Memory – Tattoos

Tattoos are not only usually a thing of beauty they are also there to remind people about certain things that happen in their lives and certain times in their lives.  People may not get a tattoo to remind them about a specific time or event but surely when they look at it it will send them back to a time in their past and events and feelings they were having at the time.  This is the first idea that I have had to base my memory piece around.  I would like to do a set of photographs of people with tattoos.  I have not yet decided wether I would do full body shots or wether I would just focus on certain tattoos across different parts of different peoples bodies.

I want to show the different people who have tattoos done.  Different sexes, different ages, different races and so on and so forth.  To show that this phenomenon is a universal thing and is becoming more widespread now than ever before as it becomes more culturally and socially accepted to have tattoos.

Memory – Initial Idea

My first idea for my memory artifact was to do something pretty obvious.  This was to capture memories from my life at the moment.  This is to do with my friends at university and the time that I spend with them.  I have not got much time left with them as when I leave I don’t see myself keeping in touch with everyone.  This is not something that I aim to do on purpose its just something that I can see happening.  It would be difficult to stay in touch properly with all the people I have become friends with over my time at university.  Obviously there will be the odd phone call to people and maybe birthdays we will meet up but I think out of all the people I have met and got to know I will only see like two or three on a regular basis.

I never really take my camera out on nights out as I am too scared.  It’s worth a bit too much to me to be broken in some drunken stumble or to be lost altogether.  It is with this idea in mind though that I have decided to take my camera everywhere I go for a week including nights out to bars and clubs to capture as many moments as possible with my friends.  I think this captures the idea of memory in the most obvious way possible and it is something that I thought could not only capture my memories but also those memories of the friends that I am talking about.

Idea – Spectacle 3

Due to massive time restraints my favourite idea for Spectacle which was the one based around celebrity has been put on the back burner.  I will continue to build on this idea however and will build on another idea of mine which is the Spectacle that is the urban landscape.  Living in Birmingham my entire life has led to an obsession of sorts of city life.  I much prefer breaks to other cities rather than things like beach holidays and so on.  This led me to thinking about how cities become such an overwhelming thing to some people and how we fill these spaces with huge monstrosities of buildings.  How architects are trying to better our spaces by not only building out but also upwards and creating more and more interesting looking buildings.  This more or less is an idea for a landscape project of how we decorate our city spaces. I am not just though talking about brand new buildings or unusual buildings but places in the middle of being knocked down so they can be rebuilt to better our surroundings.  Along with things like gardens, graffiti, features and so on all of these make up the cities that we live in and make them truly what they are.  I have taken a bunch of pictures for this and have edited them down.  I have also added in a few images from my recent travels to give a proepr idea of what I want to do.  Some of the pictures I have made I do like but to be honest most of them I do not.  They just don’t feel like my style as I usually shoot in a certain style and I wanted to try something new.  I suppose that is the point of this exercise though is to come out of our comfort zones.  If I wanted to carry this idea through I would want to travel to cities outside of my own to more explore this idea and how different cultures and countries treat different things in their cities.

Idea- Spectacle 2

I have started to build on the idea of spectacle in everyones everyday lives.  Obviously like I said earlier most people do not see it this way.  A lot of people want the want the money, the fame, the glamour, the sex, the drugs and everything else that comes with being famous.  The introduction on websites like myspace.com, all the different reality television shows that run including Big Brother, X-Factor, Britain’s Got Talent and all the other god awful shows people think it is easier more than ever to become famous.  This of course is true.  We have famous people that have no talents whatsoever including a bunch of Big Brother contestants especially the god awful Jade Goody.  A lot of people are obsessed with the idea of celebrity. Magazines with dozens of badly taken pictures of these so called celebrities falling out of taxi cabs with their private parts showing are now seen as a form of entertainment.  How uninterested in our own lives must we be to want to read about what certain celebrities toilet habits have been for the past week, because the way it is going soon thats what magazines like Heat will be writing about for the thousands of people that read it every week.

