But I can’t tell anyone yet, until I get the confirmation letter and screening agreement. Stay tuned, though. Hint: It’s in December.
Category: souvenir (november 2001)
arguing over nothing, or the lack of nothing
On Artforum‘s discussion boards, I had posted some criticism of Nico Israel’s article about visiting (but not finding) Robert Smithson’s earthwork sculpture Spiral Jetty. He responded, and I responded back. Other Smithson-related posts: one from after visiting the Jetty, and one about the Jetty’s reemergence and Smithson on filmmaking.
[Update: Commemorative T-shirts are now available in the greg.org two-item store.]
Jonah Freeman, Artist. Cinematographer. Geeenius. Tonight. On “In the Artist’s Studio”
Jonah Freeman, Making the Nature Scene, 2000, c-print, images: edw mitt
For a while, Ive been meaning to post some information and images of Jonah Freeman’s work. He was the DP and editor for my short film, Souvenir November 2001, but his main gig is visual art: he makes photography, video, and sculpture/installation art. He exhibits all over the place, and he shows regularly at the Andrew Kreps Gallery in NYC. This past spring, while he was editing 24/7, he was also working 24h on designing and building a stunning installation for the Public Art Fund in NYC, his largest project to date. Here are more images of his work.
The NY Times says of his work: “Occasionally voyeurism takes spectacular form…as in [his] funny, alarming surveillance video of a Manhattan hotel.” Right before he did Souvenir, he shot a beautiful film for the New York designer Tess Giberson. His interest in the subtleties of light (including explorations of its spatial characteristics and translucency) his spare, distant/intimate narrative style, and his up-to-date handling of classicist forms and symmetry made him my first and earliest choice to shoot the film. Plus, he knew how to work the lights and the camera.
Much of whatever beauty and visual power Souvenir has is because of Jonah. Reading back over the location diary, he caught some truly sublime shots; some tight, emotional/energetic shots; and some really crucial shots we would have been screwed if we’d missed. Don’t think this weblog stroke job is to pay him off; I couldn’t pay him enough (andI’m sure he’ll agree). I’ve been working on the electronic press kit lately, and I’m in an effusive mood.
On not knowing what’s in it when you open something
This witty, informative page [via Anil Dash] about the miracle of 40-foot shipping containers reminded me of this great piece by Darren Almond in September 2000 at Matthew Marks, a shipping container with a giant digital clock in its side, synched to GMT via GPS. I remember the opening, on the 15th; the container had barely arrived, and the link wasn’t working, so time (or the clock, anyway) stood still. And it was swelteringly hot; people would dart into the steamy gallery to check out the piece, then return to the ersatz street party, hoping for the slightest breeze.
The irreverent science fair tone of Cockeyed.com was endearing (a guy named Rob seem to be the main author), and after several long flights (where I cemented my disdain for rolling luggage, especially for kids, where it seems insidious), I blithely clicked on “Carry-on luggage,” half expecting to find out who invented the offending suitcase. Instead, I found two lists, with photos: items the author felt should be banned from carry-on luggage, and items he felt should be permitted. He compiled them just two days shy of the anniversary of Darren’s opening. Rob’s concludes his analysis like this:
In addition to the items I recommend leaving in your checked luggage, I also recommend reacting violently to hijackers. Attack before the second sentence leaves the terrorist’s mouth. Do not wait. Do not wait for people to be herded into a corner. Attack. Climb on top of the seats. Do not allow yourself to be penned in. Women and men should attack. Kids should attack.
Your acts may get you killed, in fact the entire aircraft may plummet to the earth, killing everyone on board. This is better than allowing the plane to slip into a madman’s hands.
Things have changed.
