Janet Cardiff at P.S. 1

Janet Cardiff at P.S. 1 MoMA: It’s rare when a work of art has the power to transform, transport so completely. Forty-part motet is such a work. 40 speakers are arranged in an ellipse in the gallery, each playing an individually recorded member of a choir. The unaccompanied choir sings a work in Latin by Thomas Tallis, a 16th century English composer. [see this National Gallery of Canada link for a more detailed description.]

You move among the speakers, pausing in front of one, trying to hear two or three at once, then move into the center to hear them all. The wall text describes the artist’s interest in the role of the individual, the impression of the collective, and the individual’s ability to succeed as part of a whole.

Does this adequately explain why every person who entered the gallery became transfixed, practically held captive once they figured out how the piece worked? Or why nearly every single person there looked like their thoughts were a million miles away? Or why almost everyone was caught wiping tears away? I don’t think so.

Cardiff’s work creates a simultaneous, visceral feeling of both presence and absence. The members of the choir are right in front of us; we hear them, sense them, move among them. But they’re not. They’re gone. And the work, by its nature, lets us know that they’re not there. In this city, at this time (the show opened on October 14), a work that aspired to one level of impact has achieved something almost unimaginably transcendent.

How NOT to screen video

How NOT to screen video of farmers baling hay that you shot on your first day of your first location:

1) Watch Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven, in which nearly every scene looks like a Vermeer, a Hopper, shot at “magic hour.”[note: this link’s a bit random; a blurb on magic hour from a home entertainment center dealer]
2)Watch your own. shot on DV.
You know, I have to say, I started writing this entry before I screened our tape, immediately after being blown away again by Malick’s daunting images. I was intimidated, and I expected the stuff we shot to be totally unwatchable by comparison. You know, it’s not the case. Our footage is certainly different, very rough in spots, and will probably not win the cinematography prize at Cannes like Nestor Almendros’ work did, but it’s not bad.
The first third of the tape were exterior shots of the barn/shed and the fields behind my grandparents’ house; their neighbor’s corral with its tired old horse; and the lawn, huge evergreen bushes and a willow tree in the backyard. (I remember when these bushes were small enough to see through, if not quite over.) There’s no sound, though. At all. I remember that.
The middle third is of my grandmother driving through Mapleton, discussing the town and their land and farming as we searched for hay being baled. We’d missed most of the harvest by a week or so, as it turns out, due to scheduling exigencies. She’s pretty good. Decades of teaching elementary school show themselves in her clear, descriptive manner.
The last third was new to me. We’d found a crew loading bales of hay onto a trailer, and Jeff got out to shoot them while I went back to get our car. There’s an interesting poetry in the footage. Two teenagers with T-shirts and baseball caps and a late 30’s guy with a walrus mustache, a paunch, and those glasses that darken automatically when you go outside. It’s hot (100+) and it’s clearly hard work. Every once in a while, you can see where the guys are hamming for the camera. No way are they gonna be caught on film struggling with a bale of hay. Jeff kept the tape rolling nonstop, so myriad adjustments and setups punctuate the footage. As he jogged towards my approaching car, he said, “that loud sound is the A/C. I could use some water.”
The mountains in the background, the cloud-streaked blue sky, the deep green field, these young guys doing essentially 100-year old work that’s not so different from that of Malick’s farmers. It’s encouraging. (and late. good night.)

When my grandfather was still

When my grandfather was still farming, the shed behind their house was where he parked his tractor and combine. It’s still where spare parts and empty grain bags hang at the ready and where tools fill the old kitchen cabinets.

This NYTimes article by Becky Gaylord talks about mens’ sheds in Australia. There’s apparently a book, Blokes & Sheds, by Mark Thomson, who’s quoted in the article. Some ideas I liked:

What looks like chaos to outsiders is easily deciphered by the master of the shed. A man can put down a wrench in his shed and know it will stay in the same spot until he moves it weeks, or even years, later…
Men speak of shed coal: layers of things that build up on the floor, shelves and workbench, reflecting the depth of their lives.

This morning on NPR, there

This morning on NPR, there was a commentary about the Christmas Truce, a moment in the first year of WWI when British and German troops left their trenches, met in No Man’s Land, and exchanged cigarettes and jam, sang Christmas carols, and even played soccer. This ad hoc truce was unofficial and unsanctioned, and it obviously didn’t last, but it was a last vestige of a human, individual, moral approach to war that was rendered obsolete by WWI’s technological advances. Paul Fussell, a UPenn historian, called it “the last twitch of the 19th century.” Read firsthand accounts of the Christmas Truce here.