Thinking about all of this has led to me deciding to evolve my idea a little bit and have a go for the first time at staging some photographs properly.  I want to do a bunch of portraits of someone who is not famous acting famous.  So paparazzi taking pictures of them, people following them for autographs and so on.  I want to do this to show the spectacle that goes with being famous.  Another thing that I can do is to leave the public in the frame trying to see what is going on as not many people can not be interested in celebrities and once one person gets involved than everyone else does, it is infectious.

Looking at people like the photographer Terry Richardson

Jake Gyllenhal

Initial Idea – Spectacle

So when we were divided into groups at the beginning of the term for this module I ended up in group two which meant that our first word to look at is the word spectacle.  I was a little disappointed with this result due to the fact that during the summer this was the word I had the most trouble coming up with ideas for. Not many ideas came to mind at all but eventually I had a couple of things that I thought could be built into good projects.  One of what I feel is my best ideas that I had to do with spectacle came about from a quote from one of my favourite comic book writers, Harvey Pekar.  Quite famously in his comic book American Splendor and in the film of the same name Harvey says “Ordinary life is pretty complex stuff”.  This tells me that even peoples ordinary lives can be quite a spectacle.  Action movies, comics, books and so on are all forms of escapism.  We have to remember that this is all they are and our normal lives can be just as exciting and beautiful.  Things including and not strictly limited to birth, growing up as a child,  teenage years and what we get up to, falling in love for the first time, getting a job and starting a career, dealing with death and starting a family and so on are all in my eyes a part of the spectacle that is the human life.

I feel that nowadays with all the media that is at the hands of people and with it being so easy to get hold of people may get caught up in the big hollywood blockbuster movies and so and and they may forgot about the spectacle that is real life.

So my first idea stems from this and it is for a photography project with sound.  I just want to do a 2 minute or so piece of photographs taken by me around Birmingham and wherever else I may visit based around people enjoying their lives, what they do in their lives to fill it, how they spend their time, what they buy, people they know and spend time with and so on.  I want the sound to just be more or less ambient noise so the sounds of things around us that we may normally ignore and people’s conversations.  I will also include my own life in this piece so it could start of as a more or less day in the life style of piece.  I will use my Lomo-LCA camera for this piece as it is as portable as my digital camera but I now much prefer to use film.  Also if I use certain slide films in it the colours should be very vivid which I think is a good thing as I want most things to be bright colours to show that life should be as exciting as any new blockbuster movie you can go and see at the cinema and these are full of bright colours and explosions.

D.A. Pennebaker – Dont Look Back

Dont Look Back is a film produced in 1967 and is a documentary film directed by D.A. Pennebaker.  The film is based around the Bob Dylan tour of the United Kingdom in 1965.  It is a very famous Cinéma vérité piece and is counted as being one of the best and most important films based around the music industry ever made.  The film is made up of not only concert footage from the tours different stops but also candid behind the scenes footage of Dylan conversing with his friends that is seldom seen in modern music documentaries.  During the filming Pennebaker also captures the relationship Dylan has with fellow musician Joan Baez and the lead up to their break up.

Cinéma vérité is a style of documentary filmmaking that in French roughly translates to cinema of truth.  The style of a piece of Cinéma vérité has to be very natural and flowing.  The camera must be used to capture events as they happen it is not there to make events happen.  Usually when a director is using the Cinéma vérité style he or she will not ask the subjects questions or prompt them in any way, they are just there to capture things as they happen.  This usually results in handheld cameras being used and long shots are usually used throughout with very little cutting and editing.  The term was initially used by Dziga Vertov he of Man with a Movie Camera fame.  The sound of these films are also captured there and then much like the visuals meaning that they cannot be re-dubbed later on.  This meant that a crew could be as little as a camera operator and a sound person meaning it was easier to get around on shoots and this also meant that they could get behind the scenes of events easier and get involved easier.  Cinéma vérité is mostly used to capture on film cultural events due to the nature of the small crews and the results that this style creates.  The method of filming often means it takes a long time to produce a piece and also means hundreds of hours of footage can be filmed and yet most of this can end up on the cutting room floor.  D.A. Pennebaker is a very famous Cinéma vérité director along with the likes of Jean Rouch and Nick Broomfield.

