Not long ago, in an effort to get ready for Halloween, Stacey and I requested Psycho from Netflix. For anyone unfamiliar with it, Psycho is an American film made in 1960 by Alfred Hitchcock. It’s a “suspense/horror” movie and ranked by AFI in 2007 as the 14th greatest movie of all time. I had never seen the movie and was eager for the experience.
It did not take long once watching the movie for me to realize that I had been duped. This film was not suspenseful and contained no horror. In fact, I found the movie to be one of the funniest movies I’ve seen in a long time. It should not be found in the horror section but instead in comedy. Attempts to build suspense were merely boring. The acting was weak and forced. Attempts to scare me were met with giggles instead. The 14th best movie of all time? It’s not in my top 14 movies that I watched in 2009.
So why the disconnect? Well, put simply, times change. I have no doubt that in 1960 Psycho was a fantastic movie. It probably deserved its Academy Award nominations. If we’re building a list of the all time greatest movies in terms of historical significance, perhaps it deserves its place. And maybe this is what AFI means by “greatest.”
One of my favorite suspense/horror movies is The Ring. Can you imagine if The Ring was played for 1960 audiences? How many heart attacks would there be? If The Ring is watched by an audience in 2050, will they just laugh? Probably.
I’m not writing about this to discuss whether or not Psycho is a great movie. I don’t think it is. The reason I think this is because the context around the movie has changed so profoundly in 50 years that the movie no longer has the same impact. My least favorite word in relation to this stuff, relevance, seems to apply here. When Psycho came out, it was probably a huge accomplishment in cinematography. Had there been a scarier, more suspenseful, movie before it? It was extremely relevant then. Now? Not at all. We’ve seen and experienced too much since. We may appreciate the movie as a piece of history, but without qualifications (I like to refer to this as “degree of difficulty” – it was great for 1960!), it no longer measures up. At least for me, anyway.
Now let’s bring this around to art. Are “great” works of art impacted by context? Can a work of art be “great” if it is impacted by context? The best example that comes to mind for me is most Pop Art. Perhaps in the 1960s it had impact. But now it just feels like a joke, and not in a good way. Undoubtedly Pop Art holds historical significance, but because it so heavily relied on its context, can it really be considered “great” today? I can think of important examples of Pop Art, but nothing that even remotely comes close to greatness, at least how I define it.
It seems we place a lot of value on relevance in art today and I don’t think I will ever understand it. To me, making something relevant is simple. It simply addresses the now. The now is right there in front of us. And for the now, that’s wonderful. But what about the then, the future? When Warhol made his Brillo boxes, I’m certain that most Americans were very familiar with what Brillo was. Now? I barely remember Brillo pads, what about people even younger than me? What about generations to come? A re-created Brillo box holds no relevance to me. Why do I care? Why do I want to look at it?
I’m left to think that the most relevant work of art is something that actually has no relevance at all. It should not be easily dated. Anything in the work that dates it, that narrows its context, that places it in a certain place, inherently limits the piece. The potential audience for the work is reduced. For many contemporary artists, this is not a problem. They seem to create work for a very specific audience… perhaps a small set of collectors and curators who play an inside game. In this approach, it’s all about getting it. If you get it, you’re inside. If you don’t, tough luck.
I have no problem with this approach but it’s not the way for me. I don’t wish to be relevant in the way that many gallerists, curators and critics talk about today. I don’t want to create work that is tied closely to a specific time and place.
What I saw in Psycho was a silly and fairly boring movie. I did not see greatness. Perhaps it’s actually there and I didn’t recognize it. Regardless, it helped me think about what I want my art to do. It made me think about context and the audience. It made me think about how greatness is created. It made me think about not knowing what the future will bring for how my work is viewed. Given all that, it was a well-spent 109 minutes.
And hey, laughing is never a bad thing.
23 Comments
November 5, 2009 at 3:33 pm
For the score by Bernard Herrmann and the cinematography alone, this movie is brilliant. Dig the music in the long, drawn out sequence where Janet Leigh is driving, driving…imagine these scenes without the music. And take another look at some of these long purely visual stretches of the movie w/o dialogue.