This story reminded me of a trip I made in early 2000 with Paul, a former colleague of mine, while we were working in Paris. We set out one cold Saturday to visit WWI memorials to the Battle of the Somme. We set out to visit the British Memorial at the village of Thiepval [note: link is in pdf format], designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens. This arch is inscribed with the names of thousands of missing soldiers and was one inspiration for Maya Lin’s Vietnam Memorial [note: official Park Services websites are currently offline]. In November 2000, Maya Lin discussed Lutyens’ influence in an essay she wrote in 1982, right after completing the then-controversial memorial. Read it in the New York Review of Books.

Merry Christmas.

It’s obvious to see how

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.
BeecroftV_Intrepid_PAF2001.jpg
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…
gursky-madonna-0913.jpg
[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.]

Logging tapes after slacking

Still too distracted in the aftermath? Project in turnaround? The terrorist subplot deemed inappropriate for our new entertainment environment? No, no, and no. Just the rest of life–including work-related stuff, shuttling between NYC and DC, planning to build one house and to find another in the mean time, on and on–constantly impinging on my time and mind.
Also, recent travel has kept me somewhat out of touch with people who regularly ask, “how’s the movie coming? I haven’t seen an update on the web.” Cue the friends in NYC last week, including one blog coach and sounding board who cracked the whip and told me what I needed to hear: block out the time for working on the movie, to the exclusion of other things.
Somewhat unexpectedly, this weblog is functioning as a catalyst to keep this project moving forward. Not even cart/horse, really; practically harness/cart/horse. [as it turns out, he had his own motivations, too; his thought-provoking entry that mentions this site was in danger of getting stale if I didn’t update more frequently. Win-win, Chad. Thanks!]
Screening and logging: another reason it’s been easy not to work on the movie is that right now (since the first location in July/August, actually) I’m screening the footage we shot, logging the contents, taking notes, taking stock. This process–time-consuming under standard practice shooting– is even more consuming because of 1) DV profligacy and low cost (“just shoot ’em all and let the director sort ’em out.”), and 2) the Maysles-inspired fly-on-the-wall, unscripted approach.
During the two hours I blocked out yesterday, I screened “Utah 7: LW Follow,” a tape shot at my grandmother’s house.
Activity: chatting around the table; searching for recipes; starting to make biscuits shucking corn; continuing to make biscuits; negotiating with my young CT cousins for the day’s schedule; reading the paper; getting food for one, then another, cousin. It’s extremely mundane activity, but my grandmother–who was a schoolteacher for many years–has an unconscious habit of gently narrating almost everything and punctuating her narration with aphorisms, observations, recommendations. “Sometimes it’s better to listen silently across the room than to be the one asking all the questions.” (a paraphrase).
[note: it’s 10:30 AM as I write this, and someone is smoking a fatty right outside my slightly open window. Uptown. Off Park Avenue. They’re hanging around, too, not just walking by. It’s like it’s 1994 or something.]
Image: It’s generally pretty static, cleanly framed shots. Enclosed setting is a factor. Not a lot of movement by the subject, really. Also, the almost-impulsive decision to buy-not-borrow a tripod made it a favorite of the crew.
The crew being just me and Jeff, who did most of the shooting, also factored in. Ideally, it’d be more flexible with one more person to focus on sound, mikes, lighting, etc. I remember trying to corral my almost-16 year old cousin into being the boom mike guy, but he successfully evaded us for most of the time.
Technical: The sound sucks regularly. Our new XLR adaptor had a short in it, and there are long stretches where the popping and scratching are so bad, I almost had to mute the monitor. It would’ve been nice to test everything before getting out of reach of B&H. [note: the replacement’s fine, though.]
Light is great. A southfacing kitchen window is all we used. Nice contrast. Some unhappy moments with the wideangle lens. And the graduated filter (for reining in the contrast between sunlight and interior, for example) had a smudge on it. Only for a few minutes, though.
Equipment: This so clearly falls into the, “but it’s for the movie project” school of rationalization I shouldn’t mention it. Actually, if I’d posted about it two weeks ago, it’d give a too-clear portrayal of how I was avoiding screening tapes. I bought a bag for the tripod at Jack Spade, a store near my old office. Cool store, nice folks. The pitch for the bag was, “it’s for carrying blueprints. Or maybe a yoga mat.” They can safely add “or a video tripod” to their rap. Here’s a review.
Here’s a puff piece about the premiere of Jack Spade Films’ “Paperboys,” directed by Mike Mills. Mike makes Moby videos, too.
There’s an authenticity of the actual people and the store and the movie that I greatly admire, which is rendered cringingly fatuous in store reviews and movie premiers co-starring Tina Brown. How susceptible am I, is this project, to being “jaded Manhattanites [getting] a little nostalgic for suburbia?” I’d better make my grandmother executive producer. Back to work.
Actually, I’m leaving for a crazy two-day trip to see some friends whose work is in a show in London.

