Loading...

inc.ongruo.us  »  Undergrad

Undergrad

The Influence of Art and Performance on the Rise of American Independent Cinema

by tomtenney on May 20, 2010

NOTE:  Written for ‘American Independent Cinema’ class at The New School; May 5, 2010.

The Influence of Art and Performance on the Rise of Independent Cinema

“As in the other arts in America today – painting, poetry, sculpture, theater, where fresh winds have been blowing for the last few years – our rebellion against the old, official, corrupt and pretentious is primarily an ethical one.”

John Cassavetes

Cassavetes

The above statement, taken from the manifesto of the New American Cinema Group (81) written after their first meeting in 1961, is telling.  In the late 50’s and early 60’s, independent and experimental filmmakers, frustrated with the predictable commercial formulae of Hollywood cinema, began aligning themselves and what they were doing with the art and performance world, where they saw exciting changes taking place.   The original intent of this essay was to attempt to answer the question: How does what was happening in independent and experimental film in the late 50’s and 60’s compare to what was happening in art and performance at the same time? What were the common influences and how did they influence each other?   As I dug into the research, it became obvious that trying to create clean lineages and clearly drawn cause-and-effect statements would be impossible.  Attempting to define cultural influences is like trying to bottle smoke – there are simply too many artists and too many elements contributing to the cultural zeitgeist to confidently make such black and white statements.  The alternative seemed to be the much easier task of making broad generalizations like the late 50’s and 60’s were “when the American avant-garde began to define itself, in opposition to European modernism and to post-war American society,” (“Ages” 10) or that the cultural influences had to do with the ascendance of youth culture, largely due to the popularity of rock n’ roll.

Instead of relying on such generalizations, I decided instead to hone my research to focus on three representative independent filmmakers of the time – John Cassavetes, Bruce Conner, and Andy Warhol – and examine how trends in art and performance influenced their works in particular.  In this way we can hope to extrapolate a larger view by looking at a small cross-section consisting of three artists who, while working in very different ways from each other, all contributed to the changes that took place in American Independent Cinema. [continue reading this post...]

Share

Tagged as: Andy Warhol, Art, Bruce Conner, film, Fluxus, John Cassavetes, performance

{ 1 comment }

Media Jamming in the Digital Age

by tomtenney on April 19, 2010

Just finished my final web project for my ‘Media Language and Society’ – fortunately, I’ve included stuff about media, language and society so I should be good.  Media Jamming in the Digital Age (not such a clever title, I know) takes a brief look at 3 media jammers: Joey Skaggs, The Billboard Liberation Front, and The Yes Men and how digital tech both affects the way they work and their outcomes.

Share

Tagged as: Billboard Liberation Front, Joey Skaggs, media jamming, The Yes Men

{ 0 comments }

Manufacturing Desire

by tomtenney on March 31, 2010

Originally posted for Media Language & Society class, 3.31.10

1. iPad
I’m not sure if this exemplifies ‘commodity fetishism’ in the strictest Marxian sense, but this video, which apple made to introduce the iPad in January, certainly falls into the category of ‘manufacturing desire:’

http://www.genspot.com/video-278616/apple-ipad-introduction-video-keynote-january-2010.aspx

The thing that struck me about the iPad right off the bat, is that it doesn’t seem to fill any existing, practical need.  Apple has finally reached a point where they can sell something just based on the fact that it’s an Apple product and they say it’s cool.  Take a look at a few of the quotes from the video:

” When something exceeds your ability to understand how it works, it sort of becomes magical” (It’s mystical!  Don’t worry about things like why you might need it, just ooh and aahh at the technology you don’t understand.)

” It’s going to change the way we do the things we do everyday” (notice he doesn’t say how, or why we want them changed)

” it just feels right to hold the internet in your hands as you surf it” (again, no mention of why this is desirable)

I must say, Apple does a great  job of making me want something I never knew I needed.  Even watching the video again to write this post, gave me a tremendous feeling that I really want this product, although if I had to explain why, my answers would be insufficient reason to spend $700.

