Videodrome : Jessica Fenlon
Slavic's interventions allow us to forget the photograph's authority. Permitted to reimagine, we retain the authority to reimagine a destruction we were formerly reluctant to consider at all.
Slavic frames other images with decorative interlacing. The frames emphasize photographer's role as storyteller. Her playful use of animal imagery evoke other books, Western books of hours, Catholic prayer manuals used by the laity from the 7th to the 13th centuries. She pulls images from the news media's text and inserts them in another narrative.
We read the news, taking in information about the world through stories authored by reporters, illustrated by photographers and videographers. Books of prayer also tell stories about the world. In many traditions, these books function as tools by which the user actively participate in recreating the world.
Whence the authority of image? What author do you believe? What story engages, the one where each of us participates, or the one where we are powerless witness-to?
With all the argument about the relative truth of God's existance, we forget that religion has other functions. Slavic's repeated invocations of varied religious visual traditions points to the power of the human imagination to envision solutions. Perhaps our capability to imagine a God, a Being somehow capable of loving destructive creatures as ourselves, shows we have the power to imagine a better reality for ourselves and actually make that happen in the world.
Its not that the sky will or won't fall. We make the sky fall. Somewhere in the world someone is making the sky fall as you read this. Slavic gives me no alarm about this. Instead, she reminds me that how we choose to see the pieces affects the decisions we make about them.
Are her manipulations of illusions with illusions the simple scent of beauty covering destruction? Is it childlike to want to bandage the wounds we have made on the world? Or is this impulse some higher responsibility we must answer to?
3.
Art is not an argument. Art can never be right. Art rarely tells a story. When it does, it's not always the story we want to hear, especially if it is good art.
Venus was the goddess of Beauty. Often she is confused with Art. When Art is beautiful, it can more easily seduce the viewer.
A little beauty in art is a good thing. Without it, the artist will probably alienate the audience. Imagine the viewer's response: It's ugly, and it doesn't make sense to me. Why the hell should I spend time looking at that? Hence the rarity of the major museum's Joseph Beuys retrospective. True though the work may be, dead plants, piles of lead, and wool suits are an acquired taste.
Venus married Vulcan, the craftsman god, because he made a gorgeous necklace for her (gave beauty to beauty). Then she cheated on him with Ares, the god of war. Oh, aesthetics! How appearances seduce. A man in uniform is so sexy. Then we find out that he's on trial for raping and murdering civilians in another country.
Video is as seductive a medium as Venus is a goddess. Only crappy lighting or unintentional shooting exposes the shittiness of the work. Then, our attention is freed enough to think about what we're seeing.
One of the jokes amongst artists in my graduate program was, "The work sucks. So make it big. If that doesn't work, make it red. If that doesn't solve the problem, make it shiny." The next response? Turn it into a video. Video is the red lipstick and pearls that perfects the worn-out, last-season little black dress. When projected, it is big and shiny. The look is probably more blue than red, but definitely clean.
When story enters the picture, we're in the realm of Video-masquerading-as-Film. Remember, Video can be anything. That's where we're going next.
4.
Our local filmmakers are providing us with some new stories. Lets put that albatross of "Pittsburgh being defined by what it has lost" behind us, shall we? Pittsburgh Neighborhood Narratives film festival opened Thursday, September 25th with its first screening at the Regent.
Project coordinators Andrew Halasz and Kristen Lauth Shaeffer solicited filmmakers from all over Pittsburgh, blanketing the city with postcards inviting people to participate. I found cards all over the place. I gave them to friends who work in narrative video. As someone who makes what generally looks like nonsense, bizarre, or strange (i.e. "art" video), narrative film isn't my thing.
As they wrote on the project site (a nicely-dressed affair with requisite Flash opening) "Inspired by the way the neighborhoods of Paris were celebrated in the film Paris Je T'Aime, we thought it would be really cool to see the diverse neighborhoods of Pittsburgh celebrated in the same way."
