I (or somebody) went to the screening of 'Sleep' last night. I (or some other person) figured this was my one and only chance to see this piece. I have never before been in the geographical proximity of a screening of it (at least that i was aware of), and the odds would seem I never will be again. And having now been, I think that's a damn shame. I don't know if 'Sleep' is good or bad. I don't know if it should be called a 'film.' I don't know if any other rubric would fit it any better. But I would say it's a force to be reckoned with exactly because it confounds categorization, expectation, any aesthetic/cultural convention with which I am familiar. It may be the most radical piece of cinema I have ever seen. I doubt anyone has ever entered a screening of 'Sleep' without knowing a) that it's really, really long, and b) that it's just footage of one guy sleeping. But I don't think there's any way that knowledge can prepare you for the specificity of the experience. I felt I began to get a handle on that specifity maybe 5 or 10 minutes in. There's a series of big contrasty black and white image on a wall. Movement is minimal. Sometimes the images are from angles that thoroughly abstract the subject. Sometimes they are recognizable body parts (a face, a butt crack) but apprehended in a stylized form due to the contrasty image. And everything goes on and on at a variety of unpredictable lengths, until it changes to something else that goes on and on at an unpredictable length. Even with the foreknowledge that the piece is composed of a limited amount of footage repeated multiple times, I found it impossible to discern any pattern or structure. Now, why I say this is radical I because I was not prepared to deal with this, nor, by observation, was anyone else in attendance. By 'not prepared' I don't mean 'unwilling.' There were, of course, people there at the beginning who just gave up and left sooner or later (mostly sooner). I was resolved to stay to the end, but quickly found myself posing the internal question, "OK, now what do I DO?" It's called a 'film', Andy Warhol is known as a 'filmmaker'. The room is full of chairs set up facing the screen, as in a typical film screening. So my first thought was to act the way film audiences are supposed to act: sit politely and quietly pay close attention to what's on the screen and try to make some useful sense or emotional response of the experience. Since I have watched a certain amount of experimental cinema, I'm familiar with works that seems to confound this approach at first, but ultimately reward it in the end after coaxing the viewer to alter some temporal and conceptual expectations (Frampton, especially). But, as I said, for me anyway well before the first reel was halfway through it was apparent that this was not possible with 'Sleep'. One just can't pay attention to it in that way. So if you don't leave, what do you do instead? The 'film' itself offers no instructions, no clues. The compositions on the screen, the significations of the authorship, the fame/infamy of the piece, the curiosity to see how the little variations on not much will proceeed, seem to be enough to keep a few of us hanging around, but none of us seem to know what to do, and we all seem a bit awkward about the propriety of whatever choice we make. Is it wrong to strike up conversations? Is it stupid to just stare at the screen? Man, I'm hungry, what will I miss if I go to Mickey D's for a burger. Could the title be interpreted as an imperative verb? It's pretty hard not to be self aware of your status as a viewer, hard not to have that status problematized, hard not to be aware of every other viewer in the room and how they are dealing with their own likely self-aware and problematized viewership.
My conclusion is that 'Sleep' is what we would now call 'interactive' art. It has no fixed text, because the work is not experienced as a thing that appears up on screen, but as something that happens in a room full of people who react to the screen and to each other in different ways that change and repeat start and stop quite out of sync with the way the images change, repeat start and stop. I can't imagine any two screenings of it would be the same because the reactions to the work become inseperable from the work.
