Assignment January 24:
1. Create a Foound Footage Montage ROUGH-CUT
2. Attend the Whitney Museum's Dreamlands Exhibition and Write a Response.
DREAMLANDS AT THE WHITNEY
Write a 300 word response to the exhibition. How did the videos address appr!priation?
How did they use motnage editing techniques? Watch the Bruce Conner piece! How
did the repetition work in this video? How did it affect you? Did you find the work
in this show truly immersive? Which pieces did you think were strongest and why?
Having watched the video of Bruce Connor's CROSSROADS, with its beauty and horror, white but yet dark, the techniques that Connor used is the twenty-three repetitive footage of the impact from many angles with the silence before, then the impact, and then the silence again.a terrifying unleashing of the cataclysmic power. Connor's extended repetition of the video stretches the footage almost to a standstill. with the music playing in the background mixed with he rumble of the explosion, and then puts us in a moment of reflection on all the terror of technology and its catastrophic effect on us as humans or any living on this earth. Connor'S CROSSROADS is a montage of declassified military film footage of the US government's under water test explosion of an atomic bomb, connor here used the footage to create a sense of awareness to all the generations to come, and by using the repetitive style of seconds before the explosion with its quietness, and focusing on showing the terror from many angels to force us to keep thinking about it hours after leaving the room at the Museum. I left with a sense of fear and the unknown future ahead of us as americans, and how if this kind of weapons was in the wrong hands, how terrifying that would that be /or is..
ReplyDeleteThe video seemed to be very real in the sense of how as viewer lived the terror of watching the steam or the smoke was coming out from the big explosion and approaching and almost coming out of the screen to cover everything around me, and for few moments Connor used through out the footage a multiple three second full white
frame to give us the sense as if we were covered with the white smoke from the explosion itself. For my opinion that was one of the strongest elements beside the moment of the explosion.
When I entered Dreamlands exhibition, first I saw was the installation was like a movie set of science fictions and the projector was showing random montages. The space was really clouded and it was really hard to receive the contents through the projection. At the second space, I found a lot of piece of films on the floor and the audience possible to pick up or take them home. When I see one of the pieces carefully, I found the sequences of the film and in the dark room; they project those films digitally on the screen. I am not sure it was trying to mention that difference of digital and film. Even though I enjoyed this simple approach because it was my first experience to touch really 8mm films and seen how they look like.
ReplyDeleteAt the end, I went to 360-degree 3D room and I was surprised that it was made with cardboards. However inside I saw a large cat, human and strange characters in 3D and it remind me that universal studio’s attractions. The contents of the artwork was personal and it was not understand well by hearing but visuals helped to transmit the information for the audience.
excellent response!
ReplyDeleteIt is absolutely an immersive experience after entering the exhibition. Music, sounds, visuals, lights and space design, everything make me feel like I entered into another world. First, I would like to talk about Bruce Conner’s Crossroads. This film re-appear the scene of underwater test explosion of an atomic bomb at Bikini atoll in the Marshall Islands in July 1946 without any dialogue or descriptive language. Bruce Conner re-edited the video data from U.S. government into montage, and post-produce the real images with sounds effect. Actually, people should see the picture of explosion before hearing the sounds in reality, although Bruce Conner made the explosion and sounds happened together. If it was a documentary, it was opposite to rules and truth. But it shocked me in aesthetic angle with an emotional rush. In addition to Bruce Conner, I really like Oscar Fischinger’s work. I like combination of the music and shapes although the patterns are simple. In my opinion, shapes’ movement based on the music is more abstract and harder to express than a film with a narrative story. Because abstract things have higher requirements in artists’ imagination and the ability of controlling the picture. However, in the other side, the final effect will be more visible and directly acceptable with a background music or sounds.
ReplyDeleteFor me the strongest and most immersive pieces in the show were the Oskar Schlemmer piece "Das Triadische Ballett [Triadic Ballet]", Oskar Fischinger's piece "Raumlichtkunst [Space Light Art]", and the Anthony McCall piece "Line Describing a Cone". Anthony McCall’s piece was the only viscerally immersive cinema work in the show for me as it required a re-shifting of the senses and a broader embodiment than just the audio-visual --the tactile and even olfactory (smelling the dry ice) were involved. There were other pieces that attempted to approach a more multi-sensory experience through 3-D, paper on the ground, or confined spaces, but for me, they remained predominantly visual and superficially conceptual as opposed to immersive and visceral.
ReplyDeleteThe Oskar Schlemmer piece was conceptually (fantastically) immersive. The rigor with which he created his world opens up a space for the viewer to fully enter and explore. Schlemmer opens up space with his imagination and supports and entire alternate dimension which is made available to the viewer. This film to me is an offering. It does not feel like a barrage of images but rather an invitation to participate in the world and the space is there to do so. There isn’t montage here in an obvious way but the juxtaposition of shapes and colours is quite strong so that an allusion to montage is created for me.
The 3-channel Oskar Fischinger piece uses montage within each channel but also between the channels themselves. This piece was psychologically immersive to the point of hypnosis. The combination of music and image juxtaposed creating different sonic-image patterns takes one into the recesses of one’s consciousness to swim around and find out what’s going on in there. I find this piece extremely powerful on a subconscious level. It seems here that Oskar Fischinger is processing the condition of modernity and mechanization. . .exploring what’s in between the hard lines.
When I went to the show the Bruce Connor room was extremely crowded so it was difficult to get a feel for the film, though the visuals were beautiful. However, there is something very unsettling about seeing a mushroom cloud as beautiful and, at the end of the day, I’m not totally sure what Connor’s message is here. I would be interested to look at his film “A Movie” which has been compared to a recent Arthur Jafa montage work, to see if the message is clearer to me.
In general, I thought this show was very poorly curated. The pieces seem to be fighting each other (especially in some of the smaller rooms) and some of the more contemporary pieces felt like art investments someone wanted shown to increase their value rather than artworks. Immersive cinema is a complicated term (as cinema is equally disembodying and all-consuming) and I don’t think this exhibition explored the tension there in any coherent way (though I was super-happy to see the works discussed above!).