Just Like Me

Huh. In one of those strange confluences of coincidence, Anthony Lane's review of Exit Through the Gift Shop references both Welles' F for Fake and Surrealism.(*) Although he ends up in a different place - he hates the flick, and I understand his feelings, but being from LA I found it pretty entertaining - what are the odds of both of us making the same arguments and supporting them with the same fairly obscure references?

In fact, I sympathize with his misgivings, but the part that I liked was its commentary on "the scene and scenesters." THAT is the true value of this flick, and having come up in LA and watching it evokes a feeling not unlike watching Spinal Tap. It's a joke - not necessarily satire - about a joke. The transparent commenting on co-modification is okay, though a well-worn re-tread, and yet, that's not his fault. It is, after all, the way the system works, trite as it is to point it out.

One other thing; I saw ETtGS with Renee and two of her friends. Afterwards I asked her friends if they thought it had significance that it took part mainly in LA. They didn't think so.

Back to Anthony Lane.

The Welles reference I get, as his thing, like mine, is movies. Still, even among movie heads, F for Fake is obscure.

The Surrealist reference is more improbable; the guy's 48, so Surrealism was for all intents and purposes a dead issue as a movement. Now, England did play a fairly major minor role back in the day, and they had an active coterie of English Surrealists who organized some pretty big shows with the participation of many of the French group, including Breton and Eluard. Fairly recently, I believe the Tate ran a show about a decade or so ago.

Smart dude, that Anthony Lane; haha, a transparent hat tip to myself, there. His excerpted review follows.

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(*) The forever elegant Duchamp, though never formally a member, was a participant supporter and even curated some of their most famous shows, like the one where he glued coal sacks to the ceiling which created a weird and decidedly non-elegant setting to say the least.

Tzara, the Zurich dada boss before Surrealism was codified, was "awaited like the second coming" when the young, soon to be Surrealists courted him to Paris and they threw themselves into dada full force. It didn't last long; as the French group was steeped in the romantic tradition and interested in psychic explorations - this is Freud's time - dada's incessant nihilism wore on them. After the breach and formal organizing with the first Surrealist Manifesto in '24, Tzara - in a bit of weird symmetry - eventually re-joined them as a Surrealist. Thus, the father became the son.

The Current Cinema
Street Justice
“Kick-Ass” and “Exit Through the Gift Shop.”
by Anthony Lane

April 20, 2010

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/cinema/2010/04/26/100426crci_cinema_lane#ixzz0lq6IZpTw

Who made “Exit Through the Gift Shop”? No writer or director is credited, but it describes itself as “A Banksy Film.” To those of you who keep up with developments in street art less eagerly than you should, it must be explained that Banksy is not a derogatory adjective but the alias of an unspecified British artist who has indeed put art on the streets. His paintings and stencillings have won him a fan base of fashionable ardor, unceasingly piqued by his anonymity.

As if in tribute to that eel-like elusiveness, only a portion of “Exit Through the Gift Shop” is about the man himself. We see a cowled and low-lit figure, who speaks with a West Country burr. (This is the most derided of English accents, associated in the public ear with a rustic slowness, and splendidly out of kilter with the braying of the art world.) Banksy tells us about a guy who was trying to make a documentary about him, whereupon—hey, presto!—the rest of the movie turns around and follows that guy. He is Thierry Guetta, though he pronounces his first name “Terry,” thus becoming one of the few Frenchmen in history to prefer his Anglicized self. Even his mustache betrays a Victorian luxuriance; “He looked like something out of the eighteen-sixties,” as Banksy says.

Guetta explains that, living in Los Angeles, with his wife and children, he became interested in, then addicted to, the hit-and-run world of street art. He made friends with a number of artists, whether they wanted befriending or not, and filmed them with a handheld video camera as they worked. Eventually, the road led to Banksy, for whom Guetta became a partner in crime—accompanying him to Disneyland, where Banksy placed an inflatable doll resembling a hooded inmate at Guantánamo next to a ride, causing Guetta to endure hours of unamused questioning by the authorities. Even this failed to sate him, and the latter half of the movie shows him deciding to cross over and become an artist himself, like a war reporter picking up a gun. The joke is that he has no discernible gift, save a knack for self-advertisement; the more depressing joke is that this crumb of talent turns out to be enough. He calls himself Mr. Brainwash, and fills an abandoned television studio with sub-Warholian dreck of his own devising. Art scavengers, lured by the smell of publicity, line up, open the jaws of their wallets, and feast.

