Abigail Child, “Inside the Image Vortez…” continued
I would maintain that a modernist poetics of fragmentation and silence is not enough.
I have written in the recent past of a more hybrid poetics of identity and form—what I have been calling constellational structures, not “mash-ups” exactly but rather "uneven,” combining images and words in an inclusive, nonlinear, non-stringent, more vortexical manner. To describe a certain kind of poetics that melds different materials in digressive or aggressive or associative or unequal parts, in order to constitute a “polymorphous dexterity” rather than simple linear description—this is what I am seeking in my poetry and filmmaking.[1]
To give an example from others’ multimedia work, I can point to the hybrid image work of American filmmaker, cinematographer and multidisciplinary artist Arthur Jafa. His 2016 7 ½ minute video, Love is the message, the message is death, offers up a work that is not montage exactly—his shots do not connect between themselves in classic Eisensteinian relations—but rather shape an associating and disassociating whole. They offer a powerful reflection of the anger, passion, and community of what it means to be Black in America. In Jafa’s work we find a speeding complex of images invoking the body, structural poverty, fashion, style, and institutional brutality.
In his gallery exhibit “A Series of Utterly Improbable, Yet Extraordinary Renditions,” at the Serpentine in 2017, [2] a white face of a presumed model, who appears to be nearly an albino, is studied in close-up amidst a welter of blues and gospel. Life exists as a set of interruptive interferences, screens and reality in incongruent upsets, the bubbling images accompanied by sirens and helicopters, trailer morgues and rampant frictions. We are no longer in the world of fixed plots or events that conventional media or writing might endorse. We are in an equivalency of framing in perpetual instability.
One needs to be more explicit about the moral and political passions, the operative criticality, that exists beneath a potentially rarefied surface of aesthetics. One strives to unleash these seemingly inert forces of silence and abstraction through excess and rhythm—to activate what is left out, both on the page and, yes, on the street. The processes of the formally abstract are permeated by experience, by subversive comedy—less perhaps of the carnival laughter described by Mikhal Bakhtin, and closer to the uneasy laughter of Chris Rock as Loy Cannon in Fargo—seeking a drama that might slice open the artifice of narrative structure to create disorienting amalgams, aesthetic “messes” both tantalizing and provocative.
I think here of Japanese filmmaker and poet Shûji Terayama’s 1971 piece, Sho o Suteyo, Machi e Deyo (Throw Away Your Books, Let’s Go onto the Streets), a feature-length experimental drama that follows a troubled teen negotiating his dysfunctional family. Both metaphor and reflection of Japan’s materialism and social breakdown, the film includes multiple psychedelic digressions. The excessive digressivity of the action forces the audience to wade through banal and heroic fuck-ups and interactions. At times the actor breaks the “fiction” and addresses the audience. As audience, we are left with the question as to what is real and who is real, and where are we and how do we construct—or know—reality? To question the very ground of narrativity. Or in a more recent American film example, Charlie Kaufman’s surreal I'm Thinking of Ending Things (2020) [4] is a contemporary example of this kind of disturbed, disruptive, demented and digressive theatrics that takes the audience astray, even as the rhizomatic form itself remains a meaningful reflection of inconstant emotions and layered social intentions.
To borrow from Audre Lorde, the master’s tools will never dismantle the often white hegemonic structures of modernism. Rather, we must re-sharpen our aesthetic tools against new edges. We must transform our aesthetics into an open field—of multiple compositional possibilities, of diversity that reflects our changing world.
We might ask: what stands in our way—of finding that “open field”?
I suggest that we have learned through the Hollywood-style cinema and its narrativity—as taught in the university—to have totalized expectations of image, plot and the conventions of “meaning.” We’ve come to assume that the moving image is entertainment. That film has become “the movies,” an aesthetic situation into which we plop down after work and watch “characters” talk. (Yes, even poets do that kind of watching.) These are stories without intervention. These are narratives with the classic beginning, middle, and end.
Too often, a reflexive consciousness and spontaneity are relegated to the most eccentric and marginal of filmic constructions. In the “structural film” era of the 1970s, meta-experiments were writ large in work by German director Hans-Jürgen Syberberg (Our Hitler), in the intrepid technical (and comedic) experiments by Canadian Michael Snow, as well as in the echt-meta work of African-American filmmaker Bill Greaves (Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One). Unfortunately, these works exist in the historical background, informing filmmakers but not penetrating the mainstream audience. So the work they represent and the experiments they propose are not center-stage in the minds of our students or the general public, however significant they might be. I would venture to suggest that in universities and in our capitalized entertainment-media world, Alexis de Tocqueville’s nineteenth-century cynical prophecy for American culture and society has become a reality in our era:
Society will develop a new kind of servitude that covers the surface of society with a network of complicated rules, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate. It does not tyrannize but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, ‘till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.