Granted, the violence may no longer seem shocking; Anthony Perkins in a dress might seem a little ridiculous. But having the movie’s protagonist suddenly killed off in the first half of the movie was a pretty radical conceit then, and still feels like one when directors do it now–like when Eli Roth kills off the sympathetic kid, the one guy who seemed to be driving the narrative, in Hostel. Not that Hostel was necessarily a good movie…but I’m just trying to point out how that type of death in a contemporary movie was jarring, and it relies on the same strategy.
November 5, 2009 at 4:00 pm
Thanks for commenting, Jeffry! You make good points. And I am hardly a film buff, so what do I know?
“For the score by Bernard Herrmann and the cinematography alone, this movie is brilliant.”
I’ll take your word for it. I disagree, but there’s gotta be something to the movie I didn’t see.
“…imagine these scenes without the music.”
But why without music? Instead, what about imagining those scenes with better music? Did they use the best possible music? Or was it the best possible music at that time? For me, given my experiences, the music came across as silly. I can imagine better music, though you’re right that the scenes are better with music than without.
“And take another look at some of these long purely visual stretches of the movie w/o dialogue.”
I doubt I will devote another 109 minutes to re-watching it, but my take is that the long stretches without dialogue came across as contrived, and would do so on a second viewing too.
“Granted, the violence may no longer seem shocking; Anthony Perkins in a dress might seem a little ridiculous.”
A little?
“But having the movie’s protagonist suddenly killed off in the first half of the movie was a pretty radical conceit then, and still feels like one when directors do it now–like when Eli Roth kills off the sympathetic kid, the one guy who seemed to be driving the narrative, in Hostel.”
I’ve not seen Hostel. Thanks for ruining it for me!
I think you make strong points about the movie’s historical significance, both in terms of what it did then and how it influences movies now. But I guess it’s like Cubism or Pop Art to me. Both are very important developments in art history. They deserve to be seen in museums, but I just don’t care to look at the vast majority of it. Same with “Psycho.”
November 5, 2009 at 4:15 pm
Hi J.T.,
I have to take issue with much of what you said above, starting with your assessment of Psycho. I’ve used it in teaching a good deal over the years, so have seen it a number of times, and it still works for me. The shocks and surprises are no longer available– I know they are coming– but it holds up exceedingly well as a work of art. And I notice that my students still respond to it in a visceral way every time.
It sounds like where you ended up in your cogitations was with the idea of a “timeless” art, something that isn’t tied to its context. The trouble is, of course, there is no such thing in a pure sense. That idea itself is at this point a well-worn strand and trope of modernism. Maybe, as DeKooning said, one idea is as good as another, but ironically that particular one can seem just as dated as any other.
November 5, 2009 at 4:39 pm
Ken,
I have to take issue with you taking issue with what I said above.
Actually, why do you have to “take issue” with anything I said? I don’t understand that. I merely stated my personal reaction to the movie. Can that be wrong? Or is it all about different audiences again? I keep coming back to audiences… I think there’s something to that I need to flush out.
“It sounds like where you ended up in your cogitations was with the idea of a “timeless” art, something that isn’t tied to its context.”
Well, I wouldn’t go as far as “timeless” because “timeless” has not and will not exist. But I feel my thoughts on this are around degrees of timelessness or the inability to be tied to a specific context. I guess. In other words, that which is most tied to its context, that which is least timeless, starts day one with a reduced potential audience size. That feels right to me.
Obviously everything has context. I think it’s a matter of the choice one makes about what the context is that is tied to their work. A probably bad (and simplified) example might be this. You have one painting of the letter ‘A’. You have another painting of a shape that is unrecognizable to 99.9999% of the planet’s population because it is actually a letter from the language of a tribe that lives deep in the Amazon rain forest (assuming this imaginary tribe has a written language). While millions of people can appreciate the ‘A’ in terms of both form (what fonts are cool nowadays?) and function, hardly anyone can appreciate he function of the tribal letter. The ‘A’ is more accessible. Well, except to the tribe who have never seen the letter ‘A’ before. Again, it comes down to the audience and how big you want that audience to be.
