A director that I hold in the highest esteem for creating one of the greatest love stories of all time, in my opinion, (DRACULA) once created a film produced by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer or MGM that was shunned for decades by the studio itself. The director I of course refer to is Tod Browning and his film entitled Freaks. MGM had been known for its highly glamorized productions. And they have worked with Tod Browning on many occasions before. The reason I chose to read this particular article is because of Tod Browning’s attack on what standards of Hollywood in the thirties. Hollywood films were emotional, and had beautiful women who were gazed upon by men who always seemed a little better looking than normal. The sets were highly stylized and expensive. Even Tod Browning’s earlier work with MGM contained impeccable sets with actors such as Bela Lugosi who starred in an innumerable amount of projects after Dracula.
Then Browning released his movie Freaks and it is exactly as its title suggests, freakish. The lavishly ornate sets were replaced with carnivals. Midgets, Siamese twins, bearded ladies, and other all around squeamishly constructed individuals had replaced the beautifully star casted crew. As Gary Morris states in his essay entitled Tod Browning’s Assault of Glamour, “it’s hard to believe that Freaks was actually produced at MGM.” (Morris) I find it interesting how Tod Browning used the tools that a mainstream cinematic powerhouse gave him, and used it to “subvert conventional morality, with an emphasis on physical deformity.” (The Unholy Tree) This abnormal almost uncanny film even went as far as to directly insult the head of MGM, Thalberg Mayer, which resulted in MGM keeping freaks out of “circulation for decades.”(Morris) Thalberg quoted, “In addition to attacking the stifling morals of the day, Freaks encourages a reading of Browning himself as a sort of ungrateful artist figure.”
The way that Browning challenges the conventions of MGM reminds me of how experimental film still object to the status quo of any standard. The avant-garde challenges editing rhythm, narrative, and sound conventions in the same way that Tod Browning assaulted glamour. In some works, such as pieces by Ryan Trecartin he completely reverses everything we installed in ourselves as the norms of film/video editing.
A film like Freaks must have felt so fresh to people who enjoyed films in the thirties. In the thirties Hollywood film had already created an atmosphere of beautiful actresses and romantic storylines. Freaks seems like a repulsive scar on the giant head of Hollywood cinema. Not only does the title express the abnormality of the characters in the film, but also the uncanny nature of how this film places itself in history as one of the first to dare to be different films.
Friday, October 24, 2008
Pretty Meat
Is our body just meat? Is our flesh as simple as a permeable cover made to hold our organs in? Is violence sexualized is such a way that people cannot look away when it occurs? Jesse Stommel argues so in his essay Pity Poor Flesh. Stommel uses Hollywood film as an example. He uses slasher movies such as Halloween and Texas Chainsaw Massacre to prove his point. Also, zombie films such as Shaun of the Dead, 28 Days Later, and the legendary Night of the Living Dead. For year’s organizations such as the Motion Picture Association of America, or the MPAA, have used rating systems to keep us from this horrid site of “Undifferentiated. Liquefying. Pungent. Fetid. Oozing. Writhing. Pretty. Meat.” (Stommel)
The most interesting word in the montage of adjectives above is obviously pretty. Why put such a word in between a line up of wretched descriptions? Stommel says that “Skin is permeable”, to which I first responded; skin cannot be penetrated with water or gasses, so it is not permeable. However, Stommel uses the word permeable in relation to metal instruments. The situation of how metal penetrates the skin can be very extremely “aesthetic in the eyes of a murderer.” Or on the reverse side be incredibly non-aesthetic. Stommel relates this statement to the scene in Halloween where Michael Myers, the masked killer of the series, hangs his victim high with the use of only a knife. John Carpenter spares the gore in this scene, because it is not what is important. Very long cuts occur as Michael “views the body as though it were a work hung on a gallery wall.” As a killer Michael enjoys his work he sees skin as only an object and forgets what is behind it. We as viewers are forced to stare along with the eyes of the murderer and take his side. There is certain symmetry to this scene that relates this crime to art, the fact that we notice it catches us and enthralls the mind, and we force ourselves to watch more. This is very similar to the experimental film entitled Bears Den. The way the images, and audio, make us want to avert out eyes and cover our ears in horror and confusion, but we watch to complete the work, and are unable to look away.
Stommel then counters the aesthetic with the non-aesthetic with the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre. In this film the murderer in more unappreciative and inconsiderate in his methods. Stommel brings up a scene where Leather face hangs a female on the wall with a hook, and even before she dies he “turns around and chops up a body on the table.” In the mise en scene a female hangs splattered with blood as she squirms loosely on a hook suspended from the ground. Tobe Hooper gives us less time, as the audience, to gaze upon this creation, or maybe the word obliteration is a better term, before we are taken away to a different scene with a slower paced theme. He does not see skin the way Michael sees his first murder of his sister, nude and impaled with his knife.
