To celebrate the tenth
anniversary of the
Ten Years of Dreams About
Art
Laura U. Marks
All dreams guaranteed
dreamed by the author.
This running excursion into Peircean semiotics is intended to help us understand
aesthetic developments in experimental film and video of the 1990s in terms of
the dynamic of emergence, struggle, resolution, and re-emergence. C.S. Peirce's semiotic theory, unlike the better-known Saussurean theory, allows us to think of signs as existing
at different removes from the world as we experience it, some almost identical
to raw experience, some quite abstract. For Peirce
the real appears to us in three modes, each at a more symbolic remove from
phenomena, like layers of an onion: Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness. Firstness, for Peirce, is a
"mere quality," such as "the color of magenta, the odor of
attar, the sound of a railway whistle, the taste of quinine, the quality of the
emotion upon contemplating a fine mathematical demonstration, the quality of
feeling of love, etc."[1] Firstness
is something so emergent that it is not yet quite a sign: we can't see red
itself, only something that is red. Secondness is for
Peirce where these virtual qualities are actualized,
and this is always a struggle. In the actual world, everything exists through
opposition: this and not that, action-reaction, etc. Secondness
is the world of brute facts. Thirdness is where signs
take part in mental operations that make general statements about qualities and
events: it is the realm of interpretation and symbolization. The attitudes
toward the world of the three kinds of sign are perceptive, active, and
reflective.
Dreams, of course, are
highly condensed mental images, and thus chock-full of Thirdness.
But in dreams we are immobilized and cannot physically react to the provocative
signs they give us: dreams concentrate affect, or the feelings of Firstness in our bodies.
Best Musicians Are Three
Bugs
There is a handful of small
programming venues worldwide, including Toronto's Pleasure Dome, that devote
themselves to the most marginal and evanescent of moving-image media. Why is
this kind of programming valuable from the point of view of the larger culture?
Some of the works and artists will eventually be taken up by the broader art
world. More important, experimental film and video is a microcosmic laboratory
of the most important developments in culture — experimental makers get to all
the issues years, or decades, before mainstream media get hold of them. But
finally this work is important because it is not valuable from the point of
view of culture at large. While it's common to say that reproducible media do
not have "aura," that sense that the art object is a living being,
single-print and low-circulation films and videos have an aura denied to
mass-circulation media. Experimental programming venues nourish short films and
videos, works in low-budget and obsolete media, filmic detritus rescued from
landfills - in short, works that have aura in inverse proportion to their
commercial value. Pleasure Dome revives works that are ephemeral or forgotten,
films that have been censored, banned and burned. Like bugs on a raft, they are
precious because they are imperiled.
Brains or Love
The choice between brains and
love was a central struggle for filmmakers in the early 1990s. Some insisted on
using their media as intellectual tools on the model of written intelligence.
This is why so many works from this end of the decade are characterized by
scrolling text and quotations from important scholars: purchased brains. At
this period art schools, film funders, and art
magazines were telling young artists that being a "dumb artist" was
no longer a viable choice. Artists were now expected to issue their own
considered statements and locate themselves within a verbal intellectual
milieu. Work suffered as a result, though certain artists expanded the verbal
imperative into an expressionist form in its own right: witness the impressive
logorrhea of Istvan Kantor,
in later videotapes such as Black Flag (1998) and Brothers and Sisters
(1999). A few brave others accepted the
apparent deterioration of their brains as a consequence of love. For example,
John Porter, a Pleasure Dome regular throughout the decade, generated huge numbers
of films that seemed to be produced from pure passion for the medium, rather
than from particular ideological or aesthetic agendas. Yet he has internalized
the logic of filmmaking so profoundly that it informs even his most seemingly
artless work. As a result Porter's films, and those of others who followed this
route, are fertile with ideas, even if the artists themselves are not extremely
articulate in interviews.