I… This Artbyte article talks about Almond’s show, and his work’s allusions to stellar navigation during the voyage from London to New York. Then this sentence grabbed my eye: “Stih and Schnock are known for antimemorials, or nonmonuments, an idea which latches on to the inevitable change of time and context as our most fundamental reality.” Wary of grand architectural gestures, Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock proposed a “Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe” for Berlin where visitors at the Brandenburg Gate climbed onto buses marked Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen, thereby recapitulating the first leg of the death camp victims’ journey. “The traditional concept of a monument only encourages people to contemplate a hulking stone building and an abstracted past; nonmonuments instead create the memorial as process. Rather than distance the viewer, Bus Stop invites participation in that process…” I’ll revisit this, obviously.
2009 update: seems that Artbyte’s site has disappeared. I’m reproducing the article, “Voyeurschism” by Carly Berwick, from the Mar/Apr 2001 issue, below [via e-Xplo]:
The bus moves slowly east, away from the galleries, cafés, and shops that have sprung up along the streets of Williamsburg’s north side, now a trendy artist and working-class enclave. Ten minutes into the quiet trip–there is no narration–a symphony of groans, clangs, and syncopated twitters, mixed live by two sound artists, issues from the back of the vehicle. The tour meanders past car-part lots, warehouses, and 24-hour delis to its promised land: blocks and blocks of waste-management treatment facilities serving New York City.
For four weekends this winter, the Dencity Bus Tour made its pilgrimages through the city’s trash and raw sewage. The ride, says Rene Gabri, one of the three artists who conceived and produced the tour, was meant “to interrogate the format of the tour itself, which relies on verbal information that is often incorrect anyway.” His collaborators, Erin McGonigle and Heimo Lattner, produced the live soundtrack, largely made up of samples taken from the industrial area itself.
According to Gabri, the tour evokes what wireless gadgetry promises to provide: “Moving through space, yet having a constant stream of information.” But all tours do that, or at least they try. Unique to Dencity is the detachment and illusory sense of privacy encouraged by the atmospheric music and darkness. On the bus that night, one couple made out, another gossiped, while others stared out the windows. Without the unifying element of a tour guide to produce a sense of community, Dencity has hit on, perhaps accidentally, a lonely vision of a supposedly hyperconnected world where each person has electronic access to all varieties of data, anytime, anywhere.
The Dencity bus tour and several other art expeditions have recently been making the metaphor of mobility material. Mobility as lifestyle has become ever more common in the past half-dozen years as portable electronic inventions allow us to roam further, with greater frequency, for both work and play. At the same time, global tourism has taken hold as a major wage-earning sector for some and a regular pastime for others. Nomad-themed art plays with these two dominants of contemporary life: the international, wireless culture of businesspersons, artists, entrepreneurs, and writers shuttling between Los Angeles, London, and Lagos; and the booming tourist culture that at times seems infected with a case of “scopophilia,” as Gabri puts it‹pleasure in looking, particularly at others.
The Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI) in Culver City, CA, has also offered a series of on-the-road looks at waste-related scenery. The combination artists’ collective/rock-collecting club launched a self-guided tour in 1995 with their project “Suggested Photo Spot.” The “picture spot” was invented by Kodak, says CLUI director Matt Coolidge, “in order to put their logo up in national parks.” CLUI’s minimalist signs suggest tourists stop and notice more than the area’s inherent beauty.
The project planted 50 signs across the country, from the Trojan Recreation Area and Nuclear Power Plant in St. Helens, Oregon, to the Kodak Waste Water Treatment Plant in Rochester, New York, where CLUI’s sign informs visitors that “Kodak’s industrial waste water is treated at this plant in the beautiful Genesee River” and that “local lore has it that film can be developed in this water.” The satire offers pointed instructions to look beyond the “beautiful river” into its history within the landscape, both corporate and natural. Like many of CLUI’s projects, “Suggested Photo Spot” transcends the limits of representational art to bring viewers to the actual site of confrontation, where myths of business and government neutrality, even beneficence, toward the environment are readily exposed.
