Reviews from Bruce Stater
-edited & 'corrected' by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE & Bruce Stater
These 3 texts appeared on the FRAMEWORKS listserv as responses to various 'works' - including 2 presentations that I participated in in NYC in 1998. Bruce & I have searched thru the texts to remove spelling errors. Other slight changes have been made to modify the texts from the original e-mail format. Bracketed insertions are used when additional info struck me as desirable.
The 1st, "Bricoleurmaniabracademwitz", was written as response to the May 28, '98 "Big As Life" presentation at the Museum of Modern Art. This screening also presented films by Martha Colburn, Leslie Singer, & Bill Creston. Most of the references to these latter have been edited out to make the below function more specifically as promotional material for tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE. Brackets with 2 dots inside them [..] have replaced these sections.
The 2nd, "et in ARTemia, tENT... et Cet E'rata", was written as response to the "Attention-ExSpanDex" Tour NYC presentation of tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE (with assistance from Etta Cetera). This presentation was sponsored & organized by Brian Frye & Bradley Eros as part of the "Robert Beck Memorial Cinema" at the Collective Unconscious on September 29, '98. Movie names have been corrected in brackets [].
The 3rd, "Films of the End", contains writing about 'work' by Arthur Lipsett as well as by myself & my collaborator Etta Cetera again mostly witnessed by Bruce at the previously mentioned screening. As with "Bricoleurmaniabracademwitz", the section not relevant to me has been replaced with 2 dots in brackets.
Bricoleurmaniabracademwitz
Mime-Version: 1.0
Date: Sat, 5 Sep 1998 19:32:23 EDT
Reply-To: Experimental Film Discussion List <FRAMEWORKS@LISTSERV.AOL.COM>
Sender: Experimental Film Discussion List <FRAMEWORKS@LISTSERV.AOL.COM>
From: BStater@AOL.COM
Subject: Bricoleurmaniabracademwitz
To: FRAMEWORKS@LISTSERV.AOL.COM
"...the object of fine art must always show itself as having some dignity; and so an exhibition of it requires a certain seriousness, just as taste does when it judges the object." -- Kant from The Critique of Judgment
"I am not an artist." -- tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE (in self-designed killer whale costume) to Steve Anker
For Freud, Witz, like the dream, is yet another manifestation of the unconscious. But importantly, and unlike the dream, it is the "most social" of all the forms and expressions of the unconscious. Henri Bergson makes a similar point: seriousness can reside in solitude, but laughter, the joke, that is Witz, requires company.
It was with such company that on the evening of May 28 MoMA's Big as Life 8mm series offered a show of Witz, mingling the event genre of the film screening with those of the show-and-tell and the birthday party. And it is with some small fraction of the wit present in that particular company that I hope to render this embarrassingly late and hence somewhat critically suspect review of that evening a bit less so.
As its etymological kinship with the term "wisdom" suggests, the German "Witz" once had a closer relation to philosophy and the work of the academy than it has today. Friedrich Schlegel described it as "fragmentary genius" and Novalis defined it as a "principle of affinities." For Locke the genius of wit(z) was possessed with something like the spirit of montage-- a combining faculty which he contrasted with a discriminating and analytical one. "For wit," he writes in Essay Concerning Human Understanding, "lies mostly in the assemblage of ideas, and putting those together with quickness and variety wherein can be found any resemblance or congruity, whereby to make up pleasant pictures and agreeable visions in the fancy: judgment, on the contrary, lies quite on the other side, in separating carefully one from another ideas where can be found the least difference." In the German expression "Witz ist ein Blitz" Witz's immediacy is doubly conceived as a flash of brilliant insight and a potentially destructive force. Lawrence Sterne's Tristram Shandy pushes wit(z)'s production of "variety" still further by recognizing its principle as one of an "unhappy association of ideas which have no connection in nature." Sterne's description of the "strange combination of ideas" which accounts for the birth of Tristram Shandy, the Wit, reveals two more components of this peculiar mode of synthesis: its rejection of nature in favor of artifice, and its chimerical form.
