Art Social

In titling this post I found that Art Social is a business that sponsors painting and wine tasting classes...which is sort of the opposite of what I intended this post to be about! I do lean towards the socially conscious practice of art, whether through content, action or just plain thoughtful living. A few things caught my eye this week that are important to the crossover of creativity and progressive thinking which to me should be one of the foundation of deciding to put things into the world in the first place! Below are a list of programs and resources that I think are vital to the way we look at not just art...but at everything. (All pictures courtesy of The Illuminator, Mission: To smash the myths of the information industry and shine a light on the urgent issues of our time.)

1. The Memphis Brooks Museum was an amazing place I visited a few years back, gracious hosts, a supreme art collection, community building & outreach, all perched upon a large green park in the middle of a ramshackle, sweltering, and awesome (!) city. This museum is currently hosting a series of tours for Alzheimer's patients that I think is absolutely incredible. The tours are directed, intimate, and focus on talking with the patients as individuals in hopes of invoking some sort of clarity or memory for those afflicted with the disease. Taking my own brain degenerative parent to see a Dali exhibit a few years back was truly something that touched him in a way that little else has, I am glad to see other people recognize the therapeutic value of art for these particular patients. This is a program that should be supported, cherished and copied throughout all museums!

2. The main thing that keeps me going in terms of blogging is the e-mails that I get from readers, a wide range of people who find this little site one way or another. Most recently an activist researching contacts for an infographic about the dangers & failings of tech industry jobs reached out after coming across my review of Blood In The Mobile- a beautiful, vivid doc/expose about African mineral mining. Apparently there is still little transparency when it comes to the sources of cell phone minerals but some orgs, like Make IT Fair for example, are still trying to make a better, cleaner, socially conscious wired world. Ask questions about your phone, who knows how many people are ultimately effected by it. (Also, I am really into the infographic craze as of late! A succinct, transmittable platform that displays information in an image based way creating maximum impact and exposure- a true melding of art & knowledge and a step up from a pesky graph! LOVE!)

3. Sort of can't believe I haven't written about The Public School on here before...are you familiar with this project? There is little info about the inception of The Public School other than that it started in 2007 in the basement of the Telic Arts Exchange in L.A. The way I interpret it is that proposals are made for classes, discussions, groups on a variety of subjects (The NoCal May calendar alone ranges from "Intro to Sanskrit" to a class titled "Fantastic Spaces In Cinema: Last Year at Marienbad"), usually on topics that are filling in the gaps of standard education, or promoting a specific type of community building activity. To me the most important phrase I came across when reading about The Public School was this: It is a framework that supports autodidactic activities, operating under the assumption that everything is in everything. I myself and a firm believer in self education, and also that the more we learn about as much as we can the more informed life we can lead (a belief in action that is more than evident in this little bloggy post!). The Public School operates in many major cities, take advantage of this resource!

4. And, last but not least: PUBLIC LIBRARIES! The small town I live in up in the bottom of Vermont has had some shady library board dealings as of late, a thing that I hope our little river community is done with for now...but, the experience did make me value the resource even more! The first job I ever had was a library page, then I had my brief stint in the New York book publishing kingdom, moving on to the film, arts & writing realms- all areas of my life tending to slope into the safe stacks brimming with free information and hushed tones. I know the internet allows so much information to be, literally, at our fingertips, making us tend towards discounting libraries, but libraries (in the progressive role they so often play) are changing with the rest of the world too, filling the new needs of the tech info revolution. Historical databases, Arduino workshops, downloadable e-books, lectures on constellations employing open source planetarium-esque apps are just a few of the ways my small town library is keeping up with the world! A librarian I know was talking about the basic function of libraries, of how they came into existence, and the terms she put it in were ones I never thought of: to educate and inform those who need to be informed in order to feel and be empowered- a true statement that my Brechtian heart fluttered at! Love your library! Dammit! It might just be the key to a new revolution!

Ok, so now I think I got some socially conscious artistic resources out of my system and out into the world! I know these types of posts don't get a lot of hits but I will continue to make them as I feel it is my civic duty to bridge life and art...in fact, it is everyone's civic duty to inform themselves for the betterment of both themselves and the world (do I sound like the label to Dr. Bronner's yet?). Learning Not Fear!

Music Videos and Beyond, Art or Ad or Both?