The verbal-art phenomenon is
a case of Thirdness preceding Secondness:
judgements and symbolic pronouncements, such as
"Film should not/should offer visual pleasure," generate a course of
action. This top-heavy semiotic configuration is dangerous for artists because
it tends to backfire, since Thirdness is not a stable
state but generates new and unforeseen states of Secondness
and Firstness. For example, numerous feminist works
from the late '80s and early '90s, in a double reaction to the pronouncement
above, made "unpleasurable" works that
caused audiences to howl in amusement or "pleasurable" works that
made us feel we were being bullied. In contrast, work that luxuriates in Secondness, in the realm of simple action — like Porter's
time-lapse films, Toy Catalogue versions, and Cinefuge
versions— generates all kinds of conceptual responses in the minds of
audiences.
History of Cars and Boats
Postmodernism malingered
into the 1990s, and with it the disempowering notion that it was impossible for
artists to produce their own new images. Many filmmakers looked to found and
archival images as sources of fresh meaning. While any image they produced
themselves seemed to arrive already encoded in the sign systems of the dominant
culture, archival images had a kind of strangeness and excessiveness that
resulted from their codes having been forgotten.[2] Archival images had a
way of deconstructing themselves, because their codes, once implicit, were now
humorously obvious. Among many archive-gleaners, Mike Hoolboom
in Escape in
The postmodern dilemma
mentioned here is that the entire Real seems to exist in the realm of Thirdness, the general idea that engulfs all particulars. According
to the Baudrillardian logic by which many people were
seized in this period, the meaning everything that we perceive has already been
encoded, indeed dictated in the form of what Peirce
calls a legisign. If, as Peirce
writes, the recipe for apple pie exists in the realm of Thirdness,
but the particular apples used are Second, then postmodernism told us that
there were no apples any more, only recipes.[3] Thirdness
can be paralyzing, but, as when these artists treat the over-symbolized old
recipes as raw material, it can generate new signs, such as the arousal and
nausea that are sure indicators of Firstness.
The Immobilized Heads of
Mass Culture
Mass culture, or what the
In the early '90s artists referred to themselves as
"cultural workers" or "cultural producers" more than
artists do now. This was supposed to mean that artists, as producers of
culture, were responsible members of their communities, as well as to shy away
from the high-art connotations of the word "artist." More work was overtly
activist in the late 80s and early '90s. What happened?
Certainly part of what happened is that less money was
available for artists who wanted to make "unmarketable," i.e. truly
political, work. (By contrast, "critical" art, as Gary Kibbins points out, always has a relatively ready market.[4]) But another way to
understand the shift away from overtly political work that occurred in this
decade is to acknowledge different ways of being political. A work that
critiques popular culture reinforces its dependent relationship with popular
culture. Its goal is political change at the level of language, which is
collective but not deeply embodied. This relation of dependency is twofold in
Canadian critical experimental work, because it must take on all of American
mass media as well as the popular in Canadian culture, if the latter can be
said to exist independently.[5] By contrast, a work
that is only about itself and the passion of creation offers a model of freedom
from popular culture. Its goal is political change at the level of individual
action — which is embodied but not collective. And of course in between these
poles lay art that politicized personal, embodied experience. In short, the
shift away from activist art to personal art during the '90s can be seen as not
a depoliticization but a shift in political
strategies. though also a sign of retreat in wake of political exhaustion: the
overtly political work sometimes did not seem to exert any discernible change.