Freud provides an insightful passage concerning the relation between Witz and the critical faculties of judgment: "If the joke has made us laugh, moreover, a disposition most unfavorable for criticism will have been established in us... Jokes, even if the thought contained in them is non-tendentious and thus only serves theoretical intellectual interests, are in fact never non-tendentious. They pursue the second aim: to promote the thought by augmenting it and guarding it against criticism. Here they are once again expressing their original nature by setting themselves up against an inhibiting and restricting power-- which is now the critical judgment." Paradoxically, by installing itself in the place of critical judgment, Witz acts as a criticism of judgment itself, turning on the form rather than the content of its object of derision. For Freud, all Witz is essentially tendentious to the very form of critical judgment, whether it demonstrates a tendentious content or not. There is something inherently perverse in humor: it responds to critical judgment's appeal to the universal "We must appreciate it simply because it is good, it holds value, it is better than the others" with a logic in many ways more appealing: "Oh, for my part I much prefer the bad ones." Jean-Luc Nancy has picked up a subtle thread in Freud's discussion of Witz which moves in a slightly different direction. This line of thought has to do with Witz's destabilization of the certainty of judgment and the consequent opening of an uncertainty and interest disposed to the possibilities of a new determination. Witz makes that very perversion of the established standard of judgment the provisional locus of its own. A locus of judgment, unlike a standard, one might argue, restores the expelled freedom inherent in the faculty of judgment, and demands that judgment return to its own poiesis. Judgment and taste thus resume their roles as modalities of desire which inform the development of the subject. The space provided for a certain amount of flexibility in the critical faculty of judgment: the ability to relate "I like that one," is one condition of the very possibility of the individual subject, whose object-choices become increasingly limited by the constraints of various systems of categorization, abstraction, and social prohibition. Perversion is the enactment of the subject's freedom not within or upon desire itself, but upon the judgment of what can be desired-- that is, upon a judgment of potentially desirable objects.
Witz resides in the double articulation of immediacy and the impulse toward
assemblage characteristic of Levi-Strauss' bricolage. The bricoleur begins with a finite and extant collection of materials which she works into a provisional structure which itself is not impervious to future deconstruction and recycling. Nothing is safe from the process-- not even the product itself, which becomes expendable in the moment of its "completion." The bricoleur is jack of all trades, archivist, and collector extraordinaire-- a pack rat of materials which serve as the preconstrained elements of her art. As creative principles Witz and bricolage have little respect for the dignity of boundaries and rules-- whether those of genre, media, grammar, morphology, or etiquette. Their productions tend to be diffuse and heterogeneous as they not only ignore but intentionally violate the restraints of judgment. Witz falls outside of the logic of value and evaluation that inform the processes of canonization. The great recognized "masterpieces" of wit (in literature one thinks of the works of Rabelais, Lawrence Sterne, Alfred Jarry, Jack Spicer) necessarily occupy a rather uncomfortable position within the canon, which in order to house them must reassert or discover something dignified and serious beneath or beyond the immutable fact of their obsessive laughter.
All of these extremely abstract speculations bear upon my interpretation and appreciation of the penultimate evening of MoMA's initial segment of Big As Life, which Jytte Jensen referred to in passing as "the outsider program." All of the works included in the program marvelously embody the spirit of Witz, and hence in some sense can be seen as anti-canonical by design. And it is through the critically tendentious nature of wit that I understand tENT's response to Steve Anker in the context of his appearance at the Museum of Modern Art.
Wit spilled out every which way but loose on the evening of the 28th, into Martha Colburn's wonderful, childlike, handmade program notes, into tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE's humorous statement of protest on behalf of the S.P.C.S.M.E.F., and even onto the noses of several audience members who adorned themselves with rubber beaks, trunks, snouts, and bills in celebration of Jennifer Montgomery's birthday.
