Film-Philosophy
Journal | Salon | Portal (ISSN 1466-4615)
Vol. 7 No. 48, December 2003
Kyle Harris
Through the Pleasure Dome:
On _Lux: A Decade of Artists' Film and Video_
_Lux: A Decade of Artists'
Film and Video_ Edited by Steve Reinke and
Tom Taylor Toronto: YYZ Books,
2000 ISBN
0-920397-26-3 373 pp. Like many small cultural
venues, community-based cinemas produce and are produced by
the limits of discipline, occupation, culture, technology,
politics, psychology, and geography. The patient task of
documenting discursive flows within the tumultuous lives of
small, urban cinemas is frequently left to individuals whose
intimacy with the subject enhances their understanding. In
_Lux: A Decade of Artists' Film and Video_, Steve Reinke and
Tom Taylor compile essays, drawings, and stories relating to
the exhibitions at Toronto's Pleasure Dome, a
community-based venue for experimental, underground,
avant-garde, and activist cinema. The book studies
interactions occurring at the center and on the periphery of
the venue as it relates to the larger issues of 90s art.
Reinke and Taylor's pastiche blurs the borders between the
personal and the political, and the academic and the
playful. Using the Pleasure Dome to focus on the broader
conditions of film and video art in the past decade is a
smart way of avoiding the pitfalls of trying to encompass
the entire history of artists' film and video art. I find
the book useful in thinking about the functions of small
community cinemas amidst the muscular institutions that
dominate the film and video art world. _Lux_ documents a wide
range of experiences of 90s media art by creating an outlet
for dozens of people to express their interconnected
cultural analyses. The anthology is an excellent filmography
and biographic reference for late twentieth-century media.
The volume introduces readers to genres of media that are
difficult to access but nonetheless vital in understanding
90s art, and useful in larger theoretical and pedagogical
contexts. Synthesizing the primary
concerns of the anthology, in 'Ten Years of Dreams About
Art', Laura Marks connects her dreams and memories of the
Pleasure Dome, semiotic theory, observations regarding the
struggle between intellectual and pleasurable aesthetics,
the role of identity politics, arts funding, the
revitalization of structuralism, performance, the rawness of
video, the materiality of film, the nature of the shift from
visual culture to information culture, and the hope for
cinematic originality. Bridging theoretical territories and
merging them with her dreams, she successfully demonstrates
how ideas, imagination, and experience interrelate and how
individuality collapses into a network of community,
discourse, and imagination. Gary Kibbins's 'Flaming
Creatures: New Tendencies in Canadian Video Art' describes
pragmatic experimentation and sexual multiplicity in
contemporary video practice. The essay argues that the
experimental, propagandistic elements of contemporary art
practice occur in the relationships between various works
rather than in any individual piece's singularity. 'The
propagandistic dimension of the work lies not in the 'text'
of the work itself, but in its relations to other works, its
affiliations or alliances, which make it an element in a
larger, amorphous, politicized montage.' (51) Kibbins
asserts that through pastiche, montage, and multiplicity,
video replaces orthodox ideological propaganda with
experimental praxis, multiplying its utopian visions beyond
ideological singularity. In 'The Ghost of an
Exquisite Corpse', David Clark argues that video art has
moved beyond Rosalind Krauss's notion of 'Aesthetics of
Narcissism' to an 'Aesthetics of Echo'. Instead of turning
the camera on the self like early video artists (including
Vito Acconci, Joan Jonas, Nancy Holt and others), 90s video
artists focus on 'the repetition, the remake and the
postmodern pastiche' (61). Clark deconstructs cinematic
concepts like double exposure, reel time, and the remake to
demonstrate how video repeats and multiplies truth and
possibility. Tracing the ghost of Vito Acconci in recent
video art, he maps out various ways artistic heritage is
performed in the art world and academia. Eventually he
concludes that because of its technological specificity
video art becomes its own practice outside of the mediums of
film, painting, and other art forms. According to Andrew James
Patterson's 'Performative Impulses', 90s video art creates a
space for spectators to become active participants. By
avoiding decorative mise-en-scene and participating in
self-referential production, video artists encourage viewers
to perform as active participants rather than passive
spectators. Patterson's argument demonstrates ways in which
video-makers have created non-coercive modes of relation
with audiences accustomed to the authoritarian conventions
of catharsis. Catherine Russell's
contribution theorizes the term *autoethnography*, the means
by which the postcolonial 'other' responds to European
representations through self-representation.
