Experimental Animation & the Death of the Artist

This week was my favourite so far — early film and animation fascinate me. If I had the skills, I'd want to be an animator more than anything. I was aware of the first film being the train pulling up to the station, and the video of the horse (I watched the film NOPE, see Week 4), though I didn't know the first properly exposed photo was of the rooftops. I think that's really cool — it's genuinely well-shot. In the invention of the camera, as said in Week 4, old forms of photo-real art were destroyed, but new art was created through forced evolution, while a new medium was invented.

This class inspired me to learn more about early photography — how 'ghost photos' were a fad for a while, wondering about who the first person was to deliberately use the rule of thirds or the shot-in-shot style. In any establishment of a new medium, a lot of norms are created, and some genuinely good ideas, if not done well the first time, end up being abandoned. I wonder what kinds of photography were abandoned during the new age of the camera?

Though the name of this week was 'experimental animation and early film', the real idea within the tutorial was more around social movements at the same time — akin to how Week 2 ran. A running idea was 'what is an artist', and I totally agree with David Shea's assertion that 'everyone is an artist', especially with the existence of a camera, debunking ideas of normativity through devaluation. If you express yourself, it's art. If you don't, that's art too. I think as soon as you try and define art, you're failing.

The idea of the death of the artist came up, and I think 'death of the artist' is a bad way of putting the theory of new forms of viewer interpretation. More like the 'birth of the viewer' or an 'evolution of viewer-art conversation'. Saying the artist is dead completely devalues how the artwork and the expression of the artist can shape the direction that conversation ends up going. In my notes I wrote: 'Duchamp is a diva.' I think this speaks volumes.

The main conflict in the industrial revolution was between the Dadaists and the Futurists — either you burn something, or you recontextualise it. I can't help but feel, especially with the knowledge of the Futurists evolving into Mussolini and the fascists, that it's an underlying nihilism versus a silly optimism. Where Dadaists reject ideas of war and destruction while still reacting to it and shaping understanding, the Futurists embraced a more nihilist approach to the world — akin to the smash-and-grab politics of Modi, Trump, Hitler, or any other right-wing head across history.

There were a few jokes about the urinal in the exhibition. It's a great example of making fun of the gallery, but the urinal is still in the gallery, thus engaging with the process of making and exhibition. Also, as a side note, I want the photo of it in the gallery on my wall. It's honestly brilliant. On the other hand, the futurists rejected the idea of the gallery entirely, with a violent attitude, not even engaging with the concept at all like how Duchamp did.

The Futurist manifestos — there are so many — read very akin to the Palantir 22-point manifesto when I first saw them. I think that's scary, but also something interesting to note when it comes to cycles and how history repeats itself.

The idea of 'destroying syntax' is interesting, though it also reads akin to Orwell's 'newspeak' or modern social media within the new futurist manifesto on grammar (as they did a manifesto about everything). The 'feed' in social media, one could say, is a destruction of the linear syntax of film — with each post blending into the next and interrupting with sound, the form of the medium is used to undermine each individual post to help shape the ever-growing pile of slop produced by these conglomerates.. The futurists experimented with various different artforms, connected with industry, stating dinners and various experimental concerts. I read Marinetti's 'futurist cookbook' that had chaptesrs such as the 'Tourist Dinner' and the 'Holy supper'. They were full of themselves. Despite all of that, they sometimes made interesting art.

The term 'social engineers' stuck with me. People can change media and search algorithms silently to shift rhetoric and conversation to anything deemed fit — see the graphs of conversation around trans athletes in the last 10 years, and how it sharply rises after some hate speech laws in America were revoked, or how YouTube can be predicted to show alt-right videos within 5 videos depending on where you live.

I think it's very ironic that the Futurist technological viewpoint on art was abandoned after the Nazis came into power — their 'noise art' and such being reduced into a spectacle of warning against modernist 'degeneracy' by those they helped. The power of conservatism praised by the fascist party was stronger than the idea of progress, as it could sell better, so they proposed to go back to traditional values and art such as the landscape painting, ending up ridiculing the futurists. The Futurists were betrayed by people still using their exact ideals — down to rewriting history for their own benefit. The Nazis popularised the conspiracy theory of Atlantis, for example.

Goebbels' idea of controlling the image to control society — lies becoming reality — strikes a bit more true on an economic note. People who buy the same product at a higher price will leave better reviews.