“Exit Through the Gift Shop” could and should have been an excoriating work. It isn’t often that I wish a high-minded Marxist had been in charge of a motion picture, but who else would you trust with the spectacle of subversive activity being commandeered, and fetishized, by the capitalist machinery that it was meant to undermine? This doesn’t apply just to Guetta, who still believes, bless him, that rehashed images of Marilyn Monroe and Elvis retain the power to mock and shock, and who, long before the movie is done, dwindles from a doting eccentric into a tiring bore; it also applies to Banksy himself, or, at any rate, to the moment when his paintings found their way onto the walls of Sotheby’s. To forge a million pounds’ worth of fake British banknotes, with the Queen’s head replaced by that of Diana, Princess of Wales, is a definable feat of guerrilla art. But to have your print of Kate Moss sold by a London auction house for ninety-six thousand pounds of real money, whatever you choose to do with it, means that you have been press-ganged from the street where you roamed free.

As a study in prankhood, this Banksy film can’t touch “F for Fake,” Orson Welles’s 1974 movie about an art forger. Welles both conspired with his untrustworthy subject and held him at arm’s length, like a conjurer with his rabbit, and you came out dazzled by the sleight, whereas “Exit Through the Gift Shop” feels dangerously close to the promotion of a cult—almost, dare one say it, of a brand. Nothing by Banksy or his acolytes would have been remotely alarming to Marcel Duchamp, or to Tristan Tzara; what would have struck them was the means by which a Banksy image can be reproduced—the sudden velocity at which its impact can travel, whether online or through the eyes of a hundred cell phones. That is what binds “Exit Through the Gift Shop,” unexpectedly, to “Kick-Ass”: the sense, both arousing and disconcerting, that, whatever you want to be, whether it’s an artist, a superhero, or a mystery man, all you need is the nerve to exhibit that desire. Then hit Send.

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/cinema/2010/04/26/100426crci_cinema_lane?currentPage=all#ixzz0lqeg3x5w

F for Fake and On Volunteering

While reading a blog post by The Smirking Chimp's resident curmudgeon BlueTigress (1) and with her help, in one of those aha moments, I saw another way of talking about my favorite theme, illusions; fake.

Mere synonym aside, the reason I'm making a distinction is that I like the vehemency of "fake" versus "illusions," the latter having more of a literate flavor, the high versus the low of "fake" or "phony". It has much more muscle. There's also another dimension to "fake" that I like; agency, planning or plotting, intention, motivation. Implicit in it is the notion that someone planned something and gave or executed it, no matter how stupid or well-thought out, poorly or masterly played. That's not necessarily inherent in "illusions" which implies the receiving end of perception, the one exception being magic tricks.

The great Orson Welles essayed on this very subject whose title I stole for this entry; it's nothing less than one of the most brilliant movies I've ever seen in both form and content.(3)



All of which - BlueTigress, Welles and my liking the theme of illusions - says that I think the term "fake" or even "phony" applies more accurately to American "capitalism" than "illusion," because it places the onus upon the people who wield conglomerated power.

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I admit to an experiment; see if I could write an essay whose footnotes were longer than the main body. I've succeeded.

1. While I couldn't agree more with her take on crazy liberals, particularly white-guilted ones, I disagree with her when she admonishes them by saying,

As for the self-flagellation crowd? Look people, what's done is done and cannot be undone. Rather than go "we're so horrible" go to the reservation and volunteer to teach the kids or volunteer to be the tribe's general helper. Work with the people who are here now, rather than try to raise the consciousness of people who don't care. You're wasting your time and irritating them, which makes them even LESS receptive to your message. If it makes you feel noble to eat your bread and water meal in a room that was purposely made cheerless so you could meditate on the injustice Europeans have done to the world, fine. And when you've emerged from your hermitage, and nothing is different, don't feel bad. You did what you thought best. But did it matter?

