Week 4 Burris/Suarez

I think the most interesting point about modernism that Burris points out is that it would have inevitably led to postmodernism. The idea of continually foward-minded thinking seems to have a cap on it, until we run out of ways to expand our minds about a certain form and have to move on, either to new teachnology/mediums or right back onto itself and start making fun of everything. So it makes perfect sense how video, a medium developed around this time of artistic thought, was such a suitable medium for postmodern art.
I think it's great that there was so much modifiable elements of video that could not be achieved with film, such as with the idea of the visual synthesizer. I think that the video synthesizer actually supersedes Berman's idea that "new works are not triumphs but repetitions," in that a "moving" visual tapestry created by the device is a completely new form of art.
Suarez' explanation of political postmodernism seems like it relies heavier on utilizing preexisting norms to create new meaning, or possibly "spin." This is pretty excellently conveyed in Kenneth Anger's videos in which he gays up, through editing and suggestive music and mise en scene, a heterosexual, masculine activity such as maintenance of a hot rod. As a medium, this is pretty different from the use of a video synthesizer. The video synthesizer is rooted in progression of the medium, while Anger's video is rooted in reusing old social form into something new. You can still see that the artistic goals of both these pieces do have the modernist, progressive thinking at the very core of them, though the directions go elsewhere. This shows that modernism might always be a part of postmodernism.

Week 3 Deren

Maya Deren at one point in her anagram describes the artistic feud between the realists and the surrealists. She explains that the realists strive for mass appeal through commonality in their works. The surrealists on the other hand, are bent on exposing an interior reality which is not one of commonality, but a completely new one which is generally unspoken of at the time (sexual lust, violence) and thus can not be a part of bourgeois normality. I thought it was interesting how she united the two factions through their "very righteous contempt for the group loosely characterized as the 'romantics'" because of, well, their romantic notion of everything. I wanted to see how similar Deren's decription of some aspects of surrealism were to Breton's first surrealist manifesto.
Breton begins with talking about logic, which seems to me what he attributes to realism. He continues to describ this logic as a suppressor of the other things such as superstition and fancy, which I now know as important parts of surrealist thinking. It does seem in Breton's early writing that surrealism is meant to combat these forces of logic/realism, yet there is no mention that I can find of romantic escapist art, which probably came about after the surrealists had established themselves after the writing of this manifesto.
When Deren mentions the artist needs to create a whole piece of art, it makes me think about Stan Brakhage's Window Water Baby Moving. His piece to me, when viewed as a whole, is a memory piece from the perspective of a first-time father holding the camera. The anachronic editing and various close-ups allow for an intimite look at this birth. I noticed that any clip of the film could be taken out of its context and viewed almost in a similar way, though. Brakhage keeps his style and lighting consistent throughout the film, and so there is really would be no important moment missed for continuity's sake or anything. However, if I were to have viewed a clip of the film knowing it was a clip and not the whole thing, I would be always wondering what I was missing. Filling in the blanks as a viewer would probably piss off Deren, because she says that it's not what the viewer interprets but what the artist intends. So in her eyes, you either watch the whole thing or nothing at all.

Week 2 Burger

I think Burger sums it up well when he says that Duchamp's ready-mades are not works of art but manifestations. The aestheticist Bourgeois notion of art does not allow for the idea of ready-mades because the art is neither planned nor made from his own hands, as I understand it. Slapping the signature on the thing signifies it as so, however. I can see why this stirred up so much hullabaloo in the art world. Art is no longer defined by its traditional terms. Now it's realized that art is all around us. I'm sitting at a table right now and I'm noticing that there are rounded edges and a textured top, and despite the fact that it's a table, and could even be used as a stand to hold a more traditional piece such as a sculpture, somebody somewhere designed the thing and it could be under bright lights with an accompanying placard in a museum somewhere and it would be fine.

Week 1: Benjamin's Aura

The aura that Walter Benjamin speaks of in an object is its "value," measured in terms of distance. In Anemic Cinema, the art which is being mechanically reproduced is the sonic pun of the sentences displayed on screen. The original source of the art is the reading or recitation of the sentence from one person to another, or a person to his or herself. By reproducing these sentences on film, Duchamp is affecting the aura of the sentence, from its "original" source. The effect is not quite similar to an instance of one beholding a photograph of the Mona Lisa rather than the actual painting, since the original source of a sentence is not concrete (Though the Ten Commandments or the Magna Carta may suggest otherwise due to their status as "cult objects").
In this case, I don't think the aura of the puns are removed. This is a silent film, and so the important part of the pun is its reproduction in one's mind. If this film were made in 2008 with Morgan Freeman reading the phrases out loud, the aura will have been decreased even more so, I think. It's important to note that mechanical reproduction is exhibited rather literally in this film. The words are physically embedded in a spiraling piece of metal (or whatever it is), and perhaps that says something about the decrease of aura through mechanical reproduction. I really don't think that the aura has been decreased, though, as the art is words and I think the true essence of literary art is in its reproduction.
This is getting a bit confusing.