Having a baby really turns your life upside down for a while. This was not our first, but it doesn't mean that I was any more successful at getting any sleep for the last 3 months. I normally don't post too much about my personal life, and won't here either, but let's just say that I had plans to finally get a lot of content on this substack over the last few months and that just didn't happen. Finally I'm approaching a new-normal of sorts, so hopefully we'll start seeing some posts on here on a regular basis.
OKAY…
So, I'm going to go back and pretend it's the middle of the summer when I was thinking of sharing a handful of older video works. This is a post I was going to do in July when I dug out some old DVD documentation of a show that I did called CRUCIBLE OF SWEAT. … or maybe it was PURGATORY OF BULLETS. … I actually don't remember. It was a show with a ridiculous title and it consisted of video sculptures and mashups that made use of footage from the Rocky and the Rambo movies. A few months after the show, I set some of the installation pieces up in my studio at the Headlands Center for the Arts. I documented the pieces at that time.
In retrospect, I still love these, but I also think that they are stupid. Stupid in a way that I love. I was exploring “Toxic Masculinity” from the perspective of self-harm (in the case of Rocky) and from the perspective of wearing one’s PTSD as a kind of badge (in the case of Rambo). In addition, I ended up using footage from one of these projects in an entirely different type of project (see bottom video). I feel that the artist blurbs above each of these videos pretty much guides us through them.. so here they are!
1: The Mind is the Best Weapon
2011
Video/Sculpture
The “Shell Shocked Veteran” trope often manifests itself in forms that are as absurd as they are dramatic. The fact that John Rambo is continually sent into action despite his obvious and acute PTSD is a central plot element to the Rambo saga and also the prime target of critique for this video sculpture. Nevertheless, this sculpture serves as a simultaneous criticism and embrace of the “Rambo Brand”. It is created, in one part, as an act of admiration for the survivalist sympathies of the films sampled, but in another part, as a pacifist’s expression of disgust for the exploitation of war trauma.
2: There Ain't Gonna Be No Rematch
2011
Sculpture/Video
Re-edited scenes from the six Rocky films play as continuous loops on a circle of six televisions (each film on a separate television). Each screen reflects in every other screen to create a shifting collage of scenes. This work explores the concept of the movie sequel by highlighting the repetition of tropes from one film to the next. In the Rocky films, there is always a rematch or a new challenger right around the corner, regardless of how old Rocky gets or how many times he retires. This installation questions the primary themes of the Rocky saga. Is the story of Rocky Balboa a narrative of ongoing triumph, or never-ending hell of confrontation and self-abuse?
3: Eat Lightning and Crap Thunder
2011
Sculpture/Video
A companion piece to There Ain't Gonna Be No Rematch. Video created by placing a spinning video camera on a tripod in the middle of six televisions playing the six Rocky movies. Shown on a small stand with VHS set of the first five Rocky movies displayed below.
… and here, we see footage from Eat Lightning and Crap Thunder used in a completely different type of project…
4: 5 Transmissions
2012
Video
Each of the five sections in this video evaluates the physical properties of analog television broadcast via artistic and
scientific perspectives.
-Transmission 1. “Stardust” or the residual matter still floating through the universe after the big bang accounts for a small percentage of the static that shows up on any analog television. As we view television static, we are viewing this cosmic creationary bi-product amidst a massive invisible ocean of other frequencies and waveforms.
-Transmission 2. Television static is a naturally occurring reality that exists whether there is a television to view it with on or not. As mentioned above it can exist even without humankind’s broadcasts. It is no less natural than the patterns created in one night’s accumulated snow.
-Transmission 3. The content of any medium is another medium. Here, all six Rocky films are viewed simultaneously by spinning a camera in the middle of a ring of six televisions. By doing this, the effects of the ”boxing film genre” (a medium in it’s own right), are overtaken by the effect of it’s parent media (film and television) as we more easily respond to the effects of flickering light and video lines than we do to any story elements from any of the films.
-Transmission 4: Appropriated from a documentary segment about Philo T. Farnsworth, this is an enlarged section of Pem Farnsworth’s (the wife of the Idaho born farm boy who invented the television) face. The original footage was one of the very first recorded television images. In abstracting it, enlarging it and then converting it to a digital file, the image is given a much higher level of definition but the meaning of the image is completely lost.
-Transmission 5: A digitally created image of the sun is subjected to layer after layer of the “Bad TV” filter used in Final Cut Pro (Apple video editing software). This final video explores the idea of “Technostalgia” in video production (Nostalgia for simpler technologies. Typically induced by technological hyper-saturation of the early twenty-first century).