All of the work in the program demonstrates a do-it-yourself attitude toward filmmaking and most of the films presented represent, in one way or another, the work of a creative "jack-of-all trades." Bill Creston's piece includes a song he wrote and performed himself, Leslie Singer's works include objects crafted from paper mache, cardboard, and a variety of other materials, two of Martha Colburn's films include musical tracks from her own band, and another utilizes a series of her own cardboard puppets, one of which she displayed for the audience at the screening.
tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE, donning a makeshift killer whale costume constructed from a large Shamu-like stuffed doll, preceded the screening of his film with an impassioned plea from the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Sea Monkeys by Experimental Filmmakers. "My film is not important," professed their committed spokesman, "but the information I have to share with you is!" Backed by applause from S.P.C.S.M.E.F. co-founder Etta Cetera, alleged members of the so-called "Kino-Ethics Society," and assorted bearers of a-hypnogogic trauma-tropes, tENT related details of the horrifying atrocities committed upon the Sea Monkey (or Brine Shrimp as the more radical faction of the K.E.S. insists they should be designated) by the likes of well-known and, particularly, canonical "experimental filmmakers."
tENT's verbal performance wrapped satire and manifesto in the barrage of his unfailing wit and ingenious absurdity, pushing the evening still further into the domain of theatrical event.
[..]
"You Haven't Heard the Record, You Haven't Read the Book, NOW! Don't See the Movie!" (1988, color, S8, 27 min, accompanying sound on tape) is an impressive visual tour-de-force which showcases tENTATIVELY's record and book collection as of 1988. This cinematic show-and-tell acts simultaneously as socio-cultural document and self-portrait. But these two dimensions of his work are never entirely discrete.
tENTATIVELY's film invites comparison with Walter Benjamin's famous meditation on book collecting, "Unpacking My Library." Like tENT's film, Benjamin's essay promises a self-portrait worked through the materials of a library-- a depiction of the subject constituted as reader and collector. But Benjamin turns very quickly to the discourse genre of narrative and informs us that he will relate the process of unpacking the collection rather than describing and documenting its structure: "The books are not yet on the shelves, not yet touched by the mild boredom of order. I cannot march up and down their ranks to pass them in review before a friendly audience. You need not have any fear of that." Lacking such an order, Benjamin constructs his self-portrait by linking various stories concerning his acquisition of various books, selecting each somewhat randomly as if, in part, from the accident of the unpacking process. Yet beyond the accidental contingencies of disorder, he is also guided by desire-- the desire to tell the story of this book rather than that one, to begin with a particular kind of story concerning his collection and draw upon particular selections as the examples through which to convey this allegory of self. Benjamin's essay is both a meditation on the process of collecting and a story of the self as expression of critical judgment, taste, connoisseurship, desire, and ownership.
tENT's film, in contrast, narrates very little. There is a brief segment in the film which depicts tENT in the act of numbering and ordering part of the collection, accompanied on the separate soundtrack by a short description in which he narrates the process of making the film. But overall, there is little commentary; there is no verbal or textual explication of the nature of this collection or the act of collecting in general, nor are their any narratives which provide us with the tales of individual books within the collection.
Whereas Benjamin presents a fragment of his library, making extremely careful and personal selections, tENT includes the totality of his collection, organizing it not exactly in the order it would appear on one's bookshelf, but something like it. "You Haven't..." is segmentally structured by media, and then subcategorically by genre and finally alphabetically by author, with the brief section concerning the process of making the film inserted somewhere near the beginning. The piece mimics the organization of a library, but within this structure there is an additional poiesis at play in the various patterns and arrangements of individual selections and groups of books and records.
Typically we only see the covers of the selections, and this too is different from the experience of perusing through a library. Sometimes one gets "a hit"-- recognizes a work that is familiar or partially familiar in the collection. Questions are inevitably raised. Do I have that book? Have I read all of that book? Is that the volume I have? I wonder what that book is about? When did Grove Press start marketing that book with this illustration? The experience is more like viewing a slide show combining images taken in familiar and unfamiliar cities than it is like browsing through a bookstore or library: one can't stop the unfolding sequence of images to leaf through one in particular, nor can one select and determine the order of presentation.
