Am I Making Art

The PFA screening, “Am I Making Art”, showed four films, each one famous in it’s own right. The first film was Thresa Cha’s “Mouth to Mouth”. This film showed a screen filled with television static but it took shapes, such as that of a river, or a mouth. There were accompanying static sounds. The symbols and sounds faded in and out of focus leaving the viewer stuck trying to make sense of the compilation of the blurred pictures and distorted sound. One of the other films was, “I Am Making Art by John Boldesary. This film is possibly the most famous but also possibly the most boring and monotonous of all of the films. It consists of a fifteen minute long shot of Boldesary making different poses saying “I am making art” with each new pose. He progresses through motions and angles and eventually ends up on the floor and out of the view of the camera. The continual movement could be related to film, or Bergson’s cinematographic view because it is a series of stopped motions that come together to make motions. He represents the interval by moving from pose to pose and place to place but the stopped poses and places represent the frames. As a result, his film can be interpreted as a representation of the “art” he is supposedly making. The third film that was shown was Acconchi's "Theme Song". In this film he tries to seduce the camera, and thus the audience while playing music of the time. This seems to be a blatant criticism of the seductive medias of film and music. He acts as an embodiment of the media’s through his words and mimicking of the media’s themselves. For instance, he often refers to the lines of the song that is playing in order to seduce the audience. By doing this he not only displays the seductive quality of media but also breaks down the barier between the viewer and the viewed. By speaking directly to the audience he transforms the audience from spectator to interactive participants of his work. The last film was, “East Side, West Side” by Nancy Holt. The film portrays two artists, Nancy Holt from New York and Robert Smithson from California interacting. The difference in character between the two is almost comical at many points. Each person is trying to discus different topics and in different ways. Smithson is talking about intellectual ideas and Holt is acting in a hippie manner. There is a distinct conflict between the two throughout the film.