A cinema of anxiety: American experimental film in the realm of art (1965–75)

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A CINEMA OF ANXIETY: AMERICAN EXPERIMENTAL FILM IN THE
REALM OF ART (1965–75)

by
Carlos Kase

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(CRITICAL STUDIES)

December 2009

Copyright 2009 Carlos Kase

ii
DEDICATION

For My Parents

iii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
During my time at the University of Southern California, I have had the
benefit of learning from a group of scholars whose collective insight into the
American avant-garde cinema is unmatched. Though I was well aware of David
James’ extraordinary intellect before arriving in Los Angeles, I was pleased to
learn that his warm generosity is its equal. He has given me the unqualified
support that every graduate student desires in a mentor, while nevertheless
providing a model for scholarship that exceeds the grasp of most mortals. I feel
incredibly lucky to have had him as my advisor and dissertation chair.
Akira Lippit is an insurmountable adversary in the realm of unscripted
debate; the scope of his intelligence is boundless, and his advice has been
incredibly helpful, from the very beginnings of this project to its conclusion. In
my interdisciplinary adventures into Art History, Nancy Troy has encouraged my
enthusiasm for expanding my field of reference into the discursive spaces well
beyond cinema. Yet her diligent pedagogy and exacting scholarship have forced
me to keep my ideas grounded in argument. Michael Renov was involved in this
project in its earlier stages, continuously reenergizing my belief that experimental
film is a non-fiction form, engaged in real encounters between people and history.
Though she could not be involved in the final developments of this dissertation,
Anne Friedberg was a steady voice of encouragement and a firm believer in my
interdisciplinary ambitions. I hope that her health soon improves, so that she can

iv
return to guiding graduate students towards pioneering scholarship in untried
territory, like that she herself has produced.
At USC, I have benefited from time spent with an inspiring group of
colleagues. In particular, I would like to thank James Cahill, Jason Hill, and Paul
Reinsch. It is through the arguments and debates that I have had with these
creative thinkers that I decided how to carve out many of the conceptual,
historical, and rhetorical directions of this project.
Though this study was produced within an academic framework, it would
have been impossible without the efforts of many people who research and
support non-industrial cinema in other institutional contexts. Every single work
that I discuss at length in this dissertation I have watched in its original format
(with one exception). This was not an easy task; the experimental films referenced
herein are not generally found at the local video store. It is largely the labor of
film archivists that makes research into historical avant-garde cinema possible. In
particular, Andy Lampert (of Anthology Film Archives) and Mark Toscano (of
the Academy Film Archive) continue to preserve the material, celluloid-based
legacy of experimental cinema.
A number of archives and collections have also been incredibly helpful in
providing access to films, paper collections, and libraries. These include the
following: Charles Silver and the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the
Donnell Media Center, New York; M. M. Serra and The Film-makers’
Cooperative, New York; Electronic Arts Intermix, New York; the Pacific Film

v
Archive, Berkeley; Brad Arnold and The University of Colorado-Boulder (Stan
Brakhage Papers); The Wisconsin Historical Society and The University of
Wisconsin-Madison (Shirley Clarke Papers); The Getty Research Institute, Los
Angeles (Carolee Schneemann Papers); and The Smithsonian Museum,
Washington, D.C. (Bruce Conner Papers). Most importantly, Anthology Film
Archives always held its door open for me. Many of the documents consulted for
this project are located in the unique repository for art that lives on the corner of
2
nd
and 2
nd
. My thanks go to Robert Haller, who oversees the library, and my
other friends there, including John Mhiripiri and Jed Rapfogel, who continue
fighting to keep the ship afloat.
I would also like to recognize the many filmmakers and critics who
responded to questions via email, spoke with me in person or on the telephone, or
had brief conversations with me after their screenings. In particular, I thank
Annette Michelson, Jud Yalkut, Robert Nelson, Carolee Schneemann, Robert
Breer, and Aldo Tambellini for taking the time to talk with me and fill in
historical details related to their work and its cultural context that only they know.
Lastly, I thank my family for their warm support. My parents, my
brothers, and my sister have always been open and encouraging of my intellectual
interests, however unusual they may seem. In addition, my partner and companion
Liz Mahoney has been patient and supportive throughout the intense and often
anxiogenic process of my producing a dissertation. Liz’s intelligence has helped

vi
to make this a much better work than it would have been otherwise and her
friendship has kept me sane.

vii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Dedication ii

Acknowledgments iii

Abstract viii

Chapter 1: Fist Fight and the Intermedial Conditions of Avant-
Garde Art in the 1960s 1

Chapter 2: Performance and the Warholian Cinematic Imperative:
Provocation and Distress in the Anxiogenic Underground 76

Chapter 3: The Medium Is the Medium: Television, Experimental
Film, and Expanded Cinema 142

Chapter 4: Appropriation, Assemblage, and Collective Authorship
on the West Coast 216

Chapter 5: Somatic Cinema: Presence, Performance, Crisis,
and the Problem of “Structure” 288

Chapter 6: Paul Sharits, Perceptual Tumult, Bodily Trauma,
and the Dilemma of the Film Artist 380

Bibliography 427

viii
ABSTRACT
Contrary to the dominant narratives of art history, experimental cinema
once played a meaningful role in American art. The filmic works discussed in this
dissertation devised fresh modes of authorship and experimentation involving
chance, collaboration, and interpersonal provocation that were as modern and
innovative of those used in any art form. In this project experimental cinema is
thus situated in close conceptual and historical proximity to other kinds of
advanced art practice – including performance, video, assemblage, and
installation art – that aggravated representational, artistic, ethical, and spectatorial
anxieties, while challenging conventional divisions between art and media forms.
By creating works that were often hostile and aggressive, these filmmakers
attempted to undermine the smooth flows of information and entertainment that
dominated the United States in the waning years of film’s significance as the
nation’s dominant mass medium.
Through its consideration of selected works by multi-faceted, multi-media
artists including Robert Breer, Andy Warhol, Shirley Clarke, Nam June Paik,
Bruce Conner, Carolee Schneemann, and Paul Sharits, this study argues that an
interdisciplinary strategy provides the most effective means for understanding the
intermedial art environment that defined avant-garde cultural production in the
wake of Abstract Expressionism. In its aversion to conventional divisions
between artists’ film, avant-garde film, and non-fiction film, this project thus
attempts to reintegrate celluloid-based, experimental moving image works into the

ix
multifarious cultural, social, and historical networks that produced them and even,
for a brief moment, made them popular. Despite its fleeting presence in the
popular mindset of the late 1960s, experimental cinema never realized its promise
as a transformational influence on the overall field of American art: it did not gain
the economic support of gallery culture or the intellectual esteem of art history.
Because of its interstitial identity, provocative mode of address, and distinctive
ontological challenges to representation, it was an anxious object then, and in
critical hindsight remains so.
This dissertation argues that the anxieties surrounding avant-garde art –
related to its function as a mechanism for undermining conventional notions of
pleasure, ethics, and craft – are not only central to experimental cinema, but may
in significant ways, define it.

1
Chapter 1: Fist Fight and the Intermedial Conditions of Avant-Garde
Art in the 1960s:

Arguably the most significant independent filmmaker of the 20
th
century,
Stan Brakhage serves in many versions of the history of American experimental
cinema as a kind of figurehead, a symbolic spokesperson and representative of the
movement’s greatest ambitions and achievements, as well as its occasional
tendencies towards didacticism and rhetorical excess. Brakhage began making
films in the early 1950s, and being an independent filmmaker, spent most of his
life struggling to achieve both material sustenance for his family and some degree
of critical acceptance as a major artist outside of his small community of fellow-
travelers in this minority art practice. Despite the fact that he did not receive the
kind of widespread recognition that is typically visited on a major artist in fine art,
he maintained a dogged faith in film as a medium for meaningful artistic
intervention. However, by 1985, Brakhage had learned that major industrial
changes in cinema were leading the corporations that manufacture film to make
significant cuts in the availability of 16mm film stocks. To him this material
change also marked a shift in aesthetic and cultural values more generally. In a
1985 letter to art/film critic and scholar Annette Michelson, he expressed a
despondent attitude concerning the condition of the “branch” of film that, as he
saw it, he and his friends had created:

2
I, who’ve resisted everyone else’s paranoia on this subject [the end
of celluloid], resisted the crows of video makers, am now then (as
of yesterday) forced to admit the end of independent film as I’ve
known it and worked for it all my life [. . .] the knife came down so
fast – the ‘finis’ so abrupt – that it was evening before I could
begin to realize there’d be no continuence [sic] of this ‘branch’ of
film I and my friends had made: we hang in the air, as in a
Magritte painting.
1

Brakhage’s letter to Michelson was written partially in response to what he
perceived to be (incorrectly, at the time) the end of a particular variety of film
stock known as reversal film, which was designed primarily for amateur use.
However, his note also signaled some feeling of loss, of nostalgia for a practice
that, as he saw it, he and a small group of people had pioneered. His sense of
termination extended beyond the material limits of any particular variety of film
stock, and into the space of cultural history.
In her written response to the filmmaker, Michelson also expressed a sense
of terminus concerning what she too felt might be the end of an experimental film
practice as she had come to understand it. She writes,
Yes, I, too, in my own way mourn what seems to be the end of an entire
artistic practice; one begins, caught in the wave of retrenchment of filmic
resources and the onrush of video, to feel like a dinosaur, thrashing about
in a hostile landscape. Are we such, truly?
2

This somewhat melancholy exchange between an artist and a scholar reveals a
shared anxiety concerning the historical status of this minority art practice – what
has come to be known variously as avant-garde film, experimental film,

1
Letter from Stan Brakhage to Annette Michelson, June 7, 1985, collection of the University of
Colorado, Stan Brakhage Papers.
2
Letter from Annette Michelson to Stan Brakhage, June 16, 1985, collection of the University of
Colorado, Stan Brakhage Papers.

3
independent film, etc. – in which they were both deeply involved (albeit in
different capacities). In 1985, Brakhage and Michelson, two of the most avid
supporters of this artistic practice, felt that the narrative of the art form had
reached something of a “finis” point. Though this exchange evinces a kind of
crisis of faith, it is one that is not concerned with the aesthetic status of the art
form itself, but rather, its position within the social, economic, and cultural sphere
of the arts in the late 20
th
century. From their exchange it seems that the
“retrenchment of filmic resources,” as Michelson understands it, corresponds to a
sea change in the artistic context of moving image media art. In their
correspondence, these advocates for non-industrial film suggest that a historical
shift had taken place that was much more significant than the end of a film stock
or a stylistic trend.
In hindsight, this dialogue between Brakhage and Michelson conveys a
profound critical anxiety about the status of the art circa 1985. It also suggests a
larger historical question that may relate to the status of artistic development in
general. In 1966, art critic Harold Rosenberg argued that avant-garde art was an
“anxious object,” defined by its special ability to be fundamentally indefinite, to
resist the classical social functions of art, and to replace conventional pleasures
with a distressed searching, an anxious interrogation of the limits between art and
other human activities:
The anxiety of art is a philosophical quality perceived by artists to be
inherent in acts of creation in our time. […] Anxiety is thus the form in
which modern art raises itself to the level of human history. It is an
objective reflection on the indefiniteness of the function of art in present-

4
day society and the possibility of displacement of art by newer forms of
expression, emotional stimulation and communication.
3

Rosenberg argues that art of the 1960s struggled with other cultural practices in
an effort to define itself in relation to these other forces, to exert social influence,
and to effect historical action. In fact, to him this tension between cultural factors
induces a condition of anxiety that is not only a symptom of its historical
conditions but is the engine of its creativity. He explains:
The anxiety of art is a peculiar kind of insight. It arises, not as a reflex to
the condition of artists, but from their reflection upon the role of art among
other human activities. Where this anxiety is absent, nothing that befalls
the artist as a person, not even the threat of physical extinction, will bring
it into being.
4

As he understood it, significant modern and contemporary art was an anxious
object that continuously, by definition, engaged in a condition of ongoing social
and aesthetic research, as it interrogated the limits between different levels of
cultural understanding and signification. For him, the most exemplary works of
modern art – from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art – had always shared
common anxieties about meaning, philosophical significance, social function, and
the capacity to be historicized. Rosenberg argued that the ways in which art
functioned in society were always shifting and continuously interacting with other
cultural activities. It was his position that this anxious and perhaps anxiogenic
state of modern art was its defining attribute. The anxiety collectively expressed
by Brakhage and Michelson in the correspondence quoted above conveys

3
Harold Rosenberg, “Toward an Unanxious Profession” in The Anxious Object (Chicago and
London: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 17.
4
Rosenberg, “Toward an Unanxious Profession,” 16.

5
precisely this variety of tension, as it manifests a concern about the meaning of
one artistic practice in relation to an entire cultural field characterized by a range
of contributing media practices and social forces. There is a shared worry in their
writing that avant-garde film, which had once some force of aesthetic urgency as
a mode of philosophical inquiry, had fallen by the wayside, has lost its footing,
however meager its cultural hold may have been.
The anxiety that Brakhage and Michelson express is a result of shifts in
boundaries, interactions, and processes of valorization within the arts themselves,
which, again using Rosenberg’s language, results from “the possibility of
displacement of art by newer forms of expression, emotional stimulation and
communication.”
5
In this project, it will be argued that American experimental
film has always had a tentative footing within the realm of the fine arts, as well as
popular culture. However, if avant-garde film ever held any kind of promise for
bringing about artistic, social, or cultural transformation, its era, as Brakhage and
Michelson suggest in 1985, was in the past. If experimental film had lost some
sense of its cultural urgency by 1985, when had circumstances been different?
When and how, historically speaking, did experimental film engage with the
major philosophical and aesthetic challenges of art more generally? This variety
of film has always been, and likely always will be, obscure and little known (both
to the general public and the art establishment), but once, I will argue, between

5
Rosenberg, “Toward an Unanxious Profession,” 17.

6
roughly the mid-1960s and the mid-70s, it held an anxious promise for a measure
of cultural potency.
In 1966, journalist John Gruen wrote confidently about avant-garde
cinema in New York Magazine, an entirely mainstream, populist publication
(these essays were later collected in his book The New Bohemia):
It is safe to say that of all avant-garde manifestations in the New Bohemia,
the underground film movement, for all its deliberate derangement, is the
most active and the most daring. While the Combine Generation’s fever
for joint creativity runs rampant in all the arts, it is filmmaking that acts as
the perfect magnetic center for every restless impulse and expression.
6

To anyone who is even passingly familiar with the history of avant-garde film, it
is clear that it was never again perceived to be “the magnetic center” of the
American cultural landscape. Rather than explain the reasons for the failure of
this movement to achieve the transformations that its most ambitious supporters
(including Michelson) at one point envisioned for it, this project aims to identify a
number of its most provocative and remarkable efforts to engage with significant
developments in aesthetics and artistic practice across a range of media and
cultural forms.
In this study I argue that the anxieties surrounding avant-garde art – which
Rosenberg located in collective social doubts about its meaning, its value, its
capacity to produce pleasure – are not only central to experimental film, but may,
in significant ways, define it. Experimental film, as understood in this project,
represents a liminal art-making praxis that is poised between the plastic and the

6
John Gruen, The New Bohemia (Pennington, NJ: A Cappella Books, 1966), 93.

7
temporal arts, between fine art and the entertainment industry, between
handcrafted expression and automated surveillance, and ultimately, between the
histories of art and cinema. As Rosenberg argues, the condition of avant-garde art
is “an objective reflection on the indefiniteness of the function of art in present-
day society,” suggesting that the relationships between all of these terms shift
over time in accordance with social and historical developments.
7
This project
will evaluate a set of case studies of experimental film from the period in which,
arguably, its production was most explosive and urgent, while also intertwined
with other significant developments in aesthetics across a range of media. These
trends should all be understood in pragmatic terms as fundamentally social and
contingent upon a variety of unpredictable cultural forces, rather than determined
by any inborn metaphysical purpose.
Though it has always been a minority, outsider practice, for a brief
moment in time, avant-garde film was central to the cultural zeitgeist of the period
and occupied a significant position amongst a range of other media, genres, and
aesthetic strategies. Only when evaluated in relation to these larger artistic trends
and cultural energies can it be effectively historicized and comprehensively
understood as a praxis rather than a set of contained, isolated texts.

Methodology:
Anxiety and music, anxiety and dancing, anxiety and sex, anxiety and art
– these are the raw materials for a new Bohemia. In New York, as in other

7
Rosenberg, “Toward an Unanxious Profession,” 17.

8
cities throughout the world, these commodities run rife, and if we mean
anxiety to stand for racial tension, poverty, a simple search for something
other than the status quo, or displacement – intellectual, emotional, or
aesthetic – then it becomes clear that this anxiety, when acted upon, can
release numberless creative and emotional explosions.
8
– John Gruen, The
New Bohemia, 1966

It is a commonplace notion that during the era after World War II and
particularly in the 1960s, life in the United States reached a condition of
pronounced anxiety. The artistic actions and cultural experiences of this era often
encapsulated the tumultuous sensibility of the time, which had resulted, at least
partially, from a set of major public traumas and conflicts between dominant
institutions and countercultural forces. Intellectuals and critics from diverse
disciplines and philosophical positions argue that this anxiety resulted from a
variety of factors including the fear of extinction associated with the Cold War,
the breakdown of the conventional nuclear family (which was partially a result of
the rise of television), female sexual liberation (associated partially with the
development of the birth control pill and the Kinsey report), race riots and the
implementation of civil rights legislation that drew attention to the prevailing
racism around the country, the gay rights movement, the Chicano movement, the
rise of drug use and the counterculture’s embrace of psychedelics and later,
narcotics, the escalation of the conflict in Vietnam, and the implementation of a
draft that catalyzed a powerful and aggressive anti-war movement. The social and
perhaps psychological impacts of the conflicts associated with these historical

8
Gruen, The New Bohemia, 6.

9
developments were profound and reflected the extreme cultural conflict and
ideological anxiety of the age.
Specifically, the tumultuous historical casualties of the age concretely
embody its social tensions. The Bay of Pigs invasion, the assassinations of
Medgar Evers, John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Malcolm
X, the shooting of Andy Warhol by militant feminist Valerie Solanas, the murders
at Kent State, the race riots of Los Angeles, Detroit, and Chicago, the Stonewall
riots, the imprisonment of Black Panther Huey P. Newton (as well as
countercultural icons John Sinclair and Timothy Leary), the student revolt at
Columbia University, the bombings and social actions of the Weather
Underground and the associated actions of COINTELPRO, the Watergate
scandal, the violent uprisings at the Democratic National Convention of 1968 (and
the subsequent trial of the Chicago Seven), together symbolically encapsulate the
energies of confrontation and social dissonance that underpinned the age. These
anxious times, with their general sense of social disharmony (exhibited partially
by the numerous manifestations listed above), inscribed their collective energies
of antagonism and conflict on a range of media forms in the period, both popular
and avant-garde. Though this was the age of flower power and free love, it was
also a period marked by extreme violence and social dissonance. Experimental
film of the period expressed these anxious cultural energies and sometimes
directly addressed the historical traumas listed above. However, in a way that is
perhaps more aesthetically urgent to the topic at hand, these historical conditions

10
also escalated the capacity of the film medium – in ways that were formally,
socially, and thematically experimental – to induce extreme perceptual,
philosophical, and psychological crises for the array of people who encountered
the work. This anxiogenic use of cinema, like other artistic projects and cultural
energies of the time, directed itself towards a tumultuous, therapeutic
reconditioning of aesthetic experience.
The films that are the subject of this project directly addressed and
showcased a range of aesthetic, cultural, conceptual, and, sometimes, personal
anxieties. In some cases these works challenged particular social forces with
confrontational strategies, in an effort to combat and oppose, for example, the
influence of television on the public’s understanding of history, the War in
Vietnam, racial violence, or the exploitation of women by the media industry. In
other cases, these works perfectly represented or embodied these tensions as
documentary actions; and in still other cases, these film projects willfully
provoked anxieties in the social and public spaces of their exhibitions in a kind of
therapeutic effort to undo the perceptual and ideological structures that made the
injustices and public traumas of the era possible. In all these situations, the films
discussed in this study – including those of Robert Breer, Andy Warhol, Shirley
Clarke, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Jud Yalkut, Aldo Tambellini, Bruce Conner,
Robert Nelson, Carolee Schneemann, Stan Brakhage, and Paul Sharits –
collectively represent modes of encounter between cinema and other forces of
American artistic and social history from roughly 1965 to 1975. The films of

11
these artists presented in the following chapters enacted anxiogenic confrontations
with a range of social, historical, and aesthetic forces; this confrontational
aesthetic stance frames their interpretation within the overall argument in the
study that follows.
This dissertation’s title – “A Cinema of Anxiety” – sets up the evaluation
of the American experimental cinema as an embodiment of an anxious, unsettled
historical condition. It is a rhetorical formulation that is directly indebted to
Harold Rosenberg’s famous statement in which he described the paintings of
Abstract Expressionist artists in terms of their ability to foreground the
ontological contingency of an artwork’s particular mode of coming-into-being
above its symbolic, signifying, textual function. To him, these artworks were most
significant because of their capacity not to show or represent something, but to be
something: “What matters always is the revelation contained in the act. It is to be
taken for granted that in the final effect, the image, whatever be or be not in it,
will be a tension.”
9
[emphasis in original] In this regard, this project analyzes a
range of films that, like Abstract Expressionism, could be understood not only as
texts but as social actions, as embodied encounters between a range of social,
philosophical, and aesthetic forces.
Like Rosenberg’s text The Anxious Object, this project’s title suggests a
psychological metaphor: These films might be understood as efforts at “working-
through” certain historical, aesthetic, and perhaps psychological problems.

9
Rosenberg, “The American Action Painters” in The Tradition of the New (New York: Da Capo
Press, 1960), 27.

12
However the potential scope of such a psychologically motivated interpretation
far exceeds the intellectual goals of this study. In a sense, these works may have
come into being as therapeutic efforts to deal with hostile social, historical, and
psychic forms; however, to evaluate their efficacy in achieving such ends would
far exceed the interests and capabilities of a film historian. Rather than explain
precisely why these works came to be, this project will simply accept that they are
objects embedded in a complex web of history that both defines them and makes
them possible. This study concerns itself with filmmaking as praxis, as process,
and as such, it takes the position that there is something about the medium of film,
as a technologically automated recording of reality, that gives it a unique access to
historical tensions and human contingency.
As suggested above, the anxiety of these films might be inscribed in the
realm of the profilmic (in the social space in front of the camera), the filmic (in
the literal space of the film frame itself), the works’ exhibition (in the social space
of spectatorship), or in the discursive space between media histories and critical,
academic disciplines. Throughout this project, it will be argued that most (if not
all) of these works demonstrate some degree of anxiety in all of these
representational registers. In this regard, the subject of this project is a set of
anxiogenic film texts, which are partially defined by the anxious social spaces in
which they come to be, the anxious disciplines that frame their interpretations,
and the cinema that circumscribes an entire set of anxieties that bleed over into
the territory of a more general cultural history.

13
The boundaries of this dissertation are porous. The decade of 1965-75 that
is a part of this project’s title is only a loose frame of reference, because it is very
difficult to put concrete temporal limits on a concept or a historical trend,
regardless of how finely it is demarcated in rhetorical terms. The project begins
with 1965, months after which Andy Warhol publicly disavowed painting in order
to work in film, and it ends ten years later, when video had become an accepted
technology for experimental work in the art world, effectively displacing film (as
Brakhage and Michelson suggest in their exchange quoted earlier). A few works
will be discussed that either precede or follow this period. The same flexibility
concerns the limits of “American” as presented in the title. Since the national
identity of a media artwork is subject to a flow of people, technologies,
economics, and tastes that defies any country’s borders, all of the films discussed
herein are inscribed, to greater or lesser degrees, in an international artistic
landscape. For example, such artists as Nam June Paik and Yoko Ono have
complex histories as artists born in East Asia who lived and worked in both
Europe and the United States in the period at hand, and who interacted vigorously
with the international community of Fluxus artists. Because of this complex
network of historical, geographical, and cultural determinations, it would be very
difficult to define either of these artists according to any particular national
identity. In a very real sense, Ono and Paik are international artists. That being
said, this project accepts their filmic output as relevant to the discourses and
trends of American experimental filmmaking.

14
In terms of geography, it must be admitted that the principal focus here is
New York City, the epicenter for experimental art of the mid-1960s to the mid-
1970s. However, in the analysis of work by Bruce Conner and Robert Nelson, one
chapter addresses the films of two West Coast practitioners of experimental media
art whose work was firmly inscribed within a multi-media artistic landscape of
advanced art in the San Francisco Bay Area. Though there were some significant
overlapping strategies between avant-garde artists in New York and San
Francisco, there were also marked differences, particularly concerning the social
and cultural atmosphere in which the works developed. In fact, in 1975 English
filmmaker and theorist Peter Wollen argued that the New York avant-garde
filmmaking sensibility had always been as distinct from that of San Francisco as it
was from London.
10
The geographic, national, and temporal boundaries of this
project then, though clearly delineated, should be understood as somewhat
provisional, and though there may be an emphasis on New York artists, the work
of West Coast practitioners is discussed in order to provide some degree of
historical and conceptual perspective.
This dissertation is not a survey. Instead of analyzing dozens of films and
presenting a comprehensive history of the totality of an art practice, it is a
selective project that ties together within the minority practice that is experimental
film. In this regard, few of the films discussed herein could be described as

10
He wrote, “there is a sense in which avant-garde Co-op film-making in Europe is closer to New
York than Californian film-making is, and the leading New York critics and tastemakers – Sitney,
Michelson, etc. – are not appreciated in San Francisco any more than they are in London.” Peter
Wollen, “The Two Avant-Gardes,” Studio International: Journal of Modern Art 190
(November/December 1975), 171.

15
canonical. Each chapter considers between one and three films in detail, and it
does so in relation to a set of aesthetic concerns that often connect the work of
two or three filmmakers to each other and to other trends in the arts. Moreover, all
of the films that are discussed in this project demonstrate unusual cases for the
consideration of the relationship between a film text and the historical conditions
of its production. As Rosenberg suggested, in his influential formulation of 1960,
an artwork can be understood both as a textual object and an extra-textual event.
Like the Abstract Expressionist works that were his subject, the films described
herein all demonstrate provocative ontological relationships between their
materially contained textual spaces, the contexts of their mediation, and the
extratextual conditions of their aesthetic and social functions, and in so doing,
challenge the conventional understanding of the American avant-garde cinema as
an expressive, romantic endeavor of controlled and contained authorship. All of
the films presented here, from Robert Breer’s Fist Fight (which was presented as
a part of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s theatrical experiment, Originale), to Paul
Sharits’ Epileptic Seizure Comparison (which has been screened both as a single
film projection and as a looped two-screen installation) function both as texts and
events, as frozen artifacts and contingent performances.
11
In a sense, this study is
a historical, conceptual, and perhaps theoretical investigation into the way in
which American experimental film engaged with the ontological challenges of
both presence and plasticity, by redefining the textual and extratextual spaces of

11
The notion that experimental films have a dual status as “artifact” and “performance” is an idea
borrowed from film critic and historian Paul Arthur. See Arthur, “Structural Film: Revisions, New
Versions, and the Artifact,” Millennium Film Journal 1, no.2 (Spring 1978), 5–13.

16
cinema. In addition, in terms of the selective inclusion of certain films in this
project, choices were made in order to emphasize works that have not been
exhaustively studied in other critical volumes. In this regard, an effort has been
made to include works that might partially augment the established and canonical
history of experimental films of this period with both different film objects and
fresh interpretative criteria.
As an historical undertaking, this project recognizes that theory, like
science, art, technology, and religion, has always been subject to the machinations
of societies, economies, and intellectual fads. This study references a number of
theorists and critics – contrary to the dominant trend of related work in the
humanities – because of their historical significance for the artistic practices and
cultural milieus of the era in question, not because of their popularity today. In
this regard, there will be no leaping across time and space in some kind of
transhistorical theoretical fantasy in which, for example, Michel Foucault and
Giles Deleuze might be forced into contact with John Cage and Marshall
McLuhan. This project argues that ideas, like the artworks that are its subject,
must be understood as necessarily embedded in historical circumstances and
cultural trends. When this project considers the work of art critics, art historians,
cultural critics, or film theorists who were not in some way linked to the art-
making processes that it addresses, it does so because their work directly and
explicitly addresses the artists and cultural climate at hand (as in the case of
contemporary work in film studies and art history) or had some determining

17
influence (as in the work of theorists whose sensibilities were adopted by
filmmakers and artists of the 1960s and 70s). In its omission of any overarching
metaphysics or overt political agenda, this project intends to foreground a
particular set of artistic practices by utilizing a historical methodology that might
be described, quite simply, as pragmatic.

Historical Background: Experimental Film in the Realm of Art in the 1960s:
In the 1960s the American avant-garde cinema reached the historical point
of its greatest public awareness. Though it was always a peripheral, marginal part
of the art and film worlds, it did gain significantly in its public awareness in this
period. Throughout the decade, in the pages of the widely read alternative New
York weekly, The Village Voice, critic and filmmaker Jonas Mekas proselytized
for the cause of the filmic avant-garde, bringing it to the attention of the paper’s
bohemian readership. By the mid-1960s, American underground film (as it was
popularly known) had achieved a minor economic triumph at the box office, in
the surprise popularity of Andy Warhol’s The Chelsea Girls (1966). This
ambitious, and to popular sensibilities, perverse, three-and-a-half hour experiment
in voyeurism was the first avant-garde film to reap substantial profits ($300,000
in its first six months), having become popular enough to crossover from the
underground into traditional theatrical venues.
12
It was even reviewed in
Newsweek, where it received surprisingly favorable attention. Noteworthy

12
According to Victor Bockris, only half of these profits went to Warhol due to poor business
decisions on his part. Bockris, Warhol: The Biography (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo, 2003), 259.

18
tastemakers and public intellectuals responded excitedly to developments within
avant-garde cinema. Susan Sontag wrote an enthusiastic essay on Jack Smith’s
notorious Flaming Creatures (1963) that was published in The Nation and later
compiled in her massively influential Against Interpretation and Other Essays, a
text that was required reading for anyone interested in American art and
intellectual culture during the 1960s. Turning his attentions to an unfamiliar
medium, renowned novelist Norman Mailer made a series of films, including
most notably Maidstone (1970) that was indebted to the experiments of
alternative cinema, which openly acknowledged the influence of Andy Warhol’s
unique filmmaking approach. In addition to these cultural interventions, such
major artists as Richard Serra and Robert Smithson (and of course, Warhol) began
to utilize film in their multi-tiered art practices, which spanned a variety of media.
In this period, an enthusiasm for experimental cinema was contagious, it seemed.
As critic Amy Taubin once observed, it was “a time when anyone could, and it
was thought everyone should, become a filmmaker.”
13

Though the public’s awareness of avant-garde cinema had expanded
significantly throughout the decade and a half that followed World War II, not
everyone was paying attention. Notably, art critics were largely ignorant of
developments in advanced filmmaking of the period. In 1971 (fourteen years
before the correspondence with Brakhage quoted above), in the pages of Artforum
magazine, Annette Michelson argued that a fundamental transition was taking

13
Quoted by Arthur in “Films the Color of Blood” in The Film-makers’ Cooperative Catalogue,
no. 7 (New York: Film-makers’ Cooperative, 1989), vi.

