Another journal

I’m taking classes at the Conceptual Oregon Performance School this summer and I’m a huge nerd. Here are my notes from class and related links. This is a video based class so the majority of the links are videos.

Class notes/discussion topics:

• Initial aspects of endurance: impressing others, consistently topping oneself or others.
• Endurance as viewer: How long will you watch?
  • Once you’ve seen/watched it, you “get” it.
  • Question of the necessity of watching a long form piece in entirety.
    • [see Andy Warhol's “Sleep”, from the YouTube comments: “imagine this 10 minute clip lasting 5 hours, yeah, crazy shit"]
• Watched the San Diego Zoo’s Polar Cam while class read “A Hunger Artist” aloud.
  • [apparently the live cams at night are soothing/interesting, just barely seen waterfalls, abstract night vision]
  • Shift from initial interest in spectacle to boredom.
  • Longer work looses you from finite time frames, allowing you to come and go.
• Everybody can smash a guitar on their head. (Chunky smashes guitar on head) So why do/imitate it?
  • Documenting assholery.
    • Bas Jan Ader, Fall 1 [watched last class]
    • CKY Roof Fall [not a good example, but their early work does reference the masculine body work of folks like Ader]
  • Public interest hasn’t waned, but the bar has risen.
  • Memetic ability
  • Cover band: take a piece of something that is popular/powerful
• Why watch it?
  • Atrocity tourism: this is terrible, do you see how terrible.
  • Why else?
• Günter Brus: Vienese Actionists, 1965 action
• Documenting the challenge, the dare, Guinness Book of World Records
  • John Evans balancing 237 pints on his head
• Japanese game show, “Pass the Critter”
• Sidebar: Shepard Fairey Obey Giant Mayday Jeffrey Deitch
• Criss Angel Mindfreak
  • Beach Trick
  • Buried Alive [this has bonus of my fave California dad, Rob Zombie]

Miscellany:

• During the guitar smash video it was remarked that the room “was perfect” and agreed that to create that same space on purpose for use in a video piece would be difficult. Set dressing is, like costuming, a surprisingly detailed and involved process. It takes work to make something have natural looking detail that informs the piece. Note the falconry (and “avian control” van in the foreground pint-balancing video. You can’t make that shit up.
• WTF video source: Found Footage Festival
• WTF video and edited video source: Everything is Terrible
• WTF edited video source: Four four
  • Video re-edits
  • Terrible hunting
  • Supercuts
  • Random Youtubes
• Supercuts can be definite viewer endurance, due to repetitiveness

Mirrored from Journal of a Something or Other.