Most recently, CLUI contributed to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles’ Flight Patterns show, taking museum visitors on a bus two hours inland to their Desert Research Station. The Flight Patterns tours involved an official guide (although visitors could drive to the staffed station on their own), who pointed out land uses of the region, from the freeway to Fontana’s steel industry. “We’re talking about erosion, flood control, industrial development,” says Coolidge. “Heading out into the desert, we try to read the physical vestiges of contemporary history on the landscape.” CLUI’s bus ride was more didactic than Dencity’s, but, says Coolidge, they didn’t “spoon feed” people. “It’s important to initiate an interpretative process,” he says. Additional CLUI tours have been “taken to ridiculous extremes,” says Coolidge. “We’ve taken tours that cover over 500 miles in a day and kind of wear people out. It’s kind of an adventure, an odyssey.”
The voyeurism of the tourist on these buses, traveling past unglamorous, often desolate areas, can turn self-reflective. As the Dencity bus passes through neighborhoods where nearly as many people live as tons of waste are transferred on a daily basis, “you feel suddenly uninvited,” says Erin McGonigle, the sound artist who recorded most of the samples for the electronic mix. “We were cautious about fetishizing the spaces,” says Gabri. “There’s a lot of power being able to be in this bus. Mobility is a privilege, people pay for it.”
Of course, the inverse of the empowered, self-propelled tourist is the refugee, the person involuntarily displaced. Gabri himself is originally from Iran; his family fled the country during the 1979 revolution.
A bus project directly addressing the difference between choosing to move and having to move was proposed by artists Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock in 1995 for Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial Competition. Bus Stop: The Non-Monument engendered controversy even though it was never produced. In the proposal, buses would pull up to the vast, empty space under the Brandenburg Gate in the center of Berlin. There, a waiting hall would offer digitally displayed histories of the destinations, the names of which would also flicker across the buses: Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen, the death camps of Nazi Germany. A requirement for the competition was the inclusion of the official project name, which was “The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.” As Schnock has pointed out, placing this phrase on the buses would make it a memorial in perpetual motion. In effect, tourists would replicate the constant state of transit that the Jews endured during the Holocaust, as they either fled the Nazis or were shipped to camps. Although their proposal placed 11th out of 528 in the memorial competition (with Peter Eisenman’s “real” monument chosen for construction), it was a public favorite. In 1996, the artists published a 128-page bus timetable that listed the sites that could be reached on current public transportation.
Stih and Schnock are known for antimemorials, or nonmonuments, an idea which latches on to the inevitable change of time and context as our most fundamental reality. Many have argued these structures don’t remember events but bury them in myth. Writers and artists in Germany, still sensitive to the memory of Albert Speer and the Nazi fixation with grand gestures, are particularly aware of the loaded meaning colossal monuments can contain. The traditional concept of a monument only encourages people to contemplate a hulking stone building and an abstracted past; nonmonuments instead create the memorial as process. Rather than distance the viewer, Bus Stop invites participation in that process which, like the Dencity bus tour or CLUI’s ride to the desert, makes travel and the passage of time essential to the art. Tracking the hours, minutes, and seconds in a world where the pace of change seems to compress time itself is the theme of Darren Almond’s Mean Time (2000), a shipping container with a digital display continually ticking off Greenwich Mean Time. The artist rode with the container, linked to a Global Tracking Satellite, from London to New York for his show at Matthew Marks Gallery last fall, documenting the journey with photographs, as well as drawings of the night sky. Almond’s drawings allude to an older tradition of triangulating distance at sea by observing the sun and stars; after the 18th century, longitude was determined by calculating the time difference relative to Greenwich. Only in the past few years have mariners been able to rely on GPS. While Almond’s outsized clock mechanically ticked off the time in England, he was honoring an ancient system of navigation, by taking notations on the sky.
