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Browsing Cinema & Media Studies by Subject "Art criticism"
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Item Open Access Dissertation in Which There Appear Lost Punchlines, Dreadful Puns, Low Resolution, etc.: On the Failure of Humour in Avant-garde Film and Video(2019-11-22) Moneo, Cameron David; Zryd, MichaelThis dissertation explores the overlooked functions that humour has served in American avant-garde film and video, arguing that humour is involved consistently in many of the key operations and philosophies that have energized these moving image practices. Taking humour as an alternative historical and interpretive lens, this dissertation conducts new readings of three major formations or moments in the discourse of the American avant-gardes. These are: underground film, structural film, and early feminist video art. A branching theme of these readings is failure, seen to carry complex meanings and humorous pleasures in various cases of avant-garde activity. The introductory chapter details the propagandization of failure in the 1960s underground cinema, and argues that a divisive brand of humour highlights the sense of the avant-garde in this cinema. Chapter 1 re-conceptualizes the humourless structural film movement of the 60s and 70s, arguing that, for filmmakers like Michael Snow, the idea of structure is not a dogmatic working principle but something of a ruse, one whose limits are meant to be teased, pushed, and exceeded. Moving to early feminist video art, Chapter 2 emphasizes the importance of humour in the project of articulating feminist political horizons. In videotapes by Susan Mogul and Martha Rosler, performative nonchalance and lack of preciousness about low-grade equipment can be seen as forms of humorous delivery, which stay utopically open to future re-articulations. Circling back to underground film, Chapter 3 locates humour in the failure to distinguish sharply between the avant-garde and popular culture. Through readings of humour in queer underground film, and then in more recent pop appropriation videos, this chapter illustrates the hilarity, critique, and utopian feeling that can result when the effects of pop and of the avant-garde are brought excessively close. This dissertation assembles conceptual scaffolding for understanding humorous failure as a variable avant-garde theme, drawing upon such scholars as Matei Calinescu, Jack Halberstam, and Jose Esteban Munoz. With failure in mind, this dissertation further reflects on the instability of humour itself as an object of study, and as a device, attitude, or value that might be put to work for us.Item Open Access "Inventories of Limbo": Post-Minimal Aesthetics in Cinema From the Readymade to Institutional Critique(2016-09-20) Horwatt, Elijah Saul; Zryd, MichaelThis dissertation charts the philosophical premises of post-minimalism in the practices of experimental filmmakers and video artists, exploring specific reorientations of cinematic works since the late 1960s. Post-minimalism refers to a myriad of aesthetic transformations initiated by the conceptual art movement, interrogating the ontology of art from a perspective outside its historical bonds to medium, style, and Kantian aesthetic judgment. I examine three strategies in the progression of post-minimal aesthetic practice: the readymade, institutional critique, and seriality. A central goal of this research is to remap entrenched language and ideas in the spheres of the arts and cinema to point to a profound reciprocity between cinematic technology and post-minimal aesthetic intelligence, perception, and judgment. This research moves away from the problems raised by artificially constructed movements and prescriptive categories which inevitably produce important sites of exception, and look instead to the aesthetic engines of post-minimal artmaking offering opportunities for constant renewal, evolution, and refinement. I follow these aesthetic engines like a knights tour in chess, jumping through history, appearing in unexpected places and at unexpected times to draw continuities in the approach to the heretical breaks from modernism found in post-minimal aesthetic intelligence. I will primarily focus on four objects: William E. Jones Tearoom, Robert Smithsons Underground Cinema, Lis Rhodes collaborative intervention into the Film as Film exhibition, and Christian Marclays The Clock. Examining the use of Marcel Duchamps concept of the readymade, and its profound assault on both medium specificity and authorship, I illustrate radical new ethical imperatives in the presentation of found footage filmmaking. My two core chapters grapple with ontological and locative explorations of cinematic architectures and sites. The two projects discussed engage with institutional critique, a philosophical model of artmaking which directly engages the sites, economic infrastructures, administrative imperatives, and power dynamics of the cinema, museum, and gallery. Finally, I examine a case study in contemporary post-minimal practice through Christian Marclays 24-hour installation The Clock, and will explore its relationship to archival projects engaging in the collection, ordering, and hermeneutic approach to 20th century media. I will explore this installation as symptomatic of both a technologically determined grammar of collection for the now immense digital archive, and an archeological inclination for artists to thematize film history.Item Open Access "The Place of Imagination": Humphrey Jennings and the Biopoetics of Everyday Life(2020-11-13) Birdwise, Scott William Douglas; Marchessault, Janine MicheleThis dissertation seeks to reanimate discussion of British artist and documentary filmmaker Humphrey Jennings by reconsidering his body of work in light of the biopolitical transformations of modern life. While biopolitics is a familiar paradigm in the humanities and social sciences that understands how the category of life, in the figure of the population, became the primary object of political management and control, Jennings is famous for his poetic documentary films about the everyday life of resistance during the Second World War. Remembered as the cinematic poet of ordinary people, Jennings combined his concern with everyday life with his ongoing interest in Classical and Romantic traditions of poetry and painting modulated by the formative influence of Surrealism, to become one of the most significant British documentary filmmakers of the first half of the twentieth century. Bringing together a concern with everyday life with questions of poetic form and meaning, then, this dissertation uses the concept of biopoetics to examine how Jennings repeatedly returns to an animating tension between the poetic imagination of the people, on the one hand, and the management of the population on the other. In order to draw out how Jenningss oeuvre is animated by tensions within the people/population, this dissertation moves roughly chronologically through a selection of Jennings's projects, including his contributions to British Surrealism and the social research organization Mass-Observation in the 1930s; his unfinished imaginative history of the Industrial Revolution, Pandaemonium; and his documentary films made under the auspices of the Crown Film Unit during the war. In each case, this dissertation examines how Jenningss use of an array of poetic and cinematic techniques emerges from a biopoetic desire to at once document and transform the everyday life of the people.Item Open Access Trolling Aesthetics: The Lulz as Creative Practice(2015-12-16) Knuttila, Lee Gabriel; Marchessault, Janine Michele“The LULZ” became common Internet parlance in the mid-2000s to describe a wide array of online phenomena, from childish pranks, to the peculiar discourse of anonymous message boards, to a shadowy and subversive ideology. By the end of the decade, the canon of images and icons associated with the LULZ entered into artistic practice and along with it a certain dark understanding of the “digital condition” of online mediation. “Trolling Aesthetics: the LULZ as Creative Practice” charts how the LULZ began as an aesthetic sense and sensibility on the notorious message board 4chan. Akin to most online content, it quickly morphed into a multitude of new forms, including, for example, the video remix practice YouTube Poop, which takes the aesthetic logic of 4chan but changes its creative systems and output. The result is both a discordant bric-a-brac of absurd digital art and an example of how the LULZ functions, beyond idle message boards, as a purposeful creative work. The final chapter follows this trajectory into direct artistic practices. Unlike many of the earlier iterations that sputter rather than comment fully on what such digital culture means, artist projects like Brad Troemel’s The Jogging mobilizes the LULZ to reflect on a network of technology obsessed with speed, time, identity, and representations. Through a blend of material, expressive, and aesthetic approaches, this dissertation is both a historical analysis of the emergence of the LULZ as well as a socio-historical critique of an online world willing to foster, participate, and partake in such an ethos.