November 2001 Archives

[added 18 Feb 02: Looking for Madonna & Gursky? scroll down or click here.]

Just got this via email tonight:

Documentary Fortnight , a film and video festival at MoMA December 6-16. Most of the movies are in the "social documentary tradition," meant to illuminate, motivate, and drive social change. Many relate in some way or another to September 11 and the aftermath, including a veritable A&E marathon weekend's worth of Afghan- and Islam-related works. Hmm. Here are two films that look interesting to me:

The Fourth Dimension. 2001. USA/Japan. Directed by Trinh T. Minh-Ha. The Fourth Dimension is a multilayered work that utilizes visual metaphors to address its central themes: the experience of time, the impossibility of truly seeing, and the impact of video on image making.

Beneath the Veil 2000-01. United Kingdom. Directed by Saira Shah. British journalist Shah used a hidden camera to film the lives of ordinary Afghans under the Taliban. The result shows shocking footage of mass executions and insight into the oppression suffered by Afghan women. 49 min.

As this log grows, I hear it's becoming tricky for new visitors to the site to get up to speed with the project; I hope the highlight links will be useful (they already seem to be getting some use). As it turns out, there are nearly as many entries about NOT working on the movie, about daily life, and, obviously, about dealing with the September 11 events and their effect on the city. These entries aren't included in the highlights links, but they are integral to the site.

When I first conceived this documentary over two years ago, it was different in key aspects from what I intend it to be now. It's a product of my mind, my family, and my surroundings now, which are all different than in 1998. And now is different than August. So for those of you who are new to this site, I'd recommend looking to the highlight links for the nuts and bolts of this documentary project, and to the rest of the site for the context that's informing it.

On an unrelated, much lighter (and, given the "deep thought" seriousness of recent entries, much needed) note, I surfed out all the sites I regularly visit during the holidays. Rather than watch movies (see last post) over Thanksgiving, I checked in on some ancient sites that that were cool before the web itself was cool (i.e., in 1995-7).

Blair Magazine: Some of these guys used to work with some friends. Whaddya know, there's a new edition, number 7, after almost a two-year hiatus.

Polyestuh, aka Pimpz.org: Unlike Blair, this site hardly seems to have changed at all since 1996. It even recommends you use Netscape 2.0, just to "stick it to the man." Those were the days.

Netscape Browser Archive: So if you're interested in getting Netscape 2.0, or any other release, for that matter, check here. It supports "Java," after all...

At the beach in North Carolina, camped out with the family for Thanksgiving. I've taken to traveling with my DV camera, AV cables, and a pile of tapes to screen whenever I can get behind a TV. Unfortunately, it turns out none of our TV's has a compatible input, so I'm reduced to screening in the view finder, with no audio. Less than ideal, but a nice escape from the movies the other car picked: Best of Show; Legally Blonde; O Brother, Where art thou, and Finding Forrester.

So the first tape I put in didn't have a label, just a date. I started watching it, and I didn't recognize anyone in it at all. There were little kids running around, talking to the camera, shots of the sky, the camera set in the grass, some "dog's eye view" running across a lawn, but nothing that could be identify what kind of occasion it was. Where had I gotten this tape? The handwriting of the date seemed familiar (my brother? my father?), but not really. As I tried to imagine what in the world this (silent) tape was and how it fit into my life, all sorts of worst case scenarios began popping into my head. I forwarded trough the whole tape. Nothing prurient, at least as far as I could tell. But you never know. What were they saying? Was the cameraman talking to them? Those Steven Meisel ads for Calvin Klein came to mind.

As I re-viewed the tape, more slowly, looking for a visual clue of who shot it and what it was, I caught a glimpse of the cameraman as he placed the camera in the grass to shoot up into the sky. Frame advance, rewind, rewind, rewind. Freeze. The happy mug of my friend and cameraman in Utah was upsidedown in the top of the frame. Whew. Now it made sense. He'd borrowed my camera package for a weekend to shoot some stuff at a family reunion. These were his cousins. I remember talking about his idea for a piece at the time (he's an MFA student.) and the British artist, Gillian Wearing. This 1997 article from the CS Monitor mentioned an exhibit of Wearing's where she video'ed adults lip-syncing the confessions of teenagers. A quote: "The video's overall effect is to provoke a disquieting sense of confessionalism and voyeurism - of the private being made public in an inappropriate way." This idea, or more specifically, the trepidation of my project falling into just that trap, has been a topic here on greg.org before (see the archives). Anyway, turns out none of my family (and at least one of my friends) is in a pedophilic photo club. Something to be thankful for, indeed.

