Pratt Institute

Pratt Institute Female Art Students c. 1890

I've been accepted for graduate study at the Pratt Institute in the dual-degree MFA Fine Arts/MS Art History program, and have been offered the maximum scholarship amount.

Of all the Pratt alumni luminaries listed in the official catalogue, I'm most charmed by the inclusion of William Boyer, designer of the classic Thunderbird automobile.

In Review: shadoWord, Parse Follies, and the Literary Spectacular

Little Nemo in Slumberland, the comic strip creation of vaudeville performer Winsor McCay, features a miniature protagonist with a penchant for the spectacular. Nemo’s subconscious nightly bills him as the performer of such feats as stilt walking through an enchanted forest of oversized flamingoes, riding a circus elephant atop a bridge of jugglers’ pins, skyscraper Alpinism, and the derailing of railroad cars onto rollercoaster tracks. The nocturnal adventurer awakes each morning to discover that his journeys have been nothing more than the products of his subconscious mind’s meanderings, throughout which he has remained spatially confined to his bed. In spite of this regularly occurring discovery, reality is approximated with such vividness and precision in his dreams that Nemo continues to mistakenly believe himself to be traveling through actual time and space on each excursion to Slumberland.¹

When the comic strip debuted in the New York Herald in 1905, the construction of the visual consumer was in full throttle, fueled by increasingly persuasive and accurate methods of rendering reality.² Winsor McCay’s background of performance on the vaudeville circuit and his protagonist’s egregious fascination with popular visual culture of the period suggest a conceptualization of Nemo’s adventures in Slumberland as paradigmatic of this twentieth-century consumer’s experience with a spectacle so adept at simulating reality that, as is often the case with dreams, it becomes nearly impossible to distinguish between the two. This expands upon the 19th-century model of the spectator, revising it into a near-somnolent subject for whom viewing constitutes a state of total physical and (conscious) psychical immobility, comparable to one experienced during sleep.³ The subsequent historical development of the apparatuses and industries associated with popular visual culture has functioned to produce manipulable, quasi-catatonic viewing subjects, and consequently equally inert social subjects.

Poets of the Unreeled: A CinePoetry and Performance Extravaganza offered an altogether different model of 21st century cinematic spectatorship and the viewing subject. Presented under the troupe name shadoWord productions, the cinepoetic spectacular was coordinated by impresario, University of Miami Professor, and Movietelling scholar, Walter K. Lew.⁴

Poets of the Unreeled seems to function as a sounding alarm to the somnolent viewing subject. An endeavor toward the rethinking of Movietelling and its implications for a 21st century audience, the Cinepoetic Extravaganza’s roster of performances was comprised of eight literary and visual artists dabbling in genres of every stripe and swiss dot. The event was executed over the course of two evenings on February 8th and 9th at Galapagos Art Space and the Bowery Poetry Club, respectively. Though remarkably eclectic in thematic content and subject matter, the pieces were bound by the marriage of text and projected image and the tacit invitation to audience members to re-examine their relationship to moving pictures on a screen through the superimposition of spoken dialogue that by turns explicated, elaborated upon, and complicated them. The evenings commenced with an introduction and brief theoretical framing of the genre by Lew. Contrary to what might be expected given the academic overtones of the event; the conceptual innovation and expert delivery of several of the performances (as well as the introductory speech) lent it the sort of entertainment value one might expect to find in a more orthodox motion picture palace. Gems included; dennis M. somera’s piece entitled WEstsiDESTROY, a fast-forward paragraph-a-second satirized retelling of West Side Story turned factual postcolonial narrative punctuated by intermittent vocalizing in falsetto, Dillon Westbrook’s Long Life, a pulsing live drum performance with images of such 20th Century jazz icons as Max Roach projected behind the performer along with his textual tributes to each figure superimposed over the photographs, and the collaborative piece by Paolo Javier, Ernest Concepcion, and Mike Estabrook entitled The Original Brown Boy, which might be called a spoken Dada storybook whose construction occurred before a live audience.

