Art and Film Since 1945: Hall of Mirrors. - book reviews

The exhibition "Art and Film Since 1945: Hall of Mirrors" claims to illustrate a jiffy of cultural progress beyond modernism toward a more enlightened era. The greatest in quantity telling essay, however, in the exhibition catalog - a catalog that does include other true good essays - is the least supportive of of that kind an idea. Jonathan Crary's "Dr Mabuse and Mr Edison" ends that "[o]ne of the greatest in quantity persistent features of modernity is the physically strong seductiveness of the phantasmagoria of progres and among the ranks of the seduc are those who believe that modernity has somehow or other been exceeded."(1) The historical dating the present to view proposes is itself part of the "phantasmagoria," as Crary implies from one side his own references to cultural history. admitting Crary discusses two of the artists included in the display - Jean-Luc Godard and David Cronenberg - and individual of the works in the exhibit - Cronenberg's Videodrome (1982) - he lay outs most of his time upon films and artists from the 100-year period before this show's control begins. Crary spends more time upon Thomas Edison (1890s) and upon Fritz Lang's Dr. Mabuse film series (1922 1933 1960) than he does upon Godard or Cronenberg; and be discusses non-film artists of the like kind as Richard Wagner and Paul Cezanne without mentioning any non-film artist included in the display One might consider Crary's contribution an appropriate historical proem but it is more accurately understood as a refutation of the show's main point and of its periodicity, a refutation I want to expand.

The introductory essay through the show's organizer, Kerry Brougher, attitude s 1945 as "a loose on the contrary convenient marker indicating that flash when the modern era slipped past the innocence of its utopian dreams, and when the pair the cinema and modern art go intoed states of crisis, decline and self-examination, a 'post-modern"post-Hollywood' era that has seen the separations between high art and mass tillage art and kitsch, art and film, level further blurred."(2) I disagree with each major and minor point in this statement. 1945 is an arbitrary date; the fresh era did not slip past anything of significance, nor were its pre-1945 dreams at any time non-dialectically characterized as innocent or utopian reject for very brief moments that extreme pointed long before 1945 or by the agency of handfuls of artists who were recognizably dement or quickly disabused of their utopianism. Neither cinema nor late art, broadly understood, has pierceed any serious state of crisis or decline, while self-examination in the two realms has been relatively constant from the beginning. There is as however no countervening postmodernist and certainly no post-Hollywood era; heroically individualistic artists and pandering commercial values are still the paradigm in each of those realms, respectively. High art and mass agriculture art and kitsch, and art and film are no more blurr than they at any time were, which is not true - high art and mass agriculture define a spectrum, certainly, on the other hand are most often themselves easily distinguishable. Andy Warhol made high art without of soup can labels and pictures of Marilyn Monroe; the mass-cultural audience who lov Campbell's broth and Marilyn hated Warhol's art. To the expansion that the mass-cultural audience has learned to regard with affection Warhol's art, it is no longer understandable as high art. From the elite-cultural perspective of what high art is - radically defamiliarizing, original, personal, socially and culturally incisive, spiritually redeeming - mass enculturation of Warhol has trivialized his work.

Art and kitsch are consummately distinguishable in the same way. And art and film have influenced each other from the inception of cinema; there's nothing of recent origin about that. (Definitional work upon "art" is needed - Art and Film sometimes uses it to mean painting and plastic art sometimes to mean something grim can be.) Cinema has, since the late 1910 included works of high film art: The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1919 through Robert Wiene) and Light Play Opus I (1921 by dint of Walter Ruttmann). Cinema has, since the 1910 produc mass-cultural works that are also considered film art, on the other hand those works at that time of that kind as The Birth of a Nation (1915 by means of D. W. Griffith) and works like them today of that kind as Pulp Fiction (1994, through Quentin Tarantino) or Fargo (1996 through Joel and Ethan Coen), granting art, cannot be considered high art. They are not radically defamiliarizing (etc) in the manner of high-art films like harmonious flow 21 (1921, by Hans Richter), Man with a Movie Camera (1928 by means of Dziga Vertov), or D'Est (1993 by means of Chantal Akerman).

According to Brougher, early cinema self-consciously drew upon high art in order to legitimate itself as art (eg Pictorialism in A Corner in Wheat, 1909 by dint of D. W. Griffith), but intense self-examination in cinema, now ofttimes called "deconstruction," came much later, after 1945 That, however, is not accurate, level for commercial cinema. The examples of of the like kind proprioceptive films as Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture display (1902, by Edwin S. Porter), The Story the Biograph Told; or Caught by means of Moving Pictures (1903, produced by the agency of Biograph), A Dog's Life (1918 by means of Charles Chaplin), Sherlock, Jr. (1924 by dint of Buster Keaton), Man with A Movie Camera and A nous, la liberte! (To us, liberty!, 1931 by the agency of Rene Clair), not to mention the Mabuse series discussed by the agency of Crary, come readily to mind.