Aesthetic Strategies for Found Footage Artwork
How did you interpret the phrase, ‘these artists are united by what might be called a gestural use of editing’?
What I think is compelling about this connection between Serra’s Verb List and found footage filmmaking is thinking of film/media/cultural production in sculptural terms. What new forms might be arrived at by thinking about film/video as a tactile material, like origami paper to be folded or something that can be stretched like playdoh. Sometimes thinking in these metaphors can help generate unexpected ideas.
"One of the first things I did when I started working in New York was write down a list of verbs -- to splash, to tear, to roll, to cut, and so on. I then enacted those verbs in the studio with rubber and lead in relation to time and place. The residues of the activities didn't always qualify as art. I was primarily interested in the process and it was important that whatever was finally made reveal its making... The verb list allowed me to experiment without any preconceived idea about what I was going to make and not worry about the history of sculpture. I wasn't burdened by any prescripted definition of material, process, or end product.”
Richard Serra in an interview with Kynaston McShine, 2006
“These artists’ gestural manipulation of the most familiar of media helps to reveal the complete structuring of filmic reality, which has achieved such a level of perfection that we fail to notice it. Through such gestures as stretching, rearranging, erasing and cutting, the familiar is rendered unfamiliar and, in that moment, a new layer of comprehension is born.”
Jennifer & Kevin McCoy
Learning from Las Vegas (2003)
Appropriates 21 films which feature Las Vegas prominently or as a back drop.
120 DVD’s that feature different categories of what can be learned from different Hollywood portrayals of Las Vegas.
Categories include: Learning to Smoke, Learning from Sequins, Learning from showgirls, etc…
What happens when we break a film down into its parts and frame the content as “learning”?
Related piece: Every Shot, Every Episode
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRKzPYbEG4k
The title of this piece, Learning from Las Vegas, is a reference to a classic architectural text by Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi but the same name that was a very influential theorization of the ideas that would lead to the post-modern turn in architecture. �
Jennifer & Kevin McCoy
Traffic #1: Our Second Date (2004))
This tabletop miniature kinetic sculpture collapses two linked narratives. In Our Second Date, one narrative is a small-scale recreation of a scene from the film Week End by Jean Luc Godard, with its majestic travelling shot reduced here to an infinitely spinning disc. The other is a tableau portraying the artists themselves in the act of watching the film on a Parisian small- screen cinerama: a live video feed of the cinematic recreation on the table next to them appears on their screen. In the gallery space, a projected video sequence cuts between images of the artists in their miniature seats and images of the film scene they are watching.
Michelle Smith
Regarding Penelope's Wake
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDS5SOSA5Qo
“A two-hour film consisting of heavily edited frame by frame collage/montage/hand painted/ripped/cut/etched found footage culled from numerous sources, including a 1970's public speaking instructional film, 'Themes From The Odyssey', 8mm stag films, 'Self Protection For Women', a biography of Vincent Van Gogh, ethnographic documentaries, science films, home movies, 'The Frog Prince', a film about underwater sound, and many other assorted educational films.
Through the use of juxtaposition of images (which may by nature become narrative and/or symbolic), rapid movement of form and texture, and repetition of motifs, an intricate visual structure is created which allows the viewers to experience and create their own unique readings. The film is silent, which allows one to follow the rhythm of the edits and movements of form and color within the frame without audio distraction against the complex visual structure.
Thus assembled, Regarding Penelope's Wake weaves between the multiple layers of experimental narratives and themes, structural abstractions and patterns of cut celluloid, intertwining rhythms of form, texture and light, visual metaphors, and the interactions between the elements. Form becomes amorphous as time is spun within the individual viewer's attentions.”
https://expcinema.org/site/en/videos/michele-smith-regarding-penelopes-wake-2002
Martin Arnold
Passsage À L'Acte
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=93-G6EYnJO4
“The cinema of Hollywood is a cinema of exclusion, reduction and denial, a cinema of repression. If pièce touchée expresses sexuality and passage a l’acte aggression, then perhaps Andy Hardy finds melancholia.”
– Martin Arnold
Leslie Thornton
Peggy and Fred in Hell
https://vimeo.com/408183444
Refracted through archival material, texts, found footage and dense soundtracks, Leslie Thornton's rigorously experimental film and video work is an investigation into the production of meaning through media. For Thornton, form and content are co-extensive, as exemplified by her epic project Peggy and Fred in Hell, an ongoing cycle of interrelated films, videos and installation environments focusing on two children who have been "raised by television." Heterogeneous and open-ended, the series defies conceptions of masterwork, author, and the strictures of beginning, middle and end.