2. Ebay ( http://www.ebay.com)

One of the oldest and most trusted institutions on the web, I had to include this because I used to be what some people would call an “ebay addict.”   I would spend hours browsing the virtual aisles and checking out (and desiring) the detritus of other people’s lives.  What’s different about ebay, though, is that it uses a social dynamic to increase your desire for an item, and thus increases the amount you are willing to pay.  Part of the “fun” of ebay is that it is a live auction, and you can (and will) be outbid by another user at any moment, esp in the final seconds.  This creates an emotional tension that, in my opinion, elevates the level of the original desire for the product to a point where you are no longer able to act rationally, but instead go to any lengths to “beat” your “opponent” (other bidders.)  For me, the scenario always played out more or less like this:

* [2 minutes to go in auction] me: “cool, it looks like I’m going to win this one” [desire increases.  In my mind I have already won and am imagining where that poster will go in my apartment]

* [1 minute to go in auction. I am outbid by someone by 50 cents] me: “dammit! I am NOT going to lose this by 50 cents!” [I raise my maximum bid by $5]

* 20 seconds to go in auction and I’m outbid by the same person and I race to up my maximum bid to a point that I know they won’t have gone (i.e. way more than the item is worth) and I end up paying $10-$20 more than I should have for the product.

* 1 week later: item arrives in the mail, but my affective desire for it has died down (if not disappeared completely) and item gets tossed into a corner or used briefly, then forgotten.

3. Calvin Klein Ads

Finally, one of the things we see every day in NYC are Calvin Klein ads, usually on billboards or the sides of bus-stop shelters.  These are interesting to me in that, while they’re often criticized for being too “sexy” or even pornographic – to me the kinds of desire these ads create are an almost fetishistic desire for the self – an image of how we want to think of ourselves, not necessarily a sexual desire for another.  For example, in this ad:

we see a scantily clad man and woman in what could be seen as a sexual pose. I interpret this, however, to be more about the confidence, charisma and style of the man and woman – to me, the pose seems weirdly lacking in sexuality.  Again, I interpret this not as creating a desire for a product through sex, but by exploiting a desire to be what you’re not – i.e. that guy or that woman.  This point is, I think, brought home in this spoof of Calvin Klein ads on the culture jamming site adbusters.org:

This spoof shows us that the desire we feel when we view the ad is not for the hot guy, but to be the hot guy – when in fact, the guy in the spoof ad is the “reality” (i.e. the guy that most of us are).  The adbusters parody demonstrates the huge chasm that exists between what we are programmed to desire and the reality which is usually has little to no resemblance to that desire.

Share

Tagged as: advertising, eBay, iPad

{ 0 comments }

Electric Snow

by tomtenney on March 22, 2010

Originally posted for my Media Language & Society class 3/22/10

This week, instead of providing disparate examples for each one of the keywords in the assignment, I’d like to present one resource and illustrate how it takes on each one of these key concepts.   In my ‘googling around’ for the assignment, I stumbled upon a site called ” Electric Snow: TV in Our Time.”

The site was created by 7-12th grade kids in Sweden as an entry into the ThinkQuest Competition.  From its appearance, the technology it uses, the number of broken links to outside sources, its use of frames, and the (often outdated) sources it cites, it looks as though it was created sometime in the late 90′s. Going through it, I felt almost like a deep sea diver exploring the wreckage of an abandoned ship.  What’s fascinating to me about it is that it was created by young kids whose intent is to totally deconstruct the medium of television in order help others take a more critical view of mass media.  Not only did they succeed in this, but the process itself seems to have taught them as much about how mass media works as did their research.  For instance, in the about section they describe how they wanted to use advertisements as examples, but were concerned about copyright issues.  Speaking of themselves in the 3rd person, they say:

“Copyright was an issue the team struggled with during the creation of the site. They wanted guide users through some ad deconstructions, so they wrote to Levi’s, Coca-Cola, MTV, Nike and Gap asking for permission to include ads on the site. Nobody said okay.”