Do we find the decaying skin of a corpse sexual? Stommel brings to our attention that our hair is a dead material; our outer layer of skin is composed of nothing but lifeless cells. This is where zombies come into play. In the original Night of the Living Dead, Barbara the heroine of the film, is displayed “in a very sexist [manner] for a women in the sixties.” She is helpless and silent, and when it is time for the decisions to be made it is left the males of the household. This is also a comment made by George Romero to illuminate the light on the, in his opinion, failed feminist movement of the sixties. However, as an attractive young lady, the audience’s gaze in set upon her femininity, which is generally a weak sexist image. To the zombies flesh is made to be permeable, and to them it is useless “as it decays with time.” “We are biology. We are reminded of this at the beginning and the end, at birth and death. In between we do what we can to forget.” (Roach) However, to zombies biology is useless their skin organisms fail and with time they suffer a completely organic death. Zombies know skin is useless so they take it. We, again as the audience, see a young female be torn apart as she screams in mortified terror as her recently deceased family member grabs her face before he takes her skin. Why are we not terrified of these films, why do we not lock them in a vault and throw away the key?
The answer to that is simple. We can relate. Movies such as Death Proof sexualize a motorized vehicle accident with four young women simultaneously getting their skin penetrated and ripped apart by metal. Tarentino even reveals this scene over and over in great detail to ‘turn his audience on’ to the movie. Indeed we are biology. We are born and from there we begin the process of death. Wonderful minds such as Michael Myers realizes the art and spectacle of a fatal situation as he places a lit pumpkin as an audience to watch over his installation he placed in the middle of the room sprawled out across the bed put into position, and still bleeding what life was in it. These views are the view of a sociopath. He has no regard for life and cannot understand it. None of us completely understand life. We cannot comprehend what skin is used to bind. Does skin encase the soul, or is it simply a wrapping of material that holds our internal organs in an organized fashion? We sexualize life and in reverse order we sexualize death. We sexualize violence, because we realize this pretty meat of our dying bodies is meant to rot.
The most interesting word in the montage of adjectives above is obviously pretty. Why put such a word in between a line up of wretched descriptions? Stommel says that “Skin is permeable”, to which I first responded; skin cannot be penetrated with water or gasses, so it is not permeable. However, Stommel uses the word permeable in relation to metal instruments. The situation of how metal penetrates the skin can be very extremely “aesthetic in the eyes of a murderer.” Or on the reverse side be incredibly non-aesthetic. Stommel relates this statement to the scene in Halloween where Michael Myers, the masked killer of the series, hangs his victim high with the use of only a knife. John Carpenter spares the gore in this scene, because it is not what is important. Very long cuts occur as Michael “views the body as though it were a work hung on a gallery wall.” As a killer Michael enjoys his work he sees skin as only an object and forgets what is behind it. We as viewers are forced to stare along with the eyes of the murderer and take his side. There is certain symmetry to this scene that relates this crime to art, the fact that we notice it catches us and enthralls the mind, and we force ourselves to watch more. This is very similar to the experimental film entitled Bears Den. The way the images, and audio, make us want to avert out eyes and cover our ears in horror and confusion, but we watch to complete the work, and are unable to look away.
Stommel then counters the aesthetic with the non-aesthetic with the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre. In this film the murderer in more unappreciative and inconsiderate in his methods. Stommel brings up a scene where Leather face hangs a female on the wall with a hook, and even before she dies he “turns around and chops up a body on the table.” In the mise en scene a female hangs splattered with blood as she squirms loosely on a hook suspended from the ground. Tobe Hooper gives us less time, as the audience, to gaze upon this creation, or maybe the word obliteration is a better term, before we are taken away to a different scene with a slower paced theme. He does not see skin the way Michael sees his first murder of his sister, nude and impaled with his knife.