I really love Dont Look Back.  Recently becoming a fan of Dylan’s music I have seen it before and only recently purchased the DVD for my collection.  It is hard to believe nowadays that this type of documentary exists as we get this impression nowadays of a lot of musicians being prima donnas who don’t actually care that much about their fans.  I cannot imagine many filmmakers being granted the access that Pennebaker has in Dont Look Back by modern musicians.  I would also like to see a piece called Cocksucker Blues an unreleased documentary directed by famous photographer Robert Frank.  This is a similar type of documentary but it follows the Rolling Stones and apparently is even more candid than Dont Look Back.

I do like this style of filmmaking as I feel it is slightly more honest than a normal documentary.  Placing someone in a frame and waiting to see what they do and say is a fairly brave move by a filmmaker. It could take a lot of hard work to get what you want when you could take the easy route and prompt your subjects into saying what you want them to say.  There are more experimental types of Cinéma vérité such as the Dogme 95 movement which has its 10 golden rules.  I will look at this movement in more detail at a later date.

I would like to have a go at making a piece in a Cinéma vérité style. I feel that as I would have to spend a lot of time around my subject I would be drawn into their world a lot more resulting in a more interesting and personal piece of work.  Choosing a subject that is both interesting to me as a filmmaker and the audience would be one of the more difficult choices I would have to make.  After all what are the odds of me getting access to someone as talented and interesting as Bob Dylan?

Jan Švankmajer – Little Otik

Otesánek also know as Little Otik is a Czech film produced in the year 2000 and is both written and directed by Jan Švankmajer.  The film is made up of a mixture of live action and stop motion animation.  Švankmajer is a renowned artist known for his work in several mediums but he is mainly known for his work in the art of animations using a mixture of stop motion animation techniques.  Švankmajer’s influences can be seen in the work of much more mainstream directors such as Terry Gilliam and Tim Burton.  Otesánek is based around the idea of a couple who are not able to conceive a child.  While at a recently purchased holiday home the husband digs up a root the looks kind of like a baby.  He trims the root and cleans it up and presents it to his wife.  She then proceeds to fake a pregnancy and gives birth to baby Otik, from here on out the film only gets more bizarre.  Otik actually comes to life and can not stop eating and this results in him growing and growing and growing.  Otik becomes more violent in his hunt for food and eats the family’s cat and eats a bunch of his mother’s hair.  The film seems to include a sub-plot based around an old man who lives in the same building and his attraction to a young girl who also lives in the building.  I did not get to see the whole film but have read the plot synopsis on IMDB.com and Wikipedia.com and thanks to this and the clips I have seen I have purchased both this and also Alice directed by Jan Švankmajer.

From what I have seen and read about Otik I think that it is based around a couple of things.  First of all Švankmajer seems to have a real big thing about food and eating within this film.  When the couple realise that they cannot conceive one of the first things we see is the husband carving up a huge watermelon located inside is a baby.  We also have Otik eating a chunk of his mother’s hair, a cat, four people and all the milk and food the characters feed him throughout.  So what does this mean?  I think that it shows a hunger for things that we can never have. This is a constant hunger that people have for things in life that they feel they can never satisfy or fulfil.  The idea of the baby in the watermelon is the most obvious example as the husband has learnt that he will most likely never have a child as he satisfies one hunger he wishes to satisfy another so bad that he starts to see things that are not there.

I feel that the film also shows this idea that people think that they have developed this idea that they can play god.  If the couple cannot make life in a natural way then they feel that they can give an inanimate object life, which as we know is impossible.  It may also touch on the idea that now there is more than one way that people can bring children into this world. With the increases in technology on a yearly basis including advances in IVF treatments and also the idea of cloning perhaps soon the human race will do away with the idea that some people cannot have children.  If this does not point out the god complex that we have developed as a species then I do not know what does.