Although they didn’t say this explicitly, it seems as though by being stonewalled, they got the message loud and clear that advertisers are not interested in having their ads deconstructed.  Advertisers have a vested interest in not being “discussed” in a critical or academic way – for if we start thinking about the ads, we’ll begin to be able to see through them.  Lesson: Mass media is not, by and large, a facilitator of public discourse as it is usually ad-supported – and without advertiser dollars there would be no programming.

Clearly the medium they are examining is television, but many of their findings such as this one could be applied to almost any form of mass media.  Another that could be so applied is their conclusion that women are under-represented and used to reinforce gender roles:

“Most women’s voices in commercials are to sell products such as laundry detergent, diapers, and jewelry. Advertisers also use women as sex objects to sell products such as beer.  There is evidence that a stereotypical view of gender role may influence the viewers, especially the young.”

They even conducted their own mini-study where during one hour of television, they found that 80% of voice overs in advertisements were male, and only 20% female.

The site has an entire section devoted to ‘ Influence,’ which attempts to examine and deconstruct advertising as one of the principle constructs of mass society – one that provides us with a common lexicon of commercialization.  Their very first observation in this section is that ” A network’s product isn’t the television shows, it’s you,”  correcting a common  misunderstanding about how mass media works (a misunderstanding that exists even within the tv industry itself).  By revealing this simple truism, these kids are engendering a fundamental shift in how tv and other mass media could/should be viewed, i.e. not as harmless deliverers of entertainment as a product, but entertainment as a lure to entice the product (you) to the customer (the advertiser). The section also includes descriptions of some the techniques advertisers use to lure, entice and coerce their audiences.

Another section examines the programming itself, offering explanations of ratings, the role of objectivity in the news, and how public television works, among other things.   But perhaps most impressive to me was the site’s representation of ” watchdogs and advocacy groups” which was surprisingly fair in its representation of all the different kinds of groups that are fighting for “fairness” of representation in mass media, be they radical (adbusters), liberal (F.A.I.R.) or conservative (Accuracy in Media).  By presenting the entire spectrum of viewpoints, the kids provide an accurate representation of the diversity of opinions that vie for our mindshare on the battlefield of mass media.

Share

Tagged as: Television

{ 0 comments }

Telling the Truth in ‘David Holzman’s Diary’ and ‘Report.’

by tomtenney on March 10, 2010

Written for American Independent Cinema; March 10, 2010

Bruce Conner’s Report (1967) and Jim McBride’s David Holzman’s Diary (1967) both appeared in a year when

Bruce Conner's 'Report'

cynicism about the media, politics, and the Vietnam War were high and cultural shifts were taking place all over the globe.  The Kennedy assassination had shocked the country just four years before, and the growth of an underground press engendered views of traditional news media as puppets of the establishment.  So it’s no surprise that questions of “truth” were percolating in the works of writers, artists, and filmmakers of the decade.  David Holzman’s Diary and Report represent two films that examine the meaning of truth, and what it means to tell the truth in an age of anxiety, cynicism and change.   In my examination of these two films – and the (often radically) different methods their makers use to tell the truth in them – I will look at the ways in which they both express their ideas of truth through their different methodologies, the cultural context out of which both films emerged, and the use and roles of the camera and technology in the films.

David Holzman playing with his new fisheye lens.

In David Holzman’s Diary, Jim McBride creates a “mockumentary,” a parody of the so-called vérité documentaries that had begun to appear at the beginning of the decade, first in France and later in the United States.  Through parody, McBride accuses these films of not only taking themselves too seriously, but of actually obstructing the truth rather than exposing it. Cameras may be mechanical, he seems to be saying, but they are also subjective and all is subject to a documentarian’s bias. The film begins with the fictional filmmaker David Holzman pretentiously quoting Godard: “Film is truth 24 times per second,” and thus begins down a road that he hopes will reveal the “truth” about his messed-up life.  Almost everything he does for the rest of the film reveals to the audience (if not to himself,) in scene after scene, that personal redemption through trying to capture the truth is simply not possible.  Shortly after he “introduces” his camera, David effuses “I can stop it when I want to” and almost in the same breath, “I can get it all [on camera],” never realizing the contradiction (i.e. that if you can “stop it when you want to,” you are not “getting it all,” but editorializing.)  David is almost childlike in his obsession with his camera, and one incongruous scene is devoted entirely to him showing off and playing with his new fisheye lens.  In this scene, McBride, the real filmmaker, points out the masturbatory narcissism of documentary filmmakers by presenting the fictional filmmaker (Holzman) as childish and self-indulgent.  Later in the film, McBride makes this analogy to masturbation quite clear by having David sitting on is bed telling his camera/audience that (actual) masturbation is “the real stuff…you can thing of anything, trains, bagels.”  The filmmaker seems to be saying that in the end, most documentary films that purport to reveal a “truth” is all masturbation and only one version of the truth is revealed, usually one revealing the filmmaker’s narcissism. [continue reading this post...]