Parse Follies, performed by Jeremy Thompson, repeatedly lured spectators into a red & white striped circus tent and proceeded to collapse the canvas ceiling in on them. Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s puppet theatrical adaptation of Richard Wagner’s Parsifal was displayed on the screen while Wurlitzer Circus Calliope melodies selected by Thompson played at a disquietingly low, barely audible volume in the background. Period appropriate attire and musical accompaniment created a sense of aesthetic and aural cohesion within the work, and produced a hypnotic affect evident in a silence so acute the drop of a hatpin might have been heard. While the delivered text frequently made direct reference to the activities of the onscreen wooden effigies - it quickly developed into an absurdist, nonsensical excursion through the magical laboratory of Klingsor’s Castle, occasionally peppered with homophonic translations of the Lord’s Prayer and Baudrillardian and Benjaminian allusions (“Keep watching as they try their best to save the empire of meaning.”) Audience members were invited to suspend disbelief and enter the kingdom of Parsifal only to immediately be reminded of its illusory, celluloid status (“And here’s the king again; he’s more like a puppet, just made to watch. Let’s see what he sees.”)

The projection of Thompson’s stentorian, stylized boom across the room, his gesticulations, and the tempo of the tinkering calliope tunes recalled the familiar scenario of a Master of Ceremonies at a late 19th century World’s Fair sideshow, directing the viewer’s attention to the desired focal points of the spectacle. In the place of contortionists with limbs arranged in curlicues and trapeze artists performing death-defying feats of acrobatics, the spectacle being proffered to the viewer was a multisensory experience of text and poetics – a spectacle not lending itself to a state of somnolent, psychical immobility. Rather, a literary spectacle that reenvisions the mesmeric potential of sequined letters strung out across a stage as commensurate to that of Beatrice the Bearded Lady, Bruno: World’s Most Powerful Strongman, Mme. Zelda: Teller of Fortunes, or the popular narrative film.

¹ Winsor McCay, Little Nemo 1905-1914 (Köln: Taschen Evergreen, 2006)

² The Lumière Brothers had already held the first cinematographic screening of a motion picture in Paris, Thomas Edison had produced several films intended for viewing via Kinetoscope, and the foundations for what would become known as the “Hollywood Dream Factory” had been laid.

³ In summarizing this phenomenon, Debord writes in the oft-cited Society of the Spectacle, “So long as the realm of necessity remains a social dream, dreaming will remain a social necessity. The spectacle is the bad dream of modern society in chains, expressing nothing more than its wish for sleep.” See Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1995) 18.

⁴While the global Movietelling / Benshi sensation – encompassing any instance in which a cinematic screening is accompanied by live narration - remains by and large unknown to American audiences, it thrived in the first quarter of the 20th century in nations throughout Asia and Europe. Its permutations assume multiple names: Pyônsa in Korea, Benzi in Taiwan, Gavrilov Translation in the USSR, and Benshi in Japan. In recent years, Lew has coined the term Movietelling with reference to this phenomenon in an attempt to emphasize its international origins, to avoid associating it with one specific historical variation, and to suggest its continued vitality in the contemporary sphere.

The advent of the genre occurred concurrently with the motion picture’s emergence as a mass medium of entertainment and the transcontinental transport of Western cinema (no doubt alongside shipping crates replete with glass bottles emblazoned with the Coca Cola logo and hand-tinted Lillian Pickford postcards), and international audiences’ inability to read English interstitial text. Latently subversive content implicit in the plotlines and dialogue of Western motion pictures – so seemingly threatening that it constituted filtration and reconfiguration through the mediating figure of a film narrator - was also a contributing factor. As such, several instances of Benshi warrant quasi-propagandistic classification. (One might imagine an example wherein a Komsomolski Gavrilov Translator sporting a scarlet neck kerchief recasts Garbo in “The Mysterious Lady” as a Slavic espionage agent so thoroughly devoted to her civic duty that she expertly mimics the gestures of a lady in love so as to successfully complete her mission– rather than a traitorous secret service worker so awestruck by Conrad Nagel’s Austrian charm that she is unequivocally willing to tell the Russian government what for.) For further elaboration upon the historical origins of Movietelling and its contemporary incarnations, see Jeremy Thompson’s post entitled Movietelling: For a More Practical Avant-Garde at autotypist.blogspot.com.