19
place in experimental film practice that deserved much greater critical attention
than it had been given. For her, something was happening that was so fresh and
aesthetically urgent that it begged to be understood, in actuality, as a massive
transformation, not only in cinema, but in contemporary art in general. In her
thinking, this work demanded “the urgency of recognition for an achievement
whose importance will eventually be seen as comparable to that of American
painting in the 1950s and onwards.”
14
Yet, within mid-century America, as well
as today, these developments in experimental film were largely ignored by the art
world establishment. To Michelson, in 1971, this amounted to a crisis of sorts in
that neither professional art nor film critics were quite up to the task at hand.
Specifically describing this circumstance, she wrote, “if most ART critics have
not been ‘trying’ very hard, most FILM critics now at work are simply not, nor
ever will be, equipped for the critical task on the level which the present
flowering of cinema in this country demands.”
15
The September 1971 issue of
Artforum featured Michelson as its guest-editor and she took the opportunity to
stage a noteworthy critical intervention on behalf of these neglected works,
including the presentation of a number of articles featuring extended discussions
of a range of experimental films (including work by Warhol, Ken Jacobs, Joyce
Wieland, and Paul Sharits). As a provocation, this issue of Artforum seemed to
ask a question: why was a film such as Michael Snow’s Wavelength (1967) –

14
Annette Michelson, “Foreword in Three Letters” Artforum 10, no. 1 (September 1971), 9.
15
Ibid.

20
discussed at length in Michelson’s issue of Artforum – not of interest to other art
critics of the era?
16

Experimental cinema, because of its interstitial identity – is it film or is it
art? – has always been a source of interpretative anxiety for art critics and
curators. There are many historical, cultural, economic, and institutional reasons
for this marked neglect by the art critical and curatorial establishments. The next
few pages will offer some brief explanation for this strange disjunction between
art practice and criticism, though no answer can ever prove to be truly definitive.
It must be admitted that though Michelson proclaimed that the importance of mid-
century avant-garde cinema would “eventually be seen as comparable to that of
American painting in the 1950s and onwards” it never received the critical
attention that she predicted.
17
The disappointment that resulted from this
unrealized promise underpins her written lamentation of the death of independent
film in her letter to Brakhage some years later.
Today, in 2009, the vast majority of survey texts on postwar American art
entirely omit the American avant-garde cinema.
18
For the authors of these studies,

16
Manny Farber took an interest in Snow’s film and was in fact the only mainstream film critic
that wrote anything interesting in the period about the avant-garde cinema.
17
Michelson, “Foreword in Three Letters,” 9.
18
See for example, Robert Hugues, Shock of the New, revised ed. (New York: Knopf, 1991);
Thomas Crow, Rise of the Sixties (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996). Perhaps the
most egregious example of this historical neglect is the recent textbook by Hal Foster, Rosalind
Krauss, Yves Alain-Bois, and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Art Since 1900: Vol. 2 1945 to the
Present (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2004). The amply illustrated and researched work
features countless references and illustrations of video art and “artists’ film” but only mentions
two or three contributors to the American avant-garde cinema by name.
The notable exception is the provocative American Art Since 1945 (London: Thames &
Hudson, 2003) by David Joselit, though his presentation is far from authoritative: he only

21
despite the recognition of Warhol’s centrality to vanguard art making, cinema is
simply not part of what artists do. Film historian David James has argued that
there exists a “popular assumption of an unbridgeable gulf between the movies
and high art.” James argues that this popular misunderstanding is shared by
people both inside and outside of academia. It is commonly assumed that film is
largely the domain of popular, fictive entertainments, rather than artistic
experimentation and social intervention; he writes, “If film is the medium
practiced in Studio City, then the medium practiced by artists and Beats, Third
World women and peace workers, in New York cannot really be film.” He argues
that this popular, troubled, and prejudiced interpretation of film’s social, aesthetic,
and philosophical meaning is the result of a typically American “blend of
overfamiliarity” with the movies and “an ignorance” of alternative or avant-garde
art-making practices. This condition applies not only to the general public, but to
critics, academics, curators, and journalists as well. For James, this ignorance of
alternative modes of filmmaking “fuels … prejudices [that have] for the past forty
years surrounded the efforts of all who have envisioned for film the aesthetic,
social, or cognitive functions claimed for painting or poetry.”
19
It is generally
understood by most movie goers, film critics, art patrons, art critics, and art
historians that films are audio-visual texts that feature characters and tell stories.
When they fail to satisfy those expectations, they trigger a profound anxiety of

discusses one filmmaker (Stan Brakhage), despite the ample attention that he gives to other forms
of media and video art.
19
David E. James, “Introduction” in To Free the Cinema: Jonas Mekas and the New York
Underground, ed. David E. James (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 3–4.

22
understanding and generally fail to draw the interest of the public, critics,
academics, and art historians.

Institutional Issues and Historical Boundaries:
There are numerous historical, practical, and economic reasons that
American experimental cinema has not been assimilated into histories of art in the
20
th
century. Despite the fact that a number of the people who produced these
films were in fact relatively well-known or established artists themselves –
including Warhol, Yoko Ono, Carolee Schneemann, and Bruce Conner – the
moving image work that they produced was simply not something that most art
world professionals concerned themselves with. The art world’s institutional and
disciplinary aversions to film have not changed significantly. Chrissie Iles, curator
of moving image art at the Whitney Museum in New York recently said, quite
plainly, “It is difficult to look at and understand avant-garde film, and art world
people don’t know how to approach it. They don’t know where to find it either.”
20

This historical ignorance produces significant interpretative problems to
responsible scholarship. An example of this quandary can be located in the recent
scholarship on Andy Warhol by art historian Caroline Jones. In her chapter on
Warhol, in a highly acclaimed critical volume published in 1996, Jones, (like
most art historians of her generation), barely mentions his films, though she does
claim, paradoxically perhaps, an interest in the totality of the artist’s identity as a

20
Chrissie Iles quoted in Malcolm Turvey, Ken Jacobs, Annette Michelson, Paul Arthur, Brian
Frye, Iles, “Obsolescence and American Avant-Garde Film” October 100 (Spring 2002), 119.

23
cultural force (even discussing the clothes that he wore). When she does analyze
one of Warhol’s films, it is clear, because of a number of massive errors in
description, that she has not seen the work in question.
21
Jones thus fails to take
Warhol’s cinema seriously. It might be presumed that her descriptive and
interpretative errors result from the fact that Warhol’s cinema does not satisfy the
particular rhetorical role in which she has cast the artist: as efficient businessman
and industrialist. Jones’ evaluation of Warhol’s work instrumentalizes it in a way
that occludes the complexities and ambivalences of his multipart multi-media
artistic practice. The rhetorical and disciplinary blinders that guarantee such an
interpretative error are a major hindrance to the comprehensive understanding of
Warhol’s work. However, what such circumstances also demonstrate is that
Warhol’s cinema remains enigmatic and undigested in general, particularly in
relation to his artistic output in other media. Though Warhol’s fine art has
produced one of the largest bibliographies in recent art historical scholarship, his
film work remains largely unseen. This is a function of the fact that most art
historians have not been particularly cognizant of developments in moving image

21
Caroline A. Jones, “Andy Warhol’s Factory, ‘Commonism,’ and the Business Art Business” in
Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar American Artist (Chicago & London: University
of Chicago Press, 1996), 256. She describes the opening of Blow Job (1964): “the film opens with
a slightly wider shot that takes in the glimpse of a leather-jacketed shoulder of a figure bending
down in front of the subject, before the camera closes in on the subject’s face.” As anyone who
has seen the film knows, this description is entirely inaccurate: the camera never shows a second
onscreen figure; there is no camera movement; the different shots of the film are all taken from
precisely the same camera position and placement (on a tripod). Despite her imprecise and
uniformed description of Warhol’s film, she still feels capable of making summary judgments
about large swaths of the artist’s filmography: “I believe the pre-1969 films are, above all,
exemplars of Warhol’s management style” (Ibid., 236). Such bold claims should depend on some
degree of close analysis and actual exposure to the work being described. Errors such as Jones’
description of Blowjob go unnoticed because of the collective disciplinary aversion that art
historians demonstrate towards experimental cinema.

24
art, and as Iles suggests above, they simply “don’t know how to approach it.” If
art historians and curators are unaware of the moving image work of perhaps the
most significant artist of the second half of the 20
th
century, then it is no surprise
that they have largely ignored the work of lesser known filmmakers as well.
In the 1960s, before the critical histories were written, the divide between
fine art and filmmaking was also inscribed in the cultural climate of the era.
Filmmaker and photographer Hollis Frampton distilled the critical and economic
details of the situation (in a succinct comment made in retrospect in 1977), as a
function of differing institutional assumptions about what defines art:
We move now, we take you now to the year 1969, and to lower
Manhattan, and the confluence of a set of circumstances. One, of course,
was that at that time and in that place film was still (and still is, but one
felt it very acutely there) – film was absolutely embattled. To make films,
to attempt to make films, at that time was to be certainly an outcast, and in
those circumstances a pariah. Art was painting and sculpture – that was it.
Yes, there was dance, yes indeed, because it was undeniable there was
music, and very strong and adventurous work was going on. Nevertheless
there were a few pariahs, a few benighted and degenerate scumbags, who
persisted in making films. And Warhol of course had become fashionable
long before he ever made films anyway, but the rest of us mostly were, as
it were, huddled together for protection against the icy blast from Castelli,
the sort of boyars of the New York art world.
22

In the quotation above, Frampton makes a number of important claims that help to
explain why experimental cinema has been omitted largely from art history
surveys and textbooks. His first point relates to the critical perception that art was
defined exclusively as painting and sculpture. Thus other kinds of art-making,
including cinema – and performance and video as well – were not of primary

22
Hollis Frampton, “Hollis Frampton in San Francisco,” from a lecture at the San Francisco Art
Institute, April 21, 1977. Reprinted in Scott MacDonald, Canyon Cinema: The Life and Times of
an Independent Film Distributor (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 267.

25
interest within the art world of the time. (However, performance and video,
though they may have been neglected initially, have now found their way into the
accepted art history narratives.) Secondly, for Frampton, this embattlement of
film with various other cultural forces was partially a result of their differing
economic specificities. As he suggests above, a powerful art dealer such as Leo
Castelli made artists’ careers by selling their work for lucrative sums, a situation
that insured significant financial comfort and cultural recognition for all parties
involved. These support systems were lacking for American experimental cinema,
and as a result, it depended on its own independent organizations and
cooperatives to distribute work and collect minor rental fees.
23
Lastly, it is also
implicit in the filmmaker’s statement that he feels that the use of film to make art
should be understood, despite protestations to the contrary, as an acceptable and
respected medium, as a part of a whole, complex, yet integrated artistic landscape.
As suggested earlier, there was some interest in experimental cinema
amongst a variety of established artists in the mid-1960s to mid-1970s, however,
that interest did not in fact compel any additional economic or critical support for
that movement, as described by Frampton above. Film critic and historian Paul
Arthur has distilled this circumstance as follows:
The occasional forays into film by established artists such as Richard
Serra, Robert Morris, and Dan Graham, despite obvious correspondences
with structural work [in avant-garde film], never resulted in reciprocal
opportunities or additional interest from art journals or gallery owners; nor

23
Though many of filmmakers of Frampton’s generation found their ways into academia in the
1970s, the two-fold critical and economic neglect of experimental filmmakers by the art world has
had undeniable and marked effects on the history and historiography of this cultural practice.

26
was the avant-garde ultimately able to command regular coverage in the
mainstream press.
24

Arthur’s description of the institutional and disciplinary division between art
world experiments in film and those of a purely filmic avant-garde demonstrates
an important distinction that is perfectly congruent with Frampton’s statement.
Though there may have been aesthetic and structural similarities between the
work of established, gallery-supported artists (for example, Serra, Smithson, and
Morris) and so-called avant-garde filmmakers (for example, Jacobs, Frampton,
and Sharits), the art establishment did not consider these activities to be part of
the same network of media practice. In fact, they were perceived by art journals,
the mainstream press, and the gallery community to be the work of two different
social networks, with mutually exclusive artistic strategies and philosophical
interests. Despite the fact that these two groups had different economic supports
and institutional affiliations, this distinction simply did not hold on aesthetic,
historical, or social levels. Experimentation in film was not limited to any
particular social unit, and in fact, the divisions between work produced by
established artists, filmmakers associated with the cooperatives, and
documentarians are somewhat artificial and do not accurately identify what is
most salient and interesting about the works. In this study, I will argue that the
artistic strategies that influenced and guided major developments in the avant-
garde of one medium often overlapped with the principal innovations in other

24
Paul Arthur, A Line of Sight: American Avant-Garde Film Since 1965 (Minneapolis and
London: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 78.

27
media, despite a lack of critical recognition of the underlying dynamic social
processes.
The social networks that underpin the cultural history of the American
avant-garde are not nearly as neat and clean in their cleavage between the art and
film worlds (of New York or the San Francisco Bay Area) as most histories would
have us believe. In fact, many of the artists who will be discussed in this
dissertation moved fluidly between an avant-garde film enclave, a position of art
world recognition, and an intermedial bohemian community that was not
exclusively composed of either filmmakers or artists. The most significant
example of this hybrid identity and movement between film and art worlds is of
course Andy Warhol. Despite the fact that he was an international art celebrity,
Warhol publicly showcased his film work primarily in unglamorous underground
film showcases that were often led by Jonas Mekas, and took place well beyond
the cultural awareness of the art world (alongside the films of Stan Brakhage, Jack
Smith, and Gregory Markopolous).
25
However, many of the other filmmakers
presented in this project also fluidly navigated the spaces between the
experimental film community and other artistic networks of the time. In fact, most
of the other filmmakers who are discussed in any detail in this project, including
Robert Breer, Yoko Ono, Shirley Clarke, Nam June Paik, Jud Yalkut, Aldo

25
Though a number of the artists mentioned above showed their films in established galleries, as
distinct from the fly-by-night film venues of the Filmmaker’s Cinematheque, both Smithson and
Serra were known to be frequent attendees of the screenings of the so-called American
underground (author’s conversation with Annette Michelson, fall 2007, New York City). It should
also be noted that a number of the filmmakers described in this project – including Breer, Warhol,
Conner, Schneemann, and Sharits – screened their films at galleries during this period as well.

28
Tambellini, Bruce Conner, Robert Nelson, Carolee Schneemann, and Paul Sharits,
all had some significant aesthetic connections to other trends in the arts. In fact,
the Filmmaker’s Cinematheque, a venue devoted to the exhibition of experimental
and independent film and organized by filmmaker Jonas Mekas, was perhaps one
of the most significant venues and social spaces for the presentation of
performance art, happenings, experimental dance, and video art in the period. The
close social and historical proximity of these developments in expanded art forms
serves to further emphasize the social overlap and interaction between these
diverse, but related cultural trends in art-making.
In the 1960s, most experimental filmmakers were amateurs, and the fact
that they reaped little to no profit from their work was a fact that they often
celebrated as a mark of practical and political independence (despite the fact that
as a result these artists were forced to live under the conditions of poverty that
generally accompanied such an outsider status). This understanding of avant-
garde film, as an amateur’s practice, has been well established and convincingly
discussed by a number of artists and critics, including Brakhage and one of his
major influences, Maya Deren. She argued, in 1965, that the etymology of
“amateur” was in fact related to the Latin term for “lover,” and that, independent
filmmaking, because of its commercial freedom from conventional, industrial
cinema, could be free of the structural constraints of plot, dialogue, and star
actors. She writes, “Artistic freedom means that the amateur film-maker is never
forced to sacrifice visual drama and beauty to a stream of words, words, words,

29
words, to the relentless activity and explanations of plot, or to the display of a star
or sponsor’s product.”
26
For her, this amateur status differentiated independent
and avant-garde film practices from those of the commercial film industry.
More recently, in 2002, Ken Jacobs, a filmmaker who has been making
experimental work since the early 1960s, claimed that the non-commercial status
of the independent filmmaking mode was in fact a major triumph, not only over
Hollywood cinema, but over the art market as well: “I love the idea of making
work that can’t work into the art market. […] I think it’s a real
accomplishment.”
27
The distance of the independent cinema from the realm of
professional artists was seen by many (as Jacobs suggests) to be a mark of its
independence, yet as Frampton explains above, it was an autonomy that was won
at the expense of a more widespread cultural recognition. This institutional and
economic framing of experimental cinema as an amateur’s practice has separated
this group of artists philosophically and historically from both successful postwar
painters (and their economic support system of galleries and critical tastemakers)
as well as Hollywood filmmakers (and the infrastructural support of the studio
system). Though experimental filmmakers shared similar aesthetic aspirations
with their contemporaries in other arts, they also shared an apparatus with an
industrial entertainment medium, and thus found themselves, in Frampton’s
words, “absolutely embattled.” The historical relationships between film and the
other arts evidenced real cultural anxieties of critical, social, and economic

26
Maya Deren, “Amateur Versus Professional” Film Culture 39 (Winter 1965), 45–46.
27
Jacobs in Malcolm Turvey, et al., “Round Table: Obsolescence and American Avant-Garde
Film,” 124.

30
tensions that, in some degree, continue to the present. These tensions between
different modes of artistic and cultural production are inscribed in the works, both
in their tendencies to demonstrate the poverty of their means and to utilize a range
of confrontational strategies in a variety of artistic registers.
In accordance with the legacy of medium-specific in modernist art
criticism (most often associated with Clement Greenberg), it might be argued that
experimental film has no place within texts that present histories of painting and
sculpture. It could be claimed that film is an altogether different medium, with
distinctive attributes, aesthetic strategies, and significatory properties. (This is the
position that art historian Caroline Jones takes in her discussion of film in relation
to postwar studio art.)
28
However, most survey histories of 20
th
-century art also
consider practices in performance, conceptual art, or “dematerialized art,”
including those that reflect on earlier intermedial movements (such as Futurism or
Constructivism, for example). More importantly, for many artists of the postwar
period, despite the famous protestations by Greenberg and other art critics to the
contrary, not all significant advances in art foregrounded the supposedly essential
attributes of any single medium. Instead, it might be argued that the most
significant advances of the post World War II era were very much involved in
combinatory, impure modes of medial hybrids, including assemblage, combines,
happenings, performance art, conceptual art, and expanded cinema. In terms of
contemporary practice, this legacy remains massively important. It must be

28
See Caroline Jones’s critique of Annette Michelson in conversation with Richard Serra in The
Machine in the Studio, 390, n.13.

31
recognized that the projected moving image is now, more than ever, a major
medium for artists, and these strategies must, for the sake of responsible criticism
and scholarship, be connected to their historical precedents in experimental film
art. In 2008, film and video curator John Hanhardt addressed the neglect of
moving image art in contemporary curatorial practice:
The presence of the moving image–whether projected, seen on a monitor
or a flat screen, or constituting part of a CD-ROM or website–introduces
complex historical and interpretative questions. Yet the rush by curators
and historians to embrace emerging media artists occurs too often at the
expense of earlier generations of artists working in similar genres and
forms. Although the significance of film and video artists of the 1960s and
1970s is generally acknowledged, for example, curators and historians
frequently fail to make connections between these earlier works and what
is being created today. This oversight isolates contemporary artists and
relegates curators to championing new art without being sufficiently aware
of its potential historical links.
29

As Hanhardt suggests, the origins of popular, contemporary multi-media
practices, including the work of Douglas Gordon, Paul McCarthy, Matthew
Barney, Pierre Huyghe, and others, must be connected to the historical precedents
of other experimental work in moving image media. Though this project does not
explicitly address contemporary video, film, and multi-media art, it nevertheless
argues that, if this work is to be understood in any meaningful way (in the context
of responsible curatorial or scholarly practice), then it requires more thorough
investigations of the place of film within earlier American art history.

29
John Hanhardt, “From Screen to Gallery: Cinema, Video, and Installation Art Practices,”
American Art 22, no.2 (Summer 2008), 2.

32
Pure/Impure Forms:
Within the history of art criticism Clement Greenberg was perhaps the
most influential voice of his generation, if not the entire 20
th
century. And though
he did not explicitly address cinema, his intellectual authority was a determining
influence on the entire timbre of post World War II aesthetics, influencing a range
of critics and scholars who interacted with painting, sculpture, and even film.
Greenberg’s thinking thus needs to be understood as the philosophical
underpinning of any significant historical consideration of the relationship
between media in 20
th
century avant-garde art.
Greenberg famously argued for a teleological art history, a version of the
20
th
century art narrative that privileged a seemingly natural and logical progress
towards forms of greater aesthetic purity. According to Greenberg, as art forms
evolved, their most significant works would more forcefully address the precise
conditions of their own materiality. As he saw it, the most significant innovations
in advanced art would necessarily progress towards the more thorough revelation
of the essential characteristics of their medium. In short, it was the project of
advanced painting to become more immersed in opticality, the non-
representational use of paint, and the recognition of the canvas’s non-illusory
flatness. It was Greenberg’s position (and that of his most influential follower,
Michael Fried) that art had a kind of teleological destiny to fulfill, to strip away
that which was extraneous to its essential purpose. (This was an argument that
Greenberg derived, to a significant extent, from Immanuel Kant’s metaphysics).

33
By removing all that was figurative, as well as symbolic, representational,
narrative, (and most importantly for Michael Fried, “theatrical”) the most
significant American art presented, in Greenberg’s formulation, a tendency
towards progressively more purified forms.
To Greenberg and the group of modernist critics who followed in his
wake, the most important developments in art followed the law “that the
conventions not essential to the viability of a medium be discarded as soon as they
are recognized.”
30
Though this stripping away of figurative content was in fact
central to many developments of the avant-garde, both in the United States and
abroad, it did not define the totality of significant artistic practice. Greenberg
converted an observation into a prescriptive philosophical axiom. This selective
critical stance was dogmatic enough to lead critic Leo Steinberg to argue that,
“Greenberg mistakes a special case for necessity.”
31
It is a commonplace
assumption within art criticism that Greenberg, however rigorous a thinker and
compelling a writer (particularly in his early work), was misguided in his
prescriptive teleological notions about the historical direction that avant-garde art
would take.
32
Though he correctly observed that advanced painting was venturing
into more severe notions of its own materiality and pictorial flatness, he neglected

30
Clement Greenberg, “‘American-Type’ Painting” in Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1961), 208.
31
Leo Steinberg, Other Criteria, 77.
32
Two astute, but sympathetic critiques of Greenberg can be found in the work of philosopher and
art critic Arthur Danto and art historian Thomas Crow. Arthur Danto, After the End of Art:
Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). Thomas
Crow, “Modernism and Mass Culture in the Visual Arts” in Modern Art in the Common Culture
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996).

34
to recognize that some of the most significant developments in art would take
alternative paths, as they moved away from the flat canvas and into the space that
surrounded it.
In both his writing and his art practice, artist and theorist Allan Kaprow
provided a meaningful counterpoint to Greenberg’s predictions. In 1958 Kaprow
argued that the gestural innovations of Jackson Pollock, the most famous of
Abstract Expressionists, would point the way toward new directions, not into the
essence of the painted medium, but off the canvas beyond its traditional material
limits.
What we have, then, is art that tends to lose itself out of bounds, tends to
fill our world with itself, art that in meaning, looks, impulse seems to
break fairly sharply with the traditions of painters […] to give up the
making of paintings entirely […] Pollock as I see him, left us at the point
where we must become preoccupied with and even dazzled by the space
and objects of our everyday life, either our bodies, clothes, rooms, or if
need be, the vastness of Forty-second street.
33

For Greenberg, Pollock’s work was fundamentally significant because of its
unique visual content. But for Kaprow, Pollock’s painting depended on a variety
of gesture that strived to escape the physical limits of the very same frame. (This
sensibility is perfectly congruent with Harold Rosenberg’s theorizations of
painting-as-act, which are quoted earlier in this introduction.) The new directions
and major developments of advanced art in the 1960s and 70s demonstrated that
Kaprow’s premonitions would prove accurate while Greenberg’s criticism would
seem more and more incapable of adapting to noteworthy changes in artistic

33
Allan Kaprow, “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock” in Essays on the Blurring Between Art and
Life, ed. Jeff Kelley (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 67.

35
production, as developments in performance, intermedial practice, Happenings,
minimalism, conceptual art, and expanded cinema gained cultural footing.
34

In 1968, in a seminal essay on the changing nature of art in sixties
America, critics Lucy Lippard and John Chandler described the shifting
contemporary landscape of the visual arts in a way that resonates with Kaprow’s
suggestions. For those authors, it seemed that painting and sculpture had come to
a standstill in 1958, after the heyday of Abstract Expressionism and color field
painting. As a result of this condition, a number of artists had begun to expand
into other media, including particularly the “dematerialized” practices that
included conceptual art, process art, performance, and significantly, film.
35
Ten
years earlier, in his decisive essay, “On the Legacy of Jackson Pollock,” artist and
theorist Allan Kaprow had prophesized this very condition. Kaprow claimed that
artists who would follow Jackson Pollock in history would necessarily define, in
their practice, a shift away from the canvas, as they would adopt new materials
and subjects including “chairs, food, electric and neon lights, smoke, water, old
socks, a dog, movies.”
36
Here, Kaprow was likely referring to Hollywood
“movies,” understood like “old socks,” as commercial detritus, as the refuse of
industrial society. Nevertheless, he suggests that new developments in art practice
would not favor any particular material platform or medium. Kaprow, Lippard,

34
A 2008 exhibition, “Action/Abstraction: Pollock, de Kooning, and American Art, 1940–1976”
at the Jewish Museum in New York City presented paintings by the Abstract Expressionists and
juxtaposed the philosophically opposed attitudes and interpretations of Greenberg and Rosenberg,
particularly as they relate to the critical evaluation of those works.
35
They explicitly discuss Michael Snow’s Wavelength (1967) as a major work in this context.
36
Kaprow, “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock,” 9.

36
and Chandler argued that artists would necessarily move their work away from
pure plasticity and visual abstraction by emphasizing bodily contingency and
presence, through performance and mixed forms in response to the gestural
developments of Abstract Expressionism. This art emphasized interpersonal
interaction, process, and the social spaces of art practice in which they come in
contact with each other. It is significant that for Kaprow, a major catalyst for the
intermedial energies of the 1960s, as well as Lippard and Chandler, early
observers of these developments, film was indeed part of this multi-media cultural
atmosphere.
Like Kaprow, Lippard, and Chandler, theater critic and theorist of
Happenings, Michael Kirby, observed similar trends towards temporal
experimentation, interpersonal interaction, and impure, intermedial projects. He
wrote in 1968 that there had been an alternative development to what Greenberg
had predicted:
While Greenberg sees history as purifying forms, I see it as breaking down
the autonomy of formal definitions. One of the strongest tendencies in
avant-garde art has been toward what Dick Higgins has called
“intermedia” — art that exists between prevalent definitions or makes use
of materials and concepts from two different disciplines […] it is primarily
the “impure.”
37

Kirby was direct in his efforts to divide the critical history of art between the
purist teleology of Greenberg’s interest in medium specificity and a fresh hybrid
practice that voluntarily challenged the differences between disciplines. The art

37
Michael Kirby, The Art of Time: Essays on the Avant-Garde (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co,
1969), 13.

37
form in which Kirby was primarily interested was the semi-theatrical brand of
public art known as happenings, in which artists would stage events that featured
a variety of performers in interactive, semi-dramatic settings. This variety of
interactive work often incorporated devices and structures from other art forms
including dance, music, drama, and cinema. The totalizing social space of the
happening was a frame in which a variety of media could meet. Sometimes the
projected film image took part in these experiments.
As Kirby writes in the passage quoted above, Fluxus artist Dick Higgins
coined the term “intermedia” (in 1966). Higgins argued convincingly for a
counter-narrative of art criticism that challenged the dominant modernist model. It
was his position that the nature of art production in the post World War II period
tended more and more towards hybrid forms, in which a variety of media were
consciously blended and interwoven in practice. Significantly, Higgins credits this
artistic shift towards interactive, multi-media practices to the mass media. In this
regard, he makes a suggestion that is entirely harmonious with the ideas of
influential 60s media theorist Marshall McLuhan. Higgins writes in his
“Statement on Intermedia”:
due to the spread of mass literacy, to television and the transistor radio,
our sensitivities have changed. [...] As with the cubists, we are asking for a
new way of looking at things, but more totally, since we are more
impatient and more anxious to go to the basic images. This explains the
impact of Happenings, event pieces, mixed media films [...] For the last
ten years or so, artists have changed their media to suit this situation, to
the point where the media have broken down in their traditional forms.
38

38
Dick Higgins, “Statement on Intermedia” reprinted in In the Spirit of Fluxus, ed. Elizabeth
Armstrong (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1993), 172–73.

38

The shift in forms described by Higgins, which includes “mixed media films”
accompanied a social and aesthetic anxiety about representation itself, about the
capacity of any medium to contain a meaning that is purely its own. Many artists
of this intermedial milieu opposed Greenberg’s enthusiasm for medium-based
purity, taking it to be an intellectual quagmire, a critical model that was made
inoperable by the most noteworthy varieties of mixed media art-making practice
in their era. As Higgins suggests, it is indisputable that the changing nature of art
practice in the 1960s, which emphasized process, presence, chance, and hybrid
forms, was significantly influenced by changes in mass media technologies,
including the proliferation of television. Experimental cinema of the 1960s and
70s incorporates the energies described above, including an encounter with the
materials and technologies of mass culture, as well as a new, cross-medial
emphasis on more theatrical, performative modes of art making. In this sense, a
reconsideration of the interaction of cinema with these other trends in
experimental art may help to explain why journalist John Gruen described the
avant-garde cinema “as the perfect magnetic center for every restless impulse and
expression” of the artistic milieu of the mid-1960s.
39

Impure Forms, Continued: “The Theatrical”:
In the mid-to-late 1960s, modernist art critic and historian Michael Fried
wrote a polemical essay that diagnosed the changing artistic landscape of the

39
Gruen, The New Bohemia, 93.

39
period. As a protégé of Greenberg, Fried continued the hard line of modernist
medium specificity initiated by his mentor, carrying the philosophical mandates
of modernist criticism into the unlikely terrain of the aesthetically heterogeneous,
intermedial landscape of the 1960s. His 1967 essay, “Art and Objecthood,” was a
call-to-arms that demanded of critics that they distinguish between “the frivolous”
and “the serious” in art, by dismissing all that was contingent upon experiential
processes of perception, including all bodily, temporal, and phenomenological
aspects of interpretation. To Fried, these tendencies, which he felt were central to
certain strains of minimalist sculpture, could all be described as theatrical.
Overall, the essay is complex, rich in language, and persuasive in its rhetorical
structure. Yet, like the criticism of Greenberg, it is fundamentally conservative, a
reiteration of the Greenbergian argument that for an artwork to be meaningful and
serious (regardless of format or physical platform), it needs to engage not with a
variety of cultural forces or art forms, or with the temporal or physical conditions
of perception, but solely with the conditions and history of its own medium. He
argues that when art forms become mixed, they become impure, diluted, and
ultimately transformed – and this is the worst offense – into theater. He writes
that, “Art degenerates as it approaches the condition of theatre.”
40
Or: “What lies
between the arts is theatre.”
41
Though Fried is primarily concerned with sculpture
in this essay, he also presents a pointed polemic against the entire sensibility that
embraces intermedial art (as described by Kaprow, Higgins, and others quoted

40
Fried, 141.
41
Ibid., 142.

40
above). Though there may have been an increase in the popularity of hybrid
experiments in hybrid forms of art – like the happenings of Kaprow, the
performances of Jim Dine, the multi-media events of Warhol’s Exploding Plastic
Inevitable – this trend was not indicative, as Fried saw it, of any improvement in
the overall quality of contemporary art. To him, such work posed a problem.
In contradistinction to the suppositions of modernist art criticism,
composer John Cage embraced an openness toward theatrical forms that was also
profoundly influential. In the 1957 essay, “Experimental Music,” Cage proudly
welcomed a shift in music and art-making practices away from controlled
structures of classical authorship and discrete artistic structures towards a greater
openness in form, to the chance-based processes of nature and the conditions of
contingency. Towards the end of the essay he writes, “Where do we go from
here? Towards theatre. That art more than music resembles nature.”
42
To Fried,
the messy and open-ended experiments of the 1960s blended the interests of
various media and thus undermined the most powerful and significant possibilities
that these forms offered individually. In a sense, the semi-theatrical projects
described above (with which film should be included) comprised a kind of
assemblage art in which a range of both plastic and temporal structures blended,
and in which the interests of diverse technologies, representational traditions, and
cultural phenomena melded in order to create projects that at times aspired to the
ambitious scope of the multi-sensorial, operatic, Wagnerian gestamtkunstwerk. To

42
John Cage, “Experimental Music” in Silence: Lectures and Writings (Middletown, CT:
Wesleyan University Press, 1961), 12.