My video equipment’s out on

My video equipment’s out on loan for a music video, and I’ve been location scouting in DC for the last few days and haven’t been able to work on the movie at all. For cheap thrills, I’m flying out of National Airport this afternoon (good old Delta Shuttle), and will report any happenings of note.

2001-10-01, This Week In The New Yorker

ANNALS OF AVIATION/ Malcolm Gladwell/ SAFETY IN THE SKIES/ How far can airline security go?
LETTER FROM WASHINGTON/ Nicholas Lemann/ THE OPTIONS/ After the morning of September 11th, the Presidency changed, too.
DEPT. OF NATIONAL SECURITY/ Joe Klein/ CLOSEWORK/ Why we couldn’t see what was right in front of us.
LIFE AND LETTERS/ Louis Menand/ HOLDEN AT FIFTY/ “The Catcher in the Rye” and what it spawned.
DISPATCHES/ Jon Lee Anderson/ A LION’S DEATH/ The assassination of the Taliban’s most important Afghan opponent.

While on vacation, we took

While on vacation, we took a weekend trip to Venice to see the Biennale, a sprawling exhibition of contemporary art. With some exceptions, the art was a tremendous disappointment. Chicken & egg, I don’t know, but most of the work either strained to stand out and provide some immediate, breakout, experience right then and there; or else it required time, consideration, and contemplation which the festival format inexorably discourages. In this oppressively large exhibition, the apparent subtlety and understatement of two installations appealed to us greatly: Robert Gober’s installation in the American Pavilion and a cafe project/installation credited to the artists Olafur Eliasson, Tobias Rehberger and Rikrit Tiravanija. Understatement is problematic, though, and in ways that concern me as I try to make a documentary that is, itself, unpretentious yet affecting and lasting. Also, these works made me even more aware of how important/complicating are the expectations/experience a viewer brings with him. Let me explain a bit:

In each room of the Jefferson-esque pavilion, Gober carefully places a few objects or assemblages that appear to be found or flotsam, but which turn out to be meticulously hand-crafted re-creations: styrofoam blocks, plywood, an empty liquor bottle. In the corner of each room, there was a white, plastic-looking chair. Were they part of the piece? Gober’s certainly done chairs before. [see an image] [read an essay] We debated, looked for evidence of the chairs’ handmade-ness (which we found), but decided they weren’t. (Clue: they weren’t lit like the other objects. Sure enough, they were for the guards.)

After walking ALL over the two main exhibition venues in Venice’s August heat, we took refuge in the “Refreshing Cafe,” which was credited to the three artists above. The cafe was a series of tables, some white lacquer columns/stools, and a counter/bar under an overturned swimming pool-like form propped up by pistons. It was a rare and welcome retreat from the heat and from the overwrought video art of the show. It wasn’t really clear what the contribution of the artists was, but an improvised cafe with a few mod-looking furniture pieces certainly seemed in keeping with the other works of these artists. Just last night, though, I ran into one of the three and complimented him on having made one of the few pieces we liked in the whole show. Turns out that not only did the three of them not really do anything with the piece, what they did do had been completely altered by the exhibition authorities, calling the existence of the “work” into question.

  • This is kind of unnerving; when understatement is the goal or medium of a work, how do you differentiate it from (or not mistake it for) the “non-art” around it? Do you?
  • What does this mean for the artist and the creation process?
  • When looking at/for art, do we readily give artists we like/know more latitude, more time, the benefit of the doubt? Does this blind us to other experiences or discoveries? Is it a sign of dulling of critical approach or increasing orthodoxy?