Autoethnographic films deconstruct identity; they confront
the totalizing narrative assumptions of conventional
documentary, and they consciously stage subjectivity. She
describes a variety of trends in contemporary
autobiographical film, including filmmakers performing
encounters with their relatives and using the camera as a
confessional tool. Jonas Mekas, Sadie Benning, George
Kuchar, and Kidlat Tahimik are the focus of her exploration
of artists whose work explores 'the contradictions and
tendencies of the diary film' (93). The author points out
ways artists use video to explore and challenge the
potentiality of transgression, socialization, and the
intersection of the personal and political through the
overlapping lenses of consumer culture and avant-garde
artistic production. Ultimately Russell observes the
fluidity, intertextuality, and fictional nature of
contemporary autoethnographic practice. Immediately following
Russell's essay are six, hand-scrawled tape descriptions by
the loveable, humble, postmodern diary filmmaker George
Kuchar. His texts, like his tapes, integrate the less
appealing aspects of the body with detailed descriptions of
landscapes, appetites, and quotidian memories. Interrupting
Russell's scholastic observations, Kuchar's notes
demonstrate his own performed subjectivity. Nelson Henricks's
'American Psycho[Drama]: Sigmund Freud vs. Henry
Ford' describes a selection of video works investigating
intersections between consumer culture and psychological
meltdown. Containing descriptions of the anxiety produced by
living in a society of mass-production, the essay emphasizes
video's use of madness as a form of anti-capitalist
resistance. Henricks agrees with Rosalind Krauss's assertion
that the primary characteristic of video is its ability to
explore psychology. Taking issue with her assumption that
narcissism is the only form of madness to be explored, he
emphasizes recent video's transcendental use of anxiety,
paranoia, sadism, masochism, and other means of disrupting
capitalist alienation. 'Women, Nature, and
Chemistry: Hand Processed Films from the Film Farm' by
Janine Marchessault describes women experimental filmmakers
associated with The Film Farm, a handprocessing film
workshop. She investigates how they interact with 'the
boundaries between identity, film, chemistry, and nature'
(135). The author describes the resurgence of avant-garde
image processing techniques and the emphasis on process,
craft, and the personal. She argues that these creative
tactics resist the cultural dominance of patriarchal,
big-budget narratives. Mike Hoolboom's 'Passing
Through: The Film Cycle of Philip Hoffman' and Barbara
Sternberg's 'And' both testify to the importance of honoring
daily life. Hoolboom's essay describes seven films by
Hoffman and demonstrates how he used tourism, technological
innovation, renovation, and the diary form to piece together
forgotten memories and suture a multiplicity of
temporalities. Sternberg describes principles of repetition,
fragmentation, and metaphysical separation creating
analogies between the quotidian and the cinematic process.
Her essay concludes with a series of quotes from authors and
filmmakers, such as Sre Sre Ravi Shankar, Virginia Woolf,
Stan Brakhage, and Joyce Wieland, emphasizing the
relationship between banal life, cinematic representation,
and the struggle between realism and illusionism. John McCullough's curt
'The Entwined Fates of Bruce LaBruce and the Pleasure Dome'
describes the contradictions of avant-gardism in a
market-driven economy, and questions the liberatory
possibilities of transgression in contemporary culture. On
the other hand, Scott Treleaven's 'Every Faggot Loves A
Fascist' considers LaBruce's assault on 'white privileged,
homoculture' (160) to be an apt critique of bourgeois
liberalism. Cameron Bailey's 'Interview With Bruce LaBruce
and G. B. Jones' escorts the reader through the contentions
of the underground, in which skins, queers, and punks
negotiate the politics of desire and control outside the
dominant social system. LaBruce critiques the politics of
coming out, misogyny in pornography, and the nostalgic
effect of 90's gay video in Toronto. Beyond focusing on
LaBruce's underground narcissism, a subject that dominates
the middle section of the anthology, readers are sobered by
a series of essays incorporating feminism, historical
memory, and political concerns. The responsibility to bare
witness to the destruction of the homeless encampment in
Thompkins Square Park leads filmmaker Abigail Child to
question intersections between the political, personal, and
aesthetic in 'Being a Witness: A Poetic Meditation on
B/side', and in the process she describes her desire to
avoid reductive melodramatic portraits of social struggle.