41
Fried, what an emphasis on temporal and embodied experience entailed was a
profound sense of duration and a phenomenological consciousness that was
fundamentally opposed to the medium-specific requirements of pure,
transcendent, entirely present opticality as realized in what he considered to be the
most ambitious and significant painting and sculpture. To other artists and critics
of intermedial work, it was precisely this condition of new art – its theatricality –
that made it interesting and provocative.
In a footnote to “Art and Objecthood,” Fried directly attacks the cultural
criticism of Susan Sontag for what he describes as “perhaps the purest – certainly
the most egregious – expression of what I have been calling theatrical sensibility
in recent criticism.”
43
Specifically, he directs his antagonism against “One Culture
and the New Sensibility,” a seminal essay that was published in Against
Interpretation and Other Essays in 1966. In that piece, Sontag celebrates the
breakdown of conventional limits between art forms and their associated modes
of perception as she writes that “the most interesting works of contemporary art
[…] are adventures in sensation, new ‘sensory mixes.’”
44
She argues that the
blending of new art practices with the interests, strategies, and technologies of
other media forms, as well as “new materials and methods drawn from the world
of non-art” (in a way related to Kaprow’s suggestions discussed above), produce a
totally fresh cultural situation in which the function of art itself has changed. It is

43
Fried, 141.
44
Susan Sontag, “One Culture and the New Sensibility” in Against Interpretation and Other
Essays (New York: Picador, 1966), 300. It is also implicit in her argument that the most relevant
artistic experimentation of the era will be immersive, rather than textually remote and isolated.

42
clear, from the following passage, which was quoted by Fried, exactly why
Sontag’s catholic perspective on avant-garde culture would aggravate him so
thoroughly:
All kinds of conventionally accepted boundaries have thereby been
challenged: not jut the one between the “scientific” and the “literary-
artistic” cultures, or the one between “art” and “non-art”; but also many
established distinctions within the world of culture itself – that between
form and content, the frivolous and the serious, and (a favorite of literary
intellectuals) “high” and “low” culture.
45

Sontag argues that new trends in art practice of the mid-1960s share a tendency to
challenge the established cultural hierarchies that had previously provided stable
criteria for critical evaluation. Though she mentions few artists by name, she
argues that Cage, Warhol, and Stockhausen all embodied new forms of authorship
and cultural engagement that dramatically differed from the closed forms that
were favored by “literary intellectuals.” From her writing in “One Culture and the
New Sensibility,” it is clear that Sontag has a contemporary observer’s
appreciation for the strategies and intentions of experimental art in the 1960s. Her
critical sensibility astutely responded to the changing conditions of culture across
a range of disciplines and evaluated it based on its own terms, within the overall
landscape of the avant-garde. It is thus clear why the logic of Fried, and in a
sense, Greenberg too, was simply incapable of adapting to the artistic
developments of the 1960s and the work of happenings, multi-media art,
expanded cinema, Fluxus, Robert Rauschenberg, and John Cage. It is no surprise
that Fried does not even mention experimental cinema in his writing.

45
Ibid., 297.

43
In her evaluation of the changing aesthetic suppositions of the era, Sontag
was particularly interested in the overall shifts in tone that accompanied the new
strategies of artistic production and their appropriately fresh notions of pleasure
and beauty. To her, the timbre of much experimental work in the period
represented a provocative and unprecedented blend of attitudes that was
“dedicated both to an excruciating seriousness and to fun and wit and nostalgia.”
46

In its promiscuous blend of tones and media forms, it marked a transition away
from values that she associates with “literary intellectuals.” In her description of
the new sensibility, she is particularly concerned with the ways in which changes
in form and media structures can catalyze fresh varieties of perceptual experience
and aesthetic encounter between a spectator and an art object. To Sontag, the
notion that new blends of intermedial interaction could encourage active
transformations of perceptual and sensorial experience, seemed artistically and
socially libratory. This belief in a transformative, catalytic art experience was also
expressed in the comments and writings of some of the most significant media
artists of the era. But Sontag also felt that cinema had a particular, perhaps unique
capacity to actually contain the other arts and achieve a variety of artistic
synthesis that was the goal of “the new sensibility” and its genre-bending, multi-
media aspirations. Like Cage, she too argued that in fact this contemporary trend
towards the expansion of art into the contingent and theatrical spaces between

46
Ibid., 304.

44
conventional disciplines created the most urgent and compelling aesthetic
experiments of the era.

P. Adams Sitney, Romanticism, and Visionary Film:
The dominant historical evaluation of the American experimental cinema
has been subject to precisely the variety of literary intellectualism that is Sontag’s
target in “One Culture and the New Sensibility.” P. Adams Sitney, in his
foundational study of the American avant-garde cinema, Visionary Film,
established its first ambitious scholarly book-length analysis. First published in
1974, Sitney’s text was authoritative in its demonstration of an unprecedented
awareness of the great diversity of avant-garde work, its detailed analyses and
descriptions of the films, and its rhetorical persuasiveness. As David James
describes it, the volume was “instantly definitive.” He writes of Sitney’s book,
“there has not since been a work of equivalent analytic force or with as detailed
and sensitive knowledge of the cannon or overall erudition.”
47
However, Sitney’s
work was far from uncontroversial. It might also be argued that some of his
willful omissions of cultural context relate directly to Sontag’s critique of
“literary intellectualism” and its influence on the writing of critics and scholars in
the 1960s and 1970s.
In Visionary Film, Sitney proposes a teleological morphology of the
history of the American avant-garde that proceeds through a series of chapters, in

47
James, “Introduction” in Stan Brakhage: Filmmaker, ed. James (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 2005), 12.

45
an evolutionary cycle that features a succession of genres (identified by him),
including the trance film, the lyrical film, the mythopoetic film, and the structural
film. Overall, Sitney utilizes a variety of interpretative structures that are derived
from the study of literature, and more specifically, English romantic poetry of the
19
th
century. He suggests that the central tradition of the American avant-garde
begins with the films of Maya Deren, which emphasized dream states, mythic
structures, symbolism, metaphor, and an exalted faith in the power of the
imagination. In short, his embrace of a Romantic view of the American avant-
garde cinema is a celebration of the demiurgic power of visionary, imaginative,
expressive, and mythical structures and strategies. He writes, “The filmmakers
who followed her [Deren] pursued the metaphors of dream and ritual by which
she had defined the avant-garde cinema, but they allowed a Romantic faith in the
triumph of the imagination to determine their forms from within.”
48
He traces this
sensibility through the work of a number of filmmakers including Deren, Kenneth
Anger, Gregory Markopolous, and others, but ultimately appoints Brakhage as the
principal heir to this project. Though Sitney’s argument is convincing in many
ways, one must wonder, why he would need to continually relate a 20
th
-century
moving image medium to the written poetry and poetics of an artistic tradition of
one hundred years earlier. What does the interpretation of the work gain by being
connected to this European tradition?

48
Sitney, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, 1943-2000, 3
rd
ed. (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2002), 370.

46
Despite the fact that his film descriptions and analyses are largely
unmatched in their detail and intelligence within the published scholarship on the
topic, there are aspects of his overall strategy that still seem somewhat
incongruous with the subject at hand. In one sense, Sitney’s continual return to
literary devices – including metaphor, metonymy, symbolism, mythopoesis, etc. –
might be understood as an effort to legitimize new experiments in moving image
art, by using language from another discipline, in order to demonstrate some
isomorphic relationship to previous traditions that may have shared some basic
similar spirit. He writes,
Whenever possible, both in my interpretation of films and discussion of
theory, I have attempted to trace the heritage of Romanticism. I have
found this approach consistently more useful and more generative than the
Freudian hermeneutics and sexual analyses which have dominated much
previous criticism of the American avant-garde film.
49

Sitney is perhaps right to suggest that a model of film interpretation based on the
heritage of Romantic poetics is more appropriate for the work of the American
avant-garde cinema than “the Freudian hermeneutics and sexual analyses” (of
critics like Parker Tyler) that he mentions. Nevertheless, his argument depends
upon the imposition of another privileged and historically removed critical
nomenclature and philosophical system that is, in some sense, an arbitrary
imposition upon the work. As a result, Sitney converts the films into series of
symbols that comprise a textual field through which he can distill them into
literary, anecdotal formulations – perfectly contained artistic rituals of symbolic

49
Sitney, Visionary Film, xiii.

47
and expressive imagination. His strategy depends on the highly refined, precise,
and persuasive reduction of film texts into semi-narrative networks of characters
and symbols. This method is entirely based upon his study of literature. As Hollis
Frampton argues, Visionary Film was “derived largely from an undergraduate
seminar in romantic poetry with Harold Bloom at Yale. That makes something of
a procrustean bed. […] But that was the extent of the intellectual tool kit that he
had to tinker and unlock this strange device. It worked a little.”
50

From what has been described of Sitney’s project in Visionary Film, it
should be clear that he presents a somewhat conservative argument and associated
interpretative methodology that, however internally coherent it may be, is entirely
incongruous with the sensibility presented by Sontag and other cultural critics
who felt that there was something markedly novel and fresh about new
experiments in the arts during the period at hand. She argued that contemporary
developments in the avant-garde arts begged to be understood in relation to each
other, not to the history of literature. In her essay of 1965, Sontag indirectly
provides a preemptive dismissal of a critical model of the avant-garde that
privileges literature as an interpretative apparatus: “Simply ignorant of the vital
and enthralling (so called ‘avant-garde’) developments in the other arts, and
blinded by their personal investment in the perpetuation of the older notion of
culture, they [‘literary intellectuals’] continue to cling to literature as the model

50
Frampton quoted in MacDonald, Canyon Cinema, 268.

48
for creative statement.”
51
Sitney was far from ignorant about new developments in
the other arts, but he was nonetheless unconvinced that there was anything
particularly novel about new trends in artistic practice in the period. To him, it
seemed more appropriate to relate the work of the filmmakers that he discusses to
artists of an entirely different cultural context than it did to consider the
relationship that film had to contemporaneous experiments in other media, like
performance or avant-garde music. In her critique of interpretation derived from
literary criticism, Sontag writes,
But the model arts of our time are actually those with much less content,
and a much cooler mode of moral judgment – like music, films, dance,
architecture, painting, sculpture. The practice of these arts – all of which
draw profusely, naturally, and without embarrassment, upon science and
technology – are the locus of the new sensibility.
52

Here Sontag suggests that in fact, the most urgent forms of fresh artistic
production expand beyond the textual limits of any one medium, into the
expanded spaces of immersive artistic experience. Interestingly, in Sitney’s
project, there is little-to-no discussion of new technology, experimental music,
expanded cinema, happenings, or other developments in the temporal or theatrical
arts of the period. Similarly, Annette Michelson differed with Sitney concerning
the use of a literary precedent as a critical model for the interpretation of cinema,
as she argued in 1966 that it would be better understood as part of an artistic
network: “The extraordinary advantage of American cinema today does lie partly
in the possibilities of these convergences and cross-fertilizations. […] One thinks

51
Sontag, “One Culture,” 298.
52
Ibid, 298–299.

49
of its already established, though still embryonic, contacts with a new music,
dance, theater, painting, and sculpture.”
53
As various media forms expanded into
the aesthetic, formal, and social space of others, a number of critics argued that
this cultural cross-pollination should stimulate new modes of critical practice.
However, such a historically situated model of interpretation has not been the
dominant one in the study of experimental cinema.
Though Sitney does draw frequent parallels between avant-garde film,
Romantic poetics, and the sensibility of abstract expressionism (a movement that
was basically extinct by the time of his book), he neglects the overall influential
force of the cultural field of the 1960s upon avant-garde film practice. Art
historian Liz Kotz has recently critiqued this interpretative tendency that connects
experimental cinema to painting, but neglects its interrelations with other trends in
the arts including performance, theater, happenings, etc. She writes, “It is ironic
that so many efforts to locate experimental cinema in the history of visual art tend
to situate it in emphatically pictorial or object-based lineages that themselves
sever modernist painting and sculpture from wider contexts of avant-garde
experimentation.”
54
Despite its erudition, Visionary Film helped to decisively
isolate the American avant-garde from the rest of art-making in post World War II
America. There remains a need, as Kotz implicitly suggests, to responsibly

53
Michelson, “Film and the Radical Aspiration” in Film Culture Reader, ed. P. Adams Sitney
(New York: Cooper Square Press, 1970), 420.
54
Liz Kotz, “Disciplining Expanded Cinema” in X-Screen: Film Installations and Actions in the
1960s and 1970s, ed. Matthias Michalka (Koln: Walther Konig, 2004), 47.

50
reconstitute a history of the ways in which experimental film both influenced and
responded to, in her words, “wider contexts of avant-garde experimentation.”
Since its original publication, there have been significant challenges to
Visionary Film. However, most of them have been primarily concerned with
criticisms of Sitney’s politics and his influence as a canon-building critic. (A
number of these critiques, including those of Janet Bergstrom, Constance Penley,
Lauren Rabinovitz, and Patricia Mellencamp, for example, were motivated by a
desire to reconsider the American avant-garde in feminist terms.)
55
But there have
been also been a small number of more wide-ranging historical interventions into
the interpretation of the American avant-garde film since the publication of
Sitney’s volume. The most significant survey of the American avant-garde to
follow his project is undoubtedly David James’ Allegories of Cinema, published
in 1989, in which the author situates this artistic tradition, including its Romantic
aspects, within its material, industrial, and political contexts. Towards the end of
that volume, at the conclusion of a political investigation of the American avant-
garde of the 1960s, the author writes, “The termination of film’s social urgency
bequeaths to the historian the task of preparing an account of film’s position
among other mediums.”
56
The project of this dissertation is to initiate an at least

55
See Lauren Rabinovitz, Points of Resistance: Women, Power & Politics in the New York Avant-
garde Cinema, 1943-71 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003); Patricia Mellencamp,
Indiscretions: Avant-Garde Film, Video & Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1990); Constance Penley and Janet Bergstrom, “The Avant-Garde History and Theories” in
Movies and Methods, Volume 1, ed. Bill Nichols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985):
287-300 and Penley, “The Avant-Garde and its Imaginary,” Ibid., 576-602.
56
James, Allegories of Cinema: American Film in the Sixties (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1989), 348.

51
partial response to this issue of the interrelation between experimental film
practice and the other artistic mediums of the period in which, as James puts it,
the impression of “film’s social urgency” shifted markedly within the American
cultural landscape.
This project does not aim to dispute Sitney’s foundational study, but to
add historical detail. In this sense, this study interprets experimental film as part
of a diverse, unruly field of multi-media art practice that extended beyond the
self-contained clique of visionary, imaginative, romantic filmmakers that are his
subject in Visionary Film. Like Carel Rowe’s Baudelarean Cinema, this project
aims to recuperate other countertrends and deviations from the romantic,
expressive tradition that Sitney establishes as the dominant one in the history that
he both describes and constitutes. The argument here is not presented in order to
contest Sitney’s principal claims, but to provide suggestions of other
interpretative models that may counteract some of the domineering influence of
his strategy.
Because of the relative obscurity and rarity of experimental cinema, its
representation in both scholarly historical writing and more popular media forms
has often depended on established patterns of interpretation – critical shortcuts
derived from Sitney’s foundational intellectual project – rather than original
research. Subsequently, canonical works that fit within and support his framework
are exhaustively exhibited and studied, while others that defy these strategies are
frequently neglected. This is not the fault of Sitney. In fact, it is a testimony to the

52
rhetorical force of his work. In a most extreme example of derivative, short-hand
history of the avant-garde derived from Sitney’s model, one could consider the
forthcoming documentary by Chuck Workman, “Jonas Mekas and the
Visionaries,” which addresses the work of Maya Deren, Kenneth Anger, Stan
Brakhage, Jonas Mekas and others, in what the filmmaker has described as a
“classic comics version of avant-garde film history.”
57
As its title suggests, it
borrows from Sitney’s analytical and historical interpretation of the avant-garde,
but in a way that likely lacks the complexity and sophistication of the author’s
work. As is suggested throughout this dissertation, other interpretative alternatives
remain. This project aims to diversify the understanding of the American
historical avant-garde cinema through an analysis of misinterpreted films,
neglected art practices, and largely forgotten intermedial experiments that situate
these works within the countercultural, experimental art landscape of the sixties
and seventies.
In 1966, journalist John Gruen wrote,
It is safe to say that of all avant-garde manifestations in the New Bohemia,
the underground film movement, for all its deliberate derangement, is the
most active and the most daring. While the Combine Generation’s fever
for joint creativity runs rampant in all the arts, it is filmmaking that acts as
the perfect magnetic center for every restless impulse and expression.
58

This sense of experimental film’s cultural, social, and psychic urgency in the
1960s is entirely absent from Sitney’s account of the movement’s history. Though
it was originally published over thirty years ago, Visionary Film remains the most

57
Author’s conversation with Workman, spring 2009.
58
Gruen, The New Bohemia, 93.

53
influential and widely read book on the American avant-garde, and as such,
demands the critical intervention of counterarguments and supplementary
histories. This project does not propose a revision of his sensibility as much it
disputes “the intensified Romantic inwardness” that he felt dominated the avant-
garde cinema.
59
Instead of conveying an introspective, reflective, meditative
meeting with sensuous forms of symbolism and myth, the films that are the
subject of this project embody aggressive, agitated, anxious, and contingent
encounters with formally, philosophically, and socially hostile forces.

Experimental Cinema: Between Plasticity and Performance: Originale (1961,
1964) and Fist Fight (1964):
Debuted in the fall of 1964, in the context of an all-star intermedial avant-
garde theater performance, Robert Breer’s Fist Fight begins the historical
trajectory of interdisciplinary interaction that this dissertation addresses. Breer’s
film draws attention to the anxious and unsure limits between different artistic
traditions while it also presents its own particularly provocative strategies for
assaulting viewers and unsettling the conventional authorial strategies of the
expressive, symbolic, and Romantic tradition of avant-garde cinema. In the place
of this sensibility, Breer presents a wildly heterogeneous assemblage work of
aleatory associations and an unprecedented anxiogenic sensorial disruption that is
achieved through the forceful use of jackhammer montage. Both within the

59
Sitney, Visionary Film, 290.

54
textual limits of the film and the extratexual space of its exhibition, Fist Fight
forces the expectations of the art form into uncomfortable spaces of confrontation.
Breer’s performative presentation of the film, as part of a theatrical work, also
suggests that the film experiments of the mid-1960s should be considered in
relation, more generally, to the interactive climate of the avant-garde arts in the
period. In its presentation within Stockhausen’s intermedial experiment, Fist
Fight functioned as one component of a multi-faceted event that meaningfully
summarized contemporary trends in avant-garde culture.
***
Many of the most celebrated performance and Happenings artists of the
postwar era worked in a diverse variety of media that often included film.
(Richard Kostelanetz has described this particular overlap of performance and
visual art as “The Theatre of Mixed Means.”)
60
In these contexts, historically
speaking, film often functioned as one component of a mixed media environment.
It has been argued by many critics, including Michael Kirby, that these mixed
means performances grew out of gestural painting and the “impure” mixed forms
of collage and assemblage. So, one can see in this cultural moment a remarkable
synthesis of the materials and concerns of a number of art forms including
painting, performance, and film.
Within film studies, this intermediary episode described above poses a
significant difficulty to historical assimilation, because in many cases these artists

60
Richard Kostelanetz, The Theatre of Mixed Means: An Introduction to Happenings, Kinetic
Environments, and Other Mixed-Means Performances (New York: Dial, 1968).

55
produced paracinematic events and one-time performance encounters.
61
In such
hybrid and contingent works, the site of meaning was not the textual space within
the frame but the social space of projection in which filmic images were
interspersed in multiple screen projections, mixed with light shows, live
performance, live music, and other modifications of the projection apparatus.
When cinema was made newly and overwhelmingly performative, as it was in the
context of 1960s intermedial experimentation, it lost its claim to textual longevity
and was instead granted a position of contingency and presence in keeping with
other varieties of performance that were central to that era.
In 1965, in a program organized by Jonas Mekas and Fluxus artist George
Maciunas at the Film-maker’s Cinematheque in New York City, three significant
mixed media pieces were debuted, each utilizing film or film projectors. These
formally hybrid events included Robert Whitman’s Prune. Flat., Claes
Oldenburg’s Moviehouse, and Robert Rauschenberg’s Map Room II. Whitman’s
and Rauschenberg’s pieces included projected images that interacted with live
performers, and Oldenburg’s piece utilized a projector without film as well as
costume fragments shaped like film cameras. In addition to the artists who came
to mixed-media performance from painting, art historian Liz Kotz argues, there
was also a significant group of artists working in mixed forms (featuring
expanded cinema or paracinema) who were trained in experimental music. For
example, in 1969, John Cage collaborated with Lejaren Hiller and Ronald Nemeth

61
The term “paracinema” has been attributed to either Ed Emshwiller or Jonas Mekas. There was
an extended argument on the genesis of this topic at the Society of Cinema and Media Studies
conference in 2007 in Chicago, during the panel titled “Cinema by Other Means.”

56
on a multimedia performance, titled HPSCHD, named for its seven amplified
harpsichords. This piece featured 100 films, many of which were projected
simultaneously.
62
Kotz also mentions Nam June Paik, Tony Conrad, and LaMonte
Young as important exemplars of this tradition of continuity between advanced
classical music and cinema as performance.
63
Yoko Ono too was a part of this
crossover tradition, working in music, performance art, and film. So, in this era of
impure, mixed media performance, one can locate a rather remarkable artistic
field that challenges the teleological notions of medium-specificity championed
by Clement Greenberg.
One of the most remarkable mixed-media events of this variety was the
New York performance of experimental classical music composer Karlheinz
Stockhausen’s Originale, an intermedial art event that featured an all-star cast of
the New York avant-garde community. Restaged in the summer of 1964 for the
Second Annual New York Avant-Garde Festival (under the leadership of
Charlotte Moorman), the revival combined the talents of a wide range of artists
involved in a range of practices, including experimental music, concrete poetry,
anarchic performance, dance, and experimental film. The semi-theatrical work
had debuted three years earlier in Cologne in the fall of 1961. In its New York
revival, artist, performer, and theorist of happenings, Allan Kaprow served as its
director. Avant-garde composer James Tenney and jazz critic and musician Don

62
Cage is generally considered to be the progenitor of happenings, due to an untitled work that he
organized in 1952 at Black Mountain College together with Merce Cunningham, as well as his
influence on the happenings generation as a teacher at The New School for Social Research.
63
Liz Kotz, “Disciplining Expanded Cinema” in X-Screen: Film Installations and Actions in the
1960s and 1970s.

57
Heckman performed on piano and saxophone respectively. Cellist-performance
artist Charlotte Moorman appeared, sometimes playing her instrument while lying
on her back. Poets Allen Ginsberg and Jackson Maclow performed alongside the
aforementioned Fluxus artist Dick Higgins and avant-garde classical composer
Alvin Lucier. Performance artist, composer, filmmaker, and videographer Nam
June Paik performed idiosyncratic gestural actions with his body (Stockhausen
described this as “action music”). And artist-filmmaker Robert Breer played the
role of “filmmaker” as he shot live closed-circuit video of the performance and,
most significantly for the concerns of the present study, projected his film Fist
Fight as part of the piece. As this historical encounter demonstrates, film was
sometimes a component of avant-garde performance within the mixed-media
environment of the 1960s, and this interaction drew attention to the ways in which
the artistic climate of the era blended and juxtaposed the interests of different
technologies, performative strategies, and representational languages.
Robert Breer has experimented with a variety of representational modes,
though he is primarily known as an animator. He has made some films that
feature conventionally hand-drawn animated segments, as in A Man and His Dog
Out for Air (1957), while in other cases he has blended this approach with live
action, as in Fuji (1974), and occasionally, he has produced documentary-style
film portraits, as in Pat’s Birthday (1962). Breer has continuously experimented
with heterogeneous methods of production, but has regularly depended on the
particular artistic resources that are provided by the film-specific technologies of

58
animation. Some of his earliest work features an unusual, idiosyncratic approach
to film composition – a kind of pseudo-animation – that is often composed in the
profilmic space of the animation stand, in which he assembled a diversity of
objects, including hand-drawn, two-dimensional figures, as well as found objects,
sequenced and organized through the use of single-frame photography. This is his
compositional strategy for Fist Fight. With this method, Breer devised a novel
form of visual construction that is in some ways closer to assemblage than it is to
drawing. This variety of filmmaking is both meticulous and spontaneous in its
combinations of single-frame composition (which is painstaking and labor-
intensive), and collagic compositional logic (which is aleatory, frenetic, and
spontaneous). It is a kind of assemblage filmmaking in which the animation stand
(a compositional device that holds the camera tightly in place while the filmmaker
carefully makes slight incremental moves in his materials in order to simulate
motion when the single-frame photography is projected) frames each discrete
visual collage, such that each composition can occupy a single frame, producing a
film organized into a string of assemblage tableaus. Breer’s film Fist Fight, which
was initially featured as part of the 1964 New York revival of Karlheinz
Stockhausen’s Originale, is one of his most exemplary works of this assemblage-
animation approach. In addition to demonstrating some of Breer’s most
significant artistic strategies, which blend the rapid, confrontational style of his
montagist filmmaking with a truly modern assemblage sensibility, the work is
also intertwined in a social, historical, extratextual context of its intermedial

59
experimentation because of its presence within Stockhausen’s semi-theatrical,
multi-media event, in which it debuted. The film thus has a double-status as it
functions textually as a self-contained experiment in rapid fire animated montage
and historically as a meeting point of different performative energies within the
space of the New York avant-garde of the mid-1960s.

Fist Fight:
The film begins with a short prologue featuring images of the artists who
contributed to the performance of Originale, including its composer, Stockhausen,
its director, Kaprow, as well as Paik, Moorman, and Tenney. Like all of the
images in the film, they pass quickly, and would not likely be recognizable upon a
single viewing; these images are still photographs that Breer has shot on his
animation stand. At times, the photos are upside down – as with the film’s
opening shot which is an extremely brief, flipped image of Stockhausen – and
occasionally, there is also camera movement across them, which creates the
illusion of movement despite the fact that the basic materials of this section are
still photographs. In addition to the photographs of these recognizable and well-
known artists, this prologue section also includes a number of their baby pictures,
which were provided to Breer for inclusion in the film. These playfully
juxtaposed images, of both the adult and infant artists, are punctuated by sections
of black leader. The soundtrack features a choppy blend of fragments of the
performance of Originale (separated by abrupt fades), that includes musical

60
segments (which feature Stockhausen’s composition, Kontakte), as well as
audience chatter and other sonic elements from the work’s performance at Judson
Hall in 1964. When the film was shown as part of Originale, it had no soundtrack;
Breer added this documentary component after the fact. In his conversion of the
film from a silent into a sound work, by adding indexical elements of the
performance, he connected it directly to the historical conditions of its
performance in Originale.
Following this prologue, the film becomes even more montagist. Its
images fly by at breakneck speed, and even after numerous viewings, it is
extremely difficult to actually notate the totality of the film’s imagery. It presents
a wildly heterogeneous blend of extremely diverse materials, including Breer’s
family photographs, images of playing cards, magazine photographs of
celebrities, bits of advertising imagery, Breer’s own drawings, brief blasts of
hand-drawn animation, children’s drawings, scraps of torn paper, decollage,
photographs of Breer’s gallery shows, race cars, and even live action footage of a
living mouse falling through the air. Fist Fight is perhaps Breer’s most complete
statement of his collage aesthetic. The film juxtaposes innumerable images from
mass media (the faces of The Beatles), comic books (including Popeye),
commercial advertisements, his own drawings (some of which have been recycled
from his other films, including images from A Man and his Dog out for Air), and
scrapbook elements and objects that have been taken from Breer’s life. In this
regard the film is an unlikely and idiosyncratic blend of original artwork, pop art

61
quotation, abstract geometric collagic juxtaposition, and autobiography. And
because of its prologue, its soundtrack, and its exhibition history, the film is
directly linked to extratextual conditions that inscribe themselves in the work
itself. Because of its extremely rapid, single-frame montage, Fist Fight combines
these disparate material elements into a visual frenzy that is so rapid that it
undermines any impression of sequential progress or temporal development. The
bristling, staccato rhythm of the film patterns these images in such a way as to
suggest a total collagic object that, rather than having a developmental structure,
explodes in a frenzied perceptual experience that overloads the viewer’s capacity
for visual comprehension.
In conventional live action cinema, the projection apparatus collaborates
with the idiosyncratic biology of the human eye in order to create the illusion of
continuous movement; when experiencing live action filmmaking, the viewer sees
one second of natural mechanical action when in actually, what actually exists on
the film strip are twenty-four discreet still images. When projected, the images in
Fist Fight move with an extreme speed that often defies visual comprehension.
On occasion, when the images are intelligible, they are often only partly so. It is
difficult for the viewer to register and comprehend these images, because the film
features extended sequences in which every single frame is different and visually
discrete: one frame might feature a playing card, the next one a family
photograph, and the next a drawing of a geometric shape. When projected, these
three discrete images occupy only one eighth of a second in total, and thus

62
become almost incomprehensible to most viewers. When creating a conventional
cartoon or hand-drawn animated sequence, an animator attempts to approximate
in his or her series of drawings the slight shifts in movement that would be natural
in real life, thus simulating (by hand) the incremental mechanized shutter action
of the motion picture camera that divides continuous physical movement into
pulsatile, rhythmic slices of discrete photographic imaging. Breer’s frame-by-
frame composition, as experienced in a work like Fist Fight, actually defies the
continuity to which most animation aspires. It utilizes a radically disjunctive
editing style that, instead of creating the illusion of continuity, gives rise to an
incredibly frenetic barrage of mostly still and singular visual compositions.
In discussing his films, Breer rhetorically challenges conventional
understandings of both illusionist and theatrical space.
Hooray for a formless film, a non-literary, non-musical, picture film that
doesn’t tell a story, become an abstract dance, or deliver a message. A film
with no escape from the pictures. A film where words are pictures or
sounds and skip around the way thoughts do. An experience itself like
eating, looking, running, like an object, a tree, buildings, drips, and
crashes. A film that instead of making sense is sense.
64

Breer has been interested for some time in demystifying the slight-of-hand upon
which filmic illusionism depends. In a 1962 interview, he said the following on
this topic:
I got disoriented by the theatrical situation of film, by the fact that you
have to turn out the lights and there is a fixed audience, and when you turn
out the lights you turn on the projection light and you project the piece of
magic on the wall. I felt that this very dramatic, theatrical situation in

64
Robert Breer, untitled, Film Culture 26 (Fall 1962), 57.

63
some ways, just by the environment of the movie house, robbed some of
the mystery of film from itself.
65

In his efforts to challenge both illusionism (of the film text) and the theatrical
spectacle (of its exhibition), Breer experimented with variations on the filmic
apparatus, creating loops for gallery screening, showing his films in atypical
venues (as in the happenings context of Originale), and by experimenting with
moving image devices that eschew projection entirely, including mutoscopes and
early proto-cinematic devices, which in their relative simplicity, more clearly
display the apparatus of their visual trickery. These strategies in composition and
assemblage can be located in Fist Fight as well. It is a work that, because of its
severe single-frame, visually heterogeneous composition, calls attention to the
constructedness of the filmic illusion as it jerks aggressively and rapidly between
radically different representational spaces. However, in this film Breer also deftly
utilizes hand-drawn, single-frame animation to break down the continuity of
illusionist cinema by utilizing the very same apparatical conceit – cinema’s rapid
sequential advance of discrete still photographs – that creates the imaginary
impression of movement. To most filmmakers (and a number of viewers), this
variety of film, because of its feverish, staccato visual pace, would be considered
unwatchable. Against the conventional pleasures of narrative and visual
continuity, Breer devised a cinema of extreme restlessness, montagic disruption,
and unrelenting assault. Breer’s work in cinema, like that of many postwar

65
Breer in “An Interview with Robert Breer, Conducted by Charles Levine at Breer’s Home,
Palisades, N.Y., Approximate Date, July 1970,” Film Culture 56 – 57 (Spring 1973), 58–59 .