Sometimes individual images appear one after the other, sometimes the works of a single author will appear organized in fan-like displays or other patterns, and sometimes the illusion of motion among the volumes is created through the use of stop action. The presentation is rapid and dynamic from beginning to end, and one experiences it something like a 28 minute display of fireworks without intervals between the individual bursts-- the difference being precisely that the formal beauty of a fireworks display does not engage memory, association, and critical judgment involving content in the manner described above.
The content of the collection is idiosyncratic, experimental, and witty, as one would expect from tENT. The record collection includes items from Captain Beefheart, The Incredible String Band, Kagel, the Mothers of Invention, Stockhausen, Varese, (and on and on); among the books I recall seeing, Burroughs, Celine, Jarry, Rimbaud, Stein, Tutuola etc. -- a brief list which points more to my own "intersection" with the collection than it adequately captures a representation of it. There is a section of science fiction and an impressive collection of pop-up books which tENT spends a considerable amount of time opening up and leafing through.
tENTATIVELY often describes himself as "an archivist" but the extent to which this particular preoccupation provides a record of his experience and his art (sic) may not be clear: the relation of this particular film to tENT's extensive archival and various self-documentary projects seems to warrant a bit of explication.
I don't know all of the dimensions of tENT's archival project, but I am aware of some of its trajectories. I know that tENT has kept what is now a nearly 1300 item list documenting the expansion of his record collection since 1967, and that he has a similar archive documenting his movements from city to city over the last few years. I imagine that he has kept a similar record of the growth of his book collection over the years. However, these lists and "You Haven't..." have neither similar structures nor identical contents. The written lists are organized chronologically rather than generically, and segmented only by year. They additionally include information concerning lost, stolen, and sold books [records] that are no longer part of the collection. The following list is the first segment, documenting the record collection's birth in 1967. Interestingly, one will note, none of the initial material is any longer part of the collection (unless repurchased or reacquired later) and hence the list serves as its only record:
0001 "Meet the Beatles" - The Beatles Sold
0002 "A Hard Day's Night" - The Beatles Sold
0003 "Mr. Tambourine Man" - The Byrds Traded for guitar case
0004 "Flowers" - The Rolling Stones Sold
0005 "The Monkees" - The Monkees Sold
0006 "The Turtles Golden Hits" - The Turtles Sold
0007 "Their Satanic Majesties Request" - The Rolling Stones Sold
Compare this with the list for 1988, already ten years old:
0830 "Pop Surgery" - John Bender
0831 "1st Annual Report - Very Friendly" - Throbbing Gristle
0832 "Live in Glasgow" - Psychic TV
0833 "Nuclear Energy" - Con Edison
0834 "Akaka Falls" - Torrent & Alexander Sold
0835 "Retrospective: 1949 - 1981" - Lejaren Hiller
0836 "Pull My Daisy"
0837 "Ahora Neoismus" - Monty Cantsin
0838 "Demolish N.Y.C." - Demo-Moe
I'm interested in the manner in which these lists both record and document popular culture (and perhaps not-so-popular-culture) and provide a sort of minimal biography along the axis of taste and critical judgment and, of course, in the various ways they differ from tENT's film.
The fact that none of the selections from 1967 remain part of the collection, but [almost] all of those from 1988 do suggests: first, an initial transformation in taste, and second, a relative stabilization of a second stage of interests. The chronological record encourages a biographical reading based upon transformation. Certain objects are given up and replaced with others, and the nature of the substitutions we read as a trajectory of critical judgment and the development of identity as a partial function of taste.