Yet we cannot deny that the early ‘90s were a lively period
for work in the arguably reactive mode of identity politics. Little of this
work showed up in the artist-curated programs at
Pleasure Dome, in contrast to, for example, the annual Images festival also
based in
In particular, the politics of ethnicity and nationality
informed the work of many Canadian media makers who got up to speed in the
mid-‘80s to the early 90s. The best of this work, such as Donna James’ gentle
meditation on her foremothers’ Jamaican aphorisms, Maigre
Dog (1990) and Shani Mootoo’s
canoe-generated rumination on Trinidadian-Canadian nationality in A Paddle and
a Compass (1992) dissolved identity categories in favor of the fecundity of not
knowing who one was, or alternatively, as in the intentionally frustrating work
of Jayce Salloum, in the
spirit of dissolving all predetermined bases for knowledge. While Helen Lee’s
critique of ethnic fetishism in Sally’s Beauty Spot (1990) was enthusiastically
received, her poetic sensibility emerged in the seemingly lighter and less critical
narrative My Niagara (1992), especially in the concluding shot of an
Asian-Canadian latter-day Marilyn Monroe carrying a flimsy flowered suitcase
and walking away from the camera in teetering heels, which suggested that
presence can be prised away from identity to float
precariously away—whether toward freedom or annihilation is more for the viewer
to decide.
Cultural critique tends to
take place in the mode of Secondness, or reaction. It
is thus doomed to a somewhat parasitic relationship with the mass media that
goad it along. The best such works, however, are rich enough in their Secondness that they generate the mental connections that
are the realm of Thirdness, or, more rarely, the
perceptual surprises of Firstness. Identity politics,
for example, when it worked, mobilized felt qualities of life into struggle
(for identity, by existing in opposition to something other, is Second) and
into new forms of communication. In the best cases, such work incorporated the
active and reactive mode of Secondness into a journey
toward the creation of mental images productive of thought, in the spirit of Thirdness.
Consciousness Is No
Different From Reality
The relationship between
reality and representation was a typically '80s concern in art. Many works
critiqued popular culture. Video artists in the '80s, in particular, eschewed
the structuralist experiments of the preceding decade
as being politically reactionary, and instead looked to critique the social and
economic foundation of the medium, television. Hence the videos that looked
like TV shows, with something amiss. The critique of representation, more
generally, became the air artists breathed. Saussurean
semiotic theory, in turn, gave us ways to understand the world as a compendium
of signs, all of which have been effectively pre-perceived for us. This gave
film- and videomakers plenty of grist to grind, in
the subversion of existing images.
But some people were uneasy with the idea
that we cannot know reality directly. If their consciousness was their reality,
then surely they did have direct access to some sort of reality? Less pressured
to evolve with their art form than videomakers,
filmmakers were somewhat freer to represent their own experience in the act of
experiencing it. Politically suspect though it may have been, they gave the
gift of their own perception to viewers and listeners. Ellie Epp, in notes in origin (1987), allowed the camera to be
moved by the beating of her own heart. In All Flesh Is Grass (1988) Susan Oxtoby allowed luminous textures and slanting shadows to
express the catharsis that comes from abandoning oneself to mourning. Zainub Verjee’s gentle Écoute s’il pleut
(1993) allowed the viewer to experience silence, full as a drop trembling on a
leaf, for eight minutes out of ordinary time. And a master of the art of
gradual revelation, Barbara Sternberg retained a rich, impressionistic
audiovisual texture in her work throughout the decade. These and other
filmmakers remained convinced that the world is still enchanted and need only
be properly recorded to enchant the viewer.
In other words, they used
the medium of film as an entranced Perceiver of the world, an agent of Firstness. One might define art as a practice that cannot
be subsumed in a symbolic mode. As Floyd Merrell suggests, wine-tasters, jazz
musicians, and others with a nonverbal grasp of their art "know more than
they can explicitly tell. A portion of their knowledge will always remain at
the level of Firstness and Secondness,
unmediated and unmediable by Thirdness."[6]
"The Pink"
In the '90s a second
generation of feminist film- and videomakers came of
age. While their predecessors had been into subverting patriarchal culture, the
critical stance lost favour with younger artists.
