Hi Crowd!
I’ve been thinking a lot about narratives and how stories are told and what the public walks away with recently so perhaps it’s fitting that the first thing I have to tell you about is ALIEN: PARADISE which is a fan made edit combining Prometheus and Covenant into a single film as well adding in some of the extra content that was available as promotional material or DVD extras. If you love the Alien/Blade Runner/Weyland-Yutani universe like I do, you know that at times the storylines can be a little open to interpretation and if you are trying to directly connect point A to point B that can occasionally be tricky. This edit pulls these two important story pieces together in a more focused and connected way – or so I’m told. I plan to watch it this weekend but I’m super excited already. It looks like this editor has previously made another Alien reedit focusing on Ripley so will need to watch that as well though that story isn’t quite as zig zaggy as Davids.
I’ve been thinking about Chris Burden’s Shoot a bit recently, at first because the performance piece popped into my head during an argument (on the internet) about how something was being classified, but then more as I thought about how a thing can exist and all the people around it can think about it differently, and how that can change over time. It’s the perfect example of that in fact because the work itself is objectively one thing – On Nov 19, 1971 Chris Burden (the artist) arranged for his friend Bruce Dunlap to shoot him in the arm at F-Space gallery in front of an audience, with photography and video produced as documentation. Those are the undeniable facts. The why gets a bit more blurry as Burden himself was intentionally vague when describing it. This allowed (or possibly intentionally led) people to create their own meaning for it – was it a comment on “gun culture,” a protest piece about the Vietnam War, an observation on how far the audience would allow it to go before stepping in..? All possible and never 100% clarified allowing the narrative to take on a life of itself over the years, right up until 2005 when UCLA art student Joe Deutch performed Russian Roulette as his final project, leading Burden (who was a professor at the university at the time) to resign over the school’s refusal to suspend Deutch, adding a final and obvious contradictory storyline to the original work. There’s a lot to unpack here and perhaps I will if “the argument” calls for it.
Speaking of art, I started making a new thing over at ARTS HAUS. Placeholder page because it’s not public yet, but I hope to have something useful and somewhat interesting to show before long. This is narrative driven as well – I often think about the distinction between art galleries who list prices on the walls and those that don’t. As someone with firsthand experience in this decision, it’s not what people assume. If you want people to come in and look at art, and talk about the art, you don’t put prices on the walls. Full stop. The moment you do, all conversations in the space are influenced by that – is the work too expensive, too cheap, why hasn’t it sold at this price, who paid that much for it, etc.. and it taints everything. With no prices, people talk about the art, what it reminds them of and how it makes them feel. Digital/blockchain art doesn’t have that option, as essentially all representations of the work online are coupled with marketplaces and transaction history. I’ve written before about why that’s useful information to have, but I’m not sure it’s helpful to display it directly next to the work so it becomes part of the first impression. If I do it right, maybe Arts Haus will allow a slightly different narrative to grow. We’ll see.
While we’re thinking about narratives, is the era of reading them coming to an end?
Lots to think about…
-s