BITE
So OK, there were some arguments made in the 'sixties (but half the people reading this were barely born then, so who cares?)... some arguments that the artist-as-creative-visionary-genius could converse with the muses and plumb the universe of the psyche in ways that mere mortals could only hope to glimpse in the streaming images of "experimental" films. If you didn't get it, that was because the hash was wet, the acid was bad, or you were simply a hopeless toad.
If that smacked a bit too much of spritual Romantic elitism, wasn't the error more than compensated in the 'seventies by the realization of the ideological benefits of film material - time, grain, scratches and degradation, etc. If one sufficiently invoked the filmic material, the reward was not only to bask in conceptual honesty, but indeed to partake on the righteous side of the rules of history so solidly grounded in the material world by brother Marx. The degree of subtlety in applying this equation varied greatly, but the case was made more than once that to enhance film grain through personal processing was a political act of the highest order.
Still not good enough to be embraced by the great unwashed? Not to worry. Throughout these same decades any problematic aspects of the media arts were redeemed by films and video documentarians. These indies showed us how THEY, the fat capitalists, were the elitists exploiting Amerika and the world, reinforced by their gun-totin' pigs and the military, in bed with the judiciary, the government, the church WE were the selfless guerrilla doing battle on behalf of the disenfranchised, the needy, the worthy. If you couldn't tell the good guys from the bad guys, the us from the other, you were a mindless idiot.
Of course, the academic arm of the "field" confounded these issues in the 'eighties by buying into (in the guise of "deconstruction") the notion pervasively disseminated by President Reagan that history (or any other story) can be whatever you declare it to be, and thus matters of good and bad, right and wrong are reshapable at will.
So, here we are, three decades later. How do we navigate our ways past adversarial postures perceived as "elitist": a) without compromising on the quality of the creative insight or act that may be (indeed, should be!) beyond the ken on "the majority," and b) without giving up discernments and action of right and wrong not driven by dogma or self-interest? Shouldn't be a problem. It's just a matter of (once again) reconfiguring Us vs. Them. Isn't it?
Bill Judson was the Curator of Film & Video at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh. The film and video program was dissolved in 2003.
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