64
experimental filmmakers, willfully tests the medium’s representational limits; yet
it also balances the opposing energies of materiality and illusionism. His work
openly incorporates seemingly paradoxical aspects of the medium by affirming its
materiality as it simultaneously utilizes its unique capacity to conjure the illusion
of movement.
The conflictual strategy of Breer’s representational approach and its
anxious, confrontational, machine-gun montage disrupt the standard notions of
visual pleasure that are generally associated with more subdued patterns of film
editing. In addition, the anxiogenic visual methods of the work, when combined
with its astounding diversity of visual objects, obliterate the possibility of the
structural coherence that is usually involved in the symbolic formulations of
Romanticism. Through the dialectical juxtaposition of seemingly different
representational strategies within Fist Fight, Breer presented a kind of balancing
act between the seemingly opposed artistic methods of illusionism and self-
reflexivity. In his juxtaposition of the most extreme kind of filmic materiality
(single-frame composition) with the most openly illusionistic film technique
(animation), Breer directly confronts two opposing models of experimental
cinema that might generally be associated with the plasticity of a Brakhagian
cinema and an illusionistic sensibility that is linked to more openly dramatic
forms. In this sense, Breer’s work stages a breakdown in film material, by openly
reminding the viewer, with the jolt of every single discrete frame, that he or she is

65
watching a series of visual objects that have simply been linked through the
plastic resources of film montage.
In an essay on filmic illusionism, published in 1972, Annette Michelson
identifies what she believes to be the philosophical force of this modernist
gesture:
Central to that sense of renewal in American cinema of independent
persuasion was the formal evidence of the manner in which it was
nourished and sustained, as in the work of Robert Breer, by a tradition
extending from the Bauhaus and Dadaism and, as in the work of Stan
Brakhage, by Abstract Expressionism. The guarantee of success seemed,
from film to film, to lie in both artists’ attempt to rethink the nature of
cinematic illusionism, and in doing so to propose new structural modes.
66

Michelson goes on to argue, in a way that was congruent with the English
structuralist filmmakers and theorists of the early-to-mid 1970s, that there was
something fundamentally political about this desire to expose the material
conditions that underpin the production of filmic illusionism. As derived in a
general sense from Marxist thought, this sensibility was extremely popular in the
1960s, and in fact corresponded with Clement Greenberg’s claims about medium
specificity and the significance of artistic materials as determining influences
upon artistic practice. However, Breer challenges the reductiveness of this
interpretative model, through his use of animation and its open and playful
complicity with the most artificial of illusions that film can create. In this regard,
Fist Fight might best be understood as a filmic realization of the perfect tension
between materiality and illusionism that is always inherent in the film apparatus

66
Michelson, “Screen/Surface: The Politics of Illusionism,” Artforum 9, no.1 (September 1972),
62.

66
itself (as well as in its social history). In concert with many of the other most
significant experimental films of the period, Fist Fight functions simultaneously
in a number of seemingly contradictory registers.

Breer’s Expanded Cinema and its Place in History:
Because of its special exhibition history, it should be clear that Fist Fight
is a film that occupies a two-tiered ontological status as it functions both as film
artifact and contingent performance.
67
Fist Fight was devised to be shown as part
of a multi-media happening that had been composed by Karlheinz Stockhausen.
The filmmaker was in fact well underway with the making of Fist Fight before he
was asked to incorporate his work into the New York performance of
Stockhausen’s project. He found his way into that theatrical presentation through
the social networks of the city’s avant-garde. As a painter, Breer was represented
by the Galeria Bonino, and that gallery also represented Mary Baumeister, an
artist who was also the romantic partner of Karlheinz Stockhausen.
68
(The same
gallery also represented Paik.) It was through this social network of the art world
that Breer got to know the composer, and as a result, was asked to contribute a
filmic portion to the work in its New York presentation. The score for the piece
indicated that a six-minute film be projected in the 79
th
minute of the event.
However, it stipulated that the film to be included in the work would be “made
during rehearsals and includes all of cast. (Not in theater. Not in costume.

67
Again, for this rhetorical formulation see Arthur, “Structural Film: Revisions, New Versions,
and the Artifact.”
68
Author’s conversation with Breer, spring 2008, Los Angeles

67
Portraits for the most part.)”
69
As described above, Breer’s film does not actually
include any documentary footage of the rehearsals, as the score would suggest.
(However, Breer did make an effort to respond to this aspect of the score by
adding the prologue as described above.) In this regard, Breer, like the other
contributors to the project was given significant artistic leeway.
The structure of Stockhausen’s piece was based on “a set of dramatic
actions conceived in musical terms.”
70
Biographer Robin Maconie explains, “In
part the exercise is designed to acquaint the composer with the techniques of a
related art in which such collaboration is taken for granted, namely theater, and in
part to accustom his musicians to the new style of collaboration.” The project
blends “simple role-playing” with “spontaneous invention on stage.”
71
The work’s
seemingly chaotic blend of actions was in some ways carefully controlled by
specific, arbitrary temporal limits that corral the kinetic diversity of visual and
sonic actions into contained, modular performance units.
It has been described as follows:
It consists of eighteen scenes in the form of instructions for the dramatis
personae carefully placed in timeboxes. Each character’s actions, in other
words, must take a specified number of seconds or minutes. These scenes
are grouped into seven ‘structures’ which may be performed successively
as ‘normal’, or simultaneously (up to three at once), or both.
72

69
Getty Research Institute, Special Collections, Allan Kaprow Papers.
70
Robin Maconie, Other Planets: The Music of Karlheinz Stockhausen (Lanham, Maryland:
Scarecrow Press, 2005), 218.
71
Maconie, 218–219.
72
Jonathan Harvey, The Music of Stockhausen: An Introduction (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1975).

68
Each of these dramatic units featured an artist who would perform as him or
herself, in the typical style and approach for which he or she had become known,
performing a series of gestures or acts which were associated with his or her
particular artistic discipline and stylistic approach: a poet recites poetry, a
musician plays his instrument, a “woman of fashion” tries on different outfits, a
camera man films the performance, etc. In this regard, the piece was meant to
feature “originals,” people recognized for their own unique art-making
approaches, rather than actors. So, the stage was populated by well-known artists
of the early and mid-sixties avant-garde: Allen Ginsberg and Jackson MacLow
read poetry. James Tenney and Charlotte Moorman played piano and cello
respectively. Nam June Paik was allowed to devise his own idiosyncratic
contributions that continued the experiments in eccentric performance that he had
begun in Cologne in the early years of that decade.
Nam June Paik had performed in the German debut of Originale in 1961.
By special request of the composer, Paik returned for the 1964 restaging of the
work, playing “action music” with his body, a piano, and various props, which
often included somewhat absurdist gestures (including drinking water from a
shoe).
73
Paik’s performances were significantly less predictable than those of the
other artists in Originale. As a result of his particularly chaotic actions, on one
evening some audience members actually handcuffed him to the scaffolding on

73
This phrase “action music” is written on the English score to describe Paik’s contributions, as
translated by Mary Baumeister (Getty Museum Special Collections, Allan Kaprow Papers).
It was through this performance that Moorman met Paik, forming a bond that would produce some
of the most interesting and controversial avant-garde performance collaborations of the decade.

69
stage, a fact that attests to the wild, interactive atmosphere in which this variety of
performance was encountered in the 1960s. In addition to Paik’s eccentric
gestural contributions, Originale also featured a number of other unusual
performance components. Kaprow’s son played with blocks onstage; scantily clad
women tried on clothes; a number of animals milled about (including two German
Shepherds, a chimpanzee, a cage of chickens); Ginsberg read some sexually
explicit poetry; eggs were dropped and apples were thrown; there were extended
monologues from ancient Greek literature and Shakespeare. The sonic and
structural background to the work was a pre-recorded electronic piece of music
titled “Kontakte.” At the end of the event, all of the performers photographed the
audience with still cameras and flash bulbs.
74

Near the end of the performance of Originale Robert Breer projected Fist
Fight within the dramatic space of the stage, in the center of large scaffolding.
The structure of Originale dictated that each performer’s contribution occupy
only a finite, pre-determined length of time; for this reason the set featured a
number of clocks distributed throughout it. These conditions applied to Breer’s
film as well. Breer describes the unusual performative projection of his film
within Originale:
At a certain point I walked over to the scaffolding where a projector was
sitting and turned on the projector. There was a movie screen on the stage.
And the stage was overridden by all the activities taking place. The film
just started up at a certain time. We had an enormous clock, like the clock
in Grand Central Station, in the middle of the acting space that everyone

74
Information taken from Kaprow’s original score (Getty Museum Special Collections, Allan
Kaprow Papers) and Harold C. Schonburg, “Music: Stockhausen’s ‘Originale” Given at Judson”
New York Times, September 9, 1964: 46.

70
had to refer to on the second, for the cue to start. So the film had to start
up, continue to x amount of time and then end, about halfway through the
film. So, the film never got shown in its entirety which pleased me
because I had made it too long (with the idea of Cage’s, to really obliterate
the audience!). […] As the film started up, lights died down on cue and it
became the center of focus. Actors had all just expired and were lying on
the floor. As the film went on for a certain amount of time, I walked up to
the screen and I made myself a hoop of paper on a metal frame, like a
butterfly net, big enough to cover the whole screen, and I took that and I
walked back to the projector with it. And as I remember I had someone
following focus. So I took the image, I took the screen and moved it up to
the projector and the image got smaller and smaller. And went right back
into the projector. It was very nice. And I had to step over the actors to do
it.
75

As the quotation above explains, Breer controlled the actual projection of the film
in terms of its performance and its dramatic presentation within the theatrical
space of Originale. Its presentation was entirely dependent on his physical, bodily
presence in the space of the film’s projection. (In addition, it should also be noted
that in other parts of the work, Breer moved around the set shooting video of the
other artists, while the images were transmitted to a number of closed-circuit
video monitors around the stage.) In this semi-theatrical context, Breer’s
presentation of Fist Fight was flexible, performative, and spontaneous. The
projection of his film was subject to the real-time, in-person modifications of its
creator, and functioned, like the other elements of the performance, as a
contingent component of the work’s realization within the social space and time
of its public presentation. In this sense, Breer’s pliable, moving, performative

75
Lois Mendelson, “Robert Breer: A Study of his Work in the Context of the Modernist
Tradition” (New York University: PhD Dissertation, 1978), 194.

71
projection represented an intervention into film exhibition that should, in
fundamental ways, affect how we interpret the work as a historical construction.
The 1964 inclusion of Breer’s Fist Fight within the context of an
interactive, multi-artist work of avant-garde theater, provides an interesting
example for the history of experimental cinema that foregrounds the difference
between film (the material substrate of the medium) and cinema (the historical
and social conditions by which it comes to be experienced in a specific space and
time). Most specifically, what this encounter between Breer’s film and
Stockhausen’s multi-faceted theatrical event demonstrates is a telling and perhaps
forgotten case study of a development in experimental art that has been
sometimes described as expanded cinema. A number of artists, working in the
1960s and 70s, made efforts to modify the formats and spaces of film projection
by often including elements of other media, live performance, multiple projectors,
film loops, and modified exhibition spaces. These developments aimed to expand
cinema beyond the controlled parameters of industrially determined and
mechanically organized time and space. As suggested above, since these
interventions, like that of Breer, were ephemeral and contingent in terms of their
spatio-temporal realizations, they are difficult to recuperate, analyze, or
comprehensively understand. How, for example, should we modify our
understanding of Fist Fight as a cultural object that is inscribed in history, if we
reflect upon its inclusion as part of Stockhausen’s seminal intermedial
experiment? In a very real sense, works like this, when understood in the cultural

72
context of avant-garde art, pose major challenges to the contained textual
limitations that are generally prerequisites for conventional film analysis
(including those varieties that are particularly dependent on the model of literary
criticism). Liz Kotz argues that cinema “becomes immeasurably more difficult to
theorize when it incorporates live performance elements and strategies drawn
from experimental theater […] Yet however undertheorized, this multidisciplinary
profusion was central to many 1960s avant-gardes. This is particularly the case in
the United States.”
76
The complex historical identity of Breer’s work perfectly
demonstrates this condition in which the extratextual conditions of its production
and exhibition mandate a reconsideration of the work’s function both within
Breer’s practice and the cultural landscape of avant-garde art more generally.
Art events like Originale were one-time occurrences that, like most
performance art, cannot ever be replicated precisely. Yet, if these mixed-media
works of expanded cinema were a significant part of the postwar environment of
the arts in America, then it must be admitted that they form a chapter that, like
performance art, can only be recuperated via anecdotal description and scant
visual documentation – a situation that is significantly dissimilar from that of film
texts, which are generally understood as uniform and repeatable. As a result of
this absence of stable performance texts, this variety of performative mixed-media
work remains a difficult object for historical recuperation.

76
Kotz, 45.

73
Originale represents a microcosm of the vibrant mid-sixties avant-garde
scene in which a wide range of artists interacted with each other, collaborating
within a shared practice that challenged the disciplinary dividing lines between
media.
77
Within the context of Originale, experimental film played a significant
role, not as a minority filmmaking tradition that was a peripheral alternative to
Hollywood filmmaking, but as an integral part of the fabric of postwar avant-
garde art practice. In retrospect, Originale functions almost as a manifesto of
intermedial art and a summary of avant-garde trends across a range of media that
foregrounded indeterminacy, arbitrary framing structures, and performance. This
encounter between a range of forms and media constitutes a compelling historical
counterargument against the conceptual straightjacket of Greenbergian
modernism, which preceded it historically. In this regard, it fulfills the predictions
of critics Lippard and Chandler above, as well as those suggested by the work’s
director, Allan Kaprow. It also forces us to reconsider the significance of
experimental film for American art history during a moment in which the
interaction between art forms – which has been a constant fact throughout the
history of aesthetics – was raised to a fever pitch by people like John Cage and
Allan Kaprow, as they presented radically new notions of interactive, intermedial,
authorially flexible art practice that induced extreme paroxysms of anxiety and
distress for audiences and reviewers alike.

77
This performance catalyzed another art event, in the form of a protest from another faction of
the New York avant-garde in the period. Involved in this protest were George Maciunas, Tony
Conrad, and Henry Flynt. See Branden W. Joseph, Beyond the Dream Syndicate: Tony Conrad
and the Arts After Cage (New York: Zone, 2008), 153–212.

74
It seems only fitting that Breer involved himself in an environment of such
radical intermedial interaction. Such an exhibition atmosphere seems entirely
appropriate for this work that posed such an open assault on conventional film
structure. Breer is an artist who has worked in a number of media forms –
including painting, sculpture, and proto-cinematic devices – and as a filmmaker,
his collagic interest in the radical juxtaposition of diverse art-making practices has
been transposed into the realm of moving images, as we can see in Fist Fight,
with its quickly moving visual family album, a catalog of performers in Originale,
hand drawn simple line cartoons, geometric shapes, live action footage of a
mouse, etc. Visually Breer translates the heterogeneity of his multi-media practice
into a radically diverse compositional logic in film, and as such foregrounds some
of the most potent, unresolved aesthetic and social tensions of artistic exhibition
in the era of the mid-1960s. A consideration of Fist Fight in relation to
Stockhausen’s intermedial event necessitates some restructuring of our inherited
tools of film analysis and the inherited conceptual toolbox of interpretative
strategies derived from literature. This encounter between various cultural
energies and aesthetic strategies foregrounds a number of tensions that
underpinned the wider range of avant-garde arts in the period, drawing attention
to the fault lines between the art world and an amateur filmmaking community,
between artistic strategies that emphasize an expressive, visual plasticity and
those that foreground simple presence, between an understanding of film as an
object or artifact and the sense that the medium had performative and

75
communicative possibilities that were substantially more contingent and
unpredictable than the contained textual space of conventional film analysis
would allow. This aggressive and unstable work embodies a telling variety of
anxious and anxiogenic encounter between different cultural and representational
registers. Even its title conveys these confrontational energies. In many ways, Fist
Fight challenges conventional notions of film pleasure and textual construction,
while simultaneously threatening the disciplinary boundaries that surround it
through the attack that it mounts against normative models of cinema experience.
Though it was an exemplary work in this regard, it was not alone in its capacity to
enervate viewers and disrupt the traditional conditions of motion picture
spectatorship.

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Chapter 2: Performance and the Warholian Cinematic Imperative:
Provocation and Distress in the Anxiogenic Underground

The underground cinema of the 1960s often utilized discomfort as an
aesthetic resource, be it a rhetorical, conceptual, or expressive tool. Much of the
better (and infamous) work of this type distressed viewers through either
uncommon form, as in the case of films with extremely extended durations (Andy
Warhol’s eight-hour Empire (1964)), or taboo content (Jack Smith’s
polymorphously perverse Flaming Creatures (1963)). However, there is an
additional register of distress and anxiety that is central to the underground
cinema of the 1960s, which has been rarely discussed or even recognized. A
number of exemplary films of this era utilized acts of profilmic provocation in
which real clashes between filmmakers and subjects were arranged or triggered
for the benefit of the camera. These moments of aggravation, be they verbal,
physical, sexual, or psychological, often produced real-life episodes of
spontaneous psychodramatic conflict in which profilmic space is more
appropriately likened to a boxing ring than a theater stage.
The chapter that follows will reflect on films by three filmmakers that
each emphasized this anxiogenic register of interpersonal confrontation and thus
serve as examples of a compelling, yet relatively unrecognized subgenre of
underground cinema of the 1960s. Andy Warhol’s The Chelsea Girls (1966),
Shirley Clarke’s Portrait of Jason (1967), and Yoko Ono (and John Lennon’s)

77
Rape (1969) all embody a particular semi-documentary filmmaking mode that is
confrontational, provocative, literally combative, and arguably sadistic.
Interestingly, these three films – that, to the author’s knowledge, have never been
addressed together in the same critical context – reveal a remarkable number of
aesthetic and conceptual similarities that cannot be simply attributed to
synchronicity or happenstance. Rather, these works were produced and
determined by the shared historical experiences of the cultural milieus of the mid-
to-late 1960s that birthed them: They do not reveal or reflect something about
these historical contexts as much as they encompass a confrontational and
psychodramatic mode of thought, being, and performance that was shared with
other work produced within the counterculture of the 1960s.
The Chelsea Girls and Portrait of Jason were two of the most
commercially successful and popularly viewed non-industrial films of the period,
yet this historical detail has been omitted from many histories of American avant-
garde cinema because of the formalist and romantic leanings of many of its critics
and practitioners. The simple economic and social fact of these films’ popular
success attests to their influence and, perhaps, to their connection to the cultural
zeitgeist of the period. Interestingly neither of these films is discussed in the
foundational and canon-making study of the American avant-garde by P. Adams
Sitney, demonstrating that his interest was not in considering the independent
cinema as part of a cultural fabric, but rather as an isolated and privileged mode of
art-making that was somehow unaffected by cultural trends and historical

78
conditions. However, only by considering these films within a set of shared
aesthetic and historical concerns can we begin to understand and recuperate the
historical significance of these thorny, volatile works.

The Warholian Set-Up and The Chelsea Girls:
Within American avant-garde cinema, there have been a small group of
filmmakers who directed their creative attentions almost exclusively towards the
space in front of the camera – the area described by film scholars as the profilmic
– and utilized it as the primary, if not singular, locus of meaning in their work.
This mode, as embodied by the films discussed in this essay, foregrounds
performance in an almost hyperbolic way: editing is minimized (or eliminated)
and camera movement is either spontaneous and slight (as it responds to character
movement) or haphazard (in a kind of denial of symbolic significance). In short
this is an approach to filmmaking that emphasizes the subjectivity of its subject in
front of the camera rather than that of the filmmaker behind it. As such, it
minimizes the romantic or expressive possibilities of film’s visual plasticity as
championed by the lyrical first-person tradition of the avant-garde cinema that is
most significantly represented by the work of Stan Brakhage, and instead
privileges the presence of its performers. This mode of production also differs
markedly from the rigid, conceptually scrupulous, almost mathematical work of
the so-called structural cinema, as exemplified by Hollis Frampton or Michael
Snow. The filmmaking mode that is addressed in this chapter might be best

79
described as semi-documentary psychodrama, a generic subset of the semi-
theatrical mode that featured Andy Warhol as its most significant filmic
practitioner.
78

Warhol, as a filmmaker, is probably best known for his earliest group of
somewhat notorious film experiments. These projects tested audience stamina in
their use of extended duration as well as silence; included in this group of works
are Sleep (1963) (almost five-and-one-half hours) and Empire (eight hours), both
silent. However his semi-dramatic sound films of the mid 1960s, including The
Chelsea Girls (1966) may ultimately prove to be more historically significant in
their capacity to represent the performative and cultural tensions of the age, the
historical idiosyncrasies of the subculture in which he worked, and the significant
and under recognized aesthetic continuities that Warhol’s cinema shared with
other modes of artistic production of the era. In short, Warhol’s sound films of the
mid-60s may be determined by history to be as significant as, if not more so than,
his earlier critically established efforts within the medium.
In 1964, Warhol made the shift from silent, minimalist cinema to semi-
dramatic sound films. Historically speaking, the changes that he made to his
filmmaking mode in this period were truly significant: his move to sync-sound
technology marked a major shift in his cinema. When Warhol was preparing to

78
Andy Warhol’s earlier silent films, including Sleep and Empire were both described as
precursors to the “structural film” movement by Sitney in his Visionary Film, 349. This category
is a highly disputed one, and will be discussed in detail in chapter four of this study. However, for
the purposes of the discussion above, this term serves as a functional shorthand for many different
modes of filmmaking that were rigorously pre-determined, carefully executed, and structurally
deliberate – all details that are markedly different from the semi-dramatic mode described herein.

80
shoot with sound, he decided that he would need dramatic content in order to
generate audience interest. To this end Warhol recruited poet and playwright
Ronald Tavel to provide loose scenarios and minimally scripted dialogue for his
new experiments in filmed drama. The screenplays that Tavel produced were not
terribly elaborate in terms of dramatic action, but they did serve fairly specific
aesthetic purposes for the filmmaker. In fact, Warhol, a man known for his
extremely limited explanations of his artistic intentions, was particularly
forthcoming and precise when he asked Tavel to construct “not plot, but
incident.”
79
It was Tavel’s job to catalyze reactions in the performers through his
semi-scripted scenarios by using relatively simple set-ups of interpersonal
provocation that were designed to psychologically unsettle the unstable people
that were their principal subjects.
In his telling preparatory suggestions to his collaborator, Warhol asked
Tavel to set up situations of extreme psychic pressure, something that would
resemble, in the artist’s words, “an inquisition.”
80
Interpersonal conflicts were
central to a number of Warhol-Tavel collaborations, including, most significantly,
the series of Screen Test features, including Screen Test #1 (1965), Screen Test 2

79
On this piece of guidance, Tavel claimed that, “It must have been the most specific statement he
ever made to me” (Stephen Koch, Stargazer: Andy Warhol’s World and His Films (New York and
Washington: Praeger Publishers, 1973), 63). Art historian Douglas Crimp has concisely identified
the tensions that catalyze the unusual interaction between Warhol’s filmmaking strategies and
Tavel’s scriptwriting in the production contexts in which these films’ were made. Douglas Crimp,
“The Rise of Coming Together: Ronald Tavel’s Screenplays for Andy Warhol’s Film” in The
Aesthetics of Risk, Volume 3 of the SoCCAS, ed. John C. Welchman (Zurich: JRP-Ringier, 2008),
113–134.
80
In first describing his ideas for the early sound films, Warhol, according to Tavel, told him to,
“go home and devise an inquisition.” (Patrick S. Smith, Andy Warhol’s Art and Films (Ann Arbor:
UMI Research Press, 1981), 481.

81
(1965), Screen Test (aka Suicide) (1965).
81
(A related aesthetic strategy was
utilized in Kitchen, Vinyl (1965), and Horse (1965), though these films were more
reliant on scripted dialogue.) In the Screen Test series of sound films, Warhol
directed his unmoving camera towards a single subject whom Tavel interrogated
from offscreen. It was Tavel’s assignment to catalyze reactions in the performers
using psychodramatic set-ups that exposed their insecurities. In this performance
context, Tavel would often intersperse insults regarding the sexual attitudes of the
films’ queer subjects. He would devise interactions between either an off-screen
interrogator (himself) and a subject, or a number of on-screen performers. The
results often featured emotionally explosive or physically violent episodes in
which profilmic tensions were intentionally and willfully escalated for the sake of
producing a reaction. For example, though it was a scripted film, Horse, presents
a series of somewhat absurdist bits of sadistic homoerotic sexual dialogue that
repeatedly culminate in unplanned violent encounters in which most of the
performers assault one of their collaborators, beating his head against the floor of
the Factory. Conflictual strategies served as the determining structures for much
of Warhol’s film work in this period. These conflicts within the profilmic were
forcefully heightened by the pressure that Warhol’s unblinking camera placed
upon its performers.
Though they were partially the result of some degree of planning, the
filmed results of these collaborations were often unpredictable and spontaneous.

81
These three films from 1965 were feature length, sync sound works that were entirely different
from Warhol’s ambitious series of silent, three minute single-roll “Screen Tests,” which number
almost five hundred in total.

82
Warhol’s collaborator described the particulars of this situation: “[I]f you want to
capture spontaneity, improvisation, the accident, and so forth, you must set up an
environment in which the spontaneous, the accidental, the improvisational, the
unexpected, will take place.”
82
This quotation suggests that Warhol and Tavel
were interested in capturing spontaneity and improvisation, artistic attributes
associated with Abstract Expressionism rather than the Pop Art and
postmodernism that are usually linked to the artist.
83
Tavel’s description thus
provides an interesting and telling link between the supposedly cold distance of
Warhol’s art and a present, but submerged layer of emotive subjectivity that is
realized through spontaneous encounters between people and technologies.
84

In their application to Warhol’s cinema, Tavel’s dramatic set-ups
functioned less like screenplays that provided character motivation or acting cues
and more as framing structures that defined a demarcated performance space.
Tavel has described this dramatic space as “an environment” of action, in which
the dialogue has a secondary function that did not, unlike its role in Hollywood
cinema, provide any psychologically believable character motivation.
85
Tavel’s
semi-dramatic set-ups provided the conceptual arena in which the performers

82
James, “The Warhol Screenplays: An Interview With Ronald Tavel,” Persistence of Vision: The
Journal of the Film Faculty of the City University of New York 11 (1995), 49.
83
This seeming conflict in cultural values between a beat infused aesthetic of emotional
expressivity and a more postmodern detachment is addressed by James in his interview with Tavel
(Ibid.).
84
Tavel does not consider these philosophical registers to be mutually exclusive, and thus
contradicts the many short-sighted critics who have ignored Warhol’s film output in order to
create simple oppositions between his pop art and the Abstract Expressionist milieu which
preceded it (Ibid.).
85
“I prepared a script, understanding that it had to allow for accident and the unknown. I fully
understood what the script had to allow to happen, allow to become. And it was an environment”
(Ibid., 52).

83
would interact, and thus partially defined the space in which the profilmic event
would take place. In a sense, these scenarios, as well as their realizations in front
of Warhol’s camera, demarcate performance spaces that function differently from
those of most other types of cinema. In fact, these films embody a performance
sensibility that, in its neglect of conventional character direction and motivation,
is more akin to the embodied non-fiction performance that one might encounter in
the happenings, performance art, and radical theater of the era.
Like the orchestrators of happenings and other varieties of experimental
theater, Tavel and Warhol created an open-ended, but tense, pressurized
environment in which something could, and probably would, happen. They set up
these encounters by interviewing the performers beforehand in order to learn their
insecurities. Tavel has said that in order to evoke the most dramatic responses
from the performers he would “literally torture the performance out of them by
being as cruel as possible.”
86
This taunting of on-screen performers continued
through Warhol’s collaborations with Chuck Wein, Tavel’s replacement
following his voluntary departure from the Factory, though Wein did not write
scripts or provide dialogue for the films’ performers. The Warhol-Wein
collaboration culminated in a legendary onscreen skirmish between Wein and
Edie Sedgwick – Warhol’s most well known and perhaps most tragic “superstar”
– in Beauty #2 (1965). In an effort to provoke an emotional response from the
film’s subject, Wein, a former lover of Sedgwick’s, slings a variety of

86
Tavel in the BBC documentary Warhol’s Cinema: A Mirror for the Sixties (1989).

84
psychosexual insults at her concerning her intelligence, her sexuality, and her
authenticity as a performer. Because Wein knows her intimately, these attacks are
particularly pointed. As she feigns an unconvincing sexual interest in Gino
Piserchio, her companion in the film, she seems like an uninterested high school
girl taking a dare, as she rolls around dispassionately in bed with a boy that does
not excite her in the least. Wein plays the role of a Hollywood director who is
jealous of his leading lady, criticizing the lack of feeling and authenticity of her
performance as he provokes her saying, “Do better than that, Edie, c’mon. Do it
like you could’ve thought of it.” In response, she drops her façade of coolness and
throws two ashtrays (one of which is of the heavy glass variety) at her offscreen
provocateur.
These Warholian collaborations hinged on a particular performance
pattern. The films begin with a playful, performative environment that turns tense
and progressively more volatile, followed by insults and berating, and finally
climaxes in some kind of emotional outburst (often tears) on the part of the
subject. This dramatic structure underpinned much of Warhol’s work in the mid
1960s, and was adopted subsequently by a number of other underground
filmmakers working in the period as a resource for semi-sadistic, semi-
documentary film encounters.
In Warhol’s films this combative approach reached its apex in the summer
of 1966, as the filmmaker and his co-director, Paul Morrissey, shot a number of
one- and two-reel sequences that would eventually become the three-and-one-half

85
hour film known as The Chelsea Girls.
87
These sequences generally featured the
Warhol “superstars” acting-out in moments of liminal experience, including
violent arguments, confessional episodes, psycho-sexual play, and drug-induced
confessionals. In short, The Chelsea Girls was a film that showcased the taboo
behaviors and experiences of the subcultures that produced it. It was primarily a
performance vehicle for the queer amphetamine users who dominated the social
and aesthetic spaces of Warhol’s Factory in this period, both in public and
onscreen. In this regard, to mainstream sensibilities of 1966, The Chelsea Girls
was a rather threatening cultural object. Formally, it too was a rather uncommon
spectacle. The film was composed entirely of uninterrupted thirty-three-minute
reels shown side-by-side in double-screen projection. Mostly filmed in black &
white, with three reels in color, all of the encounters were shot indoors, in
enclosed spaces, a formal detail that naturally heightens the interpersonal and
aesthetic tensions at work within the dramatic space of the film. In its early stages
of public exhibition, The Chelsea Girls was once (as its title suggests) conceived
of as a kind of voyeuristic cinematic compilation of peepholes into the fugitive
lifestyles of the legendary bohemian enclave of the Chelsea Hotel in New York
City.
88

87
By the time Warhol began shooting the material that would later become The Chelsea Girls,
Paul Morrissey had replaced Ronald Tavel and Chuck Wein as Warhol’s most significant film
collaborator and assistant-provocateurs.
88
In actuality, the film was shot in various locales around New York City, including Warhol’s
Factory (at its first location on 231-41 East 47
th
Street), the Chelsea Hotel, and a variety of private
apartments (one of which was the living quarters for the Velvet Underground).