In particular, advertising and lately, even more strongly, the privately owned social-media empires—Twitter, Instagram, Facebook—have been more effective than government in enacting this kind of social-cultural servitude, this tying down of expectations to a so-called normative experience of reality and time. And American film is indictable. Paul Virilio speaks of the growth of technology, and specifically television, to suggest how it separates us directly from the events of real space and real time, making us all the more submissive to our “dissimulated environment.”[2]
Certainly, avant-garde strategies have been utilized in advertising. I have always been sensitive to Virilio’s critique, when upon occasion colleagues and audiences have made comparisons of my work to commercials, or recommended I read Virilio’s Speed and Politics. I would argue that my content, in filmmaking as well as poetry, and intent, are different, and that the audience “reads” this. But that doesn’t give me a pass, even as it makes me pause. If the speed of my work (and Jafa’s please note) reflects the world as it is, is this a dangerous reification or an invitation to engage in constant change? If we locate sexist gestures in the past (and present), is this authentic critique or just a repeat of what is or an appeal to a commodity culture that is absorbed with sexuality? Neither form alone nor interiority are sufficient.
The outer world, the street itself, pulls me in: the city, the urban mix, my own need to explore gender and race. I began as a documentarian making a film on a black prostitute and her pimp, entitled Game. This enabled three commissions for WNBC’s New York Illustrated. For the weekly, long-form news show on one of the three main US broadcast television stations at the time, we were allotted six weeks from concept to airplay. One commission was on radical nuns in Brownsville, another an award-winning piece on street gangs in the South Bronx that I was able to research for two months previous (by going without pay), and which resulted in me filming in a neighborhood where the city police would not go, and where our sound men—and they were large white men—quit each night out of racism and fear. I was known as “the girl who carried a switchblade” back at my grad school because of these kinds of projects. That description was ridiculous and only spoke to the distance from the university to actual life on New York City streets in the 1970s.
Always in my work there’s been a push-pull dynamic with content. I’m aware through my training, both in film and anthropology, of the stereotype of the tall white male filming a small dark person. I remember Joan Didion’s comment that being a small woman (and I am that) makes you a less fearful figure, able to be accepted in more places. As a filmmaker, then, a divide between my need/love/sighting of form, its importance to change the terms/context/ frame of the “narrative,” and the constant of the world out there confront each other. How to speak to what is happening outside our interiority, outside ourselves, and to find a poetic form that reflects the world, addressing the context and forces of commodity culture?
What else stands in our way?
Anger by audiences, at what is not understood. I have experienced anger not only with film audiences and my own students, but most disturbingly, with university administrations. In one example during the years I was teaching at New York University (NYU), I witnessed student ridicule via a mocking film presentation. For five years, I had been teaching beginning-Super 8 to all the entering undergraduate film students in their undergraduate film program. I would have students read a range of radical poetics, from William Blake’s eighteenth-century illustrated work to Charles Bernstein’s “Three or Four Things I Know About Him.” I would show Luis Bunuel’s Land Without Bread (1933) as well as Trinh T Min-ha’s more recent Reassemblage (1982). I offered these poetry and film texts to get students to discuss poetics, gender, work, colonialism, and identity. I wanted to offer students new ways to look at the world and film. The student who mocked these texts and others was a conservative young man from the US South. He performed a film presentation in which he pretended to be me, acting out the teacher, turning off the lights, and showed a double-screen piece with out-of-focus material. His “presentation” of abstract, out-of-focus film mocked work specifically by Stan Brakhage, whose films I had shown the week before and whose work utilizes hand-held camera, painting, multiple exposures and other experimental techniques. For this student, anything outside the nineteenth-century model of plot and three-point perspective, was not art, was not “reality.”
More disturbingly, at another college where I taught (Sarah Lawrence), and after I had just described my work as utilizing irony as a strategy, a university dean moved closer to me and asked: “What do you do if a student is sincere?” Her naïve notion of “sincerity” made my mouth gape. Did I really hear that? I responded that my art work was not identical to how I negotiate with students—and that my irony was sincere, pointing to Gulliver’s Travels, Russian Samizdat, and the comedic work of Richard Pryor, in which irony sources sincere social critique.