Share

Tagged as: film

{ 0 comments }

The Meaning of Media

by tomtenney on February 24, 2010

Originally posted for “Media Language & Society” class 2/24/10

Hegemony:

A search of Google Images for “American Hegemony’ resulted in this map:

http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/usaworld.htm

displaying the growth in the distribution of US troops throughout the world from 1989-2003. The page also includes a chart showing the relative military spending by the nations of the world in 2003. Incredibly, the US spends nearly HALF of all military spending in the world. This should be a fairly clear indication that American imperialism is alive and well, and that we’re exerting our influence and power now more than ever before (well, at least more than we were in 1989.)

Dominant Meaning:

I stumbled of this image on the web, of a female McDonald’s worker in Egypt, who has a red hijab as a part of her McDonald’s uniform:

Now, regardless of what you think about women wearing burkas, this photograph is interesting in that it is clearly juxtaposing 2 cultures in one outfit, but the inclusion of the burka seems ridiculous, and almost condescending to local culture and religion. The McDonalds-ness of the uniform seems overpowering of any local culture they tried to ‘incorporate’ – making it all the more offensive.

Then, out of curiosity, I checked out the McDonalds Egypt website:

http://www.mcdonaldsegypt.com/

Which is far more American looking than Egyptian, with the exception that there’s Egyptian names for the sandwiches, and even those have the American names written (in bold) underneath.

Context:

For my reference to context, I chose this trailer of Kathryn Bigelow’s “The Hurt Locker:”

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/dor/objects/893478/hurt_locker/videos/hurtlocker_trlr_041609.html

Now, as much as I hated this film, I think that it represents the beginning of our culture trying to contextualize the Iraq war in order to make sense of it. So much of what we know about this war was fed to us by the mass media and, as we know now, key pieces of data were kept from us by our government. Although the initial invasion was almost seven years ago, I think our lack of understanding of the war has created an anxiety that we’re now starting to express culturally. By placing the war in the context of what it meant to individual soldiers and their families, we are beginning to create a narrative for ourselves that makes more sense than the one we were fed.

Encoding:

Encoding and decoding seem similar to the idea of semiotics – encoding meaning into images, news, and other kinds of media meant to convey a message beyond what meets the eye.

As an example, I found this story on the Fox News website about beauty pageant queens who oppose same-sex marriage:

http://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/2010/02/23/miss-beverly-hills-lauren-ashley-same-sex-marriage-carrie-prejean/?test=faces

While this arguably shouldn’t even be called “news,” it seems clear that the message encoded in this story is one that implies that gay marriage is not just wrong, but it’s un-American as well. If these wholesome American ideals (who are so ‘good’ that they even retain their virginity until marriage) think that it’s wrong, then you should too. It also creates a situation where one WANTS to identify with these women because of their “beauty” that we are trained to place such a high value on in our culture.

Decoding:

This one was tougher, as I feel like encoding and decoding are simply opposite sides of the same coin. For this example, I chose this website that gives a lesson plan for teachers on how to teach a class on decoding advertising:

http://www.youthxchange.net/main/e_cw_007.asp

Being able to decode media messages is obviously a main objective of media literacy education. We’re more inundated with media and advertising today than ever before, and it’s critical that kids are educated to be able to deconstruct the media that bombards them, to understand the messages, decode them, and think critically about them.