86
Through their direction of the filmmaking environment of The Chelsea
Girls, Warhol and Morrissey intentionally unsettled their performers; throughout
the production of the project they fomented tension and discomfort in their cast.
In order to achieve this end, the two filmmakers encouraged the performers’
insecurities – as Tavel and Wein had before – by spreading false rumors about
them and insulting their most sensitive attributes.
89
This method, which had been
typical at the Factory for some time, was described by author-critic Stephen Koch
as one of “taunt and betrayal,” something that would “induce the inevitable
responses of shock and anger or shame and confusion.”
90
The film’s dark
production atmosphere and its anxiogenic sensibility were described by Ondine,
one of the most prominent performers in The Chelsea Girls, as “a living torture
test”
91
and he called the final product itself “the most horrible movie ever
made.”
92
In tone, the film’s extreme tension and hostility perfectly exemplify the
variety of art-making that cultural critic Susan Sontag identified as exemplary of
the period. In 1965, she wrote that “the interesting art of our time has such a
feeling of anguish and crisis about it, however playful and abstract and ostensibly
neutral morally it may appear.”
93
As Warhol’s films shift unexpectedly from
playful to dark, and from nonsensical to tragic, they fulfill Sontag’s diagnosis of

89
This practice is a significant extra-textual and conceptual component of the work, something
that should be central to how we understand performance in Warhol’s films.
90
Stephen Koch, Stargazer: Andy Warhol’s World and His Films (New York: Praeger Publishers,
1973), 68.
91
Smith, 430. Ondine was the stage name taken by Robert Olivo, a major figure in Warhol’s circle
of the mid-to-late 1960s and early 1970s.
92
Quoted in Bockris, 258.
93
Sontag, “One Culture,” 302.

87
sixties art with its strange and idiosyncratic interplay of a disinterested
nonchalance and tangible emotional tension.
In preparation for the filming of The Chelsea Girls, Warhol and Morrissey
set up the performers by magnifying the already ever-present paranoia and
insecurities of the troupe of amphetamine users that constituted its primary cast.
The filmmakers created an “environment” (to borrow Ronald Tavel’s word), a
significant extra-textual component of the art itself, that would make this
performance-based work cohere around a set of interpersonal tensions and
psychodramatic hostilities. By magnifying the antagonism and distrust of their
performers (and their filmmaking situation), Warhol and Morrissey caused the
event of the work’s production to cohere into a dark, aggressively negative film
happening. In keeping with this mood of heightened psychic chaos and danger,
there are two scenes in which characters inject amphetamines intravenously on
camera, and one in which a male “superstar,” the young bisexual Eric Emerson,
deranged by LSD, strips off his clothes as he ruminates on the thanatophilic
thought of what it would feel like to be a drop of sweat swallowed up, literally
annihilated, by another person. One of the most significant aspects of Warhol’s
legacy as a filmmaker was his ability to create anxiogenic performance contexts
in which these kinds of liminal psychosexual behaviors were catalyzed by his
unflinching camera.
The most famous episode of The Chelsea Girls takes place in what is
generally shown as the work’s second-to-last last reel, titled “Pope Ondine.”

88
Towards the beginning of the film, about three hours earlier, Ondine first
showcased his loudly outspoken, willfully cruel character of The Pope whom he
reprises here towards its conclusion. At the beginning of this later appearance,
Ondine injects amphetamine intravenously. Then, following an extended
extemporaneous monologue from the performer, a young woman walks onscreen
and sits next to him on the Factory couch; a dramatic exchange is initiated. In his
earlier appearance in the film, Ondine forcefully insulted and berated a pair of
women, as he demanded sexual confessions while engaging in a feigned
psychoanalytic performance. He asks, “What was your first sexual experience?”
He insults one woman, saying, “You’re hardly a human … you’re a subspecies,
my dear. You’re not even a vegetable.” So, when The Pope reappears in reel
eleven, we have some idea of what to expect. However, what results from this
encounter on the couch could hardly have been predicted. To many viewers and
participants, it remains the most shocking in Warhol’s entire cinema.
Ondine suggests to this young woman, in a statement of subcultural
authority performed in a patriarchal, mock-papal tone, that she confess her sins to
him: “My dear, there is nothing that you cannot say to me. Nothing.” The
relatively ingenuous young woman responds to this challenge by playfully
questioning the legitimacy of his performance as this fictive character of The
Pope. She explains: “I cannot confess to you, because you’re such a phony. I’m
not trying to be anyone.” She does not accept Ondine’s playful, campish posture
of Pope-hood: in her criticism and behavior, she deems him inauthentic. She then

89
taunts him more actively, repeatedly calling him a “phony.” The profilmic
tensions escalate and Ondine lashes out verbally at this seemingly innocent
participant in Warhol’s film project. He responds to young woman’s charges of
“phoniness” with an extremely violent outburst: “Well, let me tell you something,
my dear little Miss Phony. You are a phony. You’re a disgusting phony. May God
forgive you … you Goddamned phony. Get the hell off this set! Get out!” As the
force of his verbal tirade escalates, he then reaches forward and slaps her in the
face, repeatedly, all the while continuing his deluge of insults, as he yells,
“Whore! Whore!” He is now screaming in an uncontrollable rabid fit of anger.
The woman runs out of the camera’s range and the people who are operating the
film and sound equipment – probably Morrissey and Gerard Malanga – attempt to
follow the action (as the performers’ voices are heard offscreen). Ondine then
returns to the couch where the scene began, appearing befuddled by his own
actions. Onscreen, he claims to have been overwhelmed spontaneously, as if
seized by some kind of paroxysm. He then makes a number of exclamations in
dire seriousness, as he shouts, “How dare she! Who does she think she is? Who is
she to challenge The Pope?” It is made clear by his explanatory monologue that,
for him, the legitimacy of his performance is not subject to the questioning of
some outsider from the straight world whose notion of authenticity is markedly
different from his own openly queer performative attitude. In Stargazer, Stephen
Koch’s exceptional book length study of Warhol’s cinema, he agrees that the
challenge of sincere performance interpenetrates the film at every level. He

90
writes, “The Chelsea Girls is haunted, dominated, by the problem of
authenticity.”
94

The victim of Ondine’s seemingly authentic and spontaneous hysterics
was a young woman named Rona Page who may have been encouraged to appear
in the film on rather unsuspecting terms. A number of people have suggested that
Morrissey encouraged and provoked Page to confront Ondine.
95
So, it seems that
there was something of a set-up here. But, the encounter that followed, in
Ondine’s spontaneous paroxysm of violence, was not scripted or planned in any
traditional sense. This scene is the result of an encounter between a violent and
unpredictable amphetamine addict from the Factory’s inner circle and a seemingly
unsuspecting young woman who was not committed to the performative
sensibility of the group’s drug-scorched and sexually polymorphous nucleus. In a
compelling turn-of-phrase, Mary Woronov, another of Warhol’s performers in
The Chelsea Girls, described Ondine’s willfully unbalanced personality –
something that boiled over into his approach to performance – when she wrote
that he “carried chaos around with him like a pet.”
96

Ondine said in 1978, over twelve years after the film was made, that he
had seen the sequence countless times and was overcome by such a tumult of
anger and hostility that he still had no idea what had happened.
97
This sequence
illustrates the emotional extremes to which Warhol was willing to go with his film

94
Koch, 94.
95
Ondine supports this theory as well. See Smith, 445.
96
Mary Woronov, Swimming Underground: My Years in the Warhol Factory (London: Serpent’s
Tail, 1995), 39.
97
Smith, 445.

91
projects. In response to the sadism and violence of this episode, the filmmaker
claimed to have been so surprised and frightened by this confrontation that he ran
off of the set. He wrote that when Ondine slapped the young woman,
it was so for real that I got upset and had to leave the room – but I made
sure that I left the camera running. This was something new. Up until this,
when people had gotten violent during any of the filmings, I’d always
turned the camera off. [....] But now I decided to get it all down on film,
even if I had to leave the room.
98

Because of the real hostility and violence that it documents, it is a difficult scene
to watch. In this sense, with The Chelsea Girls Warhol had gone about as far as he
could in saying that, in his work, everything is permitted.
His dramatic, semi-documentary film work of the mid-sixties willfully
created an arena for brutal interpersonal conflicts within the shared social space in
front of the camera. In an essay that may be the most concise critical summation
of Warhol’s cinema to date, curator and historian Callie Angell described his
unique production method as one that depended upon the presence of
“interpersonal tensions” and “destabilizing elements.”
99
In her explanation of his
rather unsettling approach, Angell suggests that Warhol’s work (because of this
tendency) shares methods with the historical lineage of performance and
performance art.
100
In a related sense, Warhol and a number of his collaborators
have described the dramatic atmosphere of these works as being indebted to a

98
Andy Warhol, Popism: The Warhol ‘60s (New York: Harper & Row, 1980), 181.
99
Callie Angell, “Andy Warhol, Filmmaker” in The Andy Warhol Museum (New York:
Distributed Art Publishers, 1994), 131.
100
Albee’s play, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolfe,” a dramatic study in sadism, is widely
rumored to be based on the fiery relationship of filmmakers and Factory regulars, Marie Menken
and Willard Maas. Menken appeared in a number of Warhol films including The Chelsea Girls,
and Maas is likely the man who performs offscreen fellatio in Blowjob (1964).

92
variety of often unrecognized influences from theater and drama, including the
hostile dramas of playwright Edward Albee and the experimental Theater of the
Ridiculous (to which Tavel was the principal contributor).
101
The connections
between Warhol’s cinema and the theatrical and performance art developments of
the 1960s have been largely neglected in the critical and historical evaluations of
his work. However, an awareness of those overlapping tendencies in
performance-based arts may help us to better understand the unsettling and
idiosyncratic nature of Warhol’s work in cinema.
In terms of the ethical concerns of this film’s somewhat sadistic approach,
Warhol argued that its emotional severity was actually a tribute to its humanism,
when he wrote, “The Chelsea Girls is an experimental film which deals in human
emotion and human life, […] anything to do with the human person, I feel is all
right.”
102
In their emphasis on the uncritical observation of people’s actions,
Warhol’s films incorporate a degree of unpredictability that is conditioned by
human behavior. This is to say, his cinema of this period is largely determined by
the contingencies and whims of volatile individuals as they act and react
spontaneously, in real time in front of his camera. Paul Arthur has argued that
Warhol’s cinema calls attention to certain attributes of his art that, in their
emphasis on human presence, are significantly different from the supposedly

101
Warhol was an acquaintance of Edward Albee, and in an interview in from 1966 with Gerard
Malanga, he cites the Mike Nichols film, released during the same summer in which he shot The
Chelsea Girls, as a major influence on his film (Gerard Malanga, “My Favorite Superstar: Notes
on My Epic, Chelsea Girls” in I’ll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews, 1962-
1987, ed. Kenneth Goldsmith (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2004), 129).
102
Ibid.

93
post-modern replicating machine who was responsible for the Campbell’s soup
cans and the Brillo Boxes of his pop art production. Playing his own devil’s
advocate, Arthur asks, “Why on earth, one might ask, do we need a humanist
Warhol, a tender purveyor of individual autonomy (minus interiority) and social
significance?” He answers his question by suggesting simply that this is the
Warhol that these films present, and thus a corrective is needed for the popular
critical approach in which Warhol is “being paraded as the father of
postmodernism (a mantle tirelessly promoted by Peter Wollen, Barbara Kruger,
and others).”
103
As Arthur suggests, Warhol, the filmmaker, might be best
understood as an artist obsessed with presence and authenticity, in short, concepts
that relate directly towards humans and their social, performative identities. Film
scholar Patricia Mellencamp shares Arthur’s opinion of Warhol’s films. She
writes, “The art historical interpretations of Warhol as the critic/celebrator of the
pleasures of consumer culture become ludicrous in front of many of his films.”
104

As he unflinchingly directed his camera towards the interpersonal space in
front of it, he attempted to engage with an ontological and representational
question that goes back to the earliest theoretical considerations of cinema: Is film
actually capable of inscribing human presence within its textual limits? Film
historian David James suggests that this is one of the most fundamental concerns
of Warhol’s film art. He writes, that Warhol’s cinema “is thus a meta-cinema, an

103
Arthur, “Flesh of Absence: Resighting the Warhol Catechism” in Andy Warhol Film Factory,
ed. Michael O’Pray (London: British Film Institute, 1992), 152.
104
Patricia Mellencamp, Indiscretions: Avant-Garde Film, Video, and Feminism (Bloomington
and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990), 197.

94
inquiry into the mechanisms of the inscription of the individual into the apparatus
and into the way such inscription has been historically organized.”
105
As James
suggests, Warhol’s cinema devised a series of mediations on the possibility of
etching subjectivity into the cinematic apparatus. In almost all of his six hundred
films the human face is of central significance.
106
(As in his painting, human
portraiture is perhaps his central generic frame.) When Warhol famously claimed
that he wanted to be a machine, his statement was not so much an utterance of a
sincere fantasy as an acknowledgment of the sheer impossibility of such a
prospect.
107
In such statements – and in his cinema more generally –Warhol
presents his art as a conceptual riddle concerning the ambivalent and complex
interaction of the artist’s volition and the mechanicity of technological mediation.
He thus draws our attention, rather paradoxically perhaps, to the ontological
potency of presence and the limits of art’s capacity to represent it.
As he turned his camera on the band of tortured extroverts that peopled the
Factory, what he revealed in his new medium of choice was not the post-modern
cynicism of the machine that he is so often credited with, but a series of semi-
documentary encounters featuring an uncomfortable variety of profilmic
performance art that he set up, catalyzed, and provoked into being – a kind of
street theater for the camera’s benefit, that eagerly engages with all the
contingencies of the uncontrollable world that it records. In this sense Warhol’s

105
James, Allegories of Cinema, 68.
106
A notable exception is of course Empire (1964), the eight-hour portrait film of the Empire State
Building.
107
“The reason I’m painting this way is that I want to be a machine” (Warhol in G.R. Swenson,
“What Is Pop Art? Answers From 8 Painters, Part 1” in I’ll Be Your Mirror, 18).

95
films share more with the concerns of performance art, happenings, and
documentary filmmaking than they do with an abstract or plastic film practice. It
is for this reason that film historian and critic P. Adams Sitney wrote, in 1974,
that Warhol’s cinema makes the rest of American avant-garde films all look
incredibly similar.
108

Performance and Public Self-Effacement: Portrait of Jason:
In 1966, the experimental filmmaker and documentarian Shirley Clarke
shot a film titled Portrait of Jason that was her direct and conscious response to
Warhol’s The Chelsea Girls, a movie that she found mesmerizing.
109
It was
Clarke’s idea to elaborate upon Warhol’s aesthetic breakthroughs in psychodrama
and confessional cinema. She too would make a semi-documentary film in which
her subject would be given free reign to express himself. However, she would
allow her subject not one or two reels to unwind psychologically, but an entire
feature film. For roughly twelve hours, Clarke filmed a performative interrogation
between the filmmakers (she and her partner, Carl Lee) and their subject, a gay

108
In this astute observation, Sitney also implicitly admits the limits of his own historical
interpretation of the American avant-garde cinema in his Visionary Film, a text that describes the
work of Stan Brakhage as its most significant achievement, while largely omitting the films of
Warhol because of their fundamental incompatibility with the romantic paradigm that he
celebrates (Sitney, Visionary Film, 350).
109
She said, “In The Chelsea Girls I found three of the most extraordinary sequences of the
cinema I’ve ever seen. Since seeing it, I’ve been continuously haunted by the movie’s beauty and
power. Anyone seriously interested in films must see Warhol’s new movie because it goes into a
whole new dimension” (Bockris, 258). For Portrait of Jason, Clarke used her apartment in the
Chelsea Hotel as her set, thus situating her film in the same space of production in which portions
of The Chelsea Girls was made. And, to further extend the extratextual determinants that Portrait
of Jason shares with The Chelsea Girls, Clarke and Warhol both used the same unusual variety of
film camera: an Auricon single-system camera that was designed primarily for sit-down television
interviews. It is a heavy camera that is intended to be used only on a tripod.

96
African-American prostitute who once worked as her housekeeper.
110
He went by
the pseudonym, Jason Holiday. Clarke edited the evening’s filmed encounter into
a feature-length film, shot basically from one camera position and featuring only
Holiday as its onscreen subject. Her film, like the largely unscripted The Chelsea
Girls, would be quite literally, an experiment: when she initiated her project of
interpersonal provocation, she did not know how it would end. She explained the
improvisational spirit of the project: “For the first time, I was able to give up my
intense control and allow Jason and the camera to react to each other.”
111
The film
that resulted from that evening’s endeavors was an assemblage of (mostly) long
takes edited together in their original performance sequence. Portrait of Jason
features what is basically a one-hundred-and-five-minute monologue as Holiday
chronicles his life story and his personal struggles while reliving them aloud for
the benefit of a unflinching camera and its audience.
Over the course of the film, Holiday tells many candid and tragic tales
from his own life, as he chronicles childhood traumas, sordid sexual exploits, and
his involvement in a variety of criminal activities. He delves deeply into his own
autobiography, as he describes his experiences with psychological problems,
anxiety, and psychoanalysis. Always central to his autobiographical presentation
is his discussion of race and sexuality. And it is clear from his stories and their
emotional delivery that he has suffered significantly because of his outsider status.
Yet Holiday never presents himself as a victim. He willingly embraces the liminal

110
Throughout the film he refers to himself as a “houseboy” for a variety of employers.
111
Mekas, Movie Journal: The Rise of a New American Cinema, 1959–1971 (New York:
Macmillan, 1972), 289.

97
position that he holds both psychologically and socially: He performs in drag and
openly discusses his sexual encounters with a candor that is both rare and
extremely brave for a gay man on film in the mid-to-late 1960s.
112

Throughout the filmmaking process, Holiday willfully engages in the
destabilizing psychodramatic inquisition that Clarke has set up for him. He openly
drinks alcohol and smokes cigarettes and pot continuously, and in the process he
does not dodge any of the faux-psychiatric questions that are presented from
offscreen by Clarke and Lee, as they command him: “Tell me about your
mother.” Or when they ask, “Have you ever made it with a chick?”
113
Yet, there is
something in Holiday’s demeanor, like that of Pope Ondine, which is a put-on, a
performed identity that cannot quite be equated with that of the person on screen.
Both of these films also feature a significant semantic slippage: When should the
performer in The Chelsea Girls be called Pope Ondine (the character) vs. Ondine
(his most common title) vs. Robert Olivo (his birth name)? Similarly, when
discussing Portrait of Jason, when are we referring to Jason Holiday (the stage
name of the performer-hustler) vs. Aaron Payne (his birth name)?
114
A tangle of
names underpins these works, demonstrating that for both films fluid,

112
Ondine, like Holiday, openly discusses his homosexuality on camera in a number of Warhol’s
films.
113
There is some evidence to suggest that he may also have taken LSD, an even more potent drug
for the encouragement of unguarded psychic states (Shirley Clarke Papers in the Wisconsin
Historical Archive at the University of Wisconsin, Madison).
114
Because of his frequent references to his jazz musician friends, including Miles Davis, Philly
Joe Jones, Dina Washington, and Carmen McRae, a logical guess would suggest that he likely
assumed the surname of Holiday, because of an affinity and appreciation for Billie Holiday (who
was also bisexual). As an extremely talented black artist, a performer of great emotional weight,
and a tragic victim of racism and sexual and drug abuse, for Aaron Payne, she would have
embodied a whole set of associations that his performance within the film suggests.

98
transgressive, and queer notions of performance and identity frame the social
experiments that they present.
It is clear throughout that part of what we are seeing is a rehearsed
nightclub routine, something that is evidenced by his repeated catchphrases (“I’ll
never tell”), his a capella performances of Broadway songs, and his clearly
practiced impersonations of Mae West and Scarlet O’Hara, that all blend, in a
manner like Lenny Bruce or Richard Pryor, into a register of performance –
between play and critique – that undoubtedly contains some detail of true
autobiography. This becomes clearer as Jason’s level of intoxication increases and
his performative façade begins to collapse. Though Clarke did indeed compress
the night’s events into a feature length film (through the act of editing and
selective shooting) in the final film she maintains a rough historical integrity by
keeping the filmed events in the basic order in which they took place.
115

As the film develops, the lines between Jason Holiday (the character,
hustler, performer) and Aaron Payne (the person) become progressively more
compromised as he begins to teeter closer and closer to the dark, drunken,
confessional abyss of his unmediated emotions. Nevertheless, Clarke and her
partner Carl Lee insist, as heard from offscreen, that all the while, Holiday “is not
coming down front,” is not being “real.” In their attacks on Holiday, Clarke and
Lee loudly claim that all of his imitations and stories are really only fictive role-
playing. (Like a variety of Warhol’s film projects, this too is “an inquisition.”) In

115
This has been claimed by Clarke on a number of occasions, and is confirmed by her lengthy
film logs that document the totality of her footage from the night (Shirley Clarke Papers in the
Wisconsin Historical Archive at the University of Wisconsin, Madison).

99
the film’s final sequence, Lee even calls Holiday a “phony,” the same insult that
Rona Page leveled at Pope Ondine a year earlier in The Chelsea Girls. Clearly a
performed “phoniness” was anathema to the underground artistic subcultures of
the 1960s, yet these conflicts between queer performers and straight provocateurs
also reflected a fundamental incongruity between the performative values of these
differently sexualized communities.
An exchange between Clarke and Holiday tellingly demonstrates the
film’s complex use of shaded colloquial language to evoke thorny, multi-layered
tensions between race, performance, and sexuality:
Clarke: You lonely?
Holiday: Lonely? I’m desperate, but I’m cool.
C: You should be lonely.
H: Yeah, I should suffer because I have no rights.
C: You’re not suffering. […]
H: I declared insanity. I said I was sick – oh, you won’t believe this – I
said I was a sick queen. […]. I got weak and I was humble and I needed
sympathy.
C: What do you mean by “humble?”
H: I was phony. That’s what humble means, right? Especially when you
look at a colored boy and say, “You’re humble.”

This difficult exchange not only further cements the viewer’s understanding of the
intricate relationship between Holiday’s outsider social status and his volatile
psychology, but it also explicitly lays out an interesting set of concerns by way of
an unusual linguistic correlation. As Holiday suggests equivalence between
humility and phoniness, he implies that being artificial or inauthentic is
tantamount to being subservient. His statement implies that the conditions of this

100
challenge “to be real,” to be true to himself, both on film and in life, is all the
more difficult and rife with potential pitfalls for the person of color.
As Portrait of Jason progresses, the interrogators become more combative
as they challenge Holiday to “come clean.” Eventually Holiday reaches his
breaking point as he collapses into tears and admits the failures and falsities of his
life, and in so doing, he lets down his performative façade. Unlike Ondine,
Holiday eventually admits to being “a phony,” like a psychiatric patient who has
made a therapeutic breakthrough. Towards the end of the film, he discharges the
following statement, using words that are punctuated with pauses of significant
emotional heft: “You only have so much energy. And I just spent too much time
being a nervous wreck. I guess I never really had any fun at all. […] Do you know
how much that hurts?” And like the subject of psychoanalysis, his breakthrough is
accompanied by a real moment of catharsis, as he is sobbing uncontrollably now.
He explains his emotional state when he says, “It only hurts when you think of it.
… And if you’re real you’ll think of it a long, long time.” Because of Holiday’s
emotional frankness, the tears on his face, the anguished expression of his pinched
mouth and eyes, there is a trace of real disturbance here. This moment of pathos
marks the film’s success as an observational document of interpersonal
interaction, yet it is also the source of great ethical discomfort and anxiety for its
viewers.
Though Clarke claimed to have ceded control to her subject, there is
nevertheless a kind of bullying – an act of profilmic aggression – that occurs in

101
the film, particularly as it reaches its climax. At the end, Holiday expresses a need
for emotional affirmation from Lee, but he only responds with: “I think you’re
full of shit.” Clarke suggests that this act of aggression was partially planned
before the film even began, as she explains her orchestration of the film’s
conclusion:
I had every intention of having a climax of something taking place. I knew
that I would have to get Jason to face the truth at some point. But I wasn’t
positive how. In other words, I was going to let Jason do whatever he
wanted to as long as I could and then I was going to challenge him to
come clean, tell the truth.
116

Despite the seemingly shared improvisatory sentiment and collective authorship
of Holiday, Clarke, and Lee, there is also a deliberate organization, a pre-planned
confrontational plot that catalyzes the filmmaking process and the emotional
breakdown of its subject. The film resembles Angell’s description of Warhol’s
cinema in relation to performance art of the period, as something that depends on
“interpersonal tensions” and “destabilizing elements,” culminating in a filmic act
of provocation and a presentation of self-effacement.
Clarke, like any viewer, was aware of the fact that some people might
interpret the film as exploitative. In one sense, Holiday is the victim of Clarke and
Lee’s aggression. He is not the one orchestrating the event, so within the sphere of
production, Holiday is contained within the apparatus as it films him and is later
edited according to Clarke’s specifications. However she claimed that she was
ethically justified in her project because, in her mind, Holiday’s performance was

116
Lauren Rabinovitz, “Choreography of Cinema: An Interview With Shirley Clarke,” Afterimage
11, no. 5 (December 1993), 11.

102
a kind of success in the face of hostile threats, and thus demonstrated his survival
and perseverance in the face of social oppression: She explained, “I will not allow
people to exploit themselves if they don’t win in the end.”
117
According to Clarke,
Holiday overcomes the exploitative frame in which he appears. However, within
the film there is indeed a sense in which Clarke and Lee are looming over their
subject, like Ronald Tavel in Warhol’s films, as aggressive interrogators wielding
a sadistic power from behind (or beside) the camera.
118
Obviously there are many
ethical issues at stake in this film’s exchange of power as it confronts issues of
race, class, and sexuality: Holiday, a gay African-American male, is manipulated
(or perhaps directed), at least partially, by Clarke, a heterosexual white woman,
and Lee, a heterosexual black male.
In an interview with Jonas Mekas, published in The Village Voice in
September of 1967, Jason Holiday addressed these topics, as he explained,
I wondered if people would think I was homosexual, bisexual, or
heterosexual. I wondered if I was great enough to convince them that I am
all three. The three-sided figure makes a triangular – trisexual. I said: try
anything as long as there is money in it, dig it? I’m being told by some
people that Miss Clarke has used me. I think the chick and me are even,
dig it? Thanks to Miss Clarke and Carl Lee, “World you’re gonna hear
from me.”
119

It is clear from Holiday’s commentary that perhaps what may have been most
controversial about the film, in pre-Stonewall era New York, was the subject’s
open admission of his own queer sexuality. (The same candidly queer sensibility

117
Ibid.
118
They are never seen onscreen, though their voices are heard, thus allowing them to partially
penetrate the profilmic space, though in soundtrack only.
119
Mekas, “Movie Journal,” The Village Voice, September 28, 1967: 31.

103
contributed to both the scandal and the popularity of The Chelsea Girls a year
earlier.) In fact, in his quotation above, Holiday plays the part not of a gay man,
but of a pragmatist without sexual preference, perhaps in an effort to retroactively
downplay the sexual candor of his performance in the film.
In the film Holiday frequently refers to himself in sexual terms,
acknowledging his polymorphous sexual identity as well as his occasional work
as a male prostitute who had sex with men. Holiday describes himself as “a stone
whore,” “a male bitch,” “bonafide freaksville,” “an experimental queen,” and he
discusses in some detail a number of his male sexual partners and queer sex acts
that he has performed. The graphic and frank back-and-forth of the film, both in
its sexual and its racial candor, would likely induce some anxiety and discomfort
in a straight white audience of 1966. In this regard Holiday’s performative
openness and his candidly queer sexual energy determine the irreverence of the
film’s content. Towards its end, Lee attempts to provoke an emotional response
from Holiday, as he repeatedly calls him a “rotten queen.” The hostility is
certainly strategic, yet the emotional sincerity of Holiday’s response is
undeniable, as he pleads for Lee’s friendship and love.
In his quotation above, Holiday suggests that though he may have been
“used” by Clarke, he and she are in fact “even” because the film gave him some
public exposure. This seems a naïve response, and in fact, after the film’s release,
Holiday hired a lawyer to acquire monetary compensation from Clarke for his

104
involvement in the film.
120
(In 1971, Tavel too sued Warhol, also claiming that
the artist did not sufficiently compensate him for his work.) Portrait of Jason is
uncomfortable for many reasons, including the profilmic hostility that Clarke and
Lee produce, the camera’s relentless long take documentation, the emotional
severity of Holiday’s performance, and the criminal and sexual frankness of its
content. Portrait of Jason does not resolve any of the ethical difficulties that it
presents. If anything, it inflames them, revealing its central aesthetic function – in
a way related to the work of Warhol described above – as the literal embodiment
of social and psychic tensions, as a kind of experiment in psychodrama, in which
the filmmakers and their camera relentlessly probe their subject, as they taunt
him, ask leading questions, and push him, as a psychotherapist might, into a
public reflection upon his life’s experiences.
As Holiday confesses for the camera, he continually affirms its presence,
making it clear that his emotional undressing is being done, at least in part, for its
benefit. Like many documentarians of the cinéma vérité and Direct Cinema
movements, Clarke used the camera as a catalyst to trigger a confrontation, and
ultimately a confession. This is a distinctly Warholian strategy. In an interview for
a recent BBC documentary on Warhol, film critic J. Hoberman eloquently
distilled the psychodramatic exchange that was central to Warhol’s cinema:

120
According to correspondence between Clarke and Holiday’s lawyer in 1968, the agreement
made between the filmmaker and her subject required that she pay him 10% of the film’s gross
profits after recouping the production costs (which were $21,500). Despite the fact that Holiday
contracted a lawyer, there is no evidence that she did not fulfill her part of the agreement (Shirley
Clarke Papers, Wisconsin Historical Society, University of Wisconsin, Madison).