Also journeying to New York City in a freight container was the art collective etoy, best known for the “Toy War” waged when an American online toy store tried to take the European art group’s domain name. The etoy.TANK, one of four bright orange containers sent for a spring show at Postmasters Gallery, is “the office, studio, hotel, storage, and webserver at the same time,” according to the group’s Agent Zai. Members of the group, spread across Switzerland, Germany, and California, reside in these “walk-in webservers” when participating in exhibitions. While the tank provides a physical manifestation of the group’s nomadic nature, the website hosts etoy. TIMEZONE, an online Twilight Zone where minutes count 100 UNIX seconds and a midday time embargo halts the clock for an etoy hour. “TIMEZONE,” writes the group, “is the solution to the insanity of the continuous physical travelling through international time zones, for time shifts in international markets and to the problem of getting older.” Through the eyes of artists like etoy, Dencity, CLUI, and Almond, nomadism today is as much about keeping up with a vision of ourselves and the time we’re constantly losing as it once was about tracking basic things‹food, weather, water‹across the land.
One need not be a member of etoy, however, to travel with attention to one’s creature comforts. With the global traveler in mind, New York’s OPENOFFICE and Denmark’s cOPENhagenOFFICE / Tanja Jordan created the NorthousEastWest (NhEW). The NhEW is a portable dwelling unit, custom-designed for around $7,000, that makes almost as much sense in crowded Manhattan as on the cold expanses of Greenland, where it got its inspiration from Inuit dwellings. Made of an aluminum frame, wood base, aluminum and plastic paneling, with a sealskin rug optional, the entire house can be packed up quickly into a crate. Inside her NhEW, the mobile citizen is at home in the world, no longer a tourist moving through someone else’s garbage-strewn, contaminated community.
On Souvenir; On encountering one’s past and being just fine, thanks
Souvenir updates from the road: Spoke with some folks in Austin, and submitted Souvenir (November 2001) to the festival. As you can discover by surfing through the Souvenir-related links at left, the film is a sytnhesis of scripted narrative and documentary language; Austin is very adamant about it’s “NO DOCUMENTARIES” requirement, which I can respect, but which I think has to be considered in a contemporary context. After talking to a couple of people in the short film selection office, they sounded persuaded; their requirements would not exclude the film. So, off it went.
I also signed up as a betatester for Withoutabox’s electronic press kit application. So far, it’s not bad, but I can’t yet feel/see the benefits. If I were a festival programmer with piles of Priority Mail packs all around me, I could see some advantage, though. We’ll see.
In the mean time, I’ve had some good breakthroughs in group (Oh, wait, that was Scott Evil.), in writing the script for Souvenir, the feature-length ensemble into which Souvenir (November 2001) will be interwoven. We’re going away soon for a solid week offline, and I expect to finish a draft then. Ideally, I’ll post it then.
One memory-related anecdote: After five years away, I visited a storage space I keep in Philadelphia. It was like running into a college-era friend, in a way; he’s changed, but you still recognize him, and (fortunately for you both) you’re not embarassed by him. Contents of this inadvertent time capsule include:
It was an unexpected chance to mark-to-market (something I would’ve said with self-conscious pride then. Of course, I also wanted to name some dogs LIFO and FIFO, but with the French pronunciation, “Leefo.”), to see how who I am now measures up to who I was then (and who I expected/hoped to be). It was reassuring to know that, despite some volatility and the current trends in the market, I have no need to take huge writeoffs or restate earnings.
On only seeing in retrospect the obvious influence of Agnes Varda on my short film
Writing and music rights: Agnes Varda’s Gleaners and I is on Sundance again. [It’s been released on DVD now, too.] While I’ve mentioned the, video-to-film transfer pleasure aspect of seeing it on TV, it’s weird to see how similar some of shots in Souvenir November 2001 are to her movie. I’d been influenced even more than I knew.