Do we find the decaying skin of a corpse sexual? Stommel brings to our attention that our hair is a dead material; our outer layer of skin is composed of nothing but lifeless cells. This is where zombies come into play. In the original Night of the Living Dead, Barbara the heroine of the film, is displayed “in a very sexist [manner] for a women in the sixties.” She is helpless and silent, and when it is time for the decisions to be made it is left the males of the household. This is also a comment made by George Romero to illuminate the light on the, in his opinion, failed feminist movement of the sixties. However, as an attractive young lady, the audience’s gaze in set upon her femininity, which is generally a weak sexist image. To the zombies flesh is made to be permeable, and to them it is useless “as it decays with time.” “We are biology. We are reminded of this at the beginning and the end, at birth and death. In between we do what we can to forget.” (Roach) However, to zombies biology is useless their skin organisms fail and with time they suffer a completely organic death. Zombies know skin is useless so they take it. We, again as the audience, see a young female be torn apart as she screams in mortified terror as her recently deceased family member grabs her face before he takes her skin. Why are we not terrified of these films, why do we not lock them in a vault and throw away the key?
The answer to that is simple. We can relate. Movies such as Death Proof sexualize a motorized vehicle accident with four young women simultaneously getting their skin penetrated and ripped apart by metal. Tarentino even reveals this scene over and over in great detail to ‘turn his audience on’ to the movie. Indeed we are biology. We are born and from there we begin the process of death. Wonderful minds such as Michael Myers realizes the art and spectacle of a fatal situation as he places a lit pumpkin as an audience to watch over his installation he placed in the middle of the room sprawled out across the bed put into position, and still bleeding what life was in it. These views are the view of a sociopath. He has no regard for life and cannot understand it. None of us completely understand life. We cannot comprehend what skin is used to bind. Does skin encase the soul, or is it simply a wrapping of material that holds our internal organs in an organized fashion? We sexualize life and in reverse order we sexualize death. We sexualize violence, because we realize this pretty meat of our dying bodies is meant to rot.
Thursday, October 23, 2008
Untitled 6 and Boundary Functions
All of the art pieces in Act React were interesting to me. The two that I found most interesting was Scott Snibbe’s Boundary Functions and Camille Utterback’s Untitled 6. It is not necessarily because they were the most aesthetically pleasing pieces, like I would choose my favorite paintings, but they were interactive in a way that I could tell how I was manipulating the piece. While I was creating a painting through a computer program with Untitled 6 I could really feel the physicality, were as with pieces like Snow Mirror by Daniel Rozin you were using the depth of the space around you, which did not feel as hands on to me. The certain touch was just not there. Boundary functions created a certain social atmosphere with me. It was not just I completing the piece; in fact with just me I was quite lonely on the white dimensionless white floor, but it was multiple people working together to create these borders that halved us all together.
I could see what John McKinnon meant by the halving theory, and relating it back to the piece Boundary Functions. He said that we could never actually touch one another but only get half as closer with every movement. As I stood inside the boundary of the pure, virgin white floor by myself I was not standing inside an art piece I was standing on nothingness. Then my friend, Bo, joined me in and instantly a beam of energy halved us. This glowing beam constantly stayed between in a diligent manner. I had left this piece for a while to go explore these other interactive wonders when I noticed a group of people standing on the outside of the boundaries of the Boundary Functions piece just staring. This spectacle was one of wonder to these people. They seemed almost afraid to touch it considering they did not have any clue of its purpose.
One asked, “What does it do?”
I simply responded, “Just walk on it.”
In one instant at least ten people jumped on. This particular piece was impressive when more people used it. A stranger tried cornering me with his light, when I ran around him leaving a line directly between us. It was like a crowded dance floor in which everyone stared bashfully at their feet as they tried to avoid their partner. As people started to leave it was me and one girl, she looked at me to with a disappointed look and exclaimed, “Well this isn’t very fun anymore” and left me standing again on a blank white space in a desolate spot of a room on top of a now defunct art piece. Which brings me back to the theory that we can never touch one another, but only get half closer with every movement.
Untitled 6 was the piece that made me feel most like an artist. I can now say, for a brief moment, my art was hanging on the wall in the Milwaukee art museum. I ran on its interactive palette that interacted with a projected computer program on the wall. I watched as people danced around its framed boundary coloring a picture on the wall. Most people enjoy this for the asthetic value; however the moment in this piece I found most interested was when nobody was on top the interactive palette. The picture still made swirls. Except now the swirls were slowly losing their color and dying. After a few minutes of these swirls dancing with no master to manipulate them they turned to very monotonous tones of gray white and black. This was also when the piece was prime to play with. I watched this dead digital painting dance around for a while when an older women walked up to me. She said “When you walk across it with your arms spread out wide you can change it the most.” So I disrupted this artistic silence I was enjoying with this piece and walked across Untitled 6. Every movement was vaguely recorded as if I were moving across the wall leaving a specter like presence behind me. The old lady who saw me clearly enjoying the piece thought it was “some sort of security cameras recorded what we [were] doing.” As I am writing this essay now I am still not positive on how it worked. My guess was as good as any spectator around me.