    • [Just ignore the dates. There’s

    [Just ignore the dates. There’s so much going on, I’m more than a little behind on the log.] On location, day 3 – We spent most of the day following around Chad, a 32-year old farmer in Mapleton. Along with his father, he works several hundred acres of land around town, including the fields he leases from my grandparents’ farm. Here’s what we spent the day shooting:

  • Changing the course of irrigation water: While the irrigation ditches we shot on Wednesday are concrete-lined with pop-out steel gates, the water Chad changed today was in a field with an unlined dirt ditch. He had hip waders as he took up and moved an 8′ plastic tarp that served as a dam, and then he used a shovel to close the 6 or so openings in the side of the ditch that allowed water to flow into the field. It was freakin’ (sic) hot (100+ degrees) with no shade. Jeff waded into the ditch to shoot, while I scampered along the bank, pushing through weeds with the boom mike (which is tethered to the camera), trying to keep up.
  • Feeding lambs in their pens: Completely deserving of their reputations as stupid animals (the theme of Babe notwithstanding), sheep are also extremely smelly. At least when they’re in pens where straw and their own manure make up the groundcover. They basically stampeded around behind each other, kicking up dust. Oh, and they licked the hell out of the lens, necessitating several midshoot wipedowns.
  • Cutting grain: We followed and rode along as Chad and his 10-year old nephew cut a field of grain with a combine (Check out ebay to see what a combine looks like.), which kicked up mad amounts of dust and chaff. Their field is located right across from a small subdivision, which was built on top of an alfalfa field. All in all, it was a hot, dirty, tiring day, and I felt like a total city poseur by the time it was over.

    So after dinner, we went to Ream’s, a grocery/western wear store, and bought big silver belt buckles with our initials on them. (Sure put a stop to that whole “poseur” thing, let me tell ya).

    • On location, day 2 –

    On location, day 2 – Email still is spotty, dialup is only AOL. And it’s hot as heck (as they say around here in rural Utah). Shooting’s going well. We were up and out at 7 yesterday (Tues.) to pick up additional sound equipment (add a Sennheiser boom mike to the list of required gear.) and to find hay fields being cut, baled and loaded. (Note: It takes 3-4 days for cut hay to dry before it’s baled; hauling is a couple of days later, so to get the entire process, we have to shoot several different fields.) About 80% of the fields in Mapleton were cut and baled a couple of weeks ago, so it took a little longer to find fields in process. Everyone we asked was very accommodating, letting us shoot with no reservation; the first field of guys (hauling) also pointed us in the direction of other fields being cut that day. Everyone knew my grandfather, so they were happy to help out. Jeff, my friend on camera, is pretty good at assimilating, while I basically looked like a tornado had picked me up off the street in NYC and dropped me in the field. (Note to self: leave sandals at home.)

    Today, (Wed.,) we’ve been shooting work on irrigation ditches, the network vital to farmers as they move water around the valley. There’s a water co-op here, which schedules each farmer’s allocation and timing. Sometimes, a farmer’ll have to be out in the middle of the night to route water through a series of locks across the valley to his field at a specified time. Today, though, the farmers we were shooting were working in the 100+ degree afternoon. We didn’t need our light kit, which is a plus… the camera’s rubber eyepiece cap fell into the fast-moving current of the ditch and shot away. We got it on tape. “That run right in front of your uncle Juan’s house [two miles away], so you could get it back,” chuckled the 80-something farmer we were following.

    Tonight we’re off to shoot the workers in my other grandfather’s dry cleaning plant, then maybe going to the drive-in to see Planet of the Apes. IF we can log the tapes in time. Also, we’ve got to check the sound on one of our two mikes, so the levels sync up. Recording sound straight into the camera is easier and cheaper, but it gives you less flexibility when making changes later.

    We’re here in Utah, shooting.

    We’re here in Utah, shooting. Got in last night. Two points:

    1) Having been on DSL at home for so long, I didn’t realize what a pain a dialup connection could be. Right now, I’m logged in through my grandmother’s AOL account. This can’t last.

    2) It’s freakin’ hot (you can’t swear in Utah without turning major heads). Been running around picking up sound equipment, testing filters, fixing the eyepiece on the camera. If you don’t have a full time equipment person, it’s going to always take extra time fixing, adjusting, and finding missing pieces of stuff.