Constant vigilance is exhausting and not much fun. Instead, more artists,
especially women queer and straight (but later in the decade gay and then
straight men as well), began making work that focused on their own sexual
pleasure. Again, this work may have looked apolitical or self-indulgent, but as
with the general shift from activist to personal work, it was rather a move to
a politics of action rather than critique. Paula Gignac
and Kathleen Pirrie Adams transcended the
dyke-music-video genre in Excess Is What I Came For (1994), a tactile ride for
the senses, thanks to the sensuous graininess of video shot in the low light of
A Glitch in the Performance
One area in which the
critique of representation continued to be important was in queer media.
Feminist film and video gave way, or opened the way (depending on your view) to
queer work and the interrogation of masculinity. "Queering"
While the boys just wanted
to have fun, lesbian work in the early part of the decade seemed to have more
demons to battle at the level of language, only after which they could afford
to be playful. A raft of political issues floated works by the performance duo
Shauna Dempsey and Lorri Millan,
Shani Mootoo’s Wild Woman
in the Woods (1993), Marusya Bociurkiw’s
Bodies in Trouble (1990), and Michelle Mohabeer’s
Coconut, Cane, and Cutlass (1994), to name a few. Other lesbian works were
overtly didactic, such as Maureen Bradley’s Safe Sex is Hot Sex (1992) and
Kathy Daymond’s Nice Girls Don’t Do It (1990), an
instructional guide to female ejaculation. The need to establish one’s position
and ground one’s voice is well understood in terms of the politics of lesbian
identity: being historically placed so far outside of language and
representation, lesbian media artists need to claim them before they can
transcend them. Exceptions includes some of the punky
chicks from the Super-8 scene, who in the thrash’n’burn
spirit of punk were not trying to be understood but just to rebel.
In the early part of the
decade queer media was powered by struggle against the symbolic order. Secondness is the realm of "not-that," and queer
work vigorously reacted to the Thirdness of received
languages in both dominant culture and subcultures for what it is to be gay or
lesbian. Sometimes this work remained at the level of reaction or generated its
own new set of limiting languages, as in the safe-sex shorts that many activist
artists produced in the early '90s. Activism around sexual activity is
extremely difficult to pull off. Education is a question of the immediate
perception of Firstness and the received knowledge of
Thirdness converging on Secondness,
or immediate response to brute facts. It is almost impossible to educate
sexuality, unless a stronger motivation than desire can act like "the firm
hand of the sheriff on your shoulder," as Peirce
characterizes Secondness.
A Hard Day at the Arts
Council
Honestly, arts council juries have provided some of the
most democratic, well-informed and passionate discussions about art I've ever
taken part in, and this has been at the federal, provincial, and municipal
levels. The jurors' investments and expertise are different, and it's hard to
make rational decisions about what kind of art deserves funding, but somehow we
always reach consensus about which projects should get the money. Then we find
out there's not enough money to fund even half of them, because of funding cuts
during this decade in most of the provinces (the Ontario Arts Council was cut
by 40% during the first premiership of Mike Harris; the arts budgets of
Alberta, BC, Manitoba and Nova Scotia experienced similar cuts) and nationwide
(the Canada Council lost funding and then had it restored to less than the
previous level). That's where the self-mutilation comes in.
Equations for Your Eye
Structural film and video
returned to the scene in the 1990s. This was partly because the concern with
representation diminished and artists were newly interested in medium
specificity. In addition, the development of new media made it timely to
reexamine the intrinsic properties of older media. Structuralism respected the
internal coherence of a film or video as a physical body, with all its implied
mortality. Many of John Porter's films were structured by the three-minute
length of a roll of 8mm, and this internal logic was as pleasurable to
audiences as finding that the shape of one's own eye describes an equation. A
rash of tapes was produced on the Pixar 2000 in the
mid-'90s, and part of the pleasure of watching Pixelvision
was knowing that these videos were recorded on audiotape and that the jagged
black scar on the frame was the actual image of an in-camera edit. Hard-core
experimental filmmakers imposed rigid structures on the most vulnerable
material. Mike Cartmell used a "chiasmic"
structure to explore identity and paternity in Film in the Shape of the Letter
X (1986). In a sort of on-the-spot structuralism, Phil Hoffman’s Opening Series
(1992-) is presented in pieces to be reorganized by audiences before each
screening. This kind of structuralism has the same effect as lacing a corset
around a pliant torso: it allows the stuff inside to remain soft and formless.