105
Part of Warhol’s originality in his direction of actors was the recognition
that the camera gives people license to dramatize themselves […] In the
mid-60s this notion had tremendous force and I think that what he inspired
was a sort of art form where people would hold forth: they would be
themselves, but in a more outrageous, more compelling manner.
121

This explanation perfectly describes the ways in which both Ondine and Jason
forcefully tested their own limits of public behavior in the films described above.
This appeal to the outrageous and the taboo shared something important with
other contemporaneous efforts of both documentary and fictive realism. In its
efforts to reveal something hidden about its subjects, it aimed to undermine the
social conventions or art-making in postwar America, to “break down the phony
privacy walls” that filmmaker and critic Jonas Mekas located as the targets for the
new cinema.
122
In this regard, both films described above are evidence of this
movement’s effort to undermine social convention, using performances as its
artistic resources performances that were more psychologically and sexually open
than those of any previous era.
In the era of the film’s production, art and film critic Parker Tyler wrote,
in his book Underground Film, that these works document previously unexposed
cultural actions, including “the social activity of making life itself into a work of
art.”
123
It is through the process of Jason’s production – that is, filmmaking as
practice – that its primary social meaning is determined as an interpersonal act

121
Hoberman in the BBC documentary Warhol’s Cinema: A Mirror for the Sixties (1989).
122
Mekas, Movie Journal, 281. Many projects of the Direct Cinema too made distinct efforts to
expose hidden personalities and private aspects of character; one of the most famous early
examples of this approach is Primary (1960) by Robert Drew Associates, in which the filmmakers
made an effort to disarm the public façade and expose the multi-layered personalities of John F.
Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey, then presidential candidates.
123
Parker Tyler, Underground Film: A Critical History (New York: Da Capo, 1995), 69.

106
and a subcultural performance. The profilmic space of Jason provided a forum for
a public investigation of selfhood within certain hyperbolized conditions of
performance and mediation. Clarke has explained that the work’s greatest value as
a forum for humanistic knowledge and understanding can be traced primarily to
the event of the film’s production and to the profilmic interaction of its
participants.
124
For this reason, it is no surprise that Jason would be her last
completed film before moving into the more immediate, process-based media
formats of interactive and closed circuit video, a medium that loudly proclaims its
preference for presence over plasticity, just as Portrait of Jason does.

Art/Rape:
Clarke’s Portrait of Jason was a film that gave a curious, perhaps
voyeuristic public privileged access to the most private thoughts and anxieties of
an outsider and fugitive from bourgeois culture. In one sense, both Portrait of
Jason and The Chelsea Girls paraded a circus of misfits so that a ticket-buying
public could gawk at their marked otherness. Yet there is also a sense in which
these films interrogate the forces of surveillance and voyeurism, as they make
private encounters public by openly engaging with scopic pressures that mimic
the rapidly expanding mediascape as it was becoming more and more dominated
by television cameras and other mechanisms of public recording. In fact,

124
In 1967, she said, “For me, the uniquely extraordinary part of making Portrait of
Jason was the shooting experience itself” (quoted in Mekas, Movie Journal, 289).

107
throughout a variety of media, much work of the avant-garde from the 1960s and
70s directly tackled a growing awareness of visual technologies in public life.
Yoko Ono and John Lennon’s 1969 film, Rape, addressed these anxieties in an
almost hyperbolic fashion.
125

Yoko Ono’s involvement with cinema, like that of Warhol, developed out
of her work in other media. For many artists of Ono and Warhol’s generation, this
work in cinema represented a culmination of activity in various other art forms.
Ono was a prominent contributor to the loose international aggregation of artists
known as Fluxus whose work embodied a particular variety of 1960s anti-art that
was playful, provocative, and anarchic. The experimental work of this group was
often conceptually oriented in its efforts to devise novel ways to challenge public
conventions of the relationship between art and life. It follows that Ono’s cinema
was inextricably linked to her previous performance pieces and conceptual art
projects. Before being romantically and publicly linked with John Lennon, Ono
was already somewhat notorious as an artist-provocateur. In 1964-65, she
presented a famous performance work, Cut Piece, in Japan, New York, and

125
Because of their international stature as artists and public figures, it is difficult to establish a
national frame for the interpretation of the film projects of Ono and Lennon. Though Rape was
filmed in London, Ono and Lennon moved back and forth between London and New York during
the late 60s and early 70s, permanently relocating to the United States in 1971. In addition, their
artistic milieu was truly international in its well-known connections with a number of artists and
movements in Europe and the United States. Also, Ono was born in Japan, but relocated to the
United States on a number of occasions in childhood and adolescence, and throughout her career,
produced performance based work around the world. (And Lennon was of course English, but
spent significant amounts of time in New York throughout the 1960s and 1970s, before eventually
getting a green card in 1976 and later becoming a citizen; Ono was granted permanent resident
status and remains a long-time resident of the United States.) Though Rape was produced in the
UK, its filmmakers worked in a milieu that was in some sense, extremely international. In
addition, it is significant that the film’s primary performer was an Austrian national and that the
film premiered on Austrian TV.

108
London. In it, she walked on stage carrying a pair of scissors. She then sat down,
placed the scissors on the floor, and asked the audience to cut off her clothing,
which they did to varying degrees depending on the performance. Ultimately, the
performance of the piece (how the people interacted with Ono) and its final
outcome (how much clothes she was left wearing) were entirely determined by
choices made by the audience. It was a project in which she put her own body at
the risk of public humiliation for politically symbolic purposes by engaging in
performance with the forces of visual and physical violence that frequently
directed their energies towards the bodies of women in everyday life. These
registers of controversy, tension, and scopic violence are closely related to Ono’s
efforts in cinema as well.
Throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s, Ono and Lennon collaborated
on a number of films including Film #5 (Smile) (1968), Rape (1969), Fly (1970),
Freedom (1970), Apotheosis (1970), and Erection (1971). A number of these
films grew directly out of conceptual projects that Ono had produced as a member
of the Fluxus art group. One of the principal artistic strategies of these artists was
the use of the event-score, a simple script-like framing device that featured sparse
lists of commands and actions to be enacted by an artist or performer. Consider,
for example, Ono’s strange and provocative City Piece (1961), which has as its
content only the following instruction: “Walk all over the city with an empty baby

109
carriage.”
126
The Fluxus event-scores are simple and haiku-like in their
succinctness; because of their structural economy they are also powerful in their
ability to draw our attention to the somewhat arbitrary conventions that govern
human interaction, language, and art-making. Rape had its genesis in one of these
event scores that Ono had conceived a number of years before its filming.
127
It
reads as follows:
RAPE (or CHASE)
Rape with camera. 1 ½ hr. colour synchronized sound.

A cameraman will chase a girl on a street with a camera persistently until
he corners her in an alley, and, if possible, until she is in a falling position.

The cameraman will be taking a risk of offending the girl as the girl is
somebody he picks up arbitrarily on the street, but there is a way to get
around this.

Depending on the budget, the chase should be made with girls of different
age, etc. May chase boys and men as well.

As the film progresses, and as it goes towards the end, the chase and the
running should become slower and slower like in a dream, using a
highspeed camera.

by yoko ono copyright ‘68
128

The film that resulted from this idea largely follows the first half of Ono’s event
score above. However, though Rape, in some ways fulfills the succinct and
sometimes absurdist dictates of Fluxus performance, it also conveys something

126
Yoko Ono, Grapefruit: A Book of Instructions by Yoko Ono (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1970), unpaginated.
127
Conner in MacDonald, A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 151.
128
Quoted in Chrissie Iles, “Erotic Conceptualism: The Films of Yoko Ono” in Yes Yoko Ono
(New York City: Japan Society and Harry N. Abrams, 2000), 216. Also see Screen Writings: Texts
and Scripts From Independent Films, ed. MacDonald (Berkeley: University of California, 1995),
22.

110
significantly more unsettling in its sadistic treatment of its subject, an Austrian
illegal resident named Eva Majilata.
In Ono and Lennon’s film, a camera crew finds a young woman on the
streets of London and follows her relentlessly around the city. The work’s subject
is at first playful and inquisitive, as the camera crew follows her across a
graveyard. (Like the performers in Clarke’s and Warhol’s filmic psychodramas,
she initially engages with the work in a lighthearted manner before the interaction
begins to turn dire.) She grows progressively more distressed and frustrated as it
becomes clear that she does not speak English and is unable to communicate with
the people who are stalking and relentlessly pursuing her with their camera. When
she runs away from the filmmakers, or tries to escape from them in a cab, they
follow her. The process becomes continuously more aggressive until, at the film’s
conclusion, the crew has chased the young woman into an apartment, at which
point she breaks down in tears – as Rona Page and Jason Holiday did in the films
discussed above – having reached the end of her patience and the limits of her
emotional restraint.
J. Hoberman explains both the brutality of this film and its relationship to
Warholian film aesthetics when he writes, “In one sense, Rape is a particularly
brutal dramatization of the Warholian discovery that the camera’s implacable
stare disrupts ‘ordinary’ behavior to enforce its own regime.”
129
The Warholian

129
J. Hoberman, “Raped and Abandoned: Yoko Ono’s Forgotten Masterpiece” in Vulgar
Modernism: Writing on Movies and Other Media (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991),
186. David James eloquently distills the force that Warhol’s camera places on its performers: “The
camera is a presence in whose regard and against whose silence the sitter must construct himself.

111
camera of performative provocation is relentless in its stare and its efforts to
trigger emotionally extreme and often ethically troubling reactions. In a situation
that is even more disconcerting perhaps than that of Jason in Clarke’s film, Rape’s
subject has little to no control over the profilmic interaction. Though she had been
set up for the encounter by her sister, she herself had no knowledge of what was
going to take place. She did not speak English, and as an illegal immigrant who is
the victim of a series of Kafkaesque acts that she does not understand, she falls
into a trap that is absurd, cruel, and beyond her control.
Like Portrait of Jason and The Chelsea Girls, Rape is a film that, through
its conflicts between people and mediating technologies, showcases the dramatic
and unsettling tensions between public and private space that were magnified
markedly by new technologies in the surveillance, audio-visual transmission, and
mobile recording media. It is significant that Rape, though shot on film, was first
exhibited on television in Austria, and in fact reenacts and dramatizes the
exploitive relationships that television film crews often have with their subjects.
(In this regard, it is no surprise that a number of critics have seen the film as an
allegory of the media’s treatment of Ono and Lennon in the media-frenzy of the
post-Beatles years.)
130
The film thematizes the ways in which the motion picture
apparatus, as well as the related technologies of television and video surveillance,
penetrate the lives of individuals. Ultimately, these tensions and energies become

As it makes performance inevitable, it constitutes being as performance” (James, Allegories of
Cinema, 69).
130
It is worth recognizing that Ono and Lennon also occasionally invited scrutiny, of what would
normally be described as their private lives, through public events such as their Bed-In
demonstration of 1969.

112
manifest on the tortured face of the film’s assaulted subject, as it registers the
extreme social and interpersonal anxieties of the work’s production, thus
providing an affective and corporeal index of its sadism and unflinching
aggression.
Like the other two films discussed in this chapter, Rape foregrounds the
actions and statements of its subject by utilizing long takes, minimal editing, and
a variety of cinematography that focuses primarily upon the tense and dramatic
actions and interactions of its subjects. This aesthetic sensibility represented a
significant shift from the hand-crafted, tightly edited work of most avant-garde
filmmakers, and in some ways reflects the style and ontology of live television
and video work. In Rape, for seventy-seven minutes, a film crew (without Ono or
Lennon present) chased and attacked a young woman, using only the motion
picture camera and its related audio-recording apparatus to frighten her, aggravate
her frustrations, and trigger a breakdown, in which ultimately, she is brought to
tears. As in the two other projects discussed in this chapter, the filmmakers’
fundamental purpose was to demonstrate the camera’s capacity to provoke real
affective breaks in their subjects.

Open Forms and Experimental Art in Context:
Contrary to the creative process described above, filmmaker Stan
Brakhage described the working method of the independent filmmaker-artist as
one in which he or she exercised control over every aspect of the work’s filming,

113
composition, and assembly. In a somewhat heated public presentation and debate
during the 1970s, Brakhage openly revolted against new trends in impersonal
authorship, particularly as they utilized pre-determined structures or mechanistic
modes of production (like that of Michael Snow’s La Région Centrale (1971), a
film shot by a robotic, spinning crane in a remote region of Canada). Brakhage
argued that “the most valuable of the parts of the process of creativity” are the
moment-to-moment choices that the artist makes throughout the continual and
uninterrupted intervention of his or her hand in every instant of the film’s coming
into being, an absolute control of the film craft “wherein the maker is called upon
to work with what he or she doesn’t know at every frame’s existence. Whether it
shall be or whether it shall not be […] as an act of absolute urgency.”
131
This
statement summarizes the personal notion of artistic control that dominated the
American avant-garde cinema, however in the age of Cage and Warhol such a
sensibility would face significant challenges.
A craft-based understanding of authorship, like that applied by Brakhage,
would likely have seemed somewhat antiquated to other visual artists of the
1960s, during the age of conceptual art, process art, and Fluxus performance. In
this era, the conceptual artist Sol Lewitt famously established a personal distance
from his art objects, as he argued that once the concept for the work was realized
it did not matter who actually executed the assignment: In his words, “The idea

131
Brakhage, “Some Arguments: Stan Brakhage at Millennium, November 4, 1977,” Millennium
Film Journal 47/48/49 (Fall/Winter 2007/2008), 67.

114
becomes a machine that makes the art.”
132
In a related fashion, the filmmakers
discussed in this chapter broke from conventional notions of controlled and
virtuosic textual space by privileging profilmic events, and thus foregrounding the
performances that they present as the primary source of their meaning. The
generative idea and the conceptual frames that bind the films’ executions function
as the artists’ principal authorial products, as exemplified by Yoko Ono’s simple
script for her film, or Warhol’s arbitrary use of thirty-three minute, one-reel units.
In his major essay on the avant-garde aesthetics of the era, “The Art of
Time: Aesthetics of the Avant-Garde,” artist, theorist, and drama critic Michael
Kirby eloquently distilled the shifting aesthetic sensibilities of vanguard artists, as
he described the principal distinctions between classical values and those of late
modernist practice. In 1969, he wrote,
Craft, technique, and talent are sometimes mistaken for significance. […]
But there is no reason that an artist actually has to make the physical work
himself as long as he determines its characteristics. The point is that the
ease with which a work of art is made (or the apparent ease with which it
is made) has nothing to do with the significance of the work.
133

Though Kirby’s evaluation of art practice was commonly accepted in most
advanced circles of art making in the 1960s, the model of authorship that
privileged a single controlling subject still had significant force within the
American avant-garde cinema, for both aesthetic and practical reasons. Often, the
avant-garde filmmaker’s poverty of means was taken to be a virtue of the
amateur’s dedication. However, as the examples above suggest, it was not the

132
Sol Lewitt, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” Artforum 5, no. 10 (June 1967), 79–83 .
133
Michael Kirby, “The Art of Time: Aesthetics of the Avant-Garde” in The Art of Time: Essays
on the Avant-Garde (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1969), 49.

115
only sensibility in practice. In fact, in their opening up into the extratextual social
and historical spaces beyond the limits of the controlled film frame, many
filmmakers of the 1960s utilized an observational, semi-documentary mode that
privileged contingent encounters with uncontrolled forces. This trend in
filmmaking reflected other artistic strategies of the era in which the dominant
model of an earlier modernist expressive author had been replaced by experiments
with chance, process, and collective authorship. In their attention to unflinching
observation, extreme performance, and extended duration, these films (by
Warhol, Clarke, and Ono) emphasized the embodied presence of the films’
subjects and the contingency and the spontaneity of their thoughts and gestures.
The films described in this chapter (along with much of Warhol’s other
cinematic output) partially shifted the terms of experimental cinema away from
the plasticity of pure abstraction and the dreamy imaginings of artists toward a
filmmaking approach that emphasized process and contingency. In a sense, these
films of the mid-to-late 1960s predicted what was to come, sharing overlapping
strategies with developments in artists’ video that emphasized performance,
extended duration, and interactive display. Though the innovations of artists’
video have been tied almost exclusively to the new technology and its
documentation of performance, it in fact has an extremely important philosophical
and aesthetic precedent in this semi-documentary undercurrent within the history
of experimental cinema.

116
Though not typical of the dominant approaches to avant-garde filmmaking
of the period, the aggressive trend in film practice described above was
acknowledged by contemporary critics. In the late 1960s, theorist Noël Burch
(writing in France on developments in both American and European cinema)
recognized and commented upon new filmmaking trends in his writings in
Cahiers du cinéma (in columns that were later translated into English and
compiled as Theory of Film Practice). Burch credited this shift toward
provocation partially to lessons that artists had learned from the strategies of mass
media:
One of the most important insights to have come from television was the
realization that the camera’s relationship to this imperfectly controllable,
“spontaneous” chance reality was not necessarily that of a spectator: The
camera could also participate in a reciprocal exchange. This discovery was
the source of cinéma vérité in all its manifestations and, in general, of a
whole new world of narrative forms involving shifts in the role of the
camera (from actual participant to passive spectator, from a mere
“provocateur” of events to active dictator of them, and so on) as a formal
and structural device, as the very basis of film discourse.
134

Interestingly, Burch creates a link between the “spontaneous chance reality” of
television and the uses of open forms and chance structures in advanced art and
experimental classical music. As he saw it, this trend towards a more extreme
profilmic cruelty was linked to a greater openness to chance structures for avant-
garde composers, artists, and filmmakers – but it was also an attribute of
television, a medium that often utilizes live transmission of unscripted events.
This confluence of historical factors reflected a cultural situation in which the

134
Noël Burch, Theory of Film Practice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), 116.

117
mass media opened onto the contingent possibilities of reality as classical
composers and artists began to cede certain authorial controls to this same world
that was coextensive with the profilmic space of cinema.
Burch rightly saw this aesthetic shift as a fundamental revision of the
conventional divisions between the filmmaker and the world towards which he or
she directs the camera. He wrote,
Over the last fifty years or so, film directors essentially attempted to
eliminate, as much as possible, any intrusion of mere chance, of the
contingencies of everyday reality. Only relatively recently has anyone
become interested in aiming a camera at this uncontrollable world […]
with the awareness that, out of this confrontation between camera and
contingent reality, new forms and new structures could result.
135

Here Burch wrote the most significant theoretical commentary on the relationship
between chance and contingency in the new cinema. In this discussion, he often
used The Chelsea Girls as one of the central examples of this burgeoning
confrontational relationship between camera and reality. When he wrote this
piece, in the late 1960s, the traditional, authoritarian, and individualistic controls
that an artist had generally exerted over his or her work were starting to seem
romantic and old-fashioned, and were being challenged by neo-avant-garde
sensibilities, including those associated with experimental music, pop art,
conceptual art, and performance.
Burch explained that the use of chance compositional strategies had been
practiced for some time in experimental music, including most notably by John
Cage, but in cinema, there were few artists willing to experiment with a variety of

135
Burch, 115.

118
textual openness that required any real sacrifice of authorial control. In fact, Stan
Brakhage, one of the most meticulous and romantic of all artisanal avant-garde
filmmakers described the philosophical innovations of John Cage’s as a
conceptual trap, as “the greatest aesthetic net of this century.” Brakhage
acknowledged the philosophical appeal of Cage’s thinking but nevertheless
interpreted the authorial or textual openness that the composer encouraged as a
trap of sorts, something that one has to “go beyond” in order to assert one’s own
authorial voice.
136
Burch recognized in the work of Warhol and other advanced
filmmakers a blend of chance and aggression that extended beyond the romantic
expectations of an artist like Brakhage, who was more sympathetic to an earlier
aesthetic model derived from Abstract Expressionism, rather than the forms that
followed its formal, performative, and social imperatives into the 1960s. The
cinematic use of chance that was Burch’s subject and a resource for the
filmmakers discussed herein, however, was not something that was determined by
aleatory organizational procedures (like those produced through the use of the I
Ching). It was rather a function of unplanned and uncontrollable interactions
between humans, the natural world, and the cinematic apparatus – in Burch’s
words, a “confrontation between camera and contingent reality.” In this regard, he
observed that a number of filmmakers and artists were mounting a challenge
against the stilted structures of conventional authorship by what he eloquently

136
Brakhage, “Respond Dance” in Film Culture Reader, ed. P. Adams Sitney (New York: Cooper
Square Press, 1970), 242–243.

119
described as “the joyful and lucid abandonment by the composer [or artist] of a
portion of his conscious control over the work.”
137

Though none of the films described herein actually engage with
indeterminacy as extreme as the music of John Cage, they do represent a
loosening of authorial control, in Burch’s words, an “abandonment” of a portion
of “conscious control over the work.” In their performative openness, these works
of Warhol, Clarke, and Ono all feature filmic interactions with an unscripted
reality that in some compelling ways maintain the conditions of contingent
encounter that define them as unpredictable and spontaneous.
138
For example,
Clarke explained her experience in shooting Portrait of Jason in terms of a set of
spontaneous reactions:
Suddenly it was as if a great weight was lifted, and I could relax and, more
important, respond to the emotions spinning around the room. I finally
became part of the situation myself […] one with Jason and the camera. At
last I found the ability to swing along with what was happening
spontaneously, with no preconceived judgments. I started to trust Jason
and the camera and not insist on being the controller.
139

In all of these works, an idea was at least partially conceived before the shooting –
a verbal confrontation between two people, a semi-psychoanalytic interview, the
stalking of a stranger – but until the end, what would result from these encounters
was unknown to everyone involved (including the filmmakers). In this regard,
these films effectively exemplify the conditions for what might be described as

137
Burch, 106.
138
Portions of The Chelsea Girls were indeed scripted, albeit in a rather unconventional way, by
Ronald Tavel. Those portions of the film are not central to the argument here.
139
Mekas, Movie Journal, 289.

120
experimental rather than avant-garde art; such a terminological distinction should
benefit the historicization of these practices.
The history of writing on independent, non-narrative, or avant-garde film
has suffered somewhat from a lack of linguistic precision. Many filmmakers have
revolted against both the idea of “avant-garde film” and “experimental cinema,”
though most accept avant-garde film as a sufficient but imperfect descriptor. In
the place of “avant-garde film” Stan Brakhage simply wanted the descriptive
phrase of “film art” to be applied to his work. Others theorists, historians, and
artists have proposed “underground film,” “poetic film,” “personal cinema,”
“independent film,” and “critical cinema.” In terms of classifying the particular
strain of semi-documentary, temporally open-ended filmmaking described here, it
might be best to turn, as Noël Burch did, to sources outside of film history and
criticism. In their openness to unplanned and uncontrolled events, these works
satisfy a definition of experimental art as presented by John Cage, an artist and
theorist of art-making in general, who, like Warhol, left a wake of influence
across the whole artistic landscape of post World War II art-making, beyond any
particular medium.
In 1957, Cage explained that this shift to an experimental understanding of
art required new practices and strategies, as well as a fresh understanding of what
artistic authorship entails. He argued that the modern artist should willfully
expose the work’s process to the world outside of his or her authorial control by
“opening the doors of the music to the sounds that happen to be in the

121
environment.” Such a move would entail a sacrifice of the classical identification
that an author has with his or her work. In this regard, this change is
“psychological and seems at first to be a giving up of everything that belongs to
humanity.”
140
Ultimately, what Cage describes is an expansion of the artistic
processes of both composition and performance in order to incorporate
uncontrolled and contingent environmental conditions. This structural openness
presents a situation in which, “the word ‘experimental’ is apt, providing it is
understood not as descriptive of an act to be later judged in terms of success and
failure, but simply as of an act the outcome of which is unknown.”
141
Like a
number of artists who came to prominence in mid-20
th
-century America, Cage
argued for an artistic practice that would escape the isolated subjective space of
the artist and incorporate the historical conditions of life’s flux in a way that was
dissimilar from earlier approaches of the avant-garde. Following Cage, a major
theorist of this shift away from a romantic identification with the art object, the
artists and the filmmakers described above might best be understood as working
within a subset of the avant-garde that, without controversy, can be described as
experimental.

Revisions in Authorial Strategies:
In addition to sharing strategies of assault and shock, these experiments in
postwar performance-based cinema also revised conventional notions of

140
Cage, Silence, 8.
141
Ibid., 13.

122
authorship. In their collective shift away from the more individualist, expressive
mode of the avant-garde, Warhol, Clarke, and Ono utilized production processes
that were significantly more collaborative than the work of most avant-garde
filmmakers of the period. The canonical American avant-garde films have
generally been described as the products of lone amateur authors engaged with a
particular set of individual concerns that culminate in work of personal
expression, sensory meditation, or philosophical statement. The films of Warhol,
Clarke, and Ono described above interestingly revise these strategies of the avant-
garde. Though most independent and avant-garde filmmakers of the era shot and
meticulously edited their work themselves – a situation that made the attribution
of authorship fairly straightforward – the films described in this chapter present
alternative models of creative control in the filmmaking process. In fact, all of the
films described above were produced by small crews shooting 16mm synchronous
sound. This format was rather rare for experimental filmmakers in the 1960s,
though it was the preferred method for documentarians (including those
associated with direct cinema, the vanguard of documentary film practice in the
United States).
Though Warhol was certainly behind the camera at some point during the
shooting of The Chelsea Girls, he may or may not have been during the shooting
of the Pope Ondine section, which is described above.
142
It is well known that

142
Warhol claimed to have been operating the camera during Ondine’s spastic episode, though at
one point the performer addresses “Paul” while looking at the camera. And in fact, after this
moment of extreme drama, we can see Warhol away from the camera in the wings of the factory
(Andy Warhol, Popism, 188).

123
Warhol did not always operate the camera in his films, and in fact it has been
reported that on some occasions, he was not even on set.
143
To some critics of his
cinema this posed a problem. For example, though he was an avid supporter of
Warhol’s work in film, the critic, filmmaker, and spokesperson for the New
American Cinema, Jonas Mekas, articulated this artisanal sensibility when he
stated at a public roundtable at the New York Film Festival in 1967, that no
filmmaker could be considered a contributor to the new cinema, to the medium’s
most advanced trends, until he or she picked up his or her own camera.
144
This
pride in a personalized, individualistic production process was the standard for
most independent and avant-garde filmmakers of the period.
For Portrait of Jason Clarke utilized a crew that included a camera person
and an editor, such that she worked as a news director might, overseeing the
interview in person and giving direction to the technicians, but not directly
controlling the filmic action.
145
The case of Ono and Lennon’s film is even more
extreme in that they were not even present for its shooting. Their camera person,
Nic Knowland shot footage for the film on the streets of London according to the

143
In Horse, Warhol can be heard engaging in an offscreen telephone conversation while the film
is being shot.
144
Here Mekas was actually explaining the difference between so-called European art cinema and
the more personal filmmaking of The New American Cinema. His exact words were, “The day
Godard will pick up the camera and will start shooting his own films he will become a part of the
New Cinema” (“Is There a New Cinema?” roundtable (1967), audio recording in the collection of
The Museum of Modern Art, New York).
145
She did oversee and direct the edit of the footage. It must also be admitted however, that she
made significant modifications to the film in its post-production as she oversaw a number of
changes to it through the use of optically printed zooms and freeze frames. So, her role in the film
was by no means entirely distanced from the creative process. Still, though Clarke oversaw and
directed these changes they were actually done by a lab technician (Shirley Clarke Papers,
Wisconsin Historical Archive, University of Wisconsin, Madison).

124
artists’ specifications. He then offered successive versions for their consideration,
until he came upon an execution of the concept that Ono and Lennon approved.
After the shooting was complete they oversaw the edit, though again, they relied
upon the labor of other technicians.
146
This mode of filmmaking, utilizing a hired
crew and a sync sound film process, was far from the standard model of avant-
garde filmmaking in the 1960s, and it marks an interesting shift in both
production strategy and aesthetic sensibility that foreground extended
performance and historical contingency; it is also closer to a model of conceptual
art than it is to an expressive, personal approach.

Production Strategies and Experimentation:
This literal experimentalism is realized in rather concrete ways through the
specific production methods that the films employ. In their open production
strategies and relative disinterest in extensive post-production manipulation, these
works featured formal traits that demarcated the historical relationships to the
events that they displayed in ways that were not typical of other projects within
American avant-garde cinema. Their structural idiosyncrasies are the evidence of
their unusually contingent historical attributes. The Chelsea Girls, like a number
of Warhol’s other films of the mid 1960s, is composed of entirely unedited five-

146
So, neither the filmmaking nor the editing was directly executed by Ono and Lennon. Ono
claims to have closely overseen the editing of each of her films, but as she explained to Scott
MacDonald in 1989 she did not do the cutting, because as she said, “I was generally in charge of
the editing … I mean I would have a film editor working with me – I don’t know the technology”
(Ono in Scott MacDonald, A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews With Independent Filmmakers
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 151).

125
hundred-foot magazines of 16mm film, which last for thirty-three minutes each.
Because of the absence of editing, the historical integrity of each of the film’s
half-hour units is always maintained. The film’s soundtrack is also an unbroken
and evidentiary document because of the unusual conditions of its recording
directly onto the film stock itself, making for an atypical format known as single-
system sound film. Because of its formal idiosyncrasies that required the
microphone to be directly attached to the camera, this technology was used
primarily for television news in which no post-production mixing would be
necessary. Most sync sound recording in this era allowed the film and sound
equipment to function independently and with greater freedom of movement (and
was thus known as double system sound). Since the sound recording did not need
to be added to the visual footage after the fact, the historical integrity of the
sound-image relationship is maintained in Warhol’s films in a way that is
strikingly different from Hollywood cinema, independent film production, and
avant-garde film.
147
After these scenes were shot, their projection sequence within
the somewhat epic project evolved over time, through various orders and
combinations, into a two-hundred-and-five minute film in which reels were
projected simultaneously side-by-side, for a total of twelve reels. In its earliest
days of exhibition at the Filmmaker’s Cinematheque in New York City, the
projection conditions of The Chelsea Girls were unusually elastic, such that the

147
In addition, the camera that Warhol used in this period was an Auricon, a heavy, tripod-based
camera that was designed for sit-down television interviews. This camera was designed to be used
with single system sound-on-film recording, such that there would be no need for the post-
production synchronization of sound and image.

126
projectionist was encouraged to act as a performer, spontaneously modifying the
sound mix between the left and right projectors, using gels to modify color, and
even bouncing the projector’s beams off of the theater walls.
148

The Chelsea Girls was a surprising financial success, and as a result, its
projection conditions needed to be standardized so that it could play in a number
of theaters across the country without technical incidents of the type that would
likely result from the strange exhibition requirements of side-by-side 16mm
double screen projection.
149
Still, there was no mechanism designed to
mechanically synchronize two projectors, so the relationship between the two
projected images was achieved by the film’s projectionist, and determined
somewhat by his or her timing choices. So, by virtue of the unsynchronized
simultaneity of left and right screen projections (and the accompanying sound
mix) every projection of the film has been, and always will be, somewhat
different. During one projection, a particular event on the left and right screen
may appear to be intentionally synchronized, when in another projection, their
timing may vary significantly because the relationship of the left and right screens
is entirely dependent on the projectionist’s actions. Though the two sides always
play in tandem, there is some leeway regarding their timing and perceived
synchronicity, such that some degree of chance will always play a role in the

148
For more details about the film’s early projection history, see a short essay by Bob Cowan, a
filmmaker who was also the projectionist for The Chelsea Girls’ first public screenings (Bob
Cowan, “My Life and Times With the Chelsea Girls,” Take One 3, no. 7 (September/October
1971), 13).
149
For the standardized projection instructions to the film, see Peter Gidal’s chart in his text,
Materialist Film (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), 87.

