After Portland filmmaker Matt McCormick screened his film The
Subconscious Art of Graffiti Removal at Sundance Film Festival,
galleries and museums began asking to show it—including such
prestigious venues as the Museum of Modern Art and the Serpentine
Gallery in London. The film would play on a loop in some corner,
looking for all the world like a clever piece of video art. More than
once, he says, a collector approached him to inquire about buying the
work. He’d say yes, but instead of naming a four-figure price, he’d
direct the collector to www.peripheralproduce.com, the
website of his own small distribution company. The Subconscious Art
of Graffiti Removal retails at $24.95, and it comes with nine
other short films.
The Subconscious Art of Graffiti Removal is a brilliant
send-up of Clement Greenberg’s view of 20th-century art history as
series of ever-severer refinements on the previous generation’s work.
The film’s deadpan premise (set forth in a voiceover by then-Portlander
Miranda July) is that the patches of paint that city workers use to
cover up graffiti tags are themselves works of art—the direct
descendents of paintings by Rothko and Malevich. These “paintings” are
said to owe something to surrealist automatism, too, as though to
further torment the formalist ghost of Greenberg. It’s extremely
funny.
No wonder a collector would assume The Subconscious Art of
Graffiti Removal was a work of art for sale. It’s an art in-joke,
after all, being shown in the context of a gallery. But when money
enters the picture, it doesn’t act like a work of art. One imagines the
collector trying to toss an improvised aura over the cheap DVD, sort of
like a would-be museum thief throws a blanket over a painting. In both
cases, there’s an attempt to remove the object from the public sphere,
always keeping the potential for appreciation
and resale in
mind.
In terms of aesthetics, subject matter, format, length, and the
presence or absence of rudimentary narrative, experimental film and
video art are basically the same. Most anything goes. One of
McCormick’s best early films, for example, is a nostalgic ode to a
beauty queen perched atop a block of ice, delivered in the computerized
voice of a man in a polar bear suit (Sincerely, Joe P.
Bear). Another is a comedic shot-on-location documentary about
huge rodents invading Louisiana (American Nutria). More
recently, McCormick has taken a subtler approach, using
vérité understatement to hype the humble tugboat
(Towlines).
But there are differences between experimental film and video art,
and most have to do with the way the pieces are displayed and marketed.
Video art is seen in galleries and museums; it plays in a loop rather
than over a discrete stretch of time. The videos are
produced in
very small editions, like prints, and if you want to own one, you have
to shell out. Experimental films, meanwhile, are screened in theaters
or on DVD, and an inexpensive copy can often be found for every
prospective buyer.
It’s hard to say whether there are any real justifications for this
distinction. Perhaps the act of putting the video on a gallery wall
does the trick. (The would-be collectors of The Subconscious Art of
Graffiti Removal might beg to differ.) Remember, though, that the
artist’s act of selection from his or her environment—that
slightly musty justification for Duchamp’s readymades or the impulse
behind Yoko Ono’s Sky TV, an early precursor of video
art—occurs whenever a documentary filmmaker aims a camera.
Moreover, a great deal of experimental film includes found components.
You can see this influence in filmmakers active in the ’90s,
especially—McCormick scored his own trove of 16 mm film as a
Portland-area ABC affiliate emptied its film archive and transitioned
to video.
The question of the artificial or willed aura hangs over every piece
of video art. I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. It’s a
blast of outside air into the rarefied atmosphere of the gallery, if
nothing else. McCormick, for his part, doesn’t seem inclined to settle
the matter. The footage in the installation opening at the Lee Center
for the Arts, Future So Bright, has been seen before in
Seattle in April, where it was screened as a live event in a crumbling
building with McCormick accompanying the projection loudly on
guitar.
I don’t doubt that the prolonged, meditative shots of sun-stripped
houses and gutted businesses, the detritus of civilization that dots
the Western landscape like optimism drying on a vast timeline in
Future So Bright, will take on a different tone when they’re
seen on a loop in a gallery. Perhaps they will be
lulling, or
perhaps they will be uncanny, but the difference will be felt.
McCormick’s newest film, It Was a Crushing Defeat, is
another telling example of the disciplinary flexibility of his output.
It’s listed in his website both as a work-in-progress “film/video
installation” and as a “film.” The project was ultimately funded by
Northwest Film Forum’s Signature Shorts program, which makes luxurious
35 mm prints and ships them off to be shown before features in theaters
across Western Washington, so you may run across it there. Seen on
film, It Was a Crushing Defeat is a stubborn little thing, dim
and hard to interpret. But who’s to say its night-vision horse and
glowing orb might
reveal something new if watched over and over on
a loop? I wouldn’t know. I saw it only once in a theater. 
