic imagery when such is manipulated to devalue experience in order to sell shit. And it isn’t just a new coffee drink that’s being sold either. McDonald’s reinforces visio-cultural habits that can prevent us from more carefully apprehending the nature of visual experience.

Flag

dsmith — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 17:46:38 +0000

Swiss-born photographer Robert Frank snapped this image in Hoboken, New Jersey, in 1955, and included it in his groundbreaking book, The Americans. With an introduction by Jack Kerouac, The Americans argues for a vision of America that conflicts with the optimistic narratives more commonly told. This image, in particular, is testament to the paranoid and cautious elements of the American dream. The women here, obscured by flag and shadow, look out of their tenement flats toward the viewer. The windows, like two eyes, observe a world beyond our view. The symbolic value of the flag is at odds with the partially hidden figures.

Kerouac said that Frank "sucked a sad poem right out of America onto film." That sadness arrives in this image too, and with it a projected failure. For all its promise, America, for many people, has been a land of deranged lunacy. Somehow Frank's image manages to project that sense of failure even as the flag of hope does its thing.

This photo also expresses something that I think is deeply shared by many Americans--a confirmed skepticism in the face of one's duty. Perhaps it's a sign of good intelligence that traditionally so few voters turn out for presidential elections. I know this year is supposed to be different, and the thought of four years of McCain is appalling, but I imagine that many Americans will march to toward voting booths with the kind of anxiety captured in Frank's image. Hopefully, when all's said and done, our faceless majority will elect an appropriate candidate.

Voodoo Nation

dsmith — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 18:22:59 +0000

As the nation moves closer to election it should not be necessary to reflect on the largely epideictic mode of the McCain-Palin campaign. It’s impossible, however, not to look at how far out and downright creepy things have gotten. Images surrounding this campaign are bizarre, and they show us how desperate politicians tap into voter anxiety and fear. While the Arizona “maverick” senator professes change for America, his campaign thrives on images of self-mutilation, leaks unsubstantiated claims that link Obama to terrorism, and, with Palin, pledges oath to a convenient form of “feminism” that professes submission to primitive religious practices and atavistic rituals of spiritual expulsion. The anti-Enlightenment freakery of the McCain-Palin ticket is now spinning itself out of control.

Kenneth Burke was no stranger to the relationship between magic and rhetoric. In the Rhetoric of Motives, he based his claims of identification largely in this psychic realm, wherein properties are evaluated, consumed, and digested in an unconscious drive toward singularity. With this work in mind it’s safe to say that persuasion, at the level of national election, does not only (or often enough) work through careful deliberation, but through images constructed to form a psychic shit storm that stirs up voter anxieties and prejudices. McCain’s narrative of heroism (panned in this Rolling Stone article) and Palin’s wolf-pack feminism, however, are now beginning to lose some luster as reports of witchcraft and spiritual warfare erupt around Palin and her submission to a Kenyan pastor in 1995.

Many by now have seen images of Kenyan “witch hunter,” Thomas Muthee, praying over Palin in a 2005 Assembly of God service in Wisilla. The New York Times even printed a recent article about this. Others in the media—particularly in the blogsphere—have reported on the event along with other incidents surrounding Palin and her religion’s odd and violent messages. Muthee, reports The Nation’s Max Blumenthal, recently told the Wisilla congregation that “[w]e come against the spirit of witchcraft! We come against the python spirits!” Indeed, claims pastor Muthee, “[w]e stomp on the heads of the enemy!”

Palin’s response to a New York Times reporter indicates how far the American Right has drifted from our national, Enlightenment-based foundations: “My faith,” she said, “has always been pretty personal.”

It is perhaps satisfying to know that American politics can inspire spiritual battle—but I worry about the Dark Forces out there in that warfare. McCain now seems to thrive in a wilderness so extreme that the results of next week’s election will reveal a new vision of national identity. Recent polling suggests that it’s unlikely that he’ll win, but he has nonetheless set in motion an irrational and violent potential in the electorate that even goes beyond what G. W. Bush brought to national politics. A president always represents an imagination of ourselves, to a large extent. I doubt we’ll wake November 5th a Voodoo nation, but the zombies of the far-right hate wing of American politics will still certainly be alert to their next claims on our national attention.

William Eggleston

dsmith — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 17:22:32 +0000

William Eggleston pioneered the use of color photography as a valid visual art form. His 1976 MoMA exhibit was the first one-man show to feature color images. Like his friend Ed Ruscha, Eggleston’s a now legendary figure in contemporary art, and many articles and interviews with him are available in print and online, like this one by Jim Lewis. Unlike most photographers, however, Eggleston rarely takes more than one shot, and only occasionally makes use of the viewfinder. He points and clicks. His saturated color photos often reveal a world that borders on terror and hilarity—and the democratic range of his gaze provides dazzling and impersonal perspectives on U. S. cultural life. The opening of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet pays tribute to Eggleston’s saturated colors—and the tone of that film captures Eggleston’s sense of the macabre and decayed peripheries that surround us.