I feel like in contemporary art today artists are getting a lot of attention for creating the equivalent of the tribal letter because gallerists, curators and critics can write so much about it. Who cares about the letter ‘A’?? Boring!
Remember, I’m just sharing my thoughts (as unpolished as they are) so I don’t think there’s anything to take issue with. Tell me what your thoughts/opinions are. I’m curious.
November 6, 2009 at 10:00 am
Hi J.T.–
Ok, instead of “take issue with” I should have said “am horrified by”. (Kidding.) Anyway, I have a different response, to say the least, than you about Psycho, but spelling out all the reasons why is more than I have time to do right now.
I will say that there is something to what Jeffry is getting at about the beauty of the artifice of art, when it is visible in the result. I liked what he said about that, a good point for all kinds of art.
Could you give me an example of some of this obscure, “tribal letter” art you are talking about? I have seen a fair amount of art lately, but I really can’t think of anything that strikes me as being like that at all. Last night I went to the opening of Roni Horn at the Whitney, and her work is fairly subtle, and I know it will be a little difficult for some of the students I will go back there with next week. But it’s not about exclusion in that way at all, it is just about what it is about.
November 6, 2009 at 10:46 am
Ken,
I should have known I would be called out for examples! While I couldn’t come up with any that are as drastic as my “tribal letter” example, I did think of a few that make my point, I think:
Matthew Barney came to mind. The “Cremaster Cycle” seems full of symbolism that allows a lot to be written about it. I saw his big solo at Whitney several years ago and I could only think WTF? Apparently some of his new work can be described like this: “The pieces Ren and Guardian of the Veil revisit the language of the Cremaster Cycle, via a ritualistic exploration of Egyptian symbolism inspired by Norman Mailer’s novel Ancient Evenings.” OK, then.
Brian Ulrich’s “Dark Stores” (http://notifbutwhen.com/projects/copia/dark-stores/) are greatly enhanced by an understanding of Capitalism and our current recession. This isn’t as abstract as “Egyptian symbolism” but the work does seem to have a reduced audience.
One of my favorite DC artists, Al Miner (abminer.com) makes paintings about his experience of being a female to male transgender person. While I find the paintings incredibly beautiful (I own two), I have to believe that the more experience/familiarity you have with transgender issues, the more appreciative you are of the work. It’s not dealing with a universal subject like puberty. The audience is smaller, but a lot can be written about it because of its specialized content.
Kara Walker’s work is greatly enhanced by an understanding of slavery, race issues in America and life as an African American today.
I wanted a better example of this so I went to the Whitney Biennial web site from 2008. Here is the first paragraph description of Mario Ybarra Jr.’s work:
“In his installations and community-based projects, Mario Ybarra Jr. reimagines the possibilities of “contemporary art that is filtered through a Mexican-American experience in Los Angeles,” as he told the LA Times. While refusing to discount social or political context, Ybarra remains skeptical about the concept of Chicano identity, a position owing as much to the politicized dockworkers of his native Wilmington neighborhood as to such artists as Rubén Ortiz-Torres and Daniel Joseph Martinez. Indeed, the work of this “cholo aestheticist and inveterate jester,” in the words of critic Andrew Berardini, frequently considers the exigencies—and perverse oddities—of cultural translations and the appropriative acts they presuppose. Brown and Proud (2006) melds Diego Rivera’s civic frescoes with inner-city graffiti art, juxtaposing the Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata with Star Wars character Chewbacca in a large-scale mural emblazoned with slogans (“POR VIDA”/ “FOR LIFE”), frenetic tags, and the requisite badass, bikiniclad model.”
Um, what?