127
film’s multi-screen projection. These unusual exhibition conditions thus
demonstrate another aspect of Warhol’s efforts to dismantle the textual control of
the artist over his or her object.
Like Warhol’s film, which had served as its inspiration, Jason too featured
many performance segments of extended duration. (Clarke also used a heavy
tripod-restricted Auricon camera for Portrait of Jason, as Warhol had on The
Chelsea Girls.) When Warhol’s reels ran out in the camera, he left the end flares
intact in the final film, exposing the physical limits of the medium. (In industrial
cinema, such a decision would be unheard of, because it would distract forcefully
from the diegetic illusion of the work.) In this sense, Clarke adapted Warhol’s
technique of exposing the film’s material limits. When film stock or audiotape
would run out in Portrait of Jason, the evidence of these truncated recordings was
simply left in the film. For example, throughout Jason we occasionally hear
Clarke tell the technicians to reload the camera, while onscreen we see black
leader, indicating that visual footage is missing. Clarke’s unusual formal choices
were engineered to create the illusion that the film is presenting us with an
unadulterated, realist, observational document. However, the film and its
soundtrack were carefully edited to create this manufactured impression.
Though the atypical formal structuring of Jason may self-reflexively call
attention to its own constructedness, it still serves the rhetorical function of
suggesting to the viewer that the work is rather rough and unprocessed, almost
live, as it flaunts the traces of its own temporal contingency in order to give the

128
impression that it was only barely mediated. This open exposure of the film’s
production process creates an illusion of historical integrity and performative
authenticity. A similar false guarantee of faithfulness is included in Ono’s Rape in
that each segment of the film begins as the filmmakers introduce the slate (or
clapboard) in order to suggest to the viewer that these segments of audio-visual
documentation have not been sutured together by Hollywood style editing or post-
production voiceover, which might disguise their material and historical limits.
However, like Jason, Rape is carefully edited. Though these films are unusual in
their capacity to capture a unique degree of the historical and ontological integrity
of the encounters that they document, they nevertheless function within a
bracketed self-aware, self-reflexive mode that features its own degree of
rhetorical and stylistic manipulation.
150

A Cinema of Cruelty: American Experimental Cinema and the Legacy of Artaud:
After having considered the ways in which these performance-based
experiments in filmic provocation differed from other poetic and Romantic modes
of experimentation, it will be suggested that this mode of art-making based on
interpersonal attack was partially derived from a set of earlier ideas that had been
imported into the New York avant-garde of the early 1960s by a range of artists

150
Portrait of Jason was actually subject to a significant degree of post-production manipulation,
though much of it is disguised. For example, a number of the camera movements, zooms, and
shifts in focus were added by an optical printer after the film was processed, though such details
would not be obvious to the untrained viewer. Similarly, there is evidence to suggest that the
soundtrack was edited rather thoroughly by Clarke after the film was shot (Lab receipts in the
Shirley Clarke Papers, Wisconsin Historical Archive, University of Wisconsin, Madison).

129
working in musical and theatrical modes. There is an important sense in which the
performative sensibility of Antonin Artaud, a radical theorist of an almost
impossibly hostile dramatic practice, took hold of the avant-garde arts of New
York in the era that is the subject of this study. As a component of the artistic
landscape of the 1960s and 70s, filmmaking was necessarily involved in the
avant-garde’s circulation of creative sensibilities. This branch of filmmaking can
be better understood in relation to its cultural climate, if it is considered in the
context of a range of trends in provocation and pressure in other performance
based arts that drew philosophical inspiration from the principles of Antonin
Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty.
***
In his consideration of these new and provocative shifts in film aesthetics,
towards greater degrees of cruelty and hostility, critic Noël Burch drew some
important connections between these works and a range of artistic practices in a
variety of media. One of Burch’s most significant observations in his volume
(Theory of Film Practice introduced above) was his recognition that some of these
innovative filmmaking strategies utilized aggression as a powerful and previously
untapped creative resource.
151
For him, The Chelsea Girls was the definitive
example of this new mode of filmmaking based on provocation; in his words, this
film used the camera as “an instrument of torture.”
152
In Rape and Portrait of
Jason, the camera is applied towards the same ends as it enacts an unflinching

151
Burch’s discussion of these aesthetic devices can be found in the chapters “Chance and Its
Functions” and “Structures of Aggression” in Theory of Film Practice, 105–135.
152
This is Burch’s phrase to describe the use of the camera in The Chelsea Girls (Burch, 118).

130
“inquisition,” in a way that is similar to, and partially derived from, the strategies
of Warhol’s cinema. For the artists described above, as well as many other artists
and thinkers of the 1960s, violence and aggression, both profilmic and filmic,
were useful aesthetic tools. As Burch described it, their unpredictability posed a
significant challenge to the controlled, regulated, and mechanized structures of
narrative and ontological containment that were typical of most cinemas, what
Burch described as “the mathematics of form.”
153

Like the filmmakers described above, a number of other drama and
performance-based artists of the era created works in which acts of violence and
provocation were willfully – sometimes sadistically or masochistically – enacted
in order to trigger a psychological rupture or destabilization in their subjects or
audience. Some of the most aggressive, confrontational, and graphic performance
art of the period, including that of Vito Acconci or Carolee Schneemann, both of
whom incorporated significant doses of explicit sexuality and violent symbolism
into their body art performances – in works such as Pryings (1971), Seedbed
(1971), Meat Joy (1964), and Interior Scroll (1975, 1977) – shared a
philosophical sensibility with Warhol and other filmmakers who worked in the
mode of profilmic provocation described above. In their aggression and emphasis
on real-time social interaction and conflict, Warhol and his milieu addressed
related cultural and aesthetic registers to those of the interactive radical drama of
the Living Theatre, the social experimentation of Allan Kaprow and the

153
Burch discusses an opposition between “structures of aggression” that were developing in
various avant-garde cinemas and “the mathematics of form” that are the typical formulaic
structures of conventional fiction filmmaking (Ibid., 134).

131
happenings movement, the bodily extremes of the Judson Hall dance group, or the
cultural anarchy and danger of Fluxus performance.
Warhol, Clarke, and Ono were all intimately familiar with the most
advanced trends in performance and experimental theater of the period.
According to Tavel, Warhol first communicated his concept for a film approach
based on “inquisition” during a happening by Yvonne Rainer at the Judson
Church.
154
Clarke, a trained modern dancer, had also worked with The Living
Theatre in her production of The Connection (1962). And Ono was perhaps more
experienced as a performance artist than as a filmmaker. Warhol, Clarke, and Ono
shared privileged cultural and artistic connections to the New York based
performance avant-garde of the 1960s (partially because of their social networks),
and though they may not have openly acknowledged this influence, it is clearly
inscribed on all of the works described above. These films, like much art of the
sixties, forcefully confronted and challenged both their subjects and their
audiences, using the controversial structures of psychic and social disorientation.
As such, they represent the filmic apex of a negative sensibility that had pervaded
significant parts of the American counterculture throughout the Vietnam era,
making a counterargument (based primarily in New York) to West Coast
hippiedom and the romantic poetics of self-realization.
In an era well known for its rhetoric of “mind-blowing,” spiritual
transformation, and social transgression, the aesthetic and philosophical influence

154
Interview with Ronald Tavel, October 8, 1978 in Smith, 480.

132
of French dramatist and theorist Antonin Artaud could not have come into contact
with the New York avant-garde at a more appropriate time. Though he wrote his
best known work in the late 1930s, Artaud arrived in America as a major
influence in the late 1950s and early 60s, largely as a result of a then recent
translation of his writing. Artaud’s work prescribed an assault on the senses that
was perfectly attuned to the neo-avant-garde of the era. The following statement
from Artaud’s “The Theater of Cruelty (Second Manifesto)” could easily have
been uttered by countercultural icon Abbie Hoffman or experimental theater
director Julian Beck: “Admittedly or not, conscious or unconscious, the poetic
state, a transcendent experience of life, is what the public is fundamentally
seeking through love, crime, drugs, war, or insurrection.” In this massively
influential manifesto, Artaud continues to explain that the purpose of his radical
and confrontational aesthetic project was “to restore … a passionate and
convulsive conception of life.”
155
This sentiment, made explicit here by a French
dramatist writing thirty years before the artworks described herein, perfectly
encapsulates the most radical and extreme of artistic strategies of the 1960s and
70s, as it also calls for us, by virtue of its conceptual congruence with this age’s
sensibility, to reconsider Artaud’s influence on the arts in America after World
War II.
Artaud’s thinking poses a sympathetic model for understanding the
hostility of the art of the late 1960s and early 1970s, both because of its popularity

155
Antonin Artaud, The Theater and its Double (New York: Grove Press, 1958), 122.

133
in that era and its conceptual resonance with the work and the cultural milieu of
the time. Artaud’s significance for experimental work in that epoch has never
been considered in relation to cinema, partially because his writing bears a
somewhat ambivalent relationship to the medium.
156
However, it is the argument
here that for both philosophical and historical reasons, a consideration of Artaud’s
thinking in relation to the avant-garde performance-based artists of the 1960s can
help us to understand a forgotten artistic legacy of hostility, aggression, and
anxiety. We can better understand the art of this period if we extend our mode of
interpretation past its textual limits, to social and cultural spaces that made it
possible, as well as the intellectual trends that helped to determine its directions.
The work of the filmmakers described above has not been evaluated in
relation to Artaud’s thinking, yet as has been argued herein, these artists were all
intricately connected to postwar performance, and were very much aware of the
cultural energies of a New York avant-garde that was encouraged by his thinking.
By considering these unsettling film projects in light of Artaud’s influential
sensibility we can make better sense of their belligerent aggression and hostility.
As has been argued throughout this project, the three films discussed above are
exemplary of an aggressive mode of experimental cinema that shared certain
philosophical, structural, and aesthetic details. On one count they share a
particular openness to reality, as opposed to the predetermined structures of
conventional fiction genre filmmaking. In this sense, as Noël Burch has argued,

156
Historically, Artaud’s writing on cinema has vacillated between enthusiastic, particularly
during his early involvement with film as an associate of the surrealists, and dismissive, because
of the heavy dependence of conventional cinema on textual content, scripting, etc.

134
these works contest “the mathematics of form” upon which industrial cinema is
built. The transformative theatrical actions envisioned by Artaud too challenged
the systematicity of controlled texts based on streamlined cause-and-effect
narratives. He was particularly distrustful of the predictable, almost algorhythmic
nature of conventional filmmaking with its dependence on written language and
generic structure. He wrote that “stupid order and habitual clarity are its
[cinema’s] enemies.”
157

***
In 1958, roughly twenty years after its publication in French, Mary
Caroline Richards translated Artaud’s Le théâtre et son double into English,
ushering in a major influence on American performance of the 1960s. John Cage
recommended the text to her while they were both at Black Mountain College, the
legendary experimental intermedial arts school in the mountains of North
Carolina. (Cage had learned of Artaud during his travels in Europe, through
fellow avant-garde composer Pierre Boulez.) The short book proved to be
massively influential, particularly upon a variety of performance-based artists
within the avant-garde community of New York City. Media theorist, literary
critic, and cultural icon Marshall McLuhan, whose own popular influence
trumped that of almost any other public intellectual of the period, argued that a
shift in theatrical sensibility correlated directly with other cultural transitions,
particularly as determined by the changing relations of various media. He

157
Artaud, “Sorcery and Cinema” in The Shadow and its Shadow: Surrealist Writings on the
Cinema, ed. and trans. Paul Hammond (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2000), 105.

135
explained that the modernist Theater of the Absurd (associated with Beckett and
Ionesco) had lost its cultural relevance, as theatrical trends shifted tone from the
allegorical to more confrontational forms, described by him as “the theater of
blood and cruelty which Artaud called for.” He explains that Artaud’s
confrontational and transgressive theater was popularized by dramatists like Peter
Weiss to function as a “probe of the violences and dislocations of the
multiconscious global village of 1963 and after.”
158
The extent to which the artists
of the 1960s actually understood the irrational and contradictory writings of
Artaud has been debated by many, however it is indisputable that certain general
details and rhetorical emphases of Artaud’s thinking were uncannily congruent
with other artistic trends of the 1960s, having left considerable traces of influence
throughout the expansive and intermedial network of performance based art of the
period.
159

In many ways, Artaud’s radical anarchic vision of social transformation
was entirely congruent with the aesthetic and social attitudes of post World War II
America. His writings on The Theater of Cruelty presented a notion of dramatic
performance intended to cleanse the aesthetic landscape of all mannered and
conventional approaches to constructing art. It would do so by utilizing methods
and manners as extreme as necessary and appropriate to the cultural timbre and

158
Marshall McLuhan with Wilfred Watson, From Cliché to Archetype (New York: Viking Press,
1970), 9. Inexplicably, the text repeatedly misspells Artaud as “Arnaud.” Since it is done three
times in one paragraph, it is possible that this error was not the typesetter’s, but perhaps that of
McLuhan or his co-author, Watson.
159
See Douglas Kahn’s essay “Artaud in America” in which he disputes this claim (Kahn, 100
Years of Cruelty: Essays on Artaud, ed. Edward Scheer (Sydney: Power Publications and
Artspace, 2000), 237–262).

136
tone of other aspects of civilization. Artaud argued that, if the times were anxious
and volatile, so too would theater be. He wrote, “The Theater of Cruelty will
choose subjects and themes corresponding to the agitation and unrest
characteristic of our epoch.”
160
In his writings, he encouraged a destabilizing
approach that would combat conventional understandings of art and life by
attacking the desensitized sensibilities of the public with hostile, aggressive, even
cruel form and content. He advocated an anarchic theater of agitation and
aggression, something that would challenge all structures of control and
systematicity. In his Theater of Cruelty Artaud envisioned revolutionary theater as
gestamtkuntswerk, a blending of all other art forms, in order to serve the anarchic
purpose of “resisting the economic, utilitarian, and technical streamlining of the
world.”
161
As he saw it, the theater would be so extreme in its means that it would
upset all conventional understandings of rational behavior and social structure. In
the words of cultural critic Susan Sontag, Artaud’s approach was “not interested
in satisfying either the political or the ludic impulse.”
162
In this regard, it poses an
unusual model of revolutionary, but apolitical transgression that was not simply
playful or absurdist (as were some trends in postwar art), but was more
compatible with the total transformation of understanding that was suggested by
John Cage. For this reason, though his popularity amongst the happenings artists
(Allan Kaprow), experimental dramatists (Julian and Malina Beck), performance

160
Artaud, The Theater and its Double, 122.
161
Ibid.
162
Susan Sontag, “Introduction” in Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings, ed. Sontag (Berkeley and
Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1976), xli.

137
artists (Carolee Schneemann), and San Francisco poets (Michael McClure) may
have been well known, some critics have debated the capacity of these often
ideologically committed aesthetes to truly embrace the cultural threat that Artaud
posed to both civilization and art as it had been previously understood.
163

Though Artaud’s vision was one of a transformed experience of the
drama, it had far reaching implications in a variety of other media. In fact, his
notion of theater extended well beyond the limits of any medium. As Sontag
argued in the early 1970s, in a reflection partially on Artaud’s influence, she
wrote that for him, “theater became his supreme metaphor for the self-correcting,
spontaneous, carnal, intelligent life of the mind.”
164
As Sontag explains in a
thorough and sympathetic summation of Artaud’s drama, essays, and influence on
American cultural history, he at times also considered cinema as a possible
nomination for his preferred ur-medium, as an art form that could transform and
contain all of the others (however his interest in cinema waned due to his distaste
for the final “literary” results of film projects in which he was involved, including
The Seashell and the Clergyman (1928)). But eventually, as Cage had done,
Artaud “assimilates all art to dramatic performance.”
165
In fact, in America,
beginning in the late 1950s (or perhaps earlier), an emphasis on theatricality and

163
On this topic, see Sontag’s introductory essay to Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings, xvii-lix.
On the inassimilable nature of Artaud, she writes: “To detach his thought as a portable intellectual
commodity is just what that thought explicitly prohibits. […] One can be scorched, changed by
Artaud. But there is no way of applying Artaud” (lvii). “All art that expresses a radical discontent
and aims at shattering complacencies of feeling risks being disarmed, neutralized, drained of its
power to disturb – by being admired, by being (or seeming to be) too well understood, by
becoming relevant” (lviii).
164
Sontag, “Introduction” in Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings, xxxvi.
165
Ibid., xxix.

138
performance had influenced many aspects of cultural production and its
associated history of ideas as a result of a series of new intellectual trends,
particularly in sociology. Included in this group are the gestalt therapy
popularized by Paul Goodman, the anthropological performance-based
interpretations of social behavior by Erving Goffman (whose The Presentation of
Self in Everyday Life was published in 1959), the theory of “symbolic
interactionism” as popularized by Herbert Blumer in his 1969 book of the same
name, as well as the aforementioned trends in performance art and happenings. If
we understand the experimental cinema as a medium that sometimes too
emphasizes performance, then we can recognize its relationship to significant
philosophical, social, and aesthetic trends of the period that shared similar
concerns.
Dance and performance historian Sally Banes explains the overlapping
efforts in performance within this period, as she suggests that its unique
experiments resulted from a shared fundamental dissatisfaction with established
cultural forms. She writes,
The urge toward performance in the separate arts, while originating in
different sources — among them, the various dissatisfactions with the
respective reigning aesthetics — brought artists in disparate fields toward
similar actions. And it may be that, in Artaud, some of these theater,
antitheater, and art performances could be traced back to a common
inspiration.
166

166
Sally Banes, Greenwich Village 1963: Avant-Garde Performance and the Effervescent Body
(Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1993), 28.

139
Her description above explains both the boom of performance in the 1960s as
well as the overlapping energies that produced surprising and sometimes
unrecognized confluences of attitude and influence, like those that developed
around the hostile and aggressive energies of a variety of performance that is the
heir to Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty.
In his shift away from textual and dramatic control Artaud advocated an
approach to drama and other temporal arts that would “put an end to the
subjugation of the theater to the text,” eliminating the dependence of theatrical
events on scripted, pre-determined formulas.
167
He envisioned an embodied
performance art that would transgress traditional boundaries between event and
audience. It was for this reason that his aesthetic and philosophical sensibility was
so beloved by Julian Beck and Malina Beck of The Living Theater, a group well
known for their unusual and active interaction between performers and spectators.
Similarly, Artaud’s writing was celebrated by John Cage as well as happenings
innovator Allan Kaprow, for its willingness to break down the artificial
boundaries that social convention interposed between art and life. In his Second
Manifesto, he writes, “between life and the theater there will be no distinct
division, but instead a continuity.” He goes on to relate this understanding of a
fluid relation between an artistic event and its surroundings, by explaining it in
relation to the profilmic space of cinema and its environment, when he writes that,
“Anyone who has watched a scene of a movie being film will understand exactly

167
Artaud, The Theater and its Double, 89.

140
what we mean.”
168
It is rather remarkable that Artaud described his revolutionary
theater in terms related to the ontology of filmmaking practice. But, for our
purposes here, it is telling.
What Artaud acknowledges in this quotation is that the frame that a
filmmaker imposes upon the space of the world is something that is only
determined by the arbitrary structure of the film frame inscribed by the cinematic
apparatus. In a sense, this quotation above suggests, as does much of this essay,
that the extratexual context of a filmmaking event is a major determinant of its
ontological and historical function. This is particularly true of films like The
Chelsea Girls, Portrait of Jason, and Rape, in which performance is hyperbolized
and made more central than in other works of the independent or avant-garde
cinema, emphasizing performative presence rather than filmic plasticity. For this
reason, Artaud’s radical vision of an open-ended, confrontational theater
resonated with experiments in cinema that also directed themselves towards the
traversal of textual boundaries and spectatorial discomfort.
Artaud’s provocative and incendiary writing presents a series of
manifestos concerning the relation between art and life, fusing revolutionary
interests with an attitude towards art intended to totally destabilize normative
modes of thinking and distinctions between media forms. His intermedial
sensibility encouraged a situation in which, in Sontag’s words, “there are no
separate works of art – only a total art environment, which is magical,

168
Ibid., 126.

141
paroxysmatic, purgative, and finally, opaque.”
169
This too was predicted years
earlier by Artaud’s belief that in Sontag’s words, “art seems to require a more
daring scene, outside the museums and legitimate showplaces, and a new, ruder
form of confrontation with its audience.”
170
In this “total art environment” he
encouraged an approach to dramatic action that was capable, in his words, of a
“dissociative and vibratory action upon the sensibility.”
171
This provocative,
almost clinical vision of artistic attack was also congruent with trends of the era in
laser light shows, happenings, and expanded cinema, as in Warhol’s Exploding
Plastic Inevitable, the Movie Drome of Stan Vanderbeek, or the Vortex Concerts
of Jordan Belson. As the relationships between artists and audiences changed,
there arose a need for new alternative art spaces. During the period of the mid-60s
to the mid-70s, many artists utilized the cinematic apparatus as a device not to
create distraction and coherent stories, as conventional dramatic theater had, but
to disrupt psychology and sensibility with action that was, in Artaud’s stimulating
words, both dissociative and vibratory. In later chapters, this dissertation will
consider works in cinema that provoke their viewers not with dramatic or ethical
discomfort, but with visual and sonic distress.

169
Sontag, “Introduction” in Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings, l.
170
Ibid., xxix.
171
Artaud, The Theater and its Double, 89.

142
Chapter 3: The Medium Is the Medium: Television, Experimental
Film, and Expanded Cinema

“No medium has its meaning or existence alone, but only in constant
interplay with other media.” – Marshall McLuhan, 1966
172

In the 1960s an aggressive performance sensibility began to assert a
significant influence throughout various practices within the international art
community. Directed towards sensorial, conceptual, and aesthetic shocks these
experiments collectively exhibited a shared artistic aim to disrupt the networks of
exchange that underpinned the socio-economic structure of the art world while
simultaneously attacking the normative expectations and sensibilities of their
audiences. This energy manifested itself in the explosive and riotous presentations
of the Destruction in Art Symposium (1966) (which featured an international
assemblage of artists including Gustav Metzger, Al Hansen, Otto Muhl, Wolf
Vostell, Raphael Montañez Ortiz), the extreme volume and duration of LaMonte
Young’s minimalist music, the performances and happenings of the Fluxus group
(which included, for example Yoko Ono, who was responsible for the legendary
performance work, Cut Piece), the Artaud inspired experiments in drama
presented by The Living Theatre, the dramatic embodied encounters between
animal carcasses and human flesh in Carolee Schneemann’s Meat Joy (1964), and
the machine-gun barrage of flicker films by artists like Paul Sharits and Tony

172
McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994),
26.

143
Conrad. As suggested in the previous chapter, many of the most compelling
intermedial exchanges of the period blended gestural, visceral energies – as
realized through performance, happenings, dance, music, and cinema – with
ideological, political, and conceptual strategies that were theoretical and abstract
in nature. In this chapter of media history, a number of artists intervened
ideologically into the flow of television imagery, often, surprisingly, by applying
performative strategies. This seemingly contradictory blend of embodied
performance elements and the technologies of mass media framed a number of
experiments in film, video, and television that interrogated the basic limits
between media.
The volatile cultural and artistic energies of the 1960s and early 70s
encouraged an open assault on the senses that mirrored the onslaught of media
that was becoming more and more pronounced in the years after World War II
when more homes were dominated by television imagery and more public space
was claimed for corporate interests. A number of artistic and countercultural
practices of the mid 1960s aimed to counteract the dominant uses of corporate
media by repurposing its technologies for use in experimental and avant-garde
moving image audio-visual art, with the express intention of creating a series of
shocks and disturbances to the mainstream sensibilities that circumscribe it. In
their efforts to shake a media saturated American public out of its normative
consciousness, many artists, like those described in the previous chapter, utilized
an anxiogenic, even convulsive artistic register in order to attack and disarm the

144
dominant attitudes of a populous whose consumerist ethics of distraction kept
them from realizing that the boundaries between life and art are fundamentally
arbitrary. In this sense, the use and repurposing of mass media images and
technologies mirrored other artistic practices in which the materials of consumer
culture were transposed into the aesthetic register of fine art. One influential
strategy for staging an encounter between fine art and mass culture was realized
through the filmic repurposing of the iconography, content, and technology of
television.
As a cultural force, television’s influence on post World War II America
could hardly be overestimated. By 1965, almost fifty-three million American
households had television sets (93% of the nation’s population). It was the
primary source of both information and entertainment for most people, and thus
effectively eliminated the boundaries between these two registers as it surpassed
both printed media and film as the dominant mass medium of the age. The rise of
television had major ramifications for a range of artistic practices due to its vast
reservoir of found images that was recontextualized and repurposed throughout a
diversity media, including painting, video art, happenings, and experimental film.
However, strategies of mass cultural appropriation by the avant-garde were not
entirely new; artists have always repurposed resources taken from industrial
culture. In an earlier phase of modernist art, collage artists, beginning with
George Braque and Pablo Picasso, famously incorporated scraps of newspaper –
the popular news and advertising medium of the day – into the spaces of their

145
paintings. Early efforts in avant-garde film also borrowed language and
iconography from the mass media. Un chien andalou (1929), a surrealist
masterwork of early avant-garde film ends with a superimposed phrase in cursive
script, “Au printemps,” which was in fact an advertising catchphrase from a major
French department store of the era.
173
Though the surrealists were particularly
enamored with mass cultural detritus, most of the early European avant-garde art
movements, including Dada, Futurism, Constructivism, as well as Cubism, made
considerable use of visual and sonic iconography derived from mass culture. In
the so-called “neo-avant-gardes” of the post World War II period, artists
continued to engage with their mediascape, further utilizing elements from print
sources and expanding their field of reference to the interaction and public
influence of electronic media. It is indisputable that television was then the most
significant electronic apparatus for the transmission of information and influence
over both the public and private spaces of the United States. Though it influenced
a variety of art forms and practices, the medium upon which television had the
most significant influence is likely that with which it shares its principal
technology: video art. Yet, in largely unrecognized ways, television was a
significant determining influence on experimental film as well.
Though experimental film had, and continues to have, a largely
antagonistic relationship with conventional Hollywood fiction filmmaking,
television provided yet another, perhaps less significant source of ideological and

173
This is a fact that Annette Michelson has mentioned in her classroom. To my knowledge it has
not been recognized in print, despite the extensive writing that exists on this canonical film.

146
formal opposition. Artist and filmmaker Michael Snow likely expressed the
majority opinion of experimental filmmakers when he once said casually, at a
meeting of The Filmmaker’s Cooperative “Dope is better than TV.”
174
As
suggested above, many artists working in an array of media and artistic traditions
utilized both the content and technology of television, but did so by creating work
that was directed, in a figurative sense, against the very medium itself and its
associated cultural networks of exchange. By repurposing television’s imagery, its
apparatus, and its means of transmission, media artists made significant efforts to
undermine television’s corporate rhetoric, its one-way information transmission,
its structural apparatus, and its normative ideological system. Yet, a number of
these artists also envisioned for television more utopian possibilities. In the
practices of some, these critical and hopeful sensibilities worked in tandem.
This chapter will address the significance of television by exploring its
influence upon selected case studies of experimental film artists working in the
intermedial artistic landscape of 1960s and 1970s America. This discussion will
consider the ways in which this relatively new medium provided fresh
technological and formal possibilities, and most importantly, mass produced,
mass distributed visual information, while it simultaneously presented a
communication apparatus that was anathema to many media artists and
filmmakers of the period. The works discussed in this chapter were made on film,
but utilized the technology and content of television, demonstrating another

174
Here, of course, Snow is suggesting that drugs and television aspire to the same effect, but that
drugs are more effective (Notes on New American Cinema Group, Filmmaker’s Distribution
Center, and Filmmaker’s Coop, papers of Anthology Film Archives, undated).

147
significant cultural exchange between a variety of media, cultural traditions, and
art practices in which cinema as inextricably involved.
Outside of countercultural film critic Gene Youngblood’s seminal work,
Expanded Cinema, the artistic hybrids of television and film (and to a lesser
extent, video) produced by Nam June Paik, Jud Yalkut, and Aldo Tambellini,
have been largely omitted from most histories of experimental film. This project
aims to reintegrate these interstitial art objects/events into a more wide-ranging
understanding of the historical interaction between avant-garde art practices, mass
culture, and experimental film. In addition to considering the specifically
televisual component of the era’s interactive, intermedial atmosphere, this chapter
will also discuss the more general ways in which selected avant-garde artists
expanded their experimental media practices into hybrid registers of performance
and exhibition. In general terms, these trends will be presented in relation to a
confrontational notion of art practice (as well as criticism) that embraced the
breakdown and subsequent expansion of traditional artistic categories. In their
cultural and historical contexts, the artistic experiments described herein also
provoked philosophical consideration of the limits between broader, even non-
artistic realms of human activity, including science and industry.

Nam June Paik and the Mediascape of the 1960s:
In 1964, Fluxus artist Nam June Paik moved to the United States from
West Germany. His arrival marked the entrance of an eccentric performer who

148
operated in the interstices between various media and art-making traditions
(including his notable appearance in the New York performance of Karlheinz
Stockhausen’s Originale which was discussed in the first chapter). Working in
performance and avant-garde classical music, and later robotics, video, broadcast
television, expanded cinema, and installation art, he showcased an aesthetically
promiscuous creative sensibility as he doggedly experimented with a wide variety
of performative and representational strategies. When considered as a whole, his
artistic output is impressive both in its scale and in its conceptual diversity. Yet,
despite its marked heterogeneity and anarchic sensibility, in aggregate the work
contained common themes, as it forged a series of aesthetic and social
negotiations between the replicating technologies of mediation (and electronic
representation) and the singular force of human presence. It is significant that this
aesthetic tension is also defines the media art of Andy Warhol, one of the central
figures of this study and its consideration of the relationship between
experimental film and fine art practices. Arguably, this stress could be described
as the philosophical mechanism that drove the work of both Warhol and Paik.
Both artists reflected on the social and artistic challenges presented by 60s-era
America by pursuing intermedial strategies that produced extreme displays of
human affect, but filtered and modified through mass media technologies. In
Paik’s creative use of both bodily presence and electronic ephemerality, he
attempted, concurrently with Warhol, to engage with the central tensions in
American culture between, on the one hand, a commonly held belief in

149
uniqueness, individuality, autonomy, and freedom, and on the other, a popular
affection for the mechanized, predictable, algorhythmic, infinitely replicable
images of mass media. The central tension of Paik’s work operates in this liminal
space of early American media art of the 1960s and 70s, between the free gesture
of the human hand – the abstract expressionist index – and the mechanized object
of mass media representation that is television.
Paik’s response to the medium of television makes an important
counterargument to the histories that present late modernist or postmodernist art
as something that openly and straightforwardly embraced the social, commercial,
and visual space of popular or mass culture. Often these histories have
simplistically featured Andy Warhol as an uncritical mascot of mass culture, as a
poster child for postmodernism.
175
As suggested in previous chapters, Warhol’s
work, particularly in cinema (and its representations of performance), occupies a
much more ambivalent position in relation to mass culture than most people have
generally assigned to the artist’s oeuvre. The reason many art historians and
critics have disregarded this aspect of the artist’s work is that they simply have
not seen or studied the films. Paik’s work too, however enigmatic and rhetorically
mute it may have seemed, featured an alternative response to the enveloping force
of the American mediascape of the 1960s and 70s, particularly in its consideration

175
Frederic Jameson and Peter Wollen both frequently invoke the name of Warhol as a symbolic
representative of the popular tendency to blend the modernist emphasis on formal innovation with
economic strategies of replication that is typical of the period that they describe. See Peter Wollen,
“Andy Warhol: Renaissance Man” in Who Is Andy Warhol?, eds. Colin MacCabe, Peter Francis,
and Peter Wollen (Pittsburgh: British Film Institute & Andy Warhol Museum, 1997), 11–15, and
Frederic Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society” in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on
Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Port Townshend, WA: Bay Press, 1983), 111–125.