“Peggy and Fred in Hell, Thornton's ongoing and open-ended series, maps a surreal, quasi-apocalyptic realm littered with the detritus of a pop culture bursting at the seams. Castaways in this wilderness of signs, Peggy and Fred are, as Thornton states, "raised by television," their experience shaped by a palimpsest of science and science-fiction, new technologies and obsolete ones, half-remembered movies and the leavings of history. An exploration of the aesthetics of narrative form as well as the politics of the image, Thornton's rigorously experimental oeuvre has forged a unique and powerful syntax.”
ubuweb
https://ubu.com/film/thornton.html
https://ubu.com/film/thornton_kansas.html
https://expcinema.org/site/en/videos/michele-smith-regarding-penelopes-wake-2002
Interview with Lesle Thorton in Bom Magazine: https://bombmagazine.org/articles/leslie-thornton/
Paul Pfeiffer
The Long Count (2001)
"You are setting up relationships between objects, images and people.”
https://art21.org/watch/art-in-the-twenty-first-century/s2/paul-pfeiffer-in-time-segment/
Paul Pfeiffer - Caryatid use the operation of erasure to create a new work from an archive of Stanley Cup victories. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssJZJs9g_xQ(2001)
Naomi Uman
Removed (1999)
"Starting with a piece of vintage porn, filmmaker Naomi Uman painstakingly removed each female figure from the footage using nail polish remover, leaving a striking absence where there's usually a fleshy presence. Uman's celebrated film is a smart retort to pornography's obsessive gaze at the female body."
IMDb
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Brd793wvvw
Arthur Jaffa
Love is the Message, the Message is Death
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKWmx0JNmqY
Remixing found footage can also be used to look critically at representations of race.
Arthur Jaffa’s work spans multiple disciplines from
Joseph Cornell
Rose Hobart (1936)
Generally considered one of the first artist created found footage films.
Cornell removed narrative, just used scenes of her from East of Borneo,
Slowed the speed of the in certain scenes
Blue filter
Added a mambo soundtrack Nestor Amaral’s Orchestra ‘Holiday in Brazil’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQxtZlQlTDA
Brian Eno, Music for Airports
Track “2/1”
“One of the notes repeats every 23 1/2 seconds. It is in fact a long loop running around a series of tubular aluminum chairs in Conny Plank’s studio. The next lowest loop repeats every 25 7/8 seconds or something like that. The third one every 29 15/16 seconds or something. What I mean is they all repeat in cycles that are called incommensurable — they are not likely to come back into sync again.”
Brian Eno at the Imagination Conference in San Francisco, June 8, 1996.
Published in In Motion Magazine - July 7, 1996
https://www.inmotionmagazine.com/eno1.html
A similar system using the three intervals quoted above would not repeat itself for almost 27 days
Unsynchronized multi-channel videos installations have the potential to be similar to generative systems where loops of video that are different durations will keep making new combinations of images.
“One of my long-term interests has been the invention of ‘machines’ and ‘systems’ that could produce musical and visual experiences… [T]he point of them was to make music with materials and processes I specified, but in combinations and interactions that I did not.” — From Brian Eno, “Generative Music” in A Year With Swollen Appendices
One affordance of the multi-channel framework is that it sets up a framework for juxtapositions – these juxtapositions can set up comparisons between one frame and another. You could include differences in the way gender is framed or compare and contrast stylistic tendencies over time. This approach can place the mind into a more analytical mode than traditional single channel narratives.
Looping and repetition can create a method for shifting the way we see the film screen from one of a container for narrative to that more aligned with music. The metaphor of a classical music string quartet or jazz trio or band/orchestra configuration is culturally ingrained in us. By sectioning off fragments of films and looping particular elements – it breaks the narrative flow and we begin to see the work for its sonic qualities or its visual qualities.
In other words, one way you could look at your work for this exercise or class is that you are a composer creating music with cultural media detritus. What types of sonic / musical practices, local/cultural knowledge can you apply to see/hear an archive of Hollywood media, news or Youtube genre in a new way.
Destroy illusions of continuity editing – breaking the vanishing act of ‘seamless’ editing. It enables us to see film and analyze fragments outside of the pull of the narrative flow of the work. These techniques may allow the viewer to see graphic arrangements of elements in the frame, facial gestures, editing techniques, clothing, color patterns in a way that would be difficult without the rupture.
“In 24-Hour Psycho, familiar scenes become unfamiliar and incomprehensible, since they operate outside the normal framework of time.”
“Unlike many of the other artists in this exhibition, who reorganize the structure of an original film, Gordon simply reorganizes our experience of time, which is a fundamental aspect of the medium.”
Soliloquy Trilogy Candace Breitz
“For when we realize that Sharon Stone is but a bit player in the total production that is Basic Instinct, then we start to unravel the importance of collaboration, cooperation, teamwork and the other necessarily dialogical engagements that allow all works of art, even commercial movies, to be created.”
“The making of a movie is the most obvious example of a shared labor that results in a possible work of art, despite our distressing tendency to credit all of the glory to one or two individuals.
“Ironically, in its single-minded focus on the individual star, Breitz’s work forces us to recognize the importance of everything and everybody else.”
Taken collectively, Breitz’s trilogy seems to be making an alternative telling of a Biblical story, how might you, through systematic removal and rearranging create an alternative telling of a familiar story?
How are many of these artworks like algorithms?
“Compelling their audiences to reconsider the knowledge or memory of particular movies or experiences, using new and often disruptive representations of the same visual material, these artists encourage viewers to confront hard-held beliefs and reveal the often-hidden structures that helped to inculcate those very beliefs.”
What kind of “disruptive representations” might you make that “encourage viewers to confront hard-held beliefs and reveal the often-hidden structures that helped to inculcate those very beliefs”?