Absence, Time, and Spacial Observations

Prompt 1 - “Nostalgia, like any form of narrative, is always ideological: the past it seeks has never existed except as narrative, and hence, always absent, that past continually threatens to reproduce itself as a felt lack.” (Stewart, p23)

My short documentary “Jid Jid/Sit Sit” from 2016 uses the narrative of absence to create nostalgia.  It also uses the idea of a utopian or selective memory of the past.  By that I mean, as a kid I would watch with my family this home movie using a reel to reel projector.  I used to think it was a scene of a happy Christmas, but when I got older and watched it again, I realized it was a sad scene.  The smiles were hiding tears of the loss of the matriarch of the family who had recently died.  The film plays twice; once the way I used to see it, the other the way I see it now.  The narration is of my Jido (grandfather) talking about his mother and her journey to America.

I have been trying to show the deterioration of time in my sanded paper pieces and the broken billboard pieces, as well as constructing my collages with elements that evoke the past.  The thought first occurred to me in last week’s class that I am interested in creating the feeling of nostalgia.

I went home and wrote this: Time is the through line of my body of work, whether it is capturing time, manipulating time, or showing the deterioration of time.  Time is the key ingredient for the aesthetics of nostalgia, and not of memory, but of feeling.  Old materials, worn surfaces, former movie stars, images from an old way of life, even colors from another era, can evoke a loss.  The loss is of time.

“…nostalgia is the desire for desire.” (Stewart, p23) I feel like this is what I am trying to capture with my art in general.  The idea of the passage of time, leading to a desire to stop it or reverse it.  

Stewart talks about Charlie Chaplin and Dziga Vertov’s films (p12) having a power over time.  We can only push on and off of the TV, but they can speed it up and reverse it. 

This gives me an excuse to reference one of my favorite passages from one of my favorite books Slaughterhouse Five by one of my favorite Hoosiers Kurt Vonnegut.  Vonnegut is reading the passage with music and video by someone else.

Prompt 2 - "The suburbs present us with a negation of the present; a landscape consumed by its past and its future."

This is a demo version of my favorite song (I’ve had the lyrics tattooed on my arm for 10 years) and someone else’s footage of driving around the Midwest (driving by 4 places I’ve lived).  It’s about a young person driving late at night, reflecting on their environment.  He talks about the streets, the trees, signs on highways, neon lights, AM radio, old cars, suburbs, cities, sights, smells, sounds, and feelings.  He grew up in the suburbs of Boston and wrote the song when he was 17, performed it here when he was 18, shortly before the band broke up.  People have associated this song as angsty and even the beginning of punk rock, but I see it as an awareness of the present, which is a mix of the “old world” and the “modern world” and it’s all around us no matter where we are.

As prompt by Sean, I would like to deconstruct the esthetics of a bowling alley.  A quality bowling alley interior should maintain a connection to the past.  Every element that is modernized causes the quality of the experience to decrease.  Pin boys vs mechanical pin-setters, score keeper projection vs computer generated scores, smokey league bowl vs cosmic bowling with bumpers.  There is no benefit to “updating” the design of a bowling alley.  I can appreciate a "retro" bowling alley, which represents the most popular era of bowling (the 60s) though more recently built, and I can appreciate a bowling alley that represents the time in which it was built (70s, 80s), but any attempt to modernize from an older version is a futile attempt to improve.  The real downfall however is the modernization of the ball, changing the game its self.  In golf, if a new technology comes out that makes the game easier, they ban that technology.  With bowling, they welcomed it, thinking more strikes meant more excitement, but were wrong because it changed the game and the fans moved on.  It's beauty is in its purity of tradition, its celebration of a past-time passtime.

Here is a short video/animation I made last year about bowling called “Hold On(e)”