November 5, 2009 at 6:24 pm
J.T.–I said to imagine the scene without the music because Herrmann’s score plays such a huge, huge part in the movie’s success. It’s hard to imagine a composer/director relationship that’s more dynamic and more intimate, I think–many argue that Hitchcock’s movies during the period before Torn Curtain (when they “broke up” b/c Herrmann wouldn’t give him the jazzy contemporary score he wanted) depend heavily on Herrmann’s music for their success. Heavily. And listen to the score for Psycho: all strings, no brass or anything else, which is really unusual. Maybe orchestral/classical isn’t your thing, but as far as composing music for movies, this is really about as good as it gets, ever.
Whoops! Sorry for ruining Hostel. It’s an interesting movie to watch because of what it says about the post 9/11, post-Abu Ghraib American psyche–reflected in the odd reversal in which debased Europeans are torturing fresh-faced young Americans. But otherwise, it’s very nearly torture porn–pulp entertainment that will make you squirm a little, but that’s not strictly necessary.
I’m going to restrict my comments to movies, because I think you already know where I’m coming from re: art, but maybe the two will intersect: I’m a horror movie fanatic. I very much like older horror movies in which the visual effects no longer seem impressive, instead seem dated, artificial, and strange. Once a horror movie ceases to seem contemporary, you can begin to see very clearly the devices upon which it relies, some of which still work as pure visual inventiveness, if not illusions or hyperreality. Crude stop-motion animation, matte paintings, latex appliance make-up–I’m fascinated by all of it, especially when it reads as artifice, not reality. If anything, for me, this makes the movies better.
And often, it still works, even though it looks dated. Take Suspiria: I will wager that the first murder scene in that film is about the most relentlessly violent (possibly misogynistic) pieces of moviemaking around–even though the blood all looks like red paint, the “beating heart” effect looks totally unconvincing, and the acting is completely unhinged. It looks stylized now, yet still seems transgressive–and it’s that fact, that in a fundamental way the narrative magic works that fascinates me.
You know the effects are fake; you know the genre stereotypes; you can see this isn’t reality–but part of your brain is still affected as if it were. This for me is the magic trick of great art: you know its historical limitations, you know the limitations of the artist, you can see what it’s made of, you know how it’s been explained away. But the good stuff can still take your breath away, even as you have all of these things on your mind.
See? Intersection.
November 5, 2009 at 6:56 pm
Jeffry,
I know you’re a busy guy (for those who don’t know Jeffry is Director of Exhibitions at a great arts center and also a new Dad), but seriously, when time allows, please comment here more often. I just learned an enormous amount about film, movie scores, horror flicks and art. Thanks for that.
I have no doubt whatsoever that everything you write is accurate. Obviously I am not a horror film buff… I’ve never heard of Suspiria. Still, my first experience of Psycho was a bad one. What it all boils down to (where’s the dead horse I can beat?) is I am very likely not Hithcock’s ideal audience. You, on the other hand, are probably very much his ideal audience.
What I wonder about is what Hitchcock would think of this thread. Would he even care about my comments? Would he be mad? Indifferent? Happy? Would he ignore my comments and focus on Jeffry and Ken? I think it would be great if he took my comments with a grain of salt and instead be pleased that two people who are more attuned to horror films like his movie. Not everyone can love your work. But if someone does, well, then there’s nothing else like it.
Thanks again Jeffry.
November 5, 2009 at 9:38 pm
Jeffry,
I’m also a huge horror film fanatic. I’m curious if you have any thoughts to offer regarding Gus van Sant’s remake of Psycho. I’d also be interested to know your thoughts regarding Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho.
Finally, did you see the film Deadgirl? For me, it was the River’s Edge of Zombie movies.
November 6, 2009 at 12:30 pm
J.T., I think you’re absolutely right about your opinion on Psycho. Of course you’re right — it’s your opinion! The trouble you’re having with Psycho is exactly as you described: It’s a matter of being able to imagine the context. Far too much of what made the movie great when it was made has been incorporated into the films that came after. It’s like watching Citizen Kane: The cinematography isn’t as impressive as it should be because we’re not seeing it for the first time. Most of the movies made after use the techniques. They’re part of the vocabulary now.