Share

Tagged as: language, Mass Media, MLS

{ 2 comments }

We See/We Are

by tomtenney on February 15, 2010

Originally posted in my “Media Language & Society” Class 2/15/10

Ideology : The body of doctrine, myth, belief, etc., that guides an individual, social movement, institution, class, or large group.

The first thing that came to mind when thinking about this topic was Scientology – a ‘religion’ founded in the 20th century which has been the subject of much controversy with many of its detractors calling it more of a cult than a religion.  I thought if any contemporary ideology were making use of digital media to spread their message, it would be them, so I checked out their website at scientology.org.  Sure enough, their website leverages a number of digital formats to advocate their message.  First, the home page is a Flash player featuring a video (that plays automatically) which outlines the key points of their “pitch.” Phrases like “It is the only major new religion to have emerged in the 20th century” and “Educators announce its tools as the salvage of our youth” fade in and out to a new age soundtrack playing in the background.  As it turns out, video is the way the entire site is presented.  The lower part of the Flash player is a “Video Menu” from which you can choose to watch videos on the topics of “Belief & Practices,” “Human Rights,” “Anti-Drug,” “The Way to Happiness,” “Narcanon,” “Applied Scholastics,” and “Volunteer Ministers.”  Only if you click on the link at the upper right of the player, labeled “Church of Scientology Home Page,” are you taken to their more traditional text-based site, where you can continue to read in more depth about any one of these topics.

This kind of use of digital media to spread an ideology is certainly far different than the more traditional ways churches have used to attract members to their faith. When I think of religious proselytizing, I usually think of Born Again Christians handing out flyers on the street, Mormons or Jehovah’s Witnesses going door-to-door, Baptists preaching from soapboxes, or even Scientologists giving free “stress tests” in the Times Square subway station. The use of digital media allows religious ideologies such as this one a way to approach potential converts on a visceral/emotional level, in a way that written tracts or face-to-face “convincing” cannot.  While the Scientologists still offer a text-based site, it’s no accident that they chose video – and those particular topics – as the first line of attack.  We are a visually oriented culture, and I believe this has trained the public to respond passively.  That is to say, we are more likely to give our attention to something that does not require our *effort* (watching a video) than to something like the logic of a written argument that requires our full attention and critical thought.

Icons : A sign or representation that stands for its object by virtue of a resemblance or analogy to it.

There are a number of meanings that come to mind when I hear the word “icons,” – in particular I think of corporate logos or cultural icons (like Madonna, e.g.) who represent the cultural zeitgeist.  However, given the above definition, and thinking strictly in the realm of digital media, one icon that I think represents our changing relationship to information and dialogue is this one:

This is the “official” icon of RSS (Really Simple Syndication), a web-based format that allows information to be taken from one site, and placed onto another one by subscribing to a “feed” – usually in XML format.  Without dwelling too much on the technology, I think it’s interesting that while RSS has existed for more than 10 years, the icon has only been around for 5.  According to the Wikipedia entry for RSS:

“In December 2005, the Microsoft Internet Explorer team [19] and Outlook team [20] announced on their blogs that they were adopting the feed icon first used in the Mozilla Firefox browser (). A few months later, Opera Softwarefollowed suit.This effectively made the orange square with white radio waves the industry standard for RSS and Atom feeds, replacing the large variety of icons and text that had been used previously to identify syndication data.”

When the icon first appeared a few years ago, not many people knew what it was nor how to use it.  Today, because of feed readers like NetVibes, and because information has become more and more ubiquitous and portable I think most people now understand this symbol and it’s meaning.  Whereas in 2005, the icon had to be accompanied by words like “Subscribe” to convey its meaning – today you often see it appear on its own, the meaning having been absorbed into the symbol itself.  You also see these kinds of things happening with browser icons like the little house (meaning home page) or the little floppy disk (even though we no longer use floppy disks) for “save.”  More and more are we becoming accustomed to navigating the world of digital media through a language of signs and symbols, much as we do when we navigate the streets in our cars. Everyone knows a red hexagon means STOP – and I don’t think removing the actual word from the sign would change that.