In this way the film is more static than the list, since it contains the totality of a particular moment in the collection, but does not record its growth and evolution over time. This raises a few interesting questions concerning the nature of the relationship between biography and narrative. The list implies a certain narrative, however abstractly, because it captures desire and the evolution of object-choice over time and hence in growth and transformation. If "You Haven't..." doesn't do this, in what manner and by what means does it produce an autobiographical portrait?
What the film does manage to put into motion which the list doesn't is the playful spirit of tENT's wit, his manner of organizing and discriminating between genres, types and categories, and the pleasure of producing conceptual as well as visual patterns and rhythms. Can a sense of self emerge through wit just as well as through narrative? I think so, though perhaps it is a different sort of sense of self-- a self revealed through the act of its immediate play and response to contingencies and material constraints.
There are too many examples of such wit to document and describe, but I do recall one in particular which produced some of the most audible laughter from the audience. It occurs in a moment in which, leafing through a pop-up book of human anatomy, tENT encounters a pop-up representation of a penis which he [actually Laura Trussell] gives a few jerks with his [her] hand before proceeding on further through the rest of the book. But humor is ubiquitous in the work: in the use of a simple high-pitched electronic reproduction of a Beatles tune for the duration of the display of a pop-up Beatles volume [the sound track tunes used in the pop-up sections all came from the books themselves], in the jerky high speed through which the movement in the work takes place, and in the quirky rhythms and patterns of motion orchestrated between the various images. Everywhere tENT's eye, hand, and thought is playfully at work, and hence his wit is as much the subject of the work as is his collection.
[..]
Bruce Stater
et in ARTemia, tENT... et Cet E'rata
Mime-Version: 1.0
Date: Thu, 1 Oct 1998 14:40:49 EDT
Reply-To: Experimental Film Discussion List <FRAMEWORKS@LISTSERV.AOL.COM>
Sender: Experimental Film Discussion List <FRAMEWORKS@LISTSERV.AOL.COM>
From: BStater@AOL.COM
Subject: et in ARTemia, tENT... et Cet E'rata
To: FRAMEWORKS@LISTSERV.AOL.COM
"the secrets of evolution are in death and time"-- from the blackhumour reports
Through the month of October tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE and Etta Cetera will be on tour, screening films and video transfers [& videos], projecting filmstrips, narrating slide shows, providing demonstrations, performing experiments, reading
manifestos, and playing party games. tENT will be dazzling vaudiences with his phosphorescent dust mite tattoo and his live demonstrations of "sound thinking" and Etta will be revealing the growth of her new locks, taking photographs and recording stories of our most hair-raising encounters. The tour provides tENT with an opportunity to screen and discuss a voluminous quantity of his older work and to showcase his recent collaborations with Jen Lahn (aka Etta Cetera). As the allusion in the title of this review suggests, tENT and Etta's joint projects focus largely on the theme of death, which they treat with perverse and absurd good cheer, avoiding the sardonic bitterness and contempt, the spleen, typical of blackhumour.
On the evening of September 29, Bradley Eros and Brian Frye hosted tENT et Etta's appearance at NYC's newest experimental film venue, the Robert Beck Memorial Cinema. This full evening of over four hours included the screenings of eleven [5] short films, the projection of two experimental filmstrips, a video tape and slide show overview of tENT's work [+ 7 other videos], and ended with a game of 2001 questions.