The above two points may be seen as negative points but there is also one point I can see that is a huge positive.  I also think that the film points out the immense will that some people have. The fact that the couple cannot conceive in the usual way does not stop them at all. The husband finds this root that only just about looks something like a child and they polish it up and will it to come to life.  Their will is so strong that the creature actually comes to life and other people accept and see this root as the couple’s own child.

The mix of stop motion animation and live action in movies is by no means a new technique.  However Švankmajer’s way of creating artefacts using this method but also keeping them interesting by placing them in the realms of surrealist pieces of art really sets in stone his status as one of the best animators around.  This is due to the fact that they are very surreal and dream like and yet they are not so pretentious or complicated that people cannot understand what is going on in the film.  This for the first time shows me that experimental films don’t actually have to be so complicated and out there that people haven’t the faintest clue what is going on.  Due to this fact I am going to do some research into the surrealist movement and what it actually means.

Andy Warhol Exhibition At The Ikon Eastside

Andy Warhol born in 1928 was an american artist and one of the leaders of the movement known as “pop art”.  After gaining initial success as an illustrator Warhol became famous worldwide for his work as a painter and then moved into becoming an avant-garde film maker, a record producer, author and all round famous person.  His work led him to become one of the most famous bohemians of the modern time.  Warhol was the person who coined the phrase “fifteen minutes of fame”.  He died in 1987 from a heart attack.

On Friday 10th October I paid a visit to Ikon’s east side exhibition space in the Digbeth area of Birmingham. The exhibition is showcasing some of Andy Warhol’s work that may not get as much coverage and is placed in the public eye as much as his paintings, these works are his films.  A total of six films are being shown and these include Empire, Sleep, Kiss, Eat, Blow Job and Screen Tests.

Empire is one long shot of the Empire State Building in New York City from a distance.  This shot is filmed through the day and into the night.  The shot is then slowed down and we see the same slightly out of focus long shot of the Empire State Building go from being in the daylight to night time.  This film lasts a total of just over eight hours. Sleep is a video of a man sleeping which was shot over several different nights.  The video lasts just over five hours altogether and is edited together to vary the shots.  Kiss is a video of several different couples, both gay and heterosexual passionately kissing.  Eat is a forty-five minute black and white film of fellow artist Robert Indiana eating a mushroom.  A cat appears towards the end of the film which Indiana affectionately pets.  Blow Job is a thirty-five minute black and white film.  The film shows a young man receiving fellatio from an off screen partner.  Even though the subject matter is very explicit all you see is the very expressive face of the young man.  The film is slowed down by a third due to Warhol’s request.  Screen Tests consists of videos several minutes long that are static shots of Warhol’s friends, mentors or anyone he really felt like filming.  He would place them in a room in front of the camera and tell them not to blink.  They would then act as they felt. Altogether around five hundred screen tests were made but not all of them were kept.  Some of the people who star in Screen Tests are Marcel Duchamp, Lou Reed, Bob Dylan and Salvador Dali.

One of the main things that I thought about this work is how some of it really relates to some of the Martin Creed work I viewed the day before.  It shows some things that some people may think are taboo such as the gay men kissing in Kiss and obviously the whole of the Blow Job video.  This gives people the opportunity to deal with their true feelings about things like this by confronting them head on with them and by giving the videos the long runtimes the way that Warhol does this forces people to continue to view them.  There is no getting away from the videos unless you leave the exhibition like with Creed’s work previously discussed.  Like life people wait and wait and wait for something to change but it never does it just repeats and repeats and repeats.

Another thing that I feel is that some of the works shown together simply relate to the monotonous routine that is most people’s life.  The changing of the time with the Empire piece, the continual kissing in Kiss with it going nowhere else and the oral sex in Blow Job slowed down with no apparent orgasm.

