This sketch connects in my mind connects the ideas I have had this semester with those of the last. It is a technologically mediated conversation, a banal chat over mobile telephone. Pinter is someone who like me had a certain aversion to mobiles and this sketch is a sort of parody of tedious modern phone conversations however there does seem to be something sinister going on under the surface with the mysterious unnamed event and the insistent politeness. It is I feel a nice little tragic piece about peoples inability to truly communicate.
There is I think a theme of suppression, the event which is the real reason it seems they phoned each other is never revealed they both use politeness and interest in the other to dodge the question "how are you really?".
Language has always been the great deceiver and manners has always been a way to avoid conversation and reiterate hierarchies. You must bow lower than me, you have a good strong handshake, you must open the door for the delicate lady.
Manners are a type of grease that keeps society running smoothly and one that can be used to help you slip out of certain situations and slime into others. Boy I sure do wish I had some. Suppression within the banal, the inability to truly communicate (despite all our incredible communication technologies) are the two pivotal ideas of this piece and each one has hung heavy on my mind this year.
This photograph is of the culmination of last semesters work It consisted of 3 video monitors showing various individual body parts interacting with a computer cursor: an eye get repeatedly poked, feet get tickled, a hand tries to grab it with no success...there are 6 video shown on the monitors evenly between them.
There was two projectors on showing a video of various pixulated faces all which have had their eyes replaced with the same pair that move while the faces remain immobile. The faces switch but the eyes stay the same.
The second projector displays a video of several browser windows containing 6 identical mouths which each asks the most popular google searches starting with what, where, why, who, when, or how. All these videos are looped. The final part of the set up was a laptop with a series of interactive computer error messages with slightly dyspian and cyberpunk air to them. The user interactivity however was limited to compliance by pressing and ok button at the bottom of the message box or opting out by not doing anything and therefore not progressing. It was really about the illusion of choice in the face of "progress".
One of the most prevalent ideas in that project was the growing obsolescence of the body as information technology thrives. People are being reduced to words and words are harder to empathize with. It was inspired by the growing unease of my and everyone elses lack of say in the changes that are constantly going on, the fear of being left on the scrap heap with the bodies and the chasm between communication and intimacy. Also the sinister way companies, which are inhuman creatures built of humans, are constantly keeping tags on you. If I was someone in a Hollywood conspiracy film I would say "the question isn't am I paranoid the question is am I paranoid enough!!!" and I would be kind of right.
What does this amount to?
I don't know what it all amounts to. In that project I tried to get over my technophobia but all I did was reinvent it, in a more informed way. Perhaps it I was biased with my eyes and only looked at the parts that frightened me as people tend to do but still after the semester was over I didn't want to think about it anymore so I had a break and did a little exhibition about art. Which is mostly harmless and unthreating.
Now where am I?
Well I knew I didn't want to continue to make art about art, its too self in closed and comfortable. I wanted to find out about things going in the world. I wanted to understand things like the power of the individual in society and how governments work and whats up with the economy. I began looking at Britain to see if we really are the good guys, I read about the weapons and PR Britain and British companies sell to mass murdering dictators and needless to say I began to get a little depressed. Its hard to make art about the real issues so I started thinking about my own lifestyle since that's a nice comfortable place and it is so easy to make art about yourself, in fact you almost can't help it but then I started to feel guilty, trapped and ignorant. I started to feel like a child, when do you even become an adult anyway?
In the end I felt worse than when I finished last semester. I felt incredibly small and powerless like this:
For the last crit I made several videos that did a not so great job of showing these feelings. The film that I spent most time, was a failure in many ways and I'm not interested in resuscitating it. It was however an important exercise in realising that self loathing is not a good base for an artwork plus its simply arrogance to think people will be as interested in myself as I am. We need to talk about the things that are just off that centre.
In this film, the outside world that camera represented came bursting into the flat to find a young person asleep. He has dreams that look like children's drawings. The camera gets bored and start roaming around pointlessly. The young person gets up after several noisy interruptions: alarm clock, phone, doorbell. As he heads downstairs he trips and falls and dies. He then is seen by the camera to be just another object like those in his room. the film ends with the young person looking at his dreams which are now still and their emptiness and stillness is obvious in comparison to the amount of movement in the real life.