Later in the decade it would evolve into the scratch video genre, where the ephemerality of forgettable television clips was given a
loose structure by randomized commands of digital editing.
Sad Classified Ads
Like the caress of a
stingray, grief immobilizes the body as it traverses it. As the AIDS epidemic
continued, people succumbed to melancholy paralysis. Although the urgency of
AIDS activism abated — it's hard to remain in a state of crisis indefinitely —
some artists returned feeling to our numbed bodies with blazing offerings of
rage and love. Sadomasochism had a profound place in this process, as in the
work of Tom Chomont, for whom s/m was a way to take
control of the disease in his body. During this decade Mike Hoolboom
built a flaming body of work around AIDS, whose melting saturated colors and
glistening high-contrast skins, as much as the bitter poetry of their words,
impelled us to cling to life even while we flailed against it.
In its power to immobilize,
grief imposes a state of perpetual Firstness.
According to Peirce it is impossible to exist sempiternally in a world of Firstness,
a world that "consist in nothing at all but a violet color or a stink of
rotten cabbage" — or in a pure feeling, be it love or pain.[7] A changeless state of
mourning, or of any emotion, is unbearable. The most powerful AIDS work of this
decade transmuted the Firstness of grief into the
contemplative and active states of mourning and action. In its most
transformative state, Thirdness — ideas that are
preconceived, verbalized, yea, published in the newspaper — still has the power
to move us to emotional states that far precede discourse.
Seinfeld and the
"Wilderness"
This dream is set in a big city of vast cold buildings
with broad grounds. It's dark and I'm looking for free parking on the snowy
streets, but I take a turn onto the highway by mistake, and the voice of
eminent Canadian film critic Peter Harcourt says, "It's okay, it's just
what they call the wilderness." Soon enough I am amused to find that this
circumscribed bit of land that I'm driving through is what New Yorkers call the
wilderness.
For many Canadian artists it
is a political choice to remain in
There is a myth that funding
is easier to come by for filmmakers in
Woman Ejaculates on
Prospective Canadian
Experimental cinema has
almost always rejected acting as implicated in the illusionist aesthetics of
commercial cinema. Plus, acting is expensive to shoot. But performance,
confronting the viewer with a real body enduring experience in real time, has
none of the illusionism of acting. Part of the return to phenomenal experience
that characterized the '90s was the return of performance. Often this was
inspired by unabashedly enthusiastic performances from decades past. However,
few contemporary filmmakers had not been infected in some way by the post-structuralist disease that would have us believe our own
bodies are just textual objects and don't even really exist. For a while in the
'90s it was uncool to believe that a person could
ever reveal the essence of himself or herself, or even that there was an
essence. But in performance you find the meaning of the body through physical,
not mental acts; the body has to be right there, not a construct. Performers
sacrificed their own bodies so that the rest of us could have ours back. In her
1993 series “Aberrant Motion” Cathy Sisler spun in the
streets as a proxy for our collective disequilibrium. In Super 8 1/2 (1994) and
Hustler White (1996) Bruce LaBruce stripped all the
way down to the layer of plastic wrap covering his heart, so that we didn't
have to, or we could if we wanted to. Donigan Cumming
convinced non-actors to pray for a Nettie they had
never met (A Prayer for Nettie, 1995), sacrificing
their authenticity to an audience that in turn suddenly became responsible for
both them and her (the deceased Nettie had been
Cumming’s photographic collaborator and model, but the video does not tell us
that).[8]
In 1967 Godard famously
responded to criticism of his gory film Weekend, "It's not blood, it's
red," meaning that his film was meant to be taken as a sign that was
already at some remove from the real world it signified. But for a performers
in the 90s it was red and it was blood.
