"art is my weapon"An artist is a person who makes 'art.' 'Art' is a unique physical object that has commodity status. It can be sold, acquired, possessed, collected and accrue economic value in the process of exchange. Without those properties, creative work has no function within the instrumentalities of the art world: you can't do with it the things that art-world people do. So it's 'not art.'
An 'art work' has to have a provenance, and it's history and value as an object becomes tied to the history of it's author. 'Artists' are important in the art world because their imprimatuer affects the commodity status of their work. As such a mediocre film by a painter is more worthy of attention than a great film by a filmmaker, because the painter has an established commodity cache.
I feel kind of gob-smacked that so many people seem not to 'get' the basic political economy of art -- or maybe it's an aesthetic economy, but anyway it's some kind of economy.
Curators still don't know what to do with Duchamp. When I visited the Tate a few years back, they had 'Fountain' on display, accompanied by a wall card that noted in very serious language that this was not the ORIGINAL 'Fountain' by Duchamp himself, but rather a 'limited' reproduction created by Richard Hamilton at Duchamp's behest and with his seal of approval. I almost fell over laughing.
Film upsets the whole aesthetic apple cart. No aura, no cult value: an artform by definition liberated from the old way. There was an implicit (if inchoate) leftist politics in the formation of experimental film institutions such as Anthology, FMC and Canyon. If filmmakers were hostile to the museum and gallery world, they had damn good reason to be, on a variety of higher principles. (This is a very different thing than being hostile to the art in the museums.) Here, as synecdoche, I'll just references the writings of Jack Smith, and note that in his later years he was chummy with the post-marxist folks at Semiotext(e), and suggested that they simply re-title the journal 'Hatred of Capitalism,' (which they later used as the title of an anthology).
“recent exhibition practices have demonstrated the persistent vestiges of not considering film to be a legitimate artistic medium on a par with, say, painting or sculpture -- unless, that is, it is sold in limited editions on the art market. Despite the increasing interpenetration of the worlds of art and experimental film, these lasting ramifications of their differing models of distribution and acquisition continue to mark out a divide between the two realms and their treatment in the contemporary museum.
But time moves on, situations change. It is no longer possible for institutions, much less artists, to support themselves by renting celluloid prints. The all-powerful market speaks, and most of us have to find some way to pay for rent and groceries. The only way for an 'experimental filmmaker' to thrive in the art world is to adopt the practices of that world, even though they may be antithetical to the apparent nature of the medium. As Chuck notes, photography faced a similar problem. Photographic prints though, unlike film prints, are subject to significant manipulation in enlarging from the negative. Thus, a photographic print can achieve auratic, commodity status: there is only one 'Piss Christ' and that has been destroyed...
The selling by filmmakers of limited editions of their work (on celluloid) to museums may, indeed, become more of a norm, as the use of digital reproductions increasingly becomes the norm elsewhere.
In a nutshell, somebody has to pay the bills, and right now the best bet is the 'art-world'. And the only way to extract resources from the art-world is to give them what they value: objects that "fit the art world model of purchasing and ownership."
What then do 'film artists' (or their estates) do? Withdraw all prints from circulation, and sell the entire materiality of the work -- the camera original, internegs, masters, whatever -- to the highest bidder. (At least celluloid HAS a materiality -- if photochemical film posed a problem for the art-world, digital origin in a total nightmare.) So MOMA could be THE owner of, say, Dog Star Man.
Joey Huertas aka Jane Public discourse.
BYE.