Although I admire the color and composition of his photographs, I appreciate more the perspective he brings to mundane things. One photograph form the 1970s reveals a number of shoes under a bed. In another, a child’s tricycle rises ominously over the driveway. There are pictures of gas stations and lonely fields of the Mississippi Delta. Human form does not receive special attention. Instead, it is absorbed into a body of work that values popular objects and landscapes equally. Eggleston’s perspectives make claims about what we see in a democracy and how we see it. That democracy is slightly warped intensifies the all too real values imposed by it. We’re fortunate to have Eggleston’s lens show us what is often not so readily available to our senses.

Work like his, however, confronts our understanding of rhetoric and visual communication. One photo, for instance, reveals only the inside of an oven. Such a mundane vision could be easily dismissed. But on further reflection, we might recall that ovens provide warmth and sustenance. Holiday birds and breads are baked in them. Here, the rectangular pit is striated with two metal racks, revealing an order and symmetry inherent in the design of daily objects we take for granted. Such symmetry reveals a preference for simplicity and utility: core values of democracy. The bare bulb in the back allows users to observe food as it cooks. The rust-stained bottom edge of the outer portion at the hinges suggests that this oven has been used for quite some time too, and the tile floor and doorframe to the right registers a situation wherein a middle class (or lower) sense of decorum is at stake. The oven is clean and symmetrical, and yet the signs of ware and use appeal to our sense of place and values. As viewers, we wonder about the domestic experience of this household. More significantly, the photo seems to ask us to reflect on what is shared and what is not. Certain properties in a democracy are held in common, while others separate us by class, race, gender. The photo argues that we share in certain ancient requirements of hearth to relieve the pangs of hunger. It claims too that the value of appliance and symmetry motivate our assumptions about home design, cooking, social exchange, and class. But perhaps this oven is clean not because of a tidy attention to domestic hygiene, but because it simply isn’t used that often. Perhaps it is rented along with the apartment, and the inhabitants require other domestic pleasures than home baked bread. Of course, a microwave could be on the countertop, making the oven almost obsolete. What does this tell us about a culture wherein obsolescence can so readily present itself as an option in our conception of domestic appliance?

Eggleston’s arguments about form and function in his photographs make him a peculiar and accurate witness to democratic spaces. The intimacy of his perspective is balanced with enough indifference to reveal the shared surfaces of our experience. Just enough incongruence, in Kenneth Burke’s sense, keeps his images alert to the experience of life in late 20th/early 21st century America.

Image Meltdown

dsmith — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 17:04:38 +0000

A compelling essay on the current money mess by Charles Eisenstein at the eclectic and ambitious web magazine, Reality Sandwich, offers the following perspective on the larger meaning of “meltdown”:

In ancient times entertainment was also a free, participatory function. Everyone played an instrument, sang, participated in drama. Even 75 years ago in America, every small town had its own marching band and baseball team. Now we pay for those services. The economy has grown. Hooray.

The crisis we are facing today arises from the fact that there is almost no more social, cultural, natural, and spiritual capital left to convert into money. Centuries, millennia of near-continuous money creation has left us so destitute that we have nothing left to sell. Our forests are damaged beyond repair, our soil depleted and washed into the sea, our fisheries fished out, the rejuvenating capacity of the earth to recycle our waste saturated. Our cultural treasury of songs and stories, images and icons, has been looted and copyrighted. Any clever phrase you can think of is already a trademarked slogan. Our very human relationships and abilities have been taken away from us and sold back, so that we are now dependent on strangers, and therefore on money, for things few humans ever paid for until recently: food, shelter, clothing, entertainment, child care, cooking. Life itself has become a consumer item. Today we sell away the last vestiges of our divine bequeathment: our health, the biosphere and genome, even our own minds. This is the process that is culminating in our age. It is almost complete, especially in America and the “developed” world. In the developing world there still remain people who live substantially in gift cultures, where natural and social wealth is not yet the subject of property. Globalization is the process of stripping away these assets, to feed the money machine's insatiable, existential need to grow. Yet this stripmining of other lands is running up against its limits too, both because there is almost nothing left to take, and because of growing pockets of effective resistance.