After writing out the summery I don't think it sounds that bad maybe it deserves a second chance, perhaps I should develop it a little more and reshoot with a bit more craft.
A more successful film was called "A Dream" which was a very short and very simple film which I think was a more refined and honest little piece:
This film was based more on person experience rather than personal shame and so was more entertaining and perhaps thought provoking. It talks about my fear of the banal. It was filmed in a simple non-flashy way in my own flat with simply natural lighting. Everything in it is perfectly mediocer which fits with he theme. The idea came from my boredom with the phrase "I had a dream last night" being a precursor to some sort of dark or deep insight within films such as Mulholland Drive.
for some reason I couldn't get this video to appear as a wee video screen on the blog. don't know why.
In films like these reality and fantasy merge usually leading to fantasy bleeding into reality in strange freaky sequences, in my film "A Dream" the opposite happens. The mundanity of reality bleeds into the dream so much show that they become one and the same. The dream is no longer some mysterious thing that is ungraspable and magical, the dream becomes a very achievable prophecy. The dream changes from a dream or at least a proper dream into just an extension of the mundanity of the characters life from which now that his dreams have become part of this, there is no escape from. it when he closes his eyes. I think this could be just a scary proposition as facing your nightmares.
If there is one thing art shouldn't be is mundane surely it is my duty as an art student to learn how tackle this implacable foe. I want to take the mundanity of life and turn it into something interesting. If I can't deal with the big issues then I'll have to deal with the very small ones that take up most of our time. In reality the mundane can be just as thought provoking as the celestial and spiritual or the great injustice of civilisations and can indeed reveal deepening truths about them by sneaking your head around them rather than foolhardily running into them head first into them knocking yourself out in the process.
I have been looking into people who explore their own common place experiences lifting them into a new space where some sort of humble truth and boredom cut into each other. I just want to do that.
This is a bit of comic strip by Harvey Pekar and it I couldn't find a better example of what I am now trying to aim at. It succinct yet open ended, it shows the strange trailing mists that connect disparate lives. It talks about mortality and the way it can bemuse your experience even if only lightly brushes past your life. It talks about coincidence and how we attach meaning to things like names. It shows the shimmering arbitrariness of reality in which we all make ripples in. It makes you think about things and it does this with only a few simply words placed upon a few simple and very similar drawings. Its well crafted simplicity and humbleness is in the end what makes it work. Its not grasping for attention or bristling with self importance its just a small bit of thought lifted up to our eyes so we can think about it too.
Pecker was a cult comic book writer who self published a series of comic books called with dry humor "American Splendor". The series is auto-biographical in nature displaying is day today existence as a file clerk Cleveland. and describes the struggle of day to day existence from a working class point of view
Yeah same!
I need to find my own point of view which I have mostly done already I want to talk about myself everybody does they just have to tackle the fear of being judged by others, I think you have to accept that you are an idiot but so is everyone, you can't let your work be an ego trip but there is nothing entertaining about humility and besides humility is just a way of showing off, don't worry I am cool with it even though you can feel your ego burning in your cheeks you have to flush it down and be humble because after all, pride is a sin.
People always complain about how everything has been done before. This is just silly piffle. The ultimate resource for anyone who fancies themselves an artist is their own lives, that is the most precious thing people can share, that's why I love people like Harvey Pecker.
Every little minor moment is as individual as snowflakes and we are just snowmen made of these. Please dig a snowball out of your side and through it into my eyes till I cry.
Where does banality come from? To be honest I don't experience it often enough because I am lucky enough to be an art student and have enough social awkwardness to make even the most uneventful conversation an internal drama. There is a lot of stuff packed into the dull tiny minutiae of life.
But going down is path is dangerous because ignoring the massive problems in the world doesn't make they disappear like you when the rubbish gets collected it doesn't magically vanish it goes to a landfill somewhere where it builds into an even bigger problem. If go down this path I run the risk of being terribly well, apart from that. really terribly, terribly, terribly well, you know apart from that, apart from that.
I'll just end this blog with this video since I think this poem seems to strike a balace well between addressing the indivduals life and the ills of the world. C'yah.
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