Mac DeMarco: My Kind of Woman on Nowness.com

(Leg note: Fibula? Still broken. Ligaments? Totally snapped & repairing. Ability to walk or drive? Zero. Please bear with me as I continue to struggle to write through a pain-killer and lilac wine spritzer fog.) I completely forgot to write about my journey to the foreign borough of Queens a few months back- a pilgrimage to the often heard about but never visited The Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria. I don't know what I was expecting...mostly I guess I wasn't expecting much since many of my Queens experiences have left me disappointed and lost in near surburban-esque sprawl of graveyards, and houses with fences (& yards!), as landing strips feel a little too close- hunkering airplanes in descent forming a claustrophobic ceiling between the cities low slung blocks... As I walked under the endless elevated train and down the blocks that feel like New Jersey, a huge, sleek, angular beacon sat perched between the old building bricks of Queens, slyly tucked near old (and even current) working NY film studios! The reason I wanted to bring this place up now of all times is because there is a new exhibit there that I think is really pivotal in the realm of film & art- and also media & consumerism- crossover: music videos.



Music videos don't just mark the MTV generation of short attention spans they are also the threshold of tons of different media centered exploits extending from the original Scopitone video jukeboxes that began the marriage of music/advertising/and image outside of commercials (speaking of which there is an AMAZING article/book review about the birth of music & ads & digital media over at n+1 that is sooo worth a read, the parallels to film are striking and totally engaging) to even the youtube generation of short snippets of ideas and sounds being broadcast to larger and larger outlets as technology hurtles forth. Music videos also have a legacy of being open to budding auteurs, to taking stylistic, conceptual and even technological risks that cinema would be unable to gamble on.



In terms of music videos, the video isn't the product being sold the "music" is, making the director freed up, the music oftne acting as a wedge for holding open whatever crazy idea is rattling around in the director's brain. In fact, the DVD compilation series Director's Label from Palm Pictures are a perfect example of the art of the music video and the way they act as springboards for so much talent...an extra on the DVD of Michel Gondry's first edition with Director's Label (my favorite of his music vids embedded above!) includes a VHS demo of one of his crazy ideas that he mailed to Beck in attempts to solicit a music video job (he tied shoes to his shoes, walked backwards, and reversed the tape making it seems as if the disembodied shoes were leading the way- a simplistic twist turned into a second if a huge production), a continuing collaboration that has resulted in amazing visions.



The exhibit at the Museum of Moving Image (a space I promise to write more about at length later!) is called Spectacle: The Music Video and seems to take a very physical approach to a very fleeting medium. Composed of props, recreated sets, screenings, an original Scopiotone and even a lounge where you can access a digital archive of videos you personally want to see, it seems to set out to make people take pause about the work, ingenuity and evolution of the music video. I can't speak for the actual exhibition but I am really excited that it exists, elevating the hard work of music video director's into a historical, artistic, and filmic canon of sorts. I also appreciate that artists (like Allison Schulnick whose hobo clown work is largely unknown outside of her music video for Grizzly Bear pasted above) and innovators (Sledgehammer, the legendary Peter Gabriel song that made claymation, stop motion, and analogue animation a household viewing experience) are being presented to the masses in this slightly exalted form...a thing we think of as a sort of commercial or low art being elevated to something so much more, solidifying the creative link between disciplines that we sometimes discount thanks to the heavy fog of capitalism.





Actually, that n+1 piece I mentioned above discusses the "selling out" of musicians in a way I think plays out almost the opposite when it comes to music videos? Musicians are often criticized for lending a song to a commercial in order to make money (an increasing reality thanks to the "decade of dysfunction," of the early 2000s where the digital revolution choked the revenue out of album sales). Music videos on the other hand really are advertisements for music, a way of expressing a particular image of a performer to increase appeal of the creative product they are selling, and lately it feels as if the music video is becoming even more of a genre and money maker with very little shaming on behalf of the (well paid) director! The trend of longer length video/short films (oftentimes littered with product placement beyond the musician) of pop music seems to be in full force providing money for newer, edgier directorial talent and a larger platform for their work.



Sigur Rós - Varðeldur from Sigur Rós Valtari Mystery Films on Vimeo.

 Gaga & Beyonce, Janelle Monae's ongoing sci-fi saga, and Kanye's Runaway Opus, all push the music video & film crossover and do so in ultimatley profitable ways blurring the lines between advertisement, music, film, popstar, artist, seller out or buyer in, and through new platforms that have only recently become available (iPad apps for Daniel Johnston and Bjork showcase the music but through image based, interaction that even begins to blur the lines of any media or genre we have a name for, and projects like Sigur Ros' ambitious music video /art/album comp take the traditional video but upgrade the beauty, afforded by the content being available for purchase)....I doubt the Museum of the Moving Image touches on this new frontier of consumerist film-art-music-video-extended ad-new platform music video but it is definitely a current reality that will shape the future of these media and also shape the future of audiences, auteurs, artists, and rockstars in ways we can't begin to envision! Exiting times in a post-MTV world!

