Beyond the gamut: Resfest shows up the pale in the art world
by Carine Zaayman
I was recently confronted by a familiar occurrence: a group of animation students expressed to me their indignation at the art world for shunning their work. They wanted to know why the pseudo-intellectual pursuits of artists made them feel so superior to other forms of art and craft. Yes, ok, yawn if you want. Have we not addressed ad nauseam the issue of the so-called low vs. the 'high' some time ago through movements like Pop Art, Arte Povera, Outsider Art and the like?
Clearly though, for the practitioners of 'other' forms of art, these issues remain a stumbling block. From personal experience, art institutions are generally only interested in forms of artistic expression that conform to the intellectual and conceptual standards as set out by themselves. In this way, someone may make reference to graffiti, fashion, television culture or comics, but only if they subvert the medium and relocate their interest to the fine art context. (Surely we all recognise that Lichtenstein was not a comic book artist.)
Not that there is anything wrong with such an approach, it just seems to me that many forms of contemporary culture already do this kind of interrogation internally. This is evident in examples from comic books (e.g. Dave Sim's Cerebus[and Daniel Clowes - ed.]) to even television dramas (e.g. OZ). The problem is that the institutional fine art world easily accepts that these forms of artistic expression are intellectually facile, unreflexive: in short, a given.
I found the self-interrogating motif within the world of digital video particularly intriguing at this year's Resfest. Travelling from Cape Town to Johannesburg and Durban, this international digital video festival saw its third year in South Africa.
Perhaps the most pertinent challenge to an institutional fine art sensibility was Interstella 5555: The 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar 5ystem. Created by Japanese Anime guru Kazuhisha Takenouchi, in collaboration with pop group Daft Punk, Interstella presents a 67-minute fairy tale-like narrative around a popular pop outfit incessantly playing concerts to millions of screaming fans in a galaxy, erm� far, far away. There is no dialogue, and the sickly-sweet pink and blue hues work great with the repetitive bass drum-driven compositions of Daft Punk to let you slip into hypnotic audio-visual abandon.
Another highlight was the Spike Jonze Rarities, featuring odd bits of footage from the maverick but prolific director who has since become famous for Being John Malkovich and Adaptation. Among the treats in this collection was an interview with Christopher Walken on the acclaimed Fat Boy Slim video Weapon of Choice. My favourite, though, has to be Torrence Rises, which documents the Torrence Community Dance Group's journey to perform at the 1999 MTV Music Awards.
Make no mistake, this troupe is not your average backdrop fill-ins for Madonna. Rather, they are a community-based project that accepts everyone who feels like waving their arms around a bit, shaking their bootys and not feel embarrassed about it. Why were they at the prestigious awards? Because they were the unpretentious dancers in another award winning Fat Boy Slim video directed by Jonze, Praise You. Seeing their earnest and joyful participation in an arena that would otherwise be inaccessible to them is a humbling and affirming experience.
Roman Coppola's video for Funky Squaredance, by Phoenix, is yet another example of low budget, and perhaps 'low' cultural approach to digital video. Coppola was commissioned to do a cutting-edge inventive music video for a nine-minute track almost for free. His solution to the seemingly impossible requirements was simply to have some scrolling text on how difficult it is to fulfil the brief, other pieces of text drawing on the ideas in the lyrics, spliced with pictures of his family, his cat, his favourite car and so on. The result is the pure comedy of an irrepressible wit.
Sure enough, there were the lowlights. The techno-orgasmic By Design section had little to offer apart from the exceptional Letter to the President (David Ellis), which had the only pertinent political statement on offer at the festival. Shorts #1 also often bored me stiff with clever digitally accomplished mish-mash. What was interesting, however, was that the audience was not fooled by pyrotechnics. Generally people tended to silently appreciate the technical abilities of such videos, and loudly applauded the clever, reflexive and conceptually inventive works.
Significantly, the most successful pieces did not aspire to be art; they fully embodied the genres of documentary, short film, music video or commercial of which they were part. Moreover, many of the videos utilised some of the primary conditions of the medium, namely that it is relatively easy to obtain the equipment and the software, simple enough to learn to do, and the channels for dissemination remain populist. These aspects have the effect that the field of digital video is quickly becoming one of the most important components of the public sphere.
Driven by individual concerns, often relating to sub-cultural movements, the self-made creators have carved out for themselves a genre of their own. While somewhat shy on real political and social comment, it can hardly be maintained that they are not self-reflexive or continuously pushing the possibilities of their medium. The world of digital video does not need the art world, and if the art world ignores and condescends to this genre, they are only impoverishing themselves.
Resfest ran from November 13 - 15 in Cape Town, and November 21 - 27 in Johannesburg and Durban.