Psycho also relies on knowledge of other Hitchcock movies. You have to imagine not knowing it’s a horror movie; you have to imagine you know Hitchcock’s work. Audiences expected another North By Northwest or Vertigo starring Janet Leigh. When she gets killed halfway through the movie, it’s a big shock — unless you’ve lived through the following half-century and have seen the shower scene and all its parodies more times than you can count.
What I’m saying here is that you’re exactly right on why the movie didn’t work for you. The movie requires an act of imagination for a modern viewer it just didn’t require when it was new.
However, I’d say a movie like Touch of Evil — made at about the same time as Psycho — still works for modern viewers without that act of imagination. It hits notes more universal. About the only imaginative act involved in enjoying Touch of Evil is believing Charlton Heston is Mexican. (Which is a bit of a stretch, admittedly, but the movie doesn’t really require it.)
I think the relevance required for a truly great work of art is that it be relevant in terms of things which don’t change. There are universals to being human — love, loss, pleasure and pain, “the way of a man with a maid”, hunger, and so on — and when art connects with those universals, it’s always relevant.
November 6, 2009 at 12:36 pm
Chris,
I fell asleep during Citizen Kane if that tells you anything about my ability to connect with great movies made decades ago.
I’m curious to see Touch of Evil now. I might need to add it to the Netflix queue.
Thanks!
November 6, 2009 at 12:47 pm
Another, less often discussed, part of the problem may be that you’re viewing these movies on a TV, not as films. I was lucky enough to see the restored copy of Touch of Evil at MoMA’s theater, light projected through actual celluloid. It’s a different experience.
Roger Ebert wrote once — I can’t find the reference now — about a study examining brain waves of viewers. The study found that brain waves while watching film — 24 frames per second flashing on a screen — are different from brain waves watching TV — a scanning electron beam exciting phosphors on a screen. Watching TV causes, the study found, brain waves similar to those found in sleeping subjects.
Not only can’t I find the Ebert article where he wrote this, I can’t find anything like the study anywhere. So I can’t corroborate it or provide any evidence. Still, I’m convinced film is a different experience. Our home theaters are getting better and better, but they’re still not film.
That said, I’ve recently been catching up with movies on my 50-inch 720p plasma screen through a true HDMI connection, and it’s so vastly superior to DVDs on a 32-inch CRT with a composite video cable I’m simply blown away. It’s given new life to old movies, even ones I loved in the old format. Blade Runner looks fantastic, for example.
November 8, 2009 at 12:36 pm
Touch of Evil is brilliant–an absolute favorite, and amazing to see in the theater. Of course, not only do you have Charlton Heston as a Mexican police officer, but you also have the preposterous bugged-out eyes of the strangled Grande…and the motorcycle-jacket-clad Mexican beatniks.
Despite all of that, the scene with Suzie Vargas trapped in the hotel is genuinely menacing–and everything else works, too. And that continuous opening shot with the bomb in the car…Chris, you mentioned how subsequent movies picking up the formal devices created by earlier films can diminish their power. I think despite that, Touch of Evil still looks like a strange, singular flick to contemporary eyes.
Bailey mentioned the remake of Psycho…which was an interesting experiment, but not a very successful one, I didn’t think. Attempting to re-do it shot for shot didn’t really help illuminate anything about why the original worked so well–just helped to highlight the disparity between the qualities of the original and the remake.
Now, as for remakes that manage to transform the original material into something remarkable: I’d go with Werner Herzog’s 1979 remake of Nosferatu…and from a year ealier, Philip Kaufmann’s version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, starring Donald Southerland, Jeff Glodblum, and–yikes!–Leonard Nimoy. Both movies still work, I think, and both rely on an odd trick: using the natural (or built) environment as a sort of character in the story.
For Herzog, it’s the shots of the mummies of Guanajuato at the beginning–not special effects, not dummies, but actual dead bodies, lining the walls of a cavern–and the landscape that Harker walks through with the Phinegold prelude playing in the background as he makes his way into Transylvania. For Kauffmann, it’s the TransAmerica building in San Francisco, which looks like an alien addition to the skyline, and crops up in the background of several key scenes, framing the characters.
I know, I’m a dork.