Orphan & Bastard: The New/Old Indies

Well we can all acknowledge the death of indie film, right? I mean...indie is no longer synonymous with the terms of production as it is a style, feel and commodified counter-culture vibe. People call Wes Anderson indie. Wes Anderson's last movie supposedly cost $16million to make. And the "Independent Spirit" awards is just that, a spirit, given that an indie is defined as costing under $500,000 as opposed to something like Clerks which rang in at under $30,000 during the original indie heyday. So...where does this leave the real independent filmmaker? And how do we even define indie filmmaker nowadays? I don't know. But I do know I have been seeing more and more indie film iterations popping up that might just be the next step in the indie film chain.

The first one I came across recently was "bastard film." An person I know was flooding facebook a few weeks back with constant blurry shot of film screens, bingo games (?), and dudes sitting in chairs to form various panel-like situations all under the umbrella of some unknown event called the Bastard Film Encounter. After some research, it turns out that this little symposium that took place in Raleigh North Carolina is something of an ephemeral filmmaker's dream composed of films dubbed bastard- as defined by the fest's website as "something irregular, inferior, spurious or unusual." The "Thematically clustered screening" and "lengthy discussion q&a sessions" centered around a wide ranging group of films, some long forgotten documents of things best forgotten, others bordering the eerie home movie, and others adaptations of books into movies into other movies, into art- all centering around a discourse about the need, desire, and importance of preserving these misfit films. The fest itself seemed to draw quite a few names in the bastardly world of film too with people like the Keynote speaker artist/Curator of Collections at the Anthology of Film Archives Andrew Lampert, Liz Coffrey a conservator at the Harvard Film Library, Kelli Hix the Curator of Moving Images at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum and even a banjo playing archivist/researcher in the form of Rich Remsberg. I couldn't find too much information on what went down at this event but with screening headings like "Regional Memorabilia," "Conversion Narratives," Sliced and Diced," and "Fascinating Detritus" one can only imagine the things shining brightly onto the pupils of this audience of bastards! And then, this fest lead me to the discovery of another brand of offbeat indie: the orphan film.

The Orphan Film Symposium, this years event coming up May 10th & 11th, is a venture between The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences and NYU/Tisch School of the Arts. "Orphan," as it's known, describes it's films as those "..abandoned by its owner or caretaker...films outside the commercial mainstream: public domain materials, home movies, outtakes, unreleased films,  industrial and educational movies..." and so on and so on. Two stand outs from this years bill are A Portrait of Jason, Shirley Clarke's recently restored 1967 experimental documentary about a gay, black, "hustler" a film & subject pushed the boundaries of race, sexuality and culture and has all but been lost until now...and the other stand out is a screening of the only surviving "Auroratone" film which was a genre of near psychedelic, crystalline light show scenes set to slow, calming music produced in the 40s meant as a form of meditative healing mostly for post traumatic stress suffering war veterans. Orphans, like bastards, seem to have a tendency towards the anthropological side seeing these nearly discarded relics as historical artifact in need of preservation, which is what I think connects these categories to the roots of indie film.



The Indie film genre began as a platform for unheard voices unable to be be funded by the mainstream, the counterculture, the underground just as the orphans & bastards are remnants of ideas that people felt the need to preserve and promote for whatever reason. To take it a step further, youtube, vimeo, videocamera phones, vine- are all nearly instant access to moving images, a new kind of DIY whose digital archives are incalculable- all part of everyday voices that can be accessed like never before. The orphans and the bastards really are the forefathers of a new type of indie cinema- the lost home movies, the glimpses of the unseen, the beauty in someone- anyone's- vision through a camera (or now, a phone or computer or eyeglass) lens. By making the moving image medium more approachable where is it heading? Will new ideas, new platforms, more ways of seeing emerge? Most likely yes, as will a multitude of lives and pictures people have never seen before...the promise for a globalization of cultural sharing through film is on the brink of new dawn and I really hope this fact will let all the orphans & bastards out there have a voice, and maybe even gain attention in causes, issues, lifestyles & beauty we barely even know exist.