It's obvious to see how entertainment product has been superseded by reality since September 11; movies the country may have once flocked to are now recognized as fatuous and (potentially) consigned to oblivion (or straight-to-video, whichever's worse). Today, I was made to wonder if the same thing should or would happen to so called "fine art." Work of artists I both like and prefer to ignore has been pushed to the fore by recent events, and it's a challenge to see how it holds up in the order-of-magnitude harsher glare. So many things aren't abstracts or concepts any more; what happens to art that "addresses issues" and "explores limits" once these limits have been surpassed?

This afternoon I walked to Christie's to preview the upcoming contemporary art auction. En route, I found Fifth Avenue to be completely closed for several blocks. I figured it's UN week, Vicente Fox is at Trump Tower, that kind of thing. It turned out to be the funeral service of Donald Burns, the Assistant Chief of the NY Fire Department, held at St Patrick's Cathedral. Nearly a thousand men and women in dress uniforms were standing at attention in the middle of the street, forming a line two blocks long and three to ten officers deep. [note: here is an image from a service one day earlier.] No one made a sound, including the spectators. Stores silenced their music. Burns' casket and procession had just passed into the cathedral. After several minutes, the officers snapped to attention and began to file into the church. Two months did not diminish the overwhelming sadness and sense of grief the scene evoked.

Vanessa Beecroft, The Silent Service, 2001, image via publicartfund.org

It also made me think of the work of Vanessa Beecroft, including a performance she staged in April 2001 on the Intrepid. Here is a photograph derived from the event. Especially when considered in concert with her earlier work, this seems almost as empty and wrong as a Schwarzenegger film. The emperor has no clothes, indeed.

At Christie's I saw several monumental photographs by Andreas Gursky, whose work "presents a stunning and inventive image of our contemporary world," according to MoMA's curator, Peter Galassi. From the first week after the bombings, when I was in full CNN burnout, I wanted writers' and artists' perspectives, not Paula Zahn's. The scale of the debris, the nature of the target, even in wire service photographs, it called for Gursky's perspective to make some sense of it, perhaps. As it turns out, he was grounded in Los Angeles, where he'd been traveling with (and shooting) Madonna's concert tour. The other end of the spectrum, it seems, now.

Irony and knowingness doesn't work; sheer aesthetic, devoid of context or emotion doesn't work; stunning monumentalism rings a little hollow. On the other hand, sentimentality, baring-all emotionality, sympathetic manipulation is even worse. What does it take to make meaningful art now? If it weren't nearly 2 AM (and if I had any answers), I'd keep writing...

[added 18 Feb 02: Here is Gursky's photo from the 13 Sept. LA Madonna concert, which was unveiled at the Centre George Pompidou in Paris on 13 Feb. This has become one of the top five searches for my site.]

Even though I got back from London (and decided not to really post more about the art exhibition I went to see. focus.) almost two weeks ago, family and work and travel have largely kept me from my newly resolved screening schedule. Last week was characterized by an ultimately abandoned attempt to register our new car (purchased happily through ebaymotors) at the Virginia DMV, where the confusion, cognitive dissonance and abuse are running high, no doubt due to links to the September 11 hijackers. New York's DMV proved to be reassuringly back to normal, requiring only an all-afternoon wait and the same sheaf of documents they always did. We comemmorated by ordering New York City plates, but with "Manhattan" instead of the "Bronx." [note: Props to all Bronx readers. We just don't live there.] NYC truly rules.

Screening and Logging: While a search on the web for "fierce vignetting" inexplicably came up empty, a similar search of my logging notes produces nearly 10,000 results. The combination of lenses and filters we used to shoot (see August entries), including a wide angle lens, resulted in an effect called "vignetting." This is where the outer edges of the recorded image pick up black rings, which are cropped from the camera's viewfinder. The Sony VX-1000 camera is known for this, and I thought we were aware enough before shooting to avoid it. Nope. There are entire scenes-minutes long-where we were shooting a farmer moving a stream of irrigation water that have pretty deep rings around the image. Whether it's fixable or not or usable or not remains to be determined.

Searching for a fix turned up this set of pointers on 2-pop.com, a great resource for DV info.

Poking around yielded this insane article by Paynie, who shot, edited and screened a feature-length dv docu about this year's Burning Man festival. Sounds amazing, and on an impressive schedule. "BurnBabyBurn," is playing December 1 at the New York Independent Film & Video Festival (in LA, somehow). Get tickets here. If only my grandparents hadn't chosen 2001 to stop attending Burning Man, maybe I could've made more progress by now...