Attribute some similarity to shooting in roughly the same places: overcast and rainy French autoroutes, rural side roads, fallow fields, smalltown streets. Her success in “gleaning” people (on the street, in a field) became our solution when we lost all the actors we’d lined up; we started meeting and interviewing people wherever we could find them. And I no doubt took on one of her themes as well, if unconsciously: like The Gleaners, Souvenir is a road movie, a search, but one whose target isn’t clear at first. The New Yorker in Souvenir only begins to recognize what he’s actually looking for after he’s engrossed in the search. And as Varda makes poignantly clear, the search is what’s important. Unlike Varda, however, I do not write and perform my own rap voiceover. Of course, if it costs too much to clear our music clips, I may have to…
Souvenir (November 2001), Bruegel, Houstonization, The WTC
Rewatching Souvenir (November 2001) a dozen+ times in the last 24 hours, I’d begun to wonder what it can actually contribute to the increasing volume of the WTC memorial/rebuilding debate. There was 4,000-participant offsite Saturday (with a 200-participant makeup session Monday for observant Jews and Hamptonites, I guess). Everyone and their dog is weighing in on the lameness of the Port Authority-driven devil’s choice: Memorial Office Park or Memorial Mall, but is this looming Houstonization of Ground Zero possibly the end-game of Manhattan’s last decade of suburbanization?
(“When they came for my greek-lookin’ coffee cups, I said nothing.
When they came for my independent bookstore, I said nothing.
When they came for my jewelbox-size retailer, I said nothing…”)
Then I found this Auden poem about Bruegel’s painting of the fall of Icarus. The opening lines:
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
Visiting the site of past horrors; seeing how people live among the memories and memorials of destruction; glimpsing the differences between total restoration, preserving ruins, and monumental memorializing. There are people who certainly understand how suffering takes place; there’s much we can learn from them. That’s a point that Souvenir makes, and one that’s still worth making.
Whew!: After a few weeks
Whew!: After a few weeks of fits and starts, a full day of editing followed by a full week of output-to-video frustration, I finally got the “finished” version of Souvenir (November 2001) on tape tonight. It’s not drastically different; in fact, it may be hard to spot the differences at all from the preview screening version. But it feels very different to me. Except that I’m kind of burned out on it tonight, I feel really good about it.
One change I’m still mulling over: a new song under the first scene. It’s called “I’m Coming Home on the Morning Train,” an acapella gospel song performed in 1942 by the Rev. E. M. Martin and Pearline Jones. While I’ve had it on CD for several years, it only occurred to me recently to try it in the movie. It turns out to have been recorded–like so many other incredible artifacts–in the field by Alan Lomax, the godson of American folk music (assuming his father John is the godfather, you see). Lomax just passed away over the weekend. Here is his obituary in the NY Times.
Music: Spent most of the
Music: Spent most of the morning following up on clearing music for Souvenir (November 2001). The process is moving along well. One thing I realized, though: I pointed a couple of the record company folks to this site to find further information about the film. (“Please visit greg.org for updates of me inviting you to visit greg.org.”) Is there some kind of Weblog Heisenberg Principle, where, by weblogging something, you alter it? If Wu Tang disses the movie, I guess we’ll know.
New Project: (Should I have a codename?) Seein’ as how I’m working on an animated film, I know I’m going to see Richard Linklater‘s A Waking Life, a seemingly inspired (or at least inspiring) combo of DV filmmaking and paradigm-shifting, computer-aided animation. I want to like it, although I’m not sure I will; I like Linklater, to be sure. Even so, this review on DVD Journal is so damn funny to read, it almost doesn’t matter how the movie is.
Here’s a link about rights
Here’s a link about rights and a song that I’m thinking of using, a possible replacement for Zabriskie Point.
http://www.loc.gov/folklife/cg.html
I’ve collated all Documenta 11-related entries in one page, which I’ll keep updated. There’s been a steady/increasing number of Google searches for Documenta and participating artists; rather than add a new index (“Shows I’ve seen” or something), I’ll try this compilation page idea.