I was a little nervous going to see a 90-minute program of separately-produced films edited into one larger piece, but it works. Halasz and Shaeffer stitched together the films in a screening order that make sense. Transitions between each film, buses naming the next arriving neighborhood, are a perfectly appropriate conceit.
The stories bubbled up from our very Pittsburgh neighborhoods, each little community woven into the next by bus lines and through streets. Sometimes they talk to each other, sometimes they argue, sometimes they make up.
Watching each piece I realized that even how they were made said something about the neighborhood in which they are set. In Lawrenceville, we have Mombie, an excellent take on that neighborhood's hipster-feminist population, a story told in the hippest genre of all, Pittsburgh's rich tradition of zombie films.
Bus Stop, for Downtown Pittsburgh, is an engaging story drawn from the lives of twentysomethings who leave and come back - or never leave to begin with. The narrative features departure and return in our vernacular. It also features the spectacular views that helped seduce me into moving here in the first place.
Fussy neighbors in gorgeous houses in Regent Square are in attendance, with new transplants meeting the old guard and their well-worn habits. The past collides with the present in Homestead's library, and generations with parallel concerns intersect on screen. In each of these pieces, the consequences of these meetings open an unpredictable dance. The freshness of this work, the original solutions to traditional narrative structures make the work well worth seeing and seeing again as it is screened throughout the city.
Sometimes a neighborhood's realities overwhelm the filmmakers. The filmmaker who created a work for Mt. Oliver pulled it from the festival because he found his own work too depressing. We all struggle to remake this city.
This film shows exactly how art can best help Pittsburgh. Not in providing beautiful murals that create an environment where, perhaps, fewer muggings will happen (though that's a part of it). This art is not the work of physical gentrification. Art itself can't do that. Only real political leadership, real jobs for the real workforce still seeping away can do that.
This art is the work of the psychological transformation that precedes any other new growth. These filmmakers created a window through which the viewer can catch a glimpse of the Pittsburgh that is beween, that is growing. All the small stories that go into that growth. Like Slavic's paintings, the Pittsburgh Neighborhood Narratives provide new openings for seeing our relationship to the present.
Artists can't and don't save the world. For the most part, people tend to see artists as strange and vaguely useless or dangerous creatures. But, perhaps the world is not a problem to be solved. Artists create. On good days, that means other people in the world are given a new perspective.
Suzanne Slavic's show, R & R & R, exhibits at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts from September 12 to November 2. She has a scheduled gallery talk on October 9. Visit the PCA Website for more information.
Screenings for Pittsburgh Neighborhood Narratives ... and visit - http://pghneighborhoodnarratives.com
Thursday September 25 - Regent Square Screening (Premiere) - Regent Square Theater, 7:30 pm
Sunday September 28 - Bloomfield Screening - Brillobox, 8:00 pm (21+ - with live music performance)
Friday October 3 - Homestead Screening - The Pumphouse, 7:30 pm
Sunday October 5 - Hill District Screening - Hill House Theater, 2:00 pm
Sunday October 12 - Downtown Screening - Harris Theater, 2:00 pm
Tuesday October 21 - Southside Screening - Rex Theater, 7:30 (21+)
Thursday October 23 - Oakland Screening - Melwood Screening Room, 8:00 pm
Thursday October 30 - Lawrenceville Screening - Your Inner Vagabond, 8:00 pm
Saturday November 8 - Strip District Screening (Closing) - The Firehouse Lounge, 7:00 pm
All the short stories will be shown together as one feature film at all screenings. Approximate total run time: 100 minutes. Doors open 30 minutes prior to each screening, tickets may be purchased at the door. Premiere: $10. All other screenings: $5. Limited seating.
Jessica M Fenlon is a complicated artist. Besides designing and publishing the New Yinzer, she creates video and other installation-based artwork, makes books, collaborates, and writes poetry and criticism. Visit her at www.drawclose.com