Excerpt from Blueprints Essay (Revised)

The challenge to proxemics, how people relate to spaces, is the possibility of the interchangeability of cities. The photographing of locations outside Jersey City creates a wider terrain that the photographer covers. As a result, the unidentified city becomes borderless. The idea of interchangeable cities was inspired by two sources: Dark City(1998) and Jean Baudrillard. In Alex Proyas's film, memory becomes a commodity by fulfilling Baudrillard's order of simulacra. Every midnight, memories are exchanged between individuals. Consequently, counterfeit, reproducibility, and simulation make the memory of the city irrelevant, as the city itself is ephemeral. The Strangers can "tune" (telepathically manipulate objects) the machine to change the structures of buildings by focusing their collective consciousness. For Baudrillard, the models and schematics that represent city planning zones no longer need the physical territories they represent. The city that the Strangers manipulate and the humans inhabit is a manifestation of an abstraction. In a later scene, the city is revealed to be an uprooted metropolis, a massive malleable construct floating in the cosmos. The cities in Metropolis (1927), Things to Come (1936), THX-1138 (1971), Logan's Run (1976), and Blade Runner (1982) are spaces densely populated with skyscrapers, subterranean, enclosed in domes, or an amalgamation of industrial, residential, and corporate spaces. However, Dark City's cityscape is provisionally solid. For Blueprints, I wanted to give the impression of the blending city boundaries by depicting images of buildings and their spaces in construction - a virtual interchangeability of cities.

by Raul Garcia

The Whitney Pla(q/g)ue

The Whitney Biennial 2010 validated a problem I encountered with the same museum six years ago: the fetishism of theory. I do not know if it is from the curators or the artists, but there is a tendency to finalize the experience of the artwork with overreaching statements. While I did like some of the work displayed, I will not go into details about them. What bothered me was that after looking at the artwork, I read sentences that I found perplexing. I felt like I was reading something movie commercials on TV would do. One superimposed text for commercial for Taken (2008) read, "Move over Bourne, here comes the next action hero." The former film is about human trafficking; The Bourne Identity is a film about espionage. Of course, the movie industry was forcing the action angle, and it seems that the Whitney was the authority of ideas, as Hollywood is the authority of wish fulfillment.

The "art world" theorizes like a secret that visitors stumble upon, yet this secret is revealed because it conceals a problematic within the art world: the art definition. Words like "Surrealist can draw romantic flights of the style, "weird" or "avant-garde." Instead of allowing viewers to exhibit the artwork, the curators allowed statements to represent the artwork. As a result, there is a severe disconnect between what you read and what you see. For instance, part of the description for "Michael and Charles," by Lorraine O'Grady, claims that the pairing of the pop singer and poet is "raising issues of class, race and the highly ambivalent nature of beauty that the new abstraction ignores." So Michael is black/Negro/African American, and Charles is French. Am I supposed to validate the ongoing struggle to demote white superiority? Are Jackson's standardized pop songs superior to Baudelaire's poems? Are they compatible? Hindering this line of thought I'm supposed to follow is a white ambulance/hearse in the middle of the room, spewing a female voice. Am I supposed to appreciate the photographs by being distracted? As for the "highly ambivalent nature of beauty," I guess those ads for Gap, Mabelline, and Calvin Klein make ambiguous statements. Why do women wear make-up, and why do men unbutton their buttoned shirts?

The plague of catchwords disseminate the infect visitors with the 'oh" response, so that they can proceed to the next artwork and nod along. Thus, the plaque narrows discourse by imposing an ideological wall, where one the other side "they" know what's going on with art these days.

by Raul Garcia

Notes on a Filmosopher

From Ridley Scott, director of Gladiator (2000), comes Robin Hood. The trailer for that popular film type informs audiences that watching an epic story will be like watching the other. Thus, they will have some expectations about Robin Hood because they presumably have watched the former film. Trailers are not necessarily shown in movie theaters: they proliferate online and on TV. Thus, Daniel Frampton’s idea a film is “an organic intelligence…a ‘film being’ thinking about the characters and subjects in the film” suggests that audiences encounter films without any notion of what it is or where it came from (7). I agree with Frampton that film induces some kind of a waking dream state, where we forget about directors, Hollywood, and camera angles to experience the film as a new world. However, we are not innocent to filminds or film worlds, especially if we are anticipating moments in some film worlds, as if we have travelogues prepared/habituated thanks to the domination of narrative.

Frampton states that film offers philosophy, rather than validating philosophical concepts. I see no problem in philosophers using film for philosophical discourse. Films can reveal the intricacies of debates like cloning and the sanctity of identity, or the instability of judicial meaning in particular legal situations. Besides, some narratives express philosophical issues by their very construction: story and character. If academic writing takes the position of philosophy offering its services to film, then it is the filmind that does this in its form of thinking.

Frampton also implies a general definition for or identification of cinema. An aspect of the filmind is “the creation of the basic film-world of recognisable people and objects” (6). Thus, as long as representations of reality are perceived, then the filmind is a legitimate being. Otherwise, nonrepresentational images have no existence. Since this concept is intended for the moviegoer, then he or she will accept narrative films as cinema. Abstract films do not any “film-thinking,” for there is no designing and figuring of the film-world. If films are to be treated as autonomous beings, then experimental/abstract films should garner the equality that standardized films have, in their recognition as filminds.

By Raul Garcia

Work Cited

Frampton, Daniel. Filmosophy. London: Wallflower Press, 2006.

Blueprints

My project concerns the changing landscape of Jersey City. In the narrative, though, the issue is about the nature of the city itself. The increase of condos/skyscraper gated communities, hotels, office buildings seem to eliminate any heterogeneous spaces or assimilate them into a corporate milieu. The white-flight phenomenon becomes inverted: the suburbs are abandoned for the metropolis. With great urban projects come great security: the installation of surveillance cameras in the fringes of the financial district. In effect, the metropolis is a panopticon in progress.

In the narrative, the photographer, in a voiceover, speaks about the city and his own attempt to understand his sense of forced displacement, as he captures images of construction areas.

Raul Garcia

On "Postproduction"

In reading Postproduction I find that a major concern with the artists of the nineties was the overabundance of preconditioned cultural information and its malignance in the public consciousness. In the information age, much of our interactions have become abstracted where it becomes easier for people to be apathetic to their fellow citizens, domestic and abroad. Cinema is a prime example of how such an artifact retains its solidity from copyright protection and the aura that Hollywood injects it. Consequently, many of such products continue to present society in distinct categories. How else can we still think that blacks are funnier than whites? Blondes are stupider by the dozen? Despite the "independent" films that abound, Hollywood appropriated that label to catch a certain audience of "sophisticated" film viewers. All still polarized.

Perhaps this is a broad stroke of a linguistic brush here, but upon reading, I was inspired by the artists' endeavors to reinvent art definitions. Nevertheless, I find it difficult to abolish the author, as what is implied in Postproduction. Roland Barthes was too reactive to embrace the autonomy of readers. Foucault's assessment of writing as a form of immortality (although altered in the 20th century to the sacrifice of the author) I believe still holds true with authorship and art. Is art an artifact of the human species that the species wants to remain, after possible extinction? Moreover, although I praise the artists mentioned in the book, there were some practices I found questionable, perhaps because it is absurd in writing.

I may modify this post. I think I need to develop this more coherently. Consider it a flash of light to emit a little longer.

Raul Garcia