Martin Creed Exhibition At The Ikon

On Thursday the 9th October 2008 I paid a visit to the Ikon Gallery in the centre of Birmingham.  This was to check out their most recent exhibition based around a new set of work by contemporary artist Martin Creed.  Creed won the famous Turner prize in 2001 with his piece, Work No. 227, the lights going on and off.  This was an empty room where a set of lights switched on and off constantly.  A lot of Creed’s major works are based around the idea of scale and he also works a lot with neon light signs but with this exhibition he has also created some video pieces.  Four were being shown at the Ikon and these were Work No. 730, Work No. 837, Work No. 670: Orson and Sparky and Work No. 494: Ships Coming In.

Work No. 730 is a black and white 35mm film transferred to DVD projected onto a white washed wall.  The film is a simple static close up shot of a man and woman having sexual intercourse which lasts four minutes and ten seconds and is placed on a loop.  Work No. 837 is four televisions placed on top of each other two by two and on each monitor a different 35mm colour film is shown.  Each film is similar though as they show different people making themselves sick in a white room this also includes sound.  This film installation lasts only one minute and fifty-six seconds and again is on an immediate loop.   Work No. 670: Orson and Sparky is again a colour 35mm film projected onto a wall but this time in a dark room.  The video is of several stray looking dogs passing through a white room and includes people organising themand the people talking.  This lasts four minutes and sixteen seconds.  The final video Work No. 494: Ships Coming In is two televisions stacked on one another showing two boats pulling into a harbour.  This lasts a total of eight minutes and fifty seconds and as with the other videos is on an infinite loop.

What I get from Work No. 730 and Work No. 837 is Creed is trying to confront his audience with things that are seen as to be taboo in the public eye.  With 730 most people didn’t even stop to see if the video changed and just walked straight through this section of the exhibition.  Creed took sex and made something completely un-sexy just by showing you the same monotonous motion over and over again from the same angle.  Never ending sex with no orgasm the true meaning of the words “anti-climax”.  This piece matches up so well with Work No. 180 a bunch of differently set metronomes just endlessly ticking away.  Work No. 837 had just the same effect on people as most couldn’t even watch the end of the video and just left it as it was still playing.  People were more disgusted by this piece then the sex piece though so this must tell us about what people have become more de-sensitized to in this day and age.  The thing about this piece was that you could not get away from it.  Even if you walked away you could still hear the noises the people are making on the video so if you truly want to get away from it you have to miss out on a big chunk of the exhibition.  This tells me that Creed is willing to let people miss out on his more friendly pieces but he wants to make sure that this piece affects people.

These two videos were the videos that interested me the most out of the four.  The boats pulling into the harbour again relates to the sex video for me as they continuously pull into the harbour but they never get to leave the harbour.  They are stuck in this endless cycle that gets them absolutely nowhere.  Much like the sex without the orgasm.

The video of the two dogs to me talks about the relationship of how no matter how hard we try there are certain things that we can not control.  Here is an artist and his assistant just trying to get two dogs to walk through a room but even that most mundane task is extremely difficult to complete without something going wrong.

I think coming to more exhibitions like this is going to be good for me as it not only helps me expand my ideas for my actual subject matter but it is also helping me come to terms with how experimental these sorts of films can actually be.  All four of these videos are just statically framed shots of the same thing but they all put across their messages very well and that is something that my work needs to be able to do as well.

Reflecting on the Five Obstructions

Out of the five short films that were created as part of the documentary I found four of them on YouTube.  The only one that I could not find was the final one that has the Leth voiceover written by Von Trier.  This documentary and the actual shorts that were created alongside it all tell me one thing and that is pretty much no matter what obstructions are put in your path there is always the opportunity to create something creative and interesting when it comes to producing media artifacts.  All of the shorts held my interest and I really enjoyed them.  I also felt that they were really well made and very imaginative.  Lars Von Trier is blatantly trying to hinder Jørgen Leth’s progress and wants him to make a bad film but the truth is that creativity feeds on limits and the resulting short films are all brilliant and work on every level.