In performance the
perceiving and acting body is a Peircean sign
machine, quivering like a tethered string between the poles of experience and
communication. Whenever one presents one's body and actions for public
consumption - i.e., presents oneself consciously as a sign - the same
accelerated oscillation between the three modes takes place, for one is
required to act, or make relations, an operation of Secondness,
and to be genuine, or to operate in the mode of Firstness,
at the same time that one manages oneself as a mental image. Ejaculating or
shedding blood before an audience is only one way to do this.
Divorce Ritual
Later I walk by the village again and see that the little
houses with thatch roofs have been burned for acres. The whole landscape is
smoking and gray. It's awful. I am embarrassed when the people from the town
see me staring at the misfortune.
One of the most painfully
visceral experiences you can have at the movies is when the film catches in the
projector gate and burns, especially if it is a precious lone print. We have
seen that in the '90s many artists turned to archival film for a source of
images. While the images could be deftly recontextualized
and critiqued, filmmakers were also sometimes struck by the material of the
film itself. In this decaying surface, archival filmmaking witnessed a death, a
divorce of the original meaning from the image. Rather than recontextualize
the images, filmmakers held funerals for their charred remains. Gariné Torossian built up a body
of work during the decade whose surfaces were thick with painstakingly collaged
film fragments, their scratched and glued textures overwhelming the
appropriated images on their surfaces. Carl Brown's oeuvre throughout this
decade continued to be a body of self-immolating cinema, whose recorded images
dissolved in the chemical conflagration on the surface of the film. Earlier in
the decade, Brown collaborated with Michael Snow on To Lavoisier,
Who Died in the Reign of Terror (1991). Through this film’s scarred and
crackling surface, vignettes of everyday life are just barely visible, like the
charred remains of a neighborhood.
In the '90s filmmakers returned to touch the material
body of film at a time when the medium has been pronounced obsolete. Of course,
the idea of obsolescence is meaningless to non-industrial filmmakers: when a
medium has been superseded by the industry, that's when artists can finally
afford it. What precipitated the divorce of the images from their medium was
perhaps the institution of digital filmmaking; the medium of analog video had
not been the same threat to film, because the two media looked and functioned
so differently. Over in the world of commercial cinema, and increasingly among
independent filmmakers as well, films were edited and processed not on a Steenbeck or at a lab but in the virtual space of the Media
100. Where now was the film's body? Celluloid became just an output medium for
the virtual body of the film encoded in software.
As well as these moving reflections on
film's body, the end of the decade saw a surprising nostalgia for analog video.
Videomakers who moved to non-linear editing swore
they would never go back — yet tapes were being turned out that simulated
analog interference, dropout, and generational loss!
A Peircean
would note that these works of materialist cinema liberate the medium to be
meaningful as a body in itself, rather than the medium for another message.
While plumbing archival films for their images is an operation of Thirdness, the mourning of film's material death is First
in its reaction to the film as to another body.
I Forget I Own Art
Steve Reinke's
The Hundred Videos appear to sum up the various concerns of the decade. They
began with a linguistic understanding of meaning, and the use of
psychoanalysis, a linguistic form of interpretation, to unravel it. They moved
to interests in sexuality, desire, the body, and AIDS. Following the
anti-visual turn in the arts mid-decade, they questioned documentary's relation
to the truth. But throughout the decade Reinke
maintained a conceptual rigor that made these slight works linger in the memory
of the viewer. The Hundred Videos enter the mind through a tiny aperture of
attention and then expand to fill all the available space. The sad ashtray, the
sincere inventor of potato flakes, Neil Armstrong's tribute to his dead dog —
they went by in one to three minutes but stayed with me for years. By the end
of the decade, in a final rejection of linguistic signification, Reinke and his video camera were chasing dust balls under
the bed (Afternoon, March 28, 1999).