I noticed a child, of all people in that room, really challenge the pieces ability. He laid his body across the floor and waited for his painting to come to this dimension upon the wall. Colors whirled all around his body in an almost rhythmic motion, but where his body was there was something very intriguing. A black void appeared in his frame. No color danced around, no digital paint appeared on this dimensionless display
only a hollow frame of a child.
The difference between Boundary Functions and Untitled 6 or any other piece in this the act react program is how you react to it. What senses are you using? And how are you using them? I argue that these pieces, even though both interacted by walking on the floor are in fact different from each other. They say that no piece of art is indeed art unless that audience makes it an art. The Untitled 6 piece was explored through a solitary conception. Where as Boundary Functions visibly had a better reaction with a bigger audience. Does this make it a more popular art piece seeing as it has a wider audience? Is this question of paintings validity false when no audience is around? Boundary Functions would simply be the second dimension without a group of humans interacting with it. Untitled 6 would be a dead painting existing in a redundant and non-operational order. Although different in appearance and interaction these two pieces serve the same purpose of how you enjoy them, how you interact with them, how you make them become art.
I could see what John McKinnon meant by the halving theory, and relating it back to the piece Boundary Functions. He said that we could never actually touch one another but only get half as closer with every movement. As I stood inside the boundary of the pure, virgin white floor by myself I was not standing inside an art piece I was standing on nothingness. Then my friend, Bo, joined me in and instantly a beam of energy halved us. This glowing beam constantly stayed between in a diligent manner. I had left this piece for a while to go explore these other interactive wonders when I noticed a group of people standing on the outside of the boundaries of the Boundary Functions piece just staring. This spectacle was one of wonder to these people. They seemed almost afraid to touch it considering they did not have any clue of its purpose.
One asked, “What does it do?”
I simply responded, “Just walk on it.”
In one instant at least ten people jumped on. This particular piece was impressive when more people used it. A stranger tried cornering me with his light, when I ran around him leaving a line directly between us. It was like a crowded dance floor in which everyone stared bashfully at their feet as they tried to avoid their partner. As people started to leave it was me and one girl, she looked at me to with a disappointed look and exclaimed, “Well this isn’t very fun anymore” and left me standing again on a blank white space in a desolate spot of a room on top of a now defunct art piece. Which brings me back to the theory that we can never touch one another, but only get half closer with every movement.
Untitled 6 was the piece that made me feel most like an artist. I can now say, for a brief moment, my art was hanging on the wall in the Milwaukee art museum. I ran on its interactive palette that interacted with a projected computer program on the wall. I watched as people danced around its framed boundary coloring a picture on the wall. Most people enjoy this for the asthetic value; however the moment in this piece I found most interested was when nobody was on top the interactive palette. The picture still made swirls. Except now the swirls were slowly losing their color and dying. After a few minutes of these swirls dancing with no master to manipulate them they turned to very monotonous tones of gray white and black. This was also when the piece was prime to play with. I watched this dead digital painting dance around for a while when an older women walked up to me. She said “When you walk across it with your arms spread out wide you can change it the most.” So I disrupted this artistic silence I was enjoying with this piece and walked across Untitled 6. Every movement was vaguely recorded as if I were moving across the wall leaving a specter like presence behind me. The old lady who saw me clearly enjoying the piece thought it was “some sort of security cameras recorded what we [were] doing.” As I am writing this essay now I am still not positive on how it worked. My guess was as good as any spectator around me.
I noticed a child, of all people in that room, really challenge the pieces ability. He laid his body across the floor and waited for his painting to come to this dimension upon the wall. Colors whirled all around his body in an almost rhythmic motion, but where his body was there was something very intriguing. A black void appeared in his frame. No color danced around, no digital paint appeared on this dimensionless display
only a hollow frame of a child.
The difference between Boundary Functions and Untitled 6 or any other piece in this the act react program is how you react to it. What senses are you using? And how are you using them? I argue that these pieces, even though both interacted by walking on the floor are in fact different from each other. They say that no piece of art is indeed art unless that audience makes it an art. The Untitled 6 piece was explored through a solitary conception. Where as Boundary Functions visibly had a better reaction with a bigger audience. Does this make it a more popular art piece seeing as it has a wider audience? Is this question of paintings validity false when no audience is around? Boundary Functions would simply be the second dimension without a group of humans interacting with it. Untitled 6 would be a dead painting existing in a redundant and non-operational order. Although different in appearance and interaction these two pieces serve the same purpose of how you enjoy them, how you interact with them, how you make them become art.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)