What I found most insightful here is the claim about the looting of “[o]ur cultural treasury of songs and stories, images and icons.” German filmmaker Werner Herzog once said much the same thing in an interview. The director of such stunning features as Aguirre the Wrath of God, a narrative of conquistadors suffering their fates on the Orinoco, Fitzcarraldo, in which a barge famously is carried over a mountain in the Amazon, and Stroszek, the bleakly tender portrait of German outcasts adrift on the intercontinental loam of Wisconsin, claims that contemporary culture’s knowledge of the image is impoverished. In this 1979 interview, Herzog speaks with Roger Ebert, saying:

At the present time, I think that we do not know very much about the process of vision itself. This kind of knowledge is precisely what we need. We need it very urgently because we live in a society that has no adequate images anymore, and, if we do not find adequate images and an adequate language for our civilization with which to express them, we will die out like the dinosaurs. It’s as simple as that! We have already recognized that problems like the energy shortage or the overpopulation of the world or the environmental crisis are great dangers for our society and for our kind of civilization, but I think it has not yet been understood widely enough that we also need new images.

While it’s terribly unfashionable to bring the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl G. Jung into polite academic conversation, his arguments about the collective archetypes of the imagination remain provocative for my thinking about how we often identify with certain public images. Jung’s notion of a reservoir of images circulating within a collective unconscious is, if nothing else, stimulating and useful for understanding what Eisenstein and Herzog are getting at in their perspectives. In a period when images are frequently manipulated to persuade consumers to make purchases or for voters to make decisions on election day, it’s important to think about what else images are capable of provoking in us—or what knowledge they can perhaps lead us—or mislead us—into. The weight of Herzog and Eisenstein’s claims is apparent in our current geopolitical context of sinking fortunes—whether or not we believe in the existence of shared imagery and icons of a collective imagination. We inhabit a cultural milieu where the proliferation of images via print and digital technologies both preserve and confuse the historical record of our visual codes of perception and intelligence. In recovering the image by placing it in meaningful contexts we can begin to see the possibilities inherent in a world. A visual rhetoric might take as its first mission the contextualization of imagery more generally absorbed into the copia of contemporary cultural viewing habits.

Killer of Sheep

dsmith — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 16:24:55 +0000

Charles Burnett’s little known and nearly plotless masterpiece, Killer of Sheep, offers a tender yet realistic vision of life in 1970s Watts, the racially segregated suburb of Los Angeles where poverty, racism, and riots doomed the area to generations of social and economic oblivion. Inspired by Italian neo-realism, Burnett’s camera lingers on characters—many played by non-actors—to reveal situations of familial intimacy and communal identification.

An opening scene shows a young girl in the mask of a dog. Such expressive sadness in the features of the animal hides the perceptive eyes and facial gestures of the child. Her father, Stan (played by Henry Gayle Sanders), exhausted from working shifts at a Los Angeles slaughterhouse, lays linoleum on the kitchen floor. A sensitive man, burdened with domestic duty and physical labor, Stan’s story offers occasion for audiences to reflect on the dislocation of his desire from the circumstances of his life.

Other images show children at play in an urban debris field; a young man casually walks away with a television set; children act out and are disciplined; petty gangsters arrive to tempt Stan to join them in a robbery. But the central narrative focuses on Stan and his relationship to his family and community.

This emotionally complex film, however, argues for the ambiguity of Stan’s relation to others—particularly his wife, with whom sexual intimacy is a problem. Attempts to help friends, too, often result in mishap, such as when Stan helps purchase a new engine block, only to have it fall out of the back of his pick-up as he puts it in gear. Stan’s main joy in life seems, in fact, to come through his work at the slaughterhouse, ushering sheep along to their final moments before the processing of their flesh.

Made on a budget of only $10,000 while he was a student at UCLA, Burnett’s film doesn’t try to ameliorate Stan’s situation. Instead, he argues for a vision of reality that refuses to perform to the social and racial expectations of others. He shows us, instead, a strange beauty that, perhaps against the viewer’s will, refuses to correspond to an appropriate system of values. Such tension brings viewers into a film that also denies the urgency of a crafted message, documenting instead the motives of communal actors. The final scene—a baby shower for a young pregnant woman—could have pushed the narrative into sentimentality (Spike Lee, for instance, can’t seem to live without it). Instead, viewers witness an exchange of human forces. Although we are not in the realm of Longinus’ sublime, the neo-realistic narrative nonetheless argues for a human vision that transcends social and economic behavior.

Listed in the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry and rated by the National Society of Film Critics as one of the top films of all time, Killer of Sheep is an American treasure, despite only recently acquiring the attention it deserves.

Meat Joy

dsmith — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 18:16:43 +0000

Carolee Schneeman’s controversial sixties-era films remain to my mind some of the most visually provocative reflections on the “deep and meaningless” facets of life during that turbulent period. Meat Joy (1964), made during an era of U. S. Cold War propaganda, Vietnam War escalation, and multiple political assassinations, celebrates flesh in a context that, at first, may seem anachronistic. And yet, American military and economic claims on the world provided artists of the period a safe space to reflect on the body and cultural taboos associated with libidinal experience.