It's the part about volunteering. Let me be honest about it; fuck volunteering. It's unctuous, condescending and infantilizes poor people of color. As Jonathan Kozol so aptly noted decades ago, bleeding heart liberal white kids come and go in the ghetto every summer during internships... and yet the reservation/barrio/ghetto stays the reservation/barrio/ghetto and the white kids disappear, only to be replaced by the next crop. In a poignantly funny moment, I recall Kozol remarking how blacks would look at white kids who opted to go barefoot to show that they were down as crazy, for who would choose to go barefoot when they had perfectly good shoes?

By saying, "...rather than try to raise the consciousness of people who don't care," she ignores history and that ole sayin', there's more than one way to skin a cat. After all, in conglomerating around the issues of war, civil rights, women's rights, and Watergate, those issues were dealt with because it was so in your face, all the time, even in the music and movies of the day. It's also much harder to organize disenfranchised folks, let alone impart pragmatism that works in favor of their needs, and I suspect that's the reason even the "pragmatic and down to earth" BlueTigress would rather advocate for volunteering than organizing.

And an important point that seems obvious to me but which I find myself clarifying time and again in these arguments; I'm not questioning the intention(s) of people, I'm interested in effects. I can remember the first time David Hilliard started telling me stories about crazy liberals when I produced a series of programs with he and Luis Rodriguez (and later, Piri Thomas!) and cracking up. But then, one particular gig which was at Jerry Brown's compound, we had a couple of nut cases - one a butt fugly fat Asian lesbo tree hugger who was mouthy to the point of making everyone within earshot do the eye roll; shithead snuck in without paying, too. The other was the typical Berkeley liberally conscious yenta who looked like she orgasmed at the thought of the Dewey Decimal system and replete with her white fro curls, so full of self-righteousness and certainty as to what "progressive" was that anything outside of its bounds -- such as Luis' story of transcendence or the Panther free breakfast program -- made her throw up. She ended up leaving during the program, but not before making us all aware of how we were all so wrong for listening to this (re-write? revisionism?) "stuff." Of course, they were at the extreme end.

Mr. Hilliard's real point, of course, was that the world was overflowing with crazy liberals who mouth off with lofty idealism, "book smarts" and high ideals, but in the end, shoot blanks. And that's why people who are crazy liberals can't stand true progressives - because real progressives are grounded in equal parts idealism and pragmatism; they have a sense of high and low, are resourceful, have strategic plans, and last but not least, they do the work.

Volunteering, on the other hand, is selfish and done for the feeling of "doing some thing good," ostensibly for the Other, but inwardly, psychologically, deceptively, for one's own self, (trust me, the irony's not lost here). It reminds me of people who do nothing about oppressive systems 364 days in a row, and then dole out Thanksgiving turkey on Skid Row. It accomplishes nothing systemically and in fact continues the infantilization of the recipients. Like virtually 99% of American systems, it's a quick fix.

The other "real progressive scenario" is a lot of frustration with the odds against you and a lot of poverty because the disenfranchised aren't motivated toward conglomerating like capital interests who have attainable, concrete goals, clearer paths via systems they are players in and the connections toward attaining them.

In other words, one is temporarily playing at action, the other's real hard work with poverrty level wages or somewhere thereabouts. This way of looking at volunteering also comports with the theme, because fake is deception, and that is exactly what goes on internally within the volunteer; self-deception.

2. In particular, there's the notion of the relationship between film(maker) and spectator, which for lack of a better way of stating it relies on a consistent interrogating of the viewer, with doubt as its tool. This is a deeper relationship - or at least a more complex one - that goes far beyond the "talking to the camera" gimmick (Annie Hall) or the mere pointing of a camera at the viewer (a'la' the opening credit sequence of Le Mepris). No doubt Noel Burch has nailed this.

Of course, reflexivity is nothing new to the cinema - Porter's The Great Train Robbery comes to mind - but the (psychological) level and sophistication with which Welles engages the audience portends things to come... which never were to be.

The tragedy of Welles - Never underestimate the stupidity of the studio system to ostracize greatness and banish him to a promise unfulfilled and but a beautiful glimpse.