Referencing the reflexive cinema of Jean-Luc Godard, Trinh
T. Minh-ha, and Yvonne Rainer, Child describes how she
created a heteroglossic stylistic vocabulary in order to
challenge the coercive one-point realism of Renaissance
perspective. In Child's own words: 'The film exemplifies
cinema's potential to render social issues complexly, even
as it helps us imagine new potentials of community and
agency in the midst of great economic imbalance.' (183) Her
attempt at 'unnaturalizing homelessness' and multiplying
perspectives acknowledges the constructed nature of
cinematic subjectivity. In 'Trashing Shulie:
Remnants From Some Abandoned Feminist History', Elisabeth
Subrin describes her remake of a '60s student film about
Shulamith Firestone's life as a student at the School of the
Art Institute of Chicago. Subrin's film exemplifies David
Clark's notion of the aesthetics of echo by reaching into
the annals of obscure film history and replicating a work of
*bad* cinema. The filmmaker's writing about _Shulie_
questions the gains made in civil rights since the '60s, and
the differences and similarities of symbols across
generational lines. She tests the limits of historical
progress and the assertion that only quality cinema deserves
historical regard. In Cameron Bailey's
interview with Mike Hoolboom the filmmaker describes his
tendency to remake work, the expansiveness of gender in his
dreams, and the effect of AIDS on his artistic and personal
life. In one of the most potent passages of the interview,
he talks about how his body of work began to shrink yearly
after he started re-editing his films. An artist like
Hoolboom, who reinvents their work, raises questions
regarding the original version of any given film. Which cut
is the original? Which cut is the real? Resisting the market
demand that a finished piece is in fact 'finished', Hoolboom
reduced rather than expanded his oeuvre in order to increase
its quality. Hoolboom's essay about
Kika Thorne, 'Kika Thorne: Bodies and Desire', describes
Thorne's artistic evolution from making performative
allegorical work, to working in community-based cable access
television production, and eventually documenting a series
of anti-gentrification actions by artists and architects in
The October Group. Thorne's practice exemplifies a synthesis
of theoretical, political, and artistic desires. In
Hoolboom's descriptions of Thorne's work we see her shift
from exploring identity to confronting the state. Hoolboom
understands the artist's shifts, as she interfaces with the
fringe, as reconnecting the 20th century bifurcation of the
artist and the formalist. Lisa Steele and Kim
Tomczak's 'She' is an intriguing romantic mystery about a
woman who finds her crush's notebook at a Pleasure Dome
screening. Through the man's automatic writings and the
woman's readings of them, readers get a brief history of the
Pleasure Dome. The writer of the notes turns out to be a
crossword puzzle writer with Alzheimer's, and the entire
story serves as a reminder of the complexity of
conversations, screenings, and histories at an institution
like the Pleasure Dome. Furthermore, it demonstrates the
ways a public institution relates to the professional,
personal, and psychological lives of
participants. Finally, four texts that
explore control, landscape, technology, and corporate
culture. Sally Berger's essay, 'Beyond the Absurd, Beyond
Cruelty: Donigan Cumming's Staged Realities', offers
analysis of Cumming's social realist documentaries about
disenfranchised people barely getting by. Describing how
Cumming's work relates to Antonin Artaud's theatre of
cruelty, Berger demonstrates how his work investigates
absurdity and horror. She argues that Cummings resides
within an uncomfortable community of actors whose
experiences and expressions are both in and outside their
own control. In Barbara Goslawski's interview with James
Benning, the filmmaker discusses his relationship with the
landscape, Native American history, radical vision, and his
choice to abandon political organizing in favor of
structuralist filmmaking. For enthusiasts of Benning's work,
the interview provides an historical and personal context
for many of the challenging decisions the filmmaker has
made. Kristen Lucas's article entitled 'Why Do I Keep
Repeating Myself' is an excellent analysis of the
achievements of postmodern technology: social control,
consumerism, and the reformatting of the brain. Negotiating
the wide variety of products and pathologies created in
postmodern culture, Lucas asserts the importance of using
these tools, generally associated with the military and
capitalism, towards utopian ends. And in '4/14/99' Paula
Levine and Jan Peacock share an email exchange about who new
technologies in the classroom are serving. They raise
questions about corporate co-optation of the classroom and
the production of an information-based working class.
Ultimately, they conclude that contemporary culture can
flourish in the classroom despite contamination from
corporate control because culture has never been purely
virtuous. One difficulty in
documenting the intellectual histories of moments in time
and place is capturing tangential dreams, drawings, notes,
sketches, and other forms of playful banter. Frequently left
to novels and movies, critical histories dismiss these
ephemeral details as noise. _Lux_ renders them
indistinguishable from academic texts and the movies they
study, breaking down the barriers between first and second
sources, theory, art, cinema, and sketch. Reinke and Taylor
convert the dry form of the anthology into an autonomous
work of art, representing the intellectual and cultural
trends in 90's film and video. Chicago, Illinois,
USA Copyright ©
Film-Philosophy 2003 Kyle Harris, 'Through the
Pleasure Dome: On _Lux: A Decade of Artists' Film and
Video_', _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 7 no. 48, December 2003
<http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol7-2003/n48harris>. Join the _Film-Philosophy_
salon, and receive the journal articles via email as they
are published. here
Save as Plain Text Document...Print...Read...Recycle
Film-Philosophy (ISSN 1466-4615)
PO Box 26161, London SW8 4WD, England
Contact: editor@film-philosophy.com
Back to the Film-Philosophy homepage