One last thought, J.T.: You’re a formalist, basically, right? My suggestion with Citizen Kane (since you said it bored you) would be to turn off the part of your brain that’s following the story and just look at the way the thing was made. See how often the ceiling is shown in various shots–who does that?? Where is the camera, exactly? Look at all the deep, deep shots–with some character all the way in the background, in shadow, and the other in the extreme foreground. All of the use of reflections, windows–even the mise en abyme scene at the end where a glum Orson Welles walks past an infinite number of reflections of himself. Regardless of changing context, or importance/relevance, or any of that, I’ve gotta say: It’s just cool to look at, man.
November 8, 2009 at 1:11 pm
Bailey–re: Dead Girl. Hadn’t heard of it. Found a trailer:
http://www.slashfilm.com/2009/07/01/deadgirl-trailer/
I am both repulsed and intrigued, which is usually a good thing.
November 8, 2009 at 3:23 pm
Oh, and J.T.: Thanks for the kind words.
Whose opinion would Hitchcock value? No idea. Lately, I keep having this very basic conversation with artists about what they’re trying to communicate in their work vs. what apprehensible content is actually present in the work…and as much as I’m all about context, and intentions, and communication: The audience’s experience still will always be subjective and discontinuous; what the artist thinks she or he is actually saying may not actually be what the work is saying; what the work appears to say will invariably change over time…and, at the end of the day, all the artist can really do is satisfy her or himself, I think, and hope the audience can at least glean some small part or other of the thought process behind the work. Doesn’t sound very promising, does it?
November 8, 2009 at 3:56 pm
I’m not sure why Touch of Evil still seems contemporary while Psycho has dated. I’m tempted to say it’s because the former is truly artistic while the latter is very much of its time. But I’m not sure. Robert Anton Wilson wrote a longish essay on Touch of Evil — and Orson Welles’ films in general — discussing how Welles involves the viewer in a relative space, whereas most films are shot in a (seemingly) absolute space. He discusses how the particular focal length lens Welles favored changes the depth of field — a person moving twice as close to the camera becomes four times as large, in contrast to more typical lenses where they only become twice as large and so forth — and maybe that has something to do with it.
It could also be repetition; Psycho entered the mainstream, disturbed and affected a lot of pop culture; whereas Touch of Evil is still basically a standalone product.
The two earlier Body Snatchers (although not Abel Ferrara’s version, or the latest remake) are on my to-see list, along with both Nosferatu films (and Shadow of the Vampire). I’ll get to them eventually.
Dead Girl sounds like it could be intriguing, but reviews I’ve read make it sound twisted, wrong, and bad. The reviews have been both positive and lukewarm, but even the positive ones reveal more about the writer than perhaps they should, and what I saw I didn’t like.
As far as an artist’s intent versus their result, what you describe is exactly why I think an artist’s intent is worthless, and why so many works of art which seem to consist of nothing but context and intent — that which we call “conceptual” — fail as art. At the end of the day all the artist can do is satisfy themselves — and I think that is promising. In a very real sense, the fact that humans across all times and cultures can respond to the same works of art, with the same vehemence, to any degree at all, speaks to how much we have in common. And that’s hopeful and promising to me.
November 8, 2009 at 4:32 pm
Man, I need to shut up, but this thread has me, for some reason: Chris, I agree about Dead Girl…but I also know that there are certain cinematic experiences that I value regardless of how questionable I might think the motives of either the producers or the audiences who appreciate them most are.
Example: Takashi Miike’s Audition. This film includes one of the few scenes that has ever made me stand up, stop the DVD player, and walk out of the room for some air for a few minutes. I have problems with the intense disgust that scene provokes; I have issues with the breezy way that the film connects one character’s early sexual trauma with a later state of completely outrageous homicidal glee. Yet it’s a powerful movie, it affects me, and the way that it abruptly shifts in tone–from the first half, which seems like an off-kilter romantic drama, to the second half, which is total over-the-top slasher movie mayhem–is really like nothing else.