All of the work was shown in chronological order, contextualized by tENT's brief comments between and occasionally during the screenings of individual films. The order of presentation coupled with the commentary reinforced the quality of documentation and retrospective which characterized the evening and pushed it, at least in my imagination, in the direction of tENT's myriad and diverse archival projects. (On the archive/collection as structuring device for self-portraiture see "bricoleurmaniabracademwitz")
Either unfortunately or fortunately, depending upon one's disposition toward sound asynchrony, most of tENT's films have separate sound recorded on tape. Last season at MoMA's "Big As Life," "You Haven't Heard the Record..." screened accompanied by tape sound alone; however, at Robert Beck tENT projected a number of the VHS transfers with sound alongside the silent originals. The effect was a double projection of a filmic image either slightly ahead of or slightly trailing a video image with synched sound. tENT commented that one impulse for the double projection was to allow the audience to gauge the extent of the film image-sound asynchrony and perhaps to make mental corrections relying of [on] the video. This idea of this function, whether or not one experiences the dual projection in the manner it proposes, clearly relates to tENT's meditation on aspects of James Peterson's cognitive theory of experimental film presented in the work "Peterson's Restaurant"-- which I will discuss more extensively in a separate post. tENT's brief comment on the double projection points to a set of ideas concerning the filmviewer's responsibility in "solving problems," testing pure perception against the background of various types of schemata, actively filling in the missing elements of the implied representation and participating with the work's construction of sense and meaning. But we also agreed that the double projection also adds yet another layer of "semiotic noise", a prominent feature of much of the work and creates an experience of cognitive dissonance on a different level of participation with the work.
"Les Promenades Hysteriques," "Diszey Spots," and "Peterson's Restaurant" were all shown with simultaneous video and film projection and only in the case of the latter (for reasons which will become obvious following a viewing of the film) did tENT attempt to adjust for a closer synch between them. Most of the work was shown singularly on VHS with the exception of "National Cancer Institute Documentary" a 16mm work made by adding sprocket holes to a strip of microfilm designed to pass through a viewer horizontally rather than vertically as in 16mm reel projection.
The works screened and performed at the Robert Beck included:
[01] "3 Mile Island"
[02] "Paper Dolls in Dava's Class"
[03] "Les Promenades Hysteriques"
[04] from "Philosopher's Union Member's Mouthpieces": #00,009: "Wendy Lee Parker" [#00,015: "Emma Elizabeth Downing"]
[05] "National Cancer Institute Documentary"
[09] "Rupert's Breakfast" ["Department of Failures"]
[06] "Diszey Spots"
[07] "How Orgone Cinema Treats its Visiting Filmmakers"
[08] "Peterson's Restaurant"
[10] "The Postman Always Rings the Homunculus of Hollis Frampton and Woody Allen Twice" ["The Postman Always Rings the Homunculous of Woody Allen & Hollis Frampton Twice"]
[11] "Mirthplace of the Republicans"
[12] "Background Movie for Home Music" [#2]
[13] ["Volunteers Collective"/Slide Show]
[13] "Death Bed Aerobics"
[14] ["The Department of Maybe Presents: Problem Solving Demonstration"]
I will try to address a few of these individually in one or more separate posts, but for the time being, I simply want to encourage all to show up in ARTemia-- each show promises to be a unique and exciting event-- as fascinating, charming and mysterious as the sea-monkey itself.
Bruce Stater
Films of the End
Mime-Version: 1.0
Date: Wed, 4 Nov 1998 23:34:26 EST
Reply-To: Experimental Film Discussion List <FRAMEWORKS@LISTSERV.AOL.COM>
Sender: Experimental Film Discussion List <FRAMEWORKS@LISTSERV.AOL.COM>
From: BStater@AOL.COM
Subject: Films of the End
To: FRAMEWORKS@LISTSERV.AOL.COM
"Painting has not always existed; we can determine when it began. And if its development and its moments of greatness can be drummed into our heads, can we not then also imagine its periods of decline and even its end, like any other idea?"
-- Louis Aragon
The very possibility of the death of painting must have seemed a scandalous idea when suggested by Louis Aragon in his essay "La peinture au defi," first published in 1926. Today ideas concerning the end of artistic forms, genres, and media are passe and banal by comparison.
Of course, even before Aragon's treatise on the topic, the life of painting appeared to have been threatened. For many early theorists of photography, both its proponents and its adversaries, the birth of the mechanically reproducible image heralded the death of the handmade and subjective work of art. In retrospect, some of these speculations may have been a bit premature. It seems that the vitality of performance art, installation, and event dealt painting equal or perhaps more significant blows than did photography and cinema. Recent speculation concerning the death of film at the hands of video and other electronic technologies may or may not prove to be as problematic. Each medium deserves to discover its own proper manner of dying.
