My Thoughts During and After Catherine Sullivan’s Lecture at the New School
OK quick form:
Catherine Sullivan’s work could be an interesting touchstone for me as I try to develop the body of work I’m now beginning. Her videos are rooted in a narrative film-making, but they complicate the process and the product in ways that I find interesting and relevant. She works with film’s relation to theater, fiction’s relationship to documentary, and with competing formal structures to complicate a video’s content.
OK - I thought about things that you can’t find on google. One of these is “naked bear” to get an image of a hairless bear. You’d probably get pictures of burly, nude gay men. Yep - I’m right. “hairless bear” returns what I’m looking for, though, so I don’t know if it counts. There have been others recently, but I want to keep a running list.
I thought again about restaging the video of a childhood tantrum I had. When I get home I should dig that video up, and just spend some time with the videos of my childhood. I should also get my parents’ old VHS camera, obsolescence being the new new, and all.
I thought again about ways to use spam for art, particularly the Nigerian next-of-kin scam. Catherine Sullivan uses this in her latest video, but there are still lots of possibilities there, and I should flesh out some earlier ideas with this. I should also set up an email account specifically to attract spam. Along these lines I though about the possibilities of using annonymous webcam chats as art-making devices. This is a sketchy idea still, but I think it could go somewhere…
I thought again about video and performance’s positions within the “visual arts”, and how and why this happens. What are the advantages and opportunities? What are the disadvantages and limitations?
I also wanted to remember the name of her composer Sean Griffin, and his music. The setting of Edgar Allen Poe pieces to music in a made-up “neandrathal” tongue were beautiful.
I was very inspired, too, by her collaborative approach, inviting other artists to co-author her pieces. I was thinking about something like this for my videos, but taking it another step, where roles would be changeable and collaboration would be total, and the entire production would also be an experiment in social and work relations.
I didn’t remember the name of a French film-maker whose approach inspired me some time back, without ever having seen his films. I never got to see his films either, because after learning about him I promptly forgot his name. I think she referenced him as a major influence. It would make sense: his films were sort of ethnographic studies that aimed to avoid some of the exoticism of ethnographic film by working with the communities he was filming to create the films and make impromptu narratives. Maybe I could contact her about this. I would be interested in opening a dialog anyway.
