Explode Art's Tower of Babel!

Last week I proposed to you that Wikipedia is often a very useful resource. The quality of Wikipedia entries varies, of course, but on the assumption that you treat it with the same critical judgement you treat all resources, I feel it's important to acknowledge this collaborative encyclopaedia as, in its own way, a revolutionary pedagogical tool.

The entry on Vertov is exemplary: clear, informative, scholarly. An excerpt:

However, Vertov's two credos, often used interchangeably, are in fact distinct, as Yuri Tsivian points out in the commentary track on the DVD for Man with the Movie Camera: for Vertov, "life as it is" means to record life as it would be without the camera present. "Life caught unawares" means to record life when surprised, and perhaps provoked, by the presence of a camera (16:04 on the commentary track). This explanation contradicts the common assumption that for Vertov "life caught unawares" meant "life caught unaware of the camera." All of these shots might conform to Vertov's credo "caught unawares." Dziga's slow motion, fast motion, and other camera techniques were a way to dissect the image, Vertov's brother Mikhail described in a interview. It was to be the honest truth of perception. For example, in "Man with a Movie Cameara", two trains are shown almost melting into each other, although we are taught to see trains as not riding that close, Vertov tried to portray the actual sight of two passing trains. Mikhail talked about Eisenstein's films as different from his and his brother Vertov's in that Eisenstein, "came from the theatre, in the theatre one directs dramas, one strings beads." "We all felt...that through documentary film we could develop a new kind of art. Not only documentary art, or the art of chronicle, but rather an art based on images, the creation of an image-oriented journalism" Mikhail explained. More than even film truth, "Man with a Movie Camera," was supposed to be a way to make those in the Soviet Union more efficient in their actions. He slowed down his actions, such as the decision whether to jump or not, you can see the decision in his face, a psychological dissection for the audience. He wanted a peace between the actions of man and the actions of a machine, form them to be in a sense, one.

Here is an explanation of Manovich's concept of "database cinema," which we will discuss in class.

The urgent business of kino-eye.

Hart Crane

During this week's seminar I mentioned the poetry of Hart Crane, and in particular his evocation of the Brookly Bridge in The Bridge (1930). In the Proem to the poem, "To Brooklyn Bridge," Crane writes:

I think of cinemas, panoramic sleights
With multitudes bent toward some flashing scene
Never disclosed, but hastened to again,
Foretold to other eyes on the same screen;


The stanza describes the "thought" of the cinema as a moment of transport: a sleight (trick), an experience of "multitudes . . . bent toward" (turned to, oriented by, organised through) a scene that bears repetition, and points to the future. It's an interesting image to sit beside the experience of the "Masstransiscope" artwork we discussed. From Walt Whitman ("Manhatta") to Masstransiscope, an aesthetic trajectory complements the experience of cinematic modernity.

You can read "To Brooklyn Bridge" here.

This is the cover of the first edition of The Bridge, with photographs by Walker Evans. Note the way in which the material of the bridge comes to look almost abstract, a migration we discussed as symptomatic of the conversion of shapes to objects (and back) in Ruttmann.

The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Rancière

In one of his most influential books, Jacques Rancière tells the remarkable story of the "ignorant schoolmaster" to open the question of what he calls "universal teaching." At a time of political crisis a French academic named Jacques Jacotot was forced into exile, and he left his teaching post in Dijon to take up another in the Netherlands. Many of the students who wanted to be taught by him were unable to speak French and he was unable to speak Flemish, so the situation was perplexing. His solution was novel. He found that "[t] here was … no language in which he could teach them what they sought from him," and '[y]et he wanted to respond to their wishes" (1-2); their desire to learn. Jacotot decided to improvise by establishing what Rancière calls "the minimal link of a thing in common" between himself and the students" (2), a link he secured through the use of a novel, written in French, with a parallel translation in Flemish. And what he found was that by reading the book carefully in Flemish, and studying the French, his students were able to decipher the text in French and to learn that language, decipher its grammar and understand something of its meanings. Rancière uses the story of Jacotot to question the role of explication in teaching. He writes:
Like all conscientious professors, [Jacotot] knew that teaching was not in the slightest about cramming students with knowledge and having them repeat it like parrots, but he knew equaly well that students had to avoid the chance detours where minds still incapable of distinguishing the essential from the accessory, the principle from the consequence, get lost. In short, the essential act of the master was to explicate: to disengage the simple elements of learning, and to reconcile their simplicity in principle with the factual simplicity that characterizes young and ignorant minds. To teach was to transmit learning and form minds simultaneously, by leading those minds, according to an ordered progression, from the most simple to the most complex. (3)
Rancière writes that the experiment with his Flemish students made this model less than persuasive; without explanation from him, his students had learned the language they did not know. Explication, it seemed, was not necessarily the source of a student's learning. A parallel arises with the most basic scene of learning we have in common:
The words the child learns best, those whose meaning he best fathoms, those he best makes his own through his own usage, are those he learns without a master explicator, well before any master explicator. According to the unequal returns of various intellectual apprenticeships, what all human children learn best is what no master can explain: the mother tongue. We speak to them and we speak around them. They hear and retain, imitate and repeat, make mistakes and correct themselves, succeed by chance and begin again methodically, and, at too young an age for explicators to begin instruction them, they are almost all – regardless of gender, social condition, and skin color – able to understand and speak the language of their parents. (5)
From this observation, Rancière claims a striking truth; explication in learning is a form of "enforced stultification" (7), always inferior to the style of original learning, the way we learn our mother tongue. This "best" teaching, which harnesses the will to learn in place of acts of instruction, is what he calls "universal teaching," a practice that assumes a level of universal competence among students, competence generated by their desire to learn: "[t]here is no one on earth who hasn't learned something by himself and without a master explicator" (16). As Rancière notes, almost all children success in learning their mother tongue without difficulty, although it is in fact a complex task; the capacity to learn complex things is not a talent segregated on the basis of calculable differences in talent or intelligence, but broadly possessed by all. Jacotot discovers that his students acquire French not through his teaching, but rather through his capacity to direct their own interest.
Rancière, Jacques (1987) Le maître ignorant: cinq leçons sur l'émancipation intellectuelle. The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation Trans. Kristin Ross. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991.

Some links.

tom gunning

Gunning on Modernity:

It could be argued that techniques of circulation define the intersecting transformations in technology and industry that we call modernity. By "modernity" I refer less to a demarcated historical period than to a change in experience. This new configuration of experience was shaped by a large number of factors, which were clearly dependent on the change in production marked by the Industrial Revolution. It was also, however, equally characterized by the transformation in daily life wrought by the growth of capitalism and advances in technology: the growth of urban traffic, the distribution of mass-produced good, and successive new technologies of transportation and communication. While the nineteenth century witnessed the principal conjunction of these transformations in Europe and American, with a particularly crisis coming towards the turn of the century, modernity has not yet exhausted its transformations and has a different pace in different areas of the globe.

The earliest fully developed image of this transformation of experience comes, I believe, with the railway, which embodies the complex realignment of practices which modern circulation entails.

Tom Gunning "Tracing the Individual Body: Photography, Detectives, and Early Cinema" in Charney, Leo and Vanessa R. Schwartz. Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.

masstransiscope

From the blog:

Bill Brand’s Masstransiscope was installed in the abandoned Myrtle Avenue subway station in Brooklyn, New York in September 1980. It has been seen by millions of commuters for over twenty-five years. The 228 hand-painted panels are viewed through a series of vertical slits set into a specially constructed housing. The piece works on the principle of the Zoetrope, a 19th century optical toy.


official site
blog

Manhatta (1921)