These are theorematic videos, examples of the most fertile mode of Thirdness. By creating relations among other signs, they
are mental images. Reinke brought things together:
foreign films and porn films, a love letter and a yearbook photo, an
over-the-top pornographic performance and a list of self-doubts. In so doing he
generated enabling new concepts and new models for thinking, such as, use hand
puppets to role play your fondest desires. Reinke's
work showed the generosity of Thirdness, giving
audiences material (not about which, but) with which to think.
Aggressive House
At the end of the decade we
were confronted with the Peircean extremes of
performance, work so obsessed with action that it could barely think, and
information media, work so highly encoded in symbolic form that it was
incapable of affect. Now that digital editing could alter voice and gesture to simulacral perfection, the apparent naïveté of appearing
live before the camera's witness had a new urgency. Emily Vey
Duke, Scott Beveridge, and other artists exhibited
pure affect for the camera, in performances whose virtue was in being as
spontaneous as the single-take exhibitionism of their '70s forebears.
Ironically, it was mostly thanks to digital editing that
At the extreme of Thirdness, artists moved to the small screen and
concentrated information with such density that it could no longer be processed
as information, but only affect. This time, however, the body experiencing hot
flashes was not human but silicon-based. Attacked by hell.com, jodi.org, and
other online artworks, computers jittered with illegible information, sprouted
rashes of windows on their faces, and crashed. Their human caretakers felt this
affective rush, at most, sympathetically. Meanwhile, many Canadian media
artists seized upon, or continued to develop, installation as a medium that was
apparently more physical than the virtual light of single-screen projection. In
works by David Rokeby, Nell Tenhaaf,
and other interactive media artists, the intelligent interface embraced the
visitor as though to spill its brains into our attentive bodies.
At the end of the decade,
everybody was saying we had moved decisively from a visual culture to an
information culture. What, then, would become the role of the audiovisual media
that artists had been coddling and pummeling throughout the decade, indeed the
century? Now that we had machines to see, hear, and act for us, raw experience
was a more precious commodity than ever before. The processing of information
and the debased notion of interactivity were behaviorist, Secondness-based
modes, which besides our computers could do without us. Throughout the decade,
experimental film and video artists had been pulling their media from the Secondness-based modes of narrative and critique to a Firstness that was felt only in the body, and a
hyper-symbolic Thirdness that was experienced as
First by the proxy bodies of our machines. We hoped that new connections, new
mental images, some Third thing as yet unimagined, would come to animate our
minds again.[9]
7572 words
[1] Charles S. Peirce,
"The Categories in Detail," in Collected
Papers, vol. 6, ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1931), 150.
[2] See William Wees, Recycled
Images: The Art and Politics of Found Footage Film (New York: Anthology Film
Archives, 1993), and Scott Mackenzie, “Flowers in the Dustbin: Termite Culture
and Detritus Cinema,” Cineaction! 47 (September
1998), 24-29.
[3] Peirce, "The
Categories in Detail," 172-173.
[4] Gary Kibbins, "Bored
Bedmates: Art and Criticism at the Decade's End," Fuse 22:2 (Spring 1999): 32-42.
[5] This reactive mode takes us into the footsteps of
Bruce Elder, who memorably argued that experimental work is the
quintessentially Canadian cinema in "The Cinema We Need," The Canadian Forum (February 1985);
reprint, Documents in Canadian Film,
ed. Douglas Fetherling, 260-271.
[6] Floyd Merrell, Peirce's Semiotics Now: A Primer (Toronto: Canadian Scholars' Press, 1995),
116.
[7] Peirce, "The
Categories in Detail," 150.
[8] Sally Berger, Beyond the Absurd, Beyond Cruelty: Donigan Cumming’s Staged Realities,” in Lux: A Decade of Artists’ Film and Video, ed. Steve Reinke and Tom Taylor (
[9] An earlier version of this essay appears in Lux: A Decade of Artists’ Film and Video,
ed. Steve Reinke and Tom Taylor (