Rights, On: I’ve been digging
Rights, On: I’ve been digging into rights issues for both the new project (which will get a highlights list soon) and for Souvenir, getting ready to meet with a lawyer referred by a good friend at Universal (until he just busted out). The two bodies of rights I’m working on are life rights and music clearance. Here are some highlights [up front, let me point you to Michael Donaldson’s straightforward book, Clearance & Copyright: Everything the Independent Filmmaker Needs to Know. It’s not flawless, but it’s certainly an informative reference for getting up to speed. It doesn’t replace a lawyer, but it’s quickly useful for working with one. And if you’re serious about making and showing a film, you shouldn’t go forward without at least talking to a lawyer at some point.]
Life rights are a perpetually ambiguous aspect of the filmmaking process. I’m trying to determine the most feasible approach to life rights for the new feature project, an (at least partially) animated musical. The key benefits of life rights seem to be 1) getting co-operation and insight from a party, which could improve the accuracy and entertainment value of the project, and 2) lawsuit insurance, since a valid life rights sale basically precludes any chance someone has to sue you for making a movie based on their life.
There are plenty of ways to make a movie without life rights, of course; the Law & Order universe clearly thrives without them. It ultimately comes down to the equations used by potential backers and distributors, who will weigh the value (or cost) of having (or not having) life rights agreements in place.
Some execs flatly state that rights must be in place before they’ll even consider a project; not having them is one sign of amateurism and a definite red flag. [Here is a Q&A with Angelique Higgins, the VP of Pierce Brosnan’s production company. Go down about 60% for the answer I’m referring to.] The story of Brandon Teena and Boys Don’t Cry shows however, that people are happy to move forward–even to rush forward– without rights in place if the project is hot enough. [Here is one account of the rights race around Teena’s story, but just about any of the Google results make for interesting reading.] The conclusion: you absolutely need life rights for a project. Except when you don’t.
Music clearance is at once more humorous and more grim. I don’t know if advice is suddenly coming in from everywhere, or if I just think everyone’s staring at me, knowingly. Whichever, the Slamdance FAQ came through twice with some good, hard advice: In Part 1, they talk about “festival rights” vs comprehensive usage agreements; a lot of short films screen with festival rights in the hope that a distributor or whoever will pony up the dough to get the full music rights or to remix the music altogether. “So what happens is that those music issues will often single-handedly preclude a film from getting distribution.” Hmm. No icebox.com for you. Do not pass go.com, to not collect $200. Instead, “using original music from your uncle’s Bar Mitzvah band is usually the best bet.” And in Part 2, there’s this great bit of advice on filling out the festival application:
Q: Where it says music, is that the composer or what band is on the soundtrack?
A: It can be either. But if you’ve got the Rolling Stones on your temp track and don’t have the rights, it’s best to stop kidding yourself and stick to your cousin Joey as the composer.
And the only article from Filmmaker Magazine I haven’t mentioned yet (until now, that is), talks about the dangers of “falling in love with your temp track.” It’s apparently too easy and too common to spot indie films that have been edited to the soundtrack of The Mission. You can buy it here. As if you didn’t have it already… Donaldson’s book also has a very useful, sobering read about getting rights squared away and the importance of sticking to the letter of the agreements. Music clearance services never looked so good to me as they do now.
The Takeaway: Tracks on Souvenir where we’re already making progress on securing rights will stay, but the ones I’ve been deluding myself on (Pink Floyd’s Heart Beat, Pig Meat and Wu Tang) are O-U-T, or O-T-W (On The Way), anyway. My Zabriskie Point/Antonioni homage will have to come from the box office instead (D’oh!).
Not only did I finish
Not only did I finish all the tweak editing I mentioned earlier, the momentum picked up. I worked on the pacing of some dialogue scenes, changing some breaths/gaps and taking out a few tiny lines here and there. It makes a noticeable difference (noticeable if you’ve seen the movie a hundred times; otherwise, it’s just smooth.) I was a little wary, though, since I just read an interview with Soderbergh Filmmaker Magazine. Talks about The Limey writer Lem Dobbs, who “fumes at Soderbergh for gutting his script to such an extent that Dobbs was blamed by critics for the thinness of the characters and the lack of backstory.” [It’s in the DVD commentary; buy it yourself and find out. I did.] Then I redesigned the credits, added some parentheses to the title. (It’s been Souvenir (November 2001) on a few submissions lately.) For good measure, I made a few audio level adjustments, pulling up some lines that could get a little lost.