Typically the discussion of the end of cinema is raised either at an extremely abstract level of philosophical discourse or on a purely technical plane. It is seldom brought to bear upon the content of recent works, the screenings that are organized, and the new discoveries that are being made. Instead our discussion is more likely to scuttle back and forth between citations of Susan Sontag and the availability of filmstock. Hardly, if ever, has the theme of death been linked to the anxiety of the demise of cinema or the more general anxiety of the end as we approach the fin-de-millenium. Since Lumiere's L'Arrivee d'un train of1895 ostensibly announced both the birth of cinema and that of the twentieth century, perhaps we unconsciously project that the two must depart together as well.
But it is extremely difficult to ignore the ubiquitous sense of the end in the life of recent experimental cinema events that will be familiar to FrameWorks readers. MoMA and San Francisco Cinematheque's current 8mm program is perhaps the paradigmatic case in point. The physical fragility and the historical uncertainty of this mortal gauge is inscribed within almost each individual word of the series title. The tiny gauge finds itself in the midst of a huge program-- huge both in terms of the volume of works in the series and the span of time it covers. Yet, to associate the intimate scale of this medium with life is, conversely, to associate the sublime scale of the program with its death. The word "life" is almost a sort of performative-- a magic word uttered to ward off the sense of an impending finish as the program makes its way toward the year 2000. 8mm film is already inscribed within "history" in the subtitle of the series, and my sense is that this is not a dialectical construction but a designation of a "lost past"-- a moment which is no longer possible. Perhaps Albert Kilchesty constitutes the series intense nostalgia best in the lovely allegory he provides at the outset of his introduction to the program catalog which ends with the question "Where did the little mubies go, Daddy?"
[..]
As I have remarked earlier, tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE and Etta Cetera's recent tour also focuses on the theme of death, and anxieties of both ending and not ending. Their revival of the film strip presents a different type of nostalgia since, unlike 8mm this medium has yet to realize its artistic potential. Nevertheless it is difficult to ignore the playful nostalgia with which tENT and Etta allow many of us to rediscover a medium buried in the childhood memories of our experiences in grammar school. The return to childhood is but one of a number of ways of circumventing the end. Death Bed Aerobics cheerfully inverts the telos of a regimen performed to defer death, substituting a series of instructional exercises designed precisely to prepare one for the end. A sense of non-ending is inscribed within the title The Postman Always Rings the Homunculous of Woody Allen & Hollis Frampton Twice, and even more significantly within both the content and the structure of a film strip t & E are currently working on-- a piece titled In Perplexing Pursuit of the Prodigy Paleontologist, constructed in the form of a Moebius Strip. The game I've referred to as "a round of 2001 questions" which accompanied the screening of The Department of Maybe Presents: Problem Solving Demonstration manipulates the audience's desire for conclusion, which it paradoxically and ironically protracts by forestalling its discovery of the obvious and inevitable. Like Shahrazad's endless production of narrative in The Thousand and One Nights, the length of tENT and Etta's performances themselves seemed to participate in this discourse on finitude. Yet finally, rather than extolling the "perfection of Him whom the vicissitudes of time do not destroy," tENT and Etta's tour found a more appropriate object of adoration for our time and remained content to extoll the perfection of the dust mite.
--Bruce Stater
___________________________________________________________
For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <PipChod@aol.com>.
to the tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE movie-making "Press: Criticism, Interviews, Reviews" home-page
to the "tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - Sprocket Scientist" home-page
to the "FLICKER" home-page for the alternative cinematic experience
to find out more about why the S.P.C.S.M.E.F. (Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Sea Monkeys by Experimental Filmmakers) is so important
for info on tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE's tape/CD publishing label: WIdémoUTH
to see an underdeveloped site re the N.A.A.M.C.P. (National Association for the Advancement of Multi-Colored Peoples)