Matt Johnson 302-003

Great presentations this week! I feel as though we’re getting increasingly spikier in our experimental aesthetics, and branching off from the home-spun tenderness and grand-fatherly personality of Jonas Mekas. Beginning with Stan I guess it takes a Stan to know one. His presentation on Brakhage did really well in focusing on his artistic charge of exploring human understanding through visual perception. From what I can see, this artistic goal can be seen throughout his decades of work. I really enjoyed the humanist and domestic feel of Window Water Baby Moving ’59, and I am definitely going to finish watching the film at my next convenience. As we have seen in Brakhage’s work, and will continue to see with the Kuchar Brothers, there is definitely this thread of domestic/home-movie filmmaking in the collective body of New York-based experimental artists. I’d be curious to know just how much of Mekas’s personal style and filmmaking philosophy influenced other avant-garde artists,

                  This was undoubted my favorite project so far! Using limited film stock really necessitates this appreciation for fully considering each shot and engaging with the work. In fact, we had actually met a kind, older gentleman during our galivant through the city, whom spoke to the very same sentiment. Having both a fixed amount of film stock and continually shifting sources of light allowed for us, collectively, to absorb our visual domain and garner this newfound appreciation for subtle nuances of life, much in the way that our sound recordings had also done for us. Also, learning how to double expose on film, was both haphazard and delightful! Working with Ben, Ryan, and Christian on our photography library was nothing short of rambunctious, spirited, and a truly fun exercise. Picking downtown for majority of our shoot, we had this unique, shared experience of not only exploring and discovering these small nuances of life within our city, but also simply enjoying th

     Lynne was not only a wonderful speaker, but a delight to be around. She had that infectious smile that speaks most genuinely to herself as a human being; and too, there’s this subtle and keen way she has in seeing the world. Who else would have have thought to appreciate an hour of reflection/meditation between washing and drying a load of clothes?      I think that her generosity and attention to detail was relayed quite well through her film Drawn and Quartered. In the short we see the spliced frames, like a graph of an XY axis, of inclusive images of naked bodies shifting around atop a NY city rooftop. I enjoyed her thoughts on her editing process, which in many ways reminded me of Mekas. She discussed forgoing preconceived arrangements or order to her edits. She spoke of taking what film developed and splicing it up together as she went, allowing her unconscious to unfold as she rediscovered her work. For Lynne, “meaning came from action as the subconscious spills into work