Semiotics : The study of signs and symbols as elements of communicative behavior; the analysis of systems of communication, as language, gestures, or clothing.

I think there are similarities between Icons and Semiotics, although as  I understand it, the former is really more of a subset of the latter which is more like an entire “language” of symbols than individual icons (this is given with the caveat that “my understanding” of Semiotics is sketchy, at best)

I randomly decided to choose a news item to represent Semiotics and one of the top results was, interestingly, an online NY Times review of the current Karen Finley performance about Jackie Kennedy/Onassis (for those who don’t know, Finley was the center of a controversy about NEA funding in the 80′s).   One passage from the article reads:

“she leads her audience through a haphazard slide-show tour of the events of Mrs. Onassis’s life and the marketing of them, Ms. Finley makes a persuasive case for why a country focused for so long and so obsessively on the image of one woman and what she wore. In pictures of the exquisitely photogenic widow Kennedy, Ms. Finley says, the public found a way of giving formal shape to tragedy and bereavement, a 20th-century equivalent to the Madonnas of classical paintings.”

Through the use of multimedia (performance, slides) Ms. Finley is demonstrating the semiotics of celebrity and fashion as applied to a cultural icon – that is, celebrity and fashion as meaning; in this case the meaning being the grief of a nation.   Doing this through performance and slides (i.e. semiotically) makes this performance seem in some ways self-referential or “meta” as the kids today like to say – which brings me to the way in which this might apply to the dialogue of digital media.   One of the main ways that digital technologies are being used today by artists is by appropriating existing media and cultural iconography and “remixing” them to either subvert their original message or create an entirely new work altogether.  This technique of meta-creation isn’t really new (it has traditions in Pop Art, Dada, etc.) but the tools are now so ubiquitous that almost everyone from 12 year old kids to professional artists are able to participate in the creation of a new semiotic language and participate in a public discourse in a way that was never before possible.

Representation : The expression or designation by some term, character, symbol, or the like.

Probably because of the simplicity of its meaning (one thing standing for another), this was the term that gave me the most trouble in this assignment. Narrowing this down to a concise definition that can then be applied to dialogue and digital technology is challenging.  I suppose that metaphor can be defined as a kind of representation.  If I take the idea of digital space as metaphor as a jumping off point, then examples abound as to the metaphoric nomenclature we’ve used to define the web and digital technologies for the past 15-20 years.  A few examples:

The Web : Although perhaps not its primary meaning, a web is something we think of as being associated with the complex structures woven by spiders that have no distinct beginning or end points.  This is an easy, and apt, way to represent the network of computers that form today’s internet.

Web Pages : Clearly these aren’t “pages” at all, but when the web emerged the only thing we had to compare it to was print.  We had to place it into a context that was familiar so that we’d at least have a foothold in understanding them.

Web “sites,” Cyber “space,” the @ symbol :  All of these things are metaphors for actual physical space, when the internet, of course, doesn’t exist in physical space. Again, this would seem to be a way for us to give some dimension to a dimensionless concept, enabling us to understand it a bit more easily.

Information Superhighway : Anyone remember this one?  A mercifully short-lived metaphor for the internet.

Email : Again, not mail at all, but a way for us to understand the encoding and transmission of electronic messages.

Facebook : Although I didn’t know this until fairly recently, a facebook was something that got sent to new students of a college with pictures of, and info about, their new classmates to help them to get to know each other.  In other words, it served some of the same functions of today’s social networks.

Desktop, files, folders : Way back at the dawn of the PC, these were the metaphors chosen to represent the computer interface.  It makes me wonder what other metaphors might have been chosen, and how the evolution of digital technology might have been different if they had.

YouTube : Even TVs don’t have “tubes” anymore, but the metaphor isn’t lost.

I’m sure I could sit here all night and come up with others, but the point is that it seems like much of digital culture has grown up using representation/metaphor in order for us to understand it.  Will these metaphors fade away as we become more comfortable with digital technology?  Or will the old meanings of things like “pages” fade away as digital communication gradually supplants things like books, magazines, and newspapers?

Share

Tagged as: language, MLS, semiotics

{ 0 comments }

← Previous Entries