Today, Meat Joy is a delight to view. The French voices and Dylan-esque harmonica background provide a feeling of joie de vivre that correlates with the playful embraces of scantily clad women and men. When processed fish, chicken, and sausage enter this orgy, I thought, okay, Schneeman is going to drive the metaphor down our throats (maybe not literally, but close enough). But visually, the performance remains so compact, visually kinetic and complex, and surprisingly light-hearted, that the gesture of, say, a fish, squeezed up tight between a young woman’s thighs, is, well, marvelous to behold in this context.

Schneeman’s argument, however, materializes the body—bringing it out of our minds, where too often it exists in submission to social and cultural ideals. By recontextualizing bodies on a stage in orgiastic abandon to the performative moment, the arms, legs, and torsos we see give definition to the space around them, and ask viewers to see bodies at play as they explore tabooed social boundaries.

Fuses (1967), by contrast, presents bodies in a much more intimate, domestic setting. With only ambient beach sounds to supplement the 22-minute, 16 mm film, the intimacy between Schneeman and her lover, James Tenney, is mediated through frequent narrative cuts, image-layers, and post-production manipulation of the celluloid itself. Despite the occasional glistening, post-coital cock, Fuses distances the audience from an experience of literal fucking. Instead, viewers witness an argument for how sexuality can be internalized and reflected on as an experience of the mind as well as of the body. If anything, the film is grounded in a mimesis that recalls the mental state during sex, with rapid image juxtapositions, visual submission to the body, ambient sources of light through a window, intrusions from a pet cat, and glimpses of the face of the other.

While the argument is made in a specifically hetero-context, the intrusion of ecstatic otherness often experienced in sexual intimacy is revealed here, making this a unique, and valuable, film about an area of life that typically remains hidden from popular view. Unlike pornography, which is about manipulating the image-as-product, aiming stylized sexual acts at a particular audience’s desire for physical gratification, Fuses, with its gorgeous shifts of light over the room and textured visual tableau, invites speculation from viewers on attitudes about sexuality, bodies, and expressive, if unconscious, forms.

I find films such as these compelling because they challenge our notions of suasion in the epideictic mode. Without explicit narratives—or even spoken arguments—we are left with the performative gestures of the visual frames of the films themselves.

Century 21

dsmith — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 18:18:30 +0000

Jeremy Blake’s Century 21 (2004)—the final installment in a trilogy inspired by the narrative of eccentric firearm heir, Sarah Winchester—digs into the psychic tableau of the American West. It’s gorgeous—and horrific.

The frames of Blake’s image montage are layered with different media, including gouache, ink, still photography, CG graphics, and 16mm film. Such image density creates a striking vividness of form that is part acid trip, part interlinear homage to the haunted legacy of Winchester’s eccentric "mystery" mansion, constructed in San Jose, California, from 1884 to 1922. The trilogy was screened for the first time in the U. S. in 2004 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Through these haunted surfaces and images—cartoon cowboys, iconic silhouettes of gunfighters, the tongue-like extensions of succulent plants—viewers observe the formation of narrative around the slowly paced repetition of key figures. Using these elements, Blake is able to address our attitudes toward property, freedom, and, to quote Robert Plant, the “deep and meaningless” contexts of daily life. He also asks viewers to reflect on the paranoia extant in the surfaces of objects and figures that populate the national narratives of individualism, ownership, and deal making.

In a frame that repeats throughout the film, the silhouette of a lone man on horseback arrives, head down, to be overtaken by images of geodesic domes and signage for Century 21, Century 22, and Century 23—forlorn but suggestive sites in Blake’s western geography. The accompanying Aaron Copland soundtrack is layered with the sounds of strong wind and other digitally enhanced elements to deliver a feeling of anxious vacancy.

Compare this with last Thursday’s image of Nancy Pelosi, Ben Bernanke, and Henry Paulson, who met to reaffirm world financial markets that they had a plan for handling the current mortgage/credit crisis. The tension in their faces betrayed the hopeful content of their message. I can’t help but wonder if Sarah Winchester’s paranoid legacy isn’t being carried over into Washington and Wall Street—the ghosts of bad decisions and short-term greed returning to make claims on the conduct of the “American Way of Life”—something that, as Dick Cheney once said, is “non-negotiable.”

As the media and politicians continue to blame faulty mortgages and risky decisions by Wall Street bankers in an attempt to scapegoat the nearest and most exposed playerz of the current financial meltdown, Blake’s visionary tableau of angst argues that national narratives of acquisition, confrontation, and macho individualism influence our ability to make decisions and act within the environments we inhabit. Heroism is outpaced by tragic misfortune and violent contradictions of desire. Our manipulation of the material world, Blake seems to argue, backfires as paranoia and fear catch up with us—and the ol’ homestead awaits foreclosure.