Of course I’m going to disagree on the art question: True, an artist’s intentions may not ultimately determine what is communicated in a work of art. But if art really is fundamentally a form of communication–and I would say that it is–then the artist absolutely has to think about the audience, and about the context in which what is being said is said.
Now, the artist may not get any of that right. Most human undertakings are likely to fail, or at least not to really end up precisely as whatever the person responsible initially intended. That doesn’t mean we should surrender any hope of having intentions, or of thinking in a meangful way about connecting with others. I think artists need to be able to observe themselves critically in the act of making art, seeing the exchange what they’re intending to do and what’s happening with the materials or experiences they’re manipulating. The two are not the same thing and never will be, but they’re in dialogue, and the artist needs to be flexible and receptive enough to that dialogue.
I don’t know. Art’s messy, and I’m always a little uncomfortable with the thought of cutting off either the material or the conceptual end.
November 8, 2009 at 9:35 pm
I downloaded Audition and while I could see it was pretty gruesome, it didn’t seem to wig me out the way it did others. I worry, actually, that I saw some kind of edited version, although I can’t find any reference to there being such a thing.
Still, the about-face it pulled was pretty cool.
I think there’s a difference between a powerful (or scary or just plain gross) movie and a movie’s that actually wrong. And Dead Girl looks like it could fall on the bad side of the line. So does Human Centipede. But then as I’ve gotten older (and some switch turned when I became a parent, too) I’ve had less of a stomach for horror.
I can’t precisely disagree with anything you’ve written here about art. I guess I can say that all those things can go into the art, but I think they have little to do with the quality of the final work of art.
November 9, 2009 at 11:18 am
With Audition, I think it’s two things that affected me. One is the sudden switch–if it were a gruesome romp all the way through, the viewer wouldn’t feel so blindsided. The second: 18 inch needles in your eyes, amputations, paralysis? I can take all of that. Eating a bowl full of another person’s vomit? Nooo thank you. Everyone draws their line somewhere, and I’m pretty sure that’s where mine is.
November 9, 2009 at 9:11 pm
Hm. Either my memory has holes in it or I did see an edited version.
November 8, 2009 at 10:19 pm
Hi J.T.
What we can take away from Warhol today is this quote: Art is what you can get away with. Andy Warhol. What he did was open the doors wide for artists of all mediums. Pop Art had political agenda. Andy was a graphic designer by trade and documneted everything and called it art, made time capsuals out of regular card board boxes, made mock interviews with friends, and designed shoes. These are some of his less famous projects, however stepping stones of his lifes work. I am not from Amercia, however from that little island called ‘Down Under’ Australia. I don’t recognise Billo at all. What resonates with me is that something so common, ordinary and easily dismissed is created and demands attention and is called art. Much like your artworks. I won’t look at wood the same. Candyxx
November 10, 2009 at 1:46 pm
J.T.,
I don’t believe we can avoid context “adding” meaning to art. The old saw about nothing exists in a vacuum… IMO, what the artist is pursuing in his/her work either stands the test of time…or it doesn’t, but we don’t get to control that. It’s the responsibility of the viewer, if they are interested in fully understanding the artwork, to consider the artwork in it’s original time in addition to its current position.
I was recently in the Pantheon, in Rome. The building was finished around 127 AD…the ceiling there, to my eye, was visually so clean- a delightful mix of simplicity and complexity, a perfect example of winning the time test.
Your work seems to be a careful and considered progression of an idea…hopefully future examination of this work will reveal that and it’s original context will remain intact while it may also relate to something yet unseen.
When you look at art, are you curious when it was made?
Also, isn’t there an inherent time element of another sort that’s at play in all art…that of arresting time? This is not a fully formed position in my own mind, and certainly a digression from your point … having to do with the time that elapses from initial idea to finished product. There’s a compression of a lot of time there (well, usually, anyway). Guess this is a micro examination of the other side of your macro idea of how art holds up (intellectually) over time.
November 14, 2009 at 9:42 am
JT, sounds like more of your internal Greenberg coming to the surface, you should also make sure you have ready George Kubler’s The Shape of Time.
In the meantime, I’m going to check out some of Jeffery’s movie suggestions.