Also standing in our way is the “Reality” model itself, as it is taught in university creative writing and art programs, and as it exists in the mainstream media entertainment universe. In American culture we are surrounded by a normative style of representation, one that we see regularly on television and at the movies. This style is the direct historic inheritance of the Renaissance, and its development of a Western perspectivalism. It over-occupies our screen time. David Hockney writes that “photography has…done us damage, that it has made us all see in a rather boring similar way.” He adds, “We live in an age when vast numbers of images are made that do not claim to be art. They claim something much more dubious. They claim to be reality.”[4]
I seek to break through this notion of representational “reality.” When I am teaching, I ask students to imagine their commute to work. Then I ask: What is the passage between waking up and coming to school? What are you thinking along the way? Where are you? What are you seeing from your bike? Or the bus? Are you are hoping to catch sight of a person you have a crush on, or remind yourself you can’t forget your mom's birthday, or remember you forgot your glasses or your favorite pen? In other words, I want them to consider how their passage is not a linear straightforward occurrence. Then I ask them how they might record that non-linear interiority and exteriority that exists at the same time? How they might use non-linear montage, or focus (in and out), frame positioning, or a-chronology to represent, depict their lives in full complexity, subjectively and psychologically?
Teaching at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, for the past sixteen years, I have asked students to become adept decoders of media images. I ask them to see through appearances to understand the meaning within, however concealed that “meaning” might be. For example, in addressing the falsity of ads, I might quote—you can be the “one” in Guess jeans—pointing out that these ads are being promoted to millions. I ask them to see deeply enough so that they are longer normalizing the callousness of the New York Times advertising and editorial departments, which have placed ads for Tiffany’s diamonds and gold jewelry next to photos of starving bodies across the globe. I ask students to train themselves to stop overlooking these inequalities, the so-called “incongruities” that are integral insults to our minds and the realities of the people on whom they report.[5]
If Gilles Debord’s Society of the Spectacle was supposed to “denounce the machinery of social domination in order to equip those challenging it with new weapons”—of humor and detournement—Jacques Rancière suggests, instead, that we’ve come to “a disenchanted knowledge of the reign of the commodity and the spectacle, of the equivalence between everything and everything else and between everything and its own image.”[6] For Claudia Rankine, the Black American poet best known for her multimedia poetry work about racism in America and across the globe, entitled Citizen, “reality” is different again. She sees the racist machinery of “reality” penetrating life with constant jolts—“as light as the rain seems, it rains down on you.” Her weapon of choice is words. Bringing the jolts into focus, she adds: “No one should adhere to the facts that contribute to narrative, the facts that create lives. To your mind, feelings are what create a person, something unwilling, something wild, vandalizing whatever the skull holds.”[7]
Growing up in white suburbia, I nonetheless lived in a world of constant jolts, receiving a reductive education by being female, by being “a girl.” Sponsored advertisements were our myths: the Double-Mint gum jingle, the Clairol hair ads with their white faces and shiny locks (impossible to imitate), the Ralston Purina checkered packaging, the dog and Gramophone of RCA Victor (these are totally dating me I realize). These along with the rituals of racist and misogynist play were part of my American suburban upbringing: whether “Cowboys and Indians,” or miniature tea parties, or the violence of cartoons that I feasted on, these images were strange and alerting to me. Somehow I knew we were being sold down the river and it was a river ending at a closed door—of experience, of equality, of meaningful work. The corporate, sexist, and institutional takeover was already on the move.
In my work, I try to upset those narrative ideals and the associative social ideals they represent, to bring these debased and common rituals into focus: in order to de-assimilate them, and us from them. In that light, I would like to offer an excerpt from my 2011 film, entitled, Cake and Steak, which is part of my film trilogy on American suburbia. Here I am working to de-familiarize the images and sounds from the 1950s and ‘60s, typical and all too familiar—the vistas under which many of us grew and against which we rebelled:
[1] Melissa Ragona’s curatorial work at Brooklyn’s Union Docs, New York, in March 2016, used an idea of “constellation”; she has been exceptionally helpful in discussing these concepts.
[2] Paul Virillo, Speed and Politics: An Essay on Dromology, trans. Mark Polizzotti (New York: Semiotext(e), 1977 [1986]), 21.
[3] Trinh T. Min-ha, “Outside In Inside Out,” in Questions of Third Cinema (London: BFI Publishing, 1991 reprint), 133-34.
[4] David Hockney in A Bigger Message, Conversations with David Hockney (New York City: Thames and Hudson, 2011; 2016 [updated and expanded edition]), 52.
[5] See Jeanne Liotta Tiffany One-Cuts, at Songs for Presidents, 1673 Gates Avenue (basement), L/M to Myrtle-Wyckoff, Brooklyn NY, January 8-February 14, 2016.
[6] Jacques Ranciére, The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliott (New York: Verso, 2011), 18.
[7] Claudia Rankine, Citizen, An American Lyric (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2014), 62.