After reading just the first few paragraphs, I can already tell that it's turning into a who's better than who contest. Now that television has "revealed the observed, the observer, and the process of observing", as well as the fact that there's no longer any need to represent the human condition through art, expanded cinema must attempt to go beyond these concepts, not in a technological advancement way, but in order to deeper probe our consciousness where "synaesthetic" cinema is created and viewed. This point on how expanded cinema is constructed and observed by and through the viewer rather than the artist who directed it has been stated before in Rosler's text. It is an idea that I continuously find interesting.
However, there are times where I feel like the weirder or more abstract videos become, that the people who made them are all trying to be better than the other by saying "mine takes a deeper trip into the subconscious and is harder to understand, therefore mine is better!" I'm not sure if there is, in fact, any competition in expanded cinema since each video is different from each other, but I imagine this is how it would be if so. Not all new media work is like this, of course. There are many videos that are infinitely entertaining to me, whether I understand them or not, but every so often there exists a video I come across that seems to be trying too hard, that instead of being baffling yet fun to watch, is confusing and boring to watch. (I'm not trying to come off as ignorant when I say these things, but I definitely won't sit and watch a video that I don't understand and PRETEND to afterward. I believe merely acting like you know what the meaning of a work of art is, rather than admitting you have no clue what the idea was behind it, would be kind of insulting to the artist, and ultimately you'd be insulting your own intelligence as well.)
Hi Paige,
ReplyDeleteGood points here. I think the time of working against storytelling and convention being an end in itself has mostly passed. I believe attitudes about "passive" reception to media have shifted to the point that calling a work "entertaining" would not necessarily be pejorative. Alternative forms have started to establish their own conventions and genres and are not always made for the purpose of subverting the popular narrative.
I think you make a good point about not pretending to understand difficult or confusing works. Understanding something doesn't necessarily have to be a prerequisite for recognizing that it has value or is enjoyable. There's a great quote by Wallace Stevens that addresses this. "A poem must resist the intelligence almost successfully." This could be said of art more generally. And sometimes works really are too obtuse to be enjoyed. As an artist, it's difficult to know how far you can ask your audience to go with you. And since even today, cinema is still widely understood primarily as "entertainment", audiences may be reluctant to become "active" in their viewing.