I like this little clip because the guy presenting the art tries to grasp the meaning of the artist’s installation and apparently doesn’t get it right. But the artist himself doesn’t really know what the meaning is either. It is not the job of an artist to understand or articulate meaning.
Mater Susperia Vision – Seduction of the Armageddon Witches: A Short Film by Diego Barrera
Spanish filmmaker Diego Barrera uses Christian symbolism and New Age crystals to mount a mystical vision trip the takes inspiration from the film works of Alejandro Jodorowski. I believe it is a music video for a group called ‘Mater Susperia Vision.’
Ultimate Dog Tease
Write Like a Pretentious Artist! The Arty Bollocks Generator!
German film director, Werner Herzog.
If you simply must hang your work in a gallery, then here is the tool you’ll need to make just the right impression on your viewing public: The Arty Bollocks Generator.
It’ll flawlessly create your entire artist’s statement for any truly serious and irreproachably artistic endeavor.
Some samples: ‘My work explores the relationship between the tyranny of ageing and skateboard ethics.’
‘As shifting phenomena become frozen through emergent and personal practice, the viewer is left with a statement of the limits of our world.’
Please be serious, donate to a charity, write a manifesto, and for god’s sake go to a gallery for some bloody education! Then take yourself to see a fine German movie… film, I meant ‘film.’ Okay?
Now get going.
And for further sublime examples of pretentious statement-making, try Werner Herzog’s film school!
Warhol and Maciunas: A Film by Jonas Mekas
This is a film by Jonas Mekas that features Andy Warhol, Yoko Ono, John Lennon, and George Maciunas who founded the New York art movement known as Fluxus. The film shows a Whitney Museum art opening in 1971 and an artists’ party in New York. Home movies become an artform in Mekas’ hands.
Those Dreams That On the Silent Night Intrude; The Secret Cinema of Jerzy Treblinka: A Film by Luca Gennari
This is a Super 8 film made on a single cartridge without post-production effects by Italian filmmaker Luca Gennari for the Straight Eight Festival at Cannes 2010. There’s a great reference to the brilliant Super 8 filmmaker Derek Jarman buried in here. This film glories in the history of abstract, surreal and neorealist cinema. But it fuses those things with a documentary realism. It ties the artistic workings and ramblings of a mysterious filmmaker to the darkness, horror and murder of the Twentieth Century. I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again… Italy is involved in a cinema movement that is just as profound as the movements there in the 1940s, 50s, and sixties. The filmmakers in Italy who are today using the Web for their expression are the equals of Fellini and Rossellini.