    Since I made the decision

    Since I made the decision to actually go forward and shoot this film project (rather than just ruminate over it and periodically outline it), I’ve been watching films in slightly changed light. Now, I’m much more conscious of really parsing out:

    what a director’s intentions were,

    when something was executed (i.e., writing, acting, directing, setting, editing, etc.)

    how he/she did it (i.e., technical processes, decisionmaking process).

    I basically have gotten into full “influence/tool/idea absorption mode. The result so far is a list of films I’ve seen or re-seen recently that have an impact on me and this project in some way (all links are to imdb and/or amazon):

  • Agnes Varda’s The Gleaners – a simple, powerful movie–shot on DV–that basically pushed me over the edge to make this film.
  • Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg – Bizarre if you get right down to it, but an essentially unique film that I’ve fixated on. I’m not making a bittersweet, technicolor french musical, though. [DVD]
  • Hirokazu Kore-eda’s After Life – unassuming, thought-provoking, frankly touching, and carefully made (Kore-eda interviewed over 500 people for the film and included some of these non-actors in the production). [DVD]
  • Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge – What is it about me and unconventional musicals? I was heartened that such a singular vision of a film could be realized, even if it’s not completely successful. It blew me away in some ways, though. [soundtrack]
  • Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (Redux) – We saw it last night, first time on the big screen. Yow. Overwhelming. Whether it was just me, or the re-edit, or the big screen, it was definitely better than I remembered it. But basically, it’s the diametric opposite of what I’m trying to do with this film. In so many ways. [DVD]
  • Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line – I can’t seem to stop watching this movie, whose release got so overshadowed by Saving Private Ryan (it seems silly to put them side by side for anything now…). It makes me want to shoot quavering fields of sun-dappled grass, though. [DVD]
  • Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Decalogue – a 10-part made-for-Polish TV masterpiece of subtle, yet extremely deliberate storytelling based (somewhat thematically) on the Ten Commandments. Kieslowski’s sense of narrative and of portraying the inter-related nature of individuals’ lives and actions is an inspiration. [DVD]

    • It’s two days before leaving

    It’s two days before leaving for location shooting, and I’ve been wrapped up in myriad other responsibilities and projects that won’t resolve. The takeaway: I’ve been ten minutes late all day, and it’s made all the difference. (This phenomenon was portrayed in the Gwyneth Paltrow vehicle, Sliding Doors, which I didn’t see.)

    Waiting in line for some free theater tickets from 6:10AM until 1:30, They handed out the last tickets 55 people in front of me, and the last cancellation vouchers 5 people in front. Basically, ten minutes late. Whatever, I had plenty of time to work through shot lists, which I can assemble into a full schedule for our 4.5-day shoot.

    From Central Park, it was off to B&H Video, an institution in the professional video/audio world. The store is run by a phalanx of orthodox Jews, so it’s important to plan on NOT going there Saturday, when it’s obviously closed. That they also close early on Friday (to be home well before the sundown start of the Sabbath) isn’t news to customers, either. But who’d think they’d close at 2? Not me. I got there at 1:55, and five minutes into inputting my order of filters, polarizers, tapes, tape, and cables into the computer, the young guy helping me took off, leaving me hanging. So, back I go on Sunday…

    PS Thanks for the encouraging response to the “launch” of this log. I hope it’ll be interesting for you. By far the most common question from readers is, “What’s the film about?” I’ve pointedly not put too much description of the “plot,” because right now there isn’t one. The subject, themes and ideas of the film should become more apparent (to you and me) as things move forward, but for now I can say that I’m planning to tell the stories of my grandparents, who are from the neighboring towns mentioned in my last post. Stay tuned, I guess, to see how that might be at all interesting as a movie.

    First week of shooting is

    First week of shooting is scheduled. We (the crew = Jeff and me, with another guy joining up on location) leave NYC for Salt Lake City next Monday and drive down to Mapleton. (The town has the rockin’ URL, Mapleton.org. It’s some Novell millionaires interspersed (or overlooking) the original farmers who built the town. Part of the Springville metropolitan area. Springville.org. These people were really on top of the domain registration thing…)

    We’ll shoot through Sunday in and around Mapleton and Springville. There’s an art museum in Springville, thus, the nickname, Art City. Number of business listings with “Art City” in Springville: 21. [source: Anywho.com]