Everything went well, smoothly. Output my new master and slave DV copies, WHICH WERE BLANK when I got them home for dubbing. Apparently, FCP didn’t recognize the camera. CHECK YOUR TAPES BEFORE YOU LEAVE. Now I’ve gotta make an emergency run Fri. morning to re-output it. It looked good, though, and it felt good to be squarely in the “making” process again, even if it’s only for a day
Editing: After a couple of
Editing: After a couple of false starts, we’re finally set to make the editing tweaks on Souvenir November 2001 this week. (Since I only have FCP 1.0 loaded, and the project got saved in 3.0, I couldn’t open it without 3.0.) We really worked to balance the documentary “vocabulary” of the movie, that is, the degree to which the filmmaking process asserts itself: lighting quality, high-contrast exposure rates, handheld camera movement, crew and equipment appearances. Post-preview screening, we heard strong reactions to the contrast between “performed” scenes and “documented” scenes which went to the heart of the story. The two major editing tweaks deal with this balance:
The changes should only add 15-20 seconds or so to the film. Now that it’s not constrained by the Cannes 15-minute limit, it’s fine. Also, we’ll output it to DVD and Beta SP for the first time–a definitive version, suitable for screening at your local film festival (local if you live in Park City or one of the places listed at left). Stay tuned.
How my film is(not) like a busload of Chinese tourists looking at a famous war memorial
This morning, I did a driveby at the Iwo Jima Memorial (there had been a big formation of Marines there earlier in the day). Whatever Americans know of Iwo Jima today, it’s almost certain they recognize the statue. It was based on a photograph by Life Magazine combat cameraman, Joe Rosenthal [Iwojima.com has good background information.] Within 72 hours, the first 3-dimensional version, sculpted in clay by Felix deWeldon. The monument followed on a wave of popular sentiment.
As I drove by, a busload of Chinese tourists was busy snapping pictures of each other with the monument in the background. Only, they were all at the “head” of the monument, on the “wrong” axis of the sculpture/photograph. At first, I smirked at their cluelessness, but then its source became obvious, and the monument’s utter dependence on the photo alarmed me.
I would bet they had no knowledge of the monument’s (formal) origins. A monument that is inextricably linked to an image will eventually have to serve people who have no shared cultural experience, who haven’t been “trained” through repeated viewing of an image (and through history taught with this image). It ends up serving as a monument to the WWII-era American public’s media-driven remembrance; we are still living in the shadow of that memory.
Iwo Jima is at least one or two generations closer, historical distance-wise, than the WWI memorials in Souvenir November 2001, but the separation of the memorial and the cultural memory is already showing.
Director’s Headshot
One of the reasons I’d delayed submitting to some festivals was (of all things) my lack of a “director’s photo (B/W),” which some festivals require. Last week, Roe Ethridge, a friend and artist whose work I’ve collected for three-plus years, took some photos of me. In the pinch, I scanned in a Polaroid and printed it out for the submission packets, but there are real prints on the way.
Roe works as a photographer for a huge pile of magazines. While the photos he took with Julian Laverdiere to develop the Towers of Light/Tribute in Light may be more widely seen, his extremely smart style shows through much better in the photo he took of Andrew W.K., which is everywhere, including on the cover of I Get Wet, and on T-shirts.
As if that weren’t enough, he’s got a show of his work at Andrew Kreps Gallery which got great reviews in Artforum, The New Yorker [note: time sensitive link], and The Village Voice[inexplicably, there’s no link to their picks].
As if that weren’t enough, the show’s selling like crazy. I even got smoked when I was too slow to commit to a photo; the last one sold to the Mexican billionaire collector (you know the guy). Check it out until June 01.