150
of the unique challenges posed by television as a technology for the dissemination
of ideas and images, and the transformation of social structures. Like Warhol,
Paik produced work across a range of media that interrogated and interacted with
the various forces and functions of mass culture and media, but did so by utilizing
somewhat more anarchic and confrontational techniques. In the work of both
artists, however, traces of noise, contingency, and handcraftedness interpenetrate
their experiments leaving philosophical markers of embodied, gestural art
practices that were entirely dependent on the unique force of human presence.
As Paik shifted his primary artistic activities from audio and performance
media to different varieties of electronic visual art in the mid 1960s, he continued
to address a number of the same conceptual concerns. In his consideration of the
relationship between changing aesthetic strategies of the mid 1960s, particularly
as they related to the relationship between music and the visual arts, he
recognized that, “Indeterminism and variability are underdeveloped parameters in
the optical arts, though they have been the central problem in music for the last
two decades.”
176
In his earlier interactive sound experiments and installations
(produced before coming to the United States) Paik had experimented with
indeterminacy on a number of occasions, though he had yet to apply such
strategies to moving image media. John Cage – the composer and artist to work
most extensively with chance processes and indeterminacy – was incredibly
influential for Paik; the artist often claimed that Cage brought him to America.

176
Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1970), 303.

151
(More literally speaking, it was in fact Jonas Mekas who secured Paik’s visa to
come to the United States.) It was Paik’s intention to translate some of Cage’s
philosophical concepts and artistic strategies into other media contexts. And his
landmark performance/film work, Zen for Film, perhaps represents his most
successful effort to coordinate the philosophical mandates of a Cagean aesthetics
with the materials of cinema.

Zen for Film:
In concert with the feverish intermedial interaction that was occurring in
the cultural landscape around him, Paik extended his practice, which had
previously focused on performance and sound art, into the realm of the visual arts,
and particularly, moving image media. Though his later filmmaking experiments
were largely collaborative, on May 8, 1964 he premiered his only single-authored
work on celluloid, titled Zen for Film. About a half-hour in length, it consists of
nothing more than a clear piece of film leader, featuring no images.
177
Its
presentations often included performance aspects as well. In one of the few
images of this work being performed, Peter Moore photographed Paik – at The
New Cinema Festival, at The Filmmaker’s Cinematheque in November of 1965 –
standing very close to the screen as the projector’s beam covered his back,
throwing the shadow of the artist’s body onto the screen. Moore also
photographed Paik lying on the floor in front of the screen as he used his finger to

177
Upon visual examination of the film object as made available in as a “Fluxkit” in the collection
of the Getty Research Institute, it is evident that the film did not feature white leader, but was
probably made from clear leader (Special Collections, Getty Research Institute).

152
cast shadow images. Various anecdotal descriptions of the work tell of Paik
improvising a series of other simple bodily actions in front of the screen, which
created shadows upon it as he moved in and out of the projector’s beam of light.
The film was sometimes accompanied by other varieties of performance, as it was
during the New Cinema Festival in November of 1965. At this event, Paik paired
two screenings of the film, one “realized by Fluxus” and one “dedicated to
Fluxus,” with his Etude Platonique, a musical piece in which the two performers
play Beethoven’s “Kreutzer Sonata” on a violin without strings and a piano
without hammers, presumably producing a mute musical performance that was
the sonic equivalent to the film projection. This combined work in sound and
image left the framing structures of both cinema and musical performance intact,
while evacuating them of content in an effort to elicit a meditation, in a Platonic
sense (suggested by the title mentioned above), on their very essences.
Though Zen for Film was occasionally realized as a combined work of
cinema and performance, it was also a provocative aesthetic intervention into the
specific aesthetic attributes of film itself: the celluloid strip that is the material
basis of Zen for Film was made without a camera, without photosensitive film,
and featured no visual images. In this regard, it presented an extended interaction
with an empty (and silent) film strip, and thus encouraged a reflective
consideration of the specific sensory experience of cinema through the evacuation
of conventional visual content. In this regard, the film (and its musical
accompaniment of Paik’s Etude Platonique) related closely to John Cage’s

153
famous 4’33” (1952) in which a pianist performed a piece of music that featured
no actual performed sound. Though it was framed as a piano performance, with
an arbitrary length of four minutes and thirty-three seconds, the work intentionally
forced the concertgoers to focus their attentions upon the other indeterminate
elements of the concert hall’s soundscape, including the audience’s creaking
chairs, coughs, and awkward, sometimes noisy, movements. (Cage himself
explicitly addressed the structural and philosophical relationship that Paik’s film
had to his work.)
178
Zen for Film contained no content other than the unplanned
visual elements that were produced by the chance interactions of dirt, lint, and
scratches on the strip of motion picture leader (and thus mirrored the open form of
Cage’s piece in which the unintentional sounds of the theater were its principal
details). The other significant component of the film’s performance experience
was the physical encounter that it staged between the projector’s beam of light
and Paik’s moving body (as shown in Peter Moore’s photograph and described in
other anecdotal renditions of the screening event).
179
In this sense, Zen for Film
was realized as a performance framed by the rectangle of light produced by the
16mm film projector. Yet, in significant ways, it was also a film artifact. It is
important, in this regard, that Zen for Film utilized the material basis of cinema as

178
See Cage’s comments on the film in “More on Paik (1982)” in John Cage, Writer: Previously
Uncollected Pieces, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (New York: Limelight Editions, 1993), 153–157.
179
Paik’s Zen for Film was very much inspired by Cage’s 4’33” (1952). Similarly, Cage greatly
admired Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased De Kooning (1953) in which the artist bought a drawing
from Willem de Kooning and then erased it, leaving only the impressions of the pencil, the traces
of the gestures. This famous piece too shares structural similarities with both Cage’s 4’33’’ and
Paik’s Zen for Film as this group of works leaves the framing vessel for the gestures intact while
evacuating it of all referential content. This was a structural similarity between their works that
was also acknowledged by Cage (Ibid.).

154
its structuring apparatus, through its incorporation of a 16mm strip of film leader.
(Other artists had staged pseudo-filmic performances, using only the projector’s
light beam, including Claes Oldenburg in his Moviehouse performance piece,
which was also featured at the New Cinema Festival of 1965). Paik’s Zen for Film
encouraged an extended reflection on the perceptual structures of cinema and the
framing apparatus of its small gauge, temporally limited technologies.
One could imagine an alternative version of Zen for Film utilizing only the
projector itself, without the 16mm film strip, but such a realization of the work
would have removed a number of its significant structuring components,
including the work’s material base, which contained its visual content (dust
particles, scratches, etc.), as well as the sound of the projector motor, the flicker
of its shutter, and most importantly, the arbitrary time limit that the film strip’s
length imposed on the structure of the performance. (These arbitrary limiting
structures were central to much of the work of Cage, as well as Warhol, who in
his film experiments, let the lengths of the works be determined by the available
length of reels of 16mm film stock.) By imposing a limit on the performance’s
time through the use of a film strip, Paik produced a work in the visual arts that
recognized the significance of temporal structure. As Paik’s mentor, John Cage,
demonstrated, there arose a tendency, following the revolutions of abstraction in
the arts, to apply arbitrary durational limits to music and performance in order to
replace the conventional limiting structures that had previously emphasized
classical, Aristotelian notions of dramatic coherence and narrative design. In

155
short, Cage’s work realized a major break from the traditional musical, literary,
and dramatic values that required cause and effect structures, dramatic
development, and harmonic transition over time. In their place, Cage and the
many artists influenced by him (who of course, included Paik), used isotropic
structures that were non-developmental and non-morphological, emphasizing
continuous duration and serial forms. In a discussion of composer Erik Satie (a
major influence on him), Cage dismisses the classical values of structure and
expressivity when he writes that artists need to “give up ideas of order,
expressions of sentiment, and all the rest of our inherited aesthetic claptrap.”
180
As
Cage acknowledged, Zen for Film stressed this non-developmental duration as a
function of both performance and reception, encouraging its viewers to recognize
the significance of time as a major determining factor in the reception of art.
181
It
functioned as a clear instantiation – literally and figuratively – of the fact that
cinema is both a plastic and a temporal art.
In his 1965 presentation of Zen for Film, Paik screened it on a program of
the New Cinema Festival, which featured works by a number of other filmmakers
and composers. For this film screening/ performance event, Paik was aided by
four other live contributors who were listed as “Charlotte Moorman, cello soloist;
Takehisa Kosugi, assisting composer; Robert Helmboldt Dunham & Linda
Sampson, assistants.”
182
In addition to a video installation of his own titled Video

180
Cage, Silence, 82.
181
For a consideration of temporality in art of the era, see Pamela M. Lee’s Chronophobia: On
Time in the Art of the 1960s (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004).
182
Program from the collection of Anthology Film Archives.

156
Tape Essay No 1 (perhaps his legendary first videotape), and his presentation of
Zen for Film, Paik included one work by filmmaker Robert Breer and two by Stan
Vanderbeek. His incorporation of these films by other artists, like that of his own
piece described above, was flexible and performative, in that the film screenings
were accompanied by live visual and sonic modifications to the film texts. His
transformation of Breer’s Fist Fight (described in the first chapter of this
dissertation) was titled Variations on a Theme by Robert Breer, and featured a
cello performance by Charlotte Moorman.
183
In some presentations of this piece,
Paik himself intervened significantly in the projection of the work, making
shadow puppets in front of the projector’s beam, and thus blocking and
transforming Breer’s original film visually as well as sonically.
184
Some images of
the work alternatively show the shadow of Moorman’s performing body as
projected against a film screen. Similarly, Paik’s presentation of Variations on a
Theme by Stan Vanderbeek also featured major modifications to the original film
imagery in which he made changes to the film through a range of visual and sonic
interventions. The program explains their interventions as follows: “Stan
Vanderbeek’s film where everything is changed by Moorman, Paik, & Sampson
and Kosugi’s ‘Anima No 2’ performed simultaneously by Kosugi.”
185
As this
screening series demonstrates, Paik was interested in breaking the textual limits of
the film frame through a variety of interruptive and transformative gestures.

183
Ibid.
184
Hanhardt, The Worlds of Nam June Paik (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 2000), 85.
185
Program from the collection of Anthology Film Archives.

157
On his program for this event, after listing the various components, he
writes:
Leitmotiv
How to make film without filming?
How to convert the film to live performing art
from “canned” art to “cooked” food?

As his program caption indicates, Paik was interested in conducting a public
experiment into the exhibition conditions of cinema, particularly as they related to
performance in what he playfully describes as a cooking of previously canned
ingredients. As Paik’s language indicates, this performative cinema practice was
playful, spontaneous, and inquisitive. In this spirit, his program includes a brief
asterisked preemptive apology at the bottom as he explains that, “If IV
[Variations on a Theme by Robert Breer] & VI [Variations on a Theme by Stan
Vanderbeek] go well, credits go to Breer & Vanderbeek, and, if bad, blame comes
to me … N J Paik.”
186

Though Zen for Film was integrally determined by the specific
characteristics of the film medium, it was also a hybrid intermedial work of both
cinema and performance, realized in a variety of exhibition contexts that might
appropriately be understood as expanded cinema.
187
Like moving image works
produced by a number of artists of the era – including Stan Vanderbeek, Anthony
McCall, and Robert Whitman – it was an intermedial project in which filmic
material was utilized as one aesthetic component of the social performance spaces

186
Ibid.
187
It was also distributed as part of a “Fluxkit” collection of various objects produced by other
Fluxus artists. In this regard, it also has another unusual history as a reproduced multiple that was
available as a saleable art object.

158
of performance art and happenings, which blended a variety of art forms and
media. Yet Zen for Film was also, as its title might suggest, a minimalist
investigation, in a manner well-suited to Fluxus sensibilities, into the most basic
essence of cinema itself. In this sense, it is a meditation on the determinant
materials of cinema, and specifically, of film projection. Though Peter Kubelka
and Tony Conrad both made films utilizing only black and white frames and
featuring no representational visual content – in Arnulf Rainer (1960) and The
Flicker (1965), respectively – Paik’s experiment should be understood as a
cinematic innovation of a largely different sort. Zen for Film was both more
austere and more playful than the works of Kubelka and Conrad. Their projects in
minimalist cinema each featured the careful and meticulous rhythmic sequencing
of black and white frames, which were entirely dependent on a rigorous and
carefully choreographed visual manipulation of sensory experience through the
uniquely and specifically filmic resource of mechanized, rhythmic montage (on
the level of twenty-four shifts per second). Paik’s work was a simpler, perhaps
less assuming investigation into the basic theatrical experience of projected light
itself as it traveled through an unmodified strip of plastic that was subject to the
indeterminate material influences of dirt and dust. In this regard, it featured a
blend of childlike simplicity and intense conceptual reflection that was typical of
the Fluxus group.
Paik’s Zen for Film was the first Fluxus film or “Fluxfilm” and thus serves
an interesting function in the creation myth of the group’s work in cinema. In its

159
absolute simplicity Paik’s cinematic intervention presents an alternative model of
filmmaking to the labor intensive, handcrafted work of the American avant-garde
as celebrated and defined, for example, by Sitney’s Visionary Film. Film curator
Bruce Jenkins reads the work as such, as he explains that the piece represented an
“oppositional stance towards mainstream and avant-garde cinemas alike.”
188

Indeed, the film exemplifies a radically evacuated work that encouraged an
embodied spectatorial encounter with boredom – in a way not dissimilar from
Warhol’s earliest experiments with the medium, in films such as Eat and Empire
– that results from its limited filmic information and the absence of dynamic
visual stimuli. This variety of encounter with the most minimal, stripped-down
film forms encourages an inescapable consciousness of the viewer’s own passing
of time. In his exemplary analysis of Warhol’s films, Stephen Koch describes this
aesthetic as one of “hypostatized quietude.”
189
He argues that in his early,
minimalist film works, Warhol “effects a complete transformation of all the
temporal modes ordinarily associated with looking at a movie. The knot of
attention is untied, and its strands are laid out before us anew.”
190
Because of the
extreme durations and minimal content that these works demonstrate, they
propose a model of film viewing that is markedly different, as Bruce Jenkins
suggests above, from both mainstream and avant-garde traditions. This cinematic
push towards viewer self-awareness and perceptual self-consciousness in the

188
Bruce Jenkins, “Flux Films in. Three False Starts” in In The Spirit of Fluxus, ed. Elizabeth
Armstrong (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1993), 137.
189
Koch, Stargazer, 39.
190
Koch, Stargazer, 39.

160
reception of the work was also perfectly congruent with the Cagean aesthetics that
had exerted such a profound influence on all of Paik’s work. In 1966, Warhol
described the strategy of his early minimalist films along similar terms, explaining
that they were intended “to help the audiences get more acquainted with
themselves. Usually, when you go to the movies, you sit in a fantasy world,” but
his early films, like that of Paik described above, were meant to provoke a
different response, in which, perhaps, “you see something that disturbs you, [and]
you get more involved with the people next to you.”
191
In the work of both
Warhol and Cage, there exists a remarkable high-modernist blending of the
energies of a hypostasized quietude (produced by extended durations and minimal
content) with the hysteria of confrontational and anarchic performance.
In a way related to Koch’s sentiments on Warhol (as well as the artist’s
own comments), Jenkins suggests in his evaluation of Paik’s work, that Zen for
Film could “both invite intensive scrutiny and elicit absolute boredom,” implying
that what many of these works shared was a desire to undermine conventional
viewing experiences through spectatorial encounters with stripped-down,
minimalist investigations into their very conditions of both filmmaking and
exhibition.
192
As George Maciunas has argued, these experiments were
influenced by other trends in the arts, and particularly, in minimalist music. These
strategies were exemplified by other Fluxus artists, including, most notably,
LaMonte Young, and thus demonstrate a perhaps differing chain of influence

191
Gretchen Berg, “Andy Warhol: My True Story” in I’ll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy
Warhol Interviews, 92.
192
Jenkins, 137.

161
from the expressive, personal painting and poetry that motivated other trends in
the American avant-garde cinema.
193
Paik’s Zen for Film, because of its embrace
of Cagean indeterminacy, its open-ended tone, and its sheer simplicity, is an
originary cinematic object for both the artist’s own filmography and that of his
Fluxus compatriots. (It also relates to the hyper-stripped-down or extremely
ambitious filmmaking that Paul Arthur described as the “first film/last film
syndrome” that includes work like Ernie Gehr’s History (1970) and Peter
Kubelka’s Arnulf Rainer.
194
) In very simple and straightforward terms, it also
reminds us that in the history of media art in the 1960s and 70s, intermedial
experiments did not always overload the senses with overwhelming stimuli. In
fact, as Paik’s Zen for Film demonstrates, these projects were sometimes simple
and playful while still being austere and rigorous. Paik’s unique experiment
incorporated formal strategies borrowed from both experimental music and
underground cinema, while provoking productive considerations of the
relationships between media within a range of art-making movements and
traditions.
In the 1964 and 1965 presentations of Zen for Film, Paik staged
encounters between performance and specifically filmic technologies. The film
events foregrounded light, unplanned sonic elements, the performer’s body, and

193
George Maciunas, “Some Comments on Structural Film by P. Adams Sitney,” Film Culture
Reader, 349.
194
Paul Arthur discusses this most ambitious strain of 1970s experimental cinema in an essay for a
forthcoming volume of writings on Harry Smith. Arthur, “The Onus of Representation: Harry
Smith, Mahagonny, and Avant-Garde Film in the 1970s” in Harry Smith: The Avant-Garde in the
American Vernacular, eds., Andrew Perchuck, Rani Singh (Getty Publications, forthcoming).

162
the chance interaction of the film apparatus and the physical space of its
projection. Though it had performative components, visually, it represented a
severe distillation of cinema into its barest essence. The work was a rather striking
allegory of the medium specific qualities that are unique to the medium. Video
artist Frank Gillette’s description of film and video media may help us to
understand the structural premise of Paik’s piece. He writes, “Part of it [video and
TV] is that you look into the source of light, with film you look with the source of
light.”
195
In Zen for Film, Paik performs the looking that Gillette describes. The
piece is a performed literalization of the medium’s specific formal and theatrical
properties.
Though Paik would spend most of his career working with video images,
his one non-collaborative gesture in celluloid was rather remarkable on a number
of counts; in short, the work served as a meaningful historical bridge between his
experiments in live performance and later work in moving image media. Though
he had been experimenting with television since 1960, shortly after the first public
presentation of Zen for Film, Paik decided to entirely shift his artistic emphasis to
its associated technologies of video recording, moving image broadcast, and
electronic signal modification. During this transition to a greater artistic emphasis
on this new medium, he famously rid his apartment of all his books and further
immersed himself in the technologies of video production, robotics, television,
and video synthesis.

195
Quoted in David Antin, “Video: The Distinctive Features of the Medium” in Video Culture: A
Critical Investigation, ed. John Hanhardt (Rochester: Visual Studies Workshop, 1986), 148.

163

Television, the Immaterial, Recording Visual Art Actions:
To explain his transformative, perhaps combative experiments with the
television medium, Paik often described himself as fighting against the medium,
as the rebellious “prisoner of the cathode ray tube.” It was his aim to challenge the
social function of television by reconfiguring technology in human terms. Paik
wrote that, in his blending of art and technology, his concern was not how “to
make another scientific toy, but how to humanize the technology and the
electronic medium.”
196
[emphasis original] In keeping with the anarchic and
destructive trends of the Fluxus sensibility, Paik assaulted television sets – with
everything from magnets to dirt – in a series of limit-testing gestures that
attempted to reconfigure how we understand the medium as an aesthetic object
and an ideologically determining cultural force. In his earliest work with
television he utilized two principal strategies: the manual modification of the
circuitry of TV sets, and the live transformation of broadcast television imagery
with a variety of handcrafted tools. These modifications to televisions sometimes
happened in real time, as the artist performed visual and sonic transformations of
their live signals using an array of devices – from the crudest, in the form of hand-
held magnets, to the most sophisticated signal modulators – that featured a wide
range of custom built signal modifying processors that he designed, both by
himself and in collaboration with engineers and scientists. In the gallery

196
Nam June Paik, accompanying brochure for “TV as a Creative Medium” exhibition at the
Howard Wise Gallery, May 17–June 14, 1969. Reprinted in Nam June Paik, Videa/Videology,
1959-1973 (Syracuse: Everson Museum of Art, 1974), 47. [emphasis original]

164
installation of these works, Paik often devised presentations that encouraged user
interface and interactivity. One example of this interactive work in modified
television sculpture is Participation TV (1963), in which Paik rebuilt and
reconfigured a television set so that it could translate audio information into an
abstract visual representation on the television screen. By plugging a microphone
into an electronically modified television set, the gallery attendee could have his
or her words and sounds converted into an abstract televisual equivalent. Like his
sound experiments, these works promoted an interaction within gallery spaces
that was markedly dissimilar from the one-way transmission that was typical of
the information flow from corporate television conglomerates to private homes.
In 1965, Paik famously bought his first Sony Portapak video recording
device and began making original tapes. This technological development allowed
him to actually produce his own original audio-visual material, and as such, was
something of a revelation for the artist. In a way that foreshadowed some of the
more naïve utopian sentiments expressed in present day literature on new media
and interactivity, Paik felt that the public’s capacity to generate its own content
represented a kind of revolution in the means of production. He frequently
described the technological novelty of video as a means of self-defense against
the televisual institution: “Television has been attacking us all our lives. Now we
can attack it back.”
197
Like many early practitioners of video art, Paik felt that
broadcast television was a medium of control that allowed little space for creative

197
Paik quoted in Youngblood, Expanded Cinema, 302.

165
use. With video, Paik could now work in the language of television but, in a way
that allowed him to produce his own original material, using cameras and later,
image processors. The video equipment allowed him to actually record content –
from either television or the phenomenal world – that he could then reconfigure in
his performances and installations. However, in its early days, the technology of
consumer video was famously inflexible, in that it lacked color, was difficult to
edit, had a washed out appearance, and could not yet allow an artist such as Paik
to capture his image processing on videotape. In filmmaker Jud Yalkut, Paik
encountered a visual artist with whom he could collaborate on a truly unique
blend of hybrid works that incorporated the visual possibilities of television,
video, and film. They described their hybrid intermedial experiments as
“videofilms.”
The year after Paik debuted Zen for Film, the artist had his first two
American solo art openings, both of which were held in New York. The first was
titled “Cybernetics, Art, and Music” and took place at the New School for Social
Research. Galeria Bonino hosted the artist’s second one-man show, titled simply
“Electronic Art,” that marked his complete shift to a new singular medium of
choice, the modified television set. In his review of the exhibition, the New York
Times’ staff art critic John Canaday described its contents as follows:
Mr. Paik is exhibiting a dozen or so TV sets, each one violated by its own
electronic attachment to deform the image beyond anything you can
imagine, no matter how bad your reception is. Mr. Paik is in constant
attendance at his show, to demonstrate the operation of these attachments.
[…] The screen becomes a field of operation for totally abstract images.

166
[…] The TV sets can be “played” as one would play a musical instrument
if music were light.
198

As Canaday’s description suggests, Paik’s modifications to the television signal
involved the use of a number of interactive, performative devices to control and
modulate its content. In much of his work in this period Paik performed live,
ephemeral, performative modifications to the live television transmission itself.
Through his encounter with the underground filmmaker, Jud Yalkut, Paik found a
way to document his real-time plastic performances upon the television image in
which he played the set “as one would play a musical instrument.”
199

Jud Yalkut attended Paik’s 1965 exhibition at the Galeria Bonino. When
they met, the two visual artists discussed the possibility of Yalkut filming Paik’s
modified TV sets with his 16mm camera. Upon his return visits to the show,
Yalkut filmed a number of the artist’s television manipulations. These first filmed
documents of Paik’s performances and installations became the raw material for a
number of their later collaborations. Before Paik’s encounter with Yalkut, all of
his work with television had been ephemeral, in that he produced either live, real-
time manipulations of broadcast television (or more recently, with the acquisition
of his Sony Portapak, recorded programs) or automated, prepared television
sculptures with modified internal wiring, both of which, depended exclusively on
the found imagery of live broadcast. Now, with Yalkut filming Paik’s television
modifications, it became possible to record its ephemeral imagery and produce an

198
John Canaday, “Paik’s TV Sets on View at Galeria Bonino,” New York Times, December 4,
1965: 27.
199
Ibid.

167
encounter between the two media that opened up a range of creative possibilities
not previously available to either medium independently.
When he met Paik, Yalkut was fairly new to 16mm filmmaking, having
gotten his first camera only a year earlier. However, he had previous experience
in 8mm, and early in 1965 started working regularly with USCO – an intermedial
artists’ collective in upstate New York – as their in-house filmmaker. The group
emphasized collective authorship, as its name – USCO, as in “a company of us” –
suggests. A countercultural arts commune, USCO represented a utopian spirit in
media that intended to use new technologies for the benefit of both social and
psychic transformation. Their works emphasized the integration of various media
forms into happenings, group performance, and social actions. A number of
Yalkut’s early films documented the collective socio-cultural experiments of this
group, including Us Down By The Riverside (1966) (which shows a group exhibit
at the Riverside Museum in New York) and Aquarian Rushes (1969-70) (which
witnesses USCO’s involvement with the Woodstock Festival of Music and Art, as
represented in more aggressively psychedelic terms than the well known
theatrically released, commercial documentary of the event). Some of Yalkut’s
other early films provided material to be integrated visually into the group’s
intermedial events, including Diffraction Film (1965) and D. M. T. (1966), which
showcase the lightshows of Gerd Stern, the poetry of Timothy Leary, and the
artistic contributions of other members of the collective. Yalkut’s experimental
visual sensibility blended distinctively with a desire to document the most urgent

168
social and artistic experiments of his era. Effectively, Yalkut was as an amateur
filmmaker whose cultural associations and social network provided him the
opportunity to become a kind of psychedelic documentarian. Working within the
visual culture of American psychedelia, he devised a set of fluid and expressive
visual techniques for 16mm film that reflected an interest in kinesthetic
experience, multi-layered superimposition, and swirling abstraction.
In Paik’s work Yalkut encountered two significant resources to augment
his alternative media practice, one of which was plastic and one ideological. Paik
presented electronic manipulations of broadcast imagery that were a televisual
equivalent to the psychedelic visual culture of underground film and light shows,
as well as a fresh and provocative symbolic, perhaps political, intervention into
the mediascape of 1960s America. What Yalkut provided for Paik was knowledge
of a medium that could capture the television artist’s ephemeral, real-time
modifications of the broadcast images of mass media, and modify them through
the significantly more agile visual resources of film. Formally speaking, at that
point in the historical interaction of the two audio-visual media, film was more
flexible than video: it had the capacity for a greater visual plasticity, a more
luminous color palette, a much larger scale in projection, and a more significant
structural flexibility, which was offered by the medium’s unique capacity for
montage. In their collaborations the two artists documented Paik’s original
modifications to the televisual signal and reconfigured them by using the versatile
audio-visual post-production technologies of film.

169
Yalkut explained their collaboration:
In these early color TV pieces with Paik, he was transforming the video
signal through various means, either rewiring the circuits, or throwing in
electromagnetic interference, and destroying the video sync signal in the
process. I was discovering ways to capture these images on film, since
they could not be recorded on video, and then reworking these images
through film editing into final pieces.
200

By transforming television imagery into filmic materials – sometimes from live
broadcast, sometimes from pre-recorded videotapes – Yalkut and Paik were able
to document a wide variety of real time image processing transformations. After
these acts of image modulation were transcribed onto film, they could then be
resequenced and reorganized with the tools of film and sound editing. Most
importantly, by repurposing the content of television, and engaging directly with
the language of mainstream visual culture, Paik and Yalkut were able to utilize
visual resources that were largely untapped by experimental filmmakers.
Traditionally, people working in the medium of celluloid had been largely reliant
on either live action motion picture photography or animation, rather than on the
electronic, disembodied, and immaterial signal of broadcast television. Paik and
Yalkut staged a unique and historically significant encounter between old and
new media that responded directly to a number of other contemporaneous
transformations in cultural practice. They addressed the popularization of the
psychedelic sensibility within the countercultural movement, as well as new
strategies of “dematerialized art,” while developing a filmmaking practice that

200
Sabrina Gschwandtner, “Between Film and Video – the Intermedia Art of Jud Yalkut: An
Interview with Jud Yalkut,” Millennium Film Journal 42 (Fall 2004), 75.

170
extended its network of practitioners, materials, and aesthetic strategies beyond
the clique of the New York film underground.
In their fluid interaction of elements derived from television, music, video,
and film, the videofilms of Paik and Yalkut embody an effort to overcome
conventional limits between media forms through an organic and integrated
audio-visual language. In addition, the works had entirely elastic exhibition
histories, being included in performances by Paik and cellist Charlotte Moorman,
multi-media happenings by USCO, various musical and semi-theatrical events, as
well as more conventional theatrical film screenings. The flexibility of the
exhibition parameters of these works is also demonstrated by the fact that most of
them are currently available for theatrical and institutional exhibition on both
16mm film and video, a situation that is extremely rare – if not entirely unique –
for moving image art. In addition, these works are rather unusual because, despite
the fame that Nam June Paik has gained as the father of video art, there is little-to-
no published critical writing about these video-film collaborations. In her critique
of the myth-making trajectory of the dominant histories of the video medium,
artist Martha Rosler writes, “At the head of virtually every video history is the
name Nam June Paik.”
201
Yet, strangely enough, because of the intermedial status
of the Paik-Yalkut collaborations, the works that they created together are largely
absent from the dominant histories of both video art and experimental film.

201
Martha Rosler, “Video: Shedding the Utopian Moment” in Illuminating Video, eds. Doug Hall,
Sally Jo Fifer (New York: Aperture, 1990), 44.

171
Overall, the videofilms of Paik and Yalkut range significantly in tone and
sensibility, from a rigorous and delicate impressionistic abstraction – a kind of
televisual evocation of a visual language like that of Stan Brakhage or Bruce
Baillie – to a more straightforward recontextualization of TV content that is closer
to Pop Art. Electronic Moon #2 (1969) and Electronic Yoga (1972) represent the
lyrical, expressive register of their collaborations by presenting atmospheric
psychedelic works that feature sweeping blends and abstract ribbons of television
imagery, as well as figurative content that shifts in and out of visual legibility.
These works encourage a reflective and meditative sensuality that relates to the
embodied reflection of Zen for Film. The sensuous repurposing of the televisual
signal that is performed by Paik and Yalkut is significantly closer to the aesthetic
sensibility of abstract, lyrical filmmaking than it is to the content of its originary
broadcast technology, and thus represents an unlikely conversion of the most
common and banal imagery of mid-century mass culture into an artistic register
that is significantly more precious and expressive. The two films described above
share a basic abstract iconography and an aesthetic sensibility with both the
psychedelic underground cinema and the lyrical, expressive cinema of the lineage
of so-called “lyrical” avant-garde film. However, Paik and Yalkut also produced
collaborative works that, in ways that were less fluid and expressive, more
directly interrogated the social and cultural basis of the televisual image.

172
Waiting for Commercials:
Plato thought the word, or the conceptual, expresses the deepest thing.
St. Augustine thought the sound, or the audible, expresses the deepest
thing.
Spinoza thought the vision, or the visible, expresses the deepest thing.
This argument is settled for good.
TV commercials have all three.
–Nam June Paik
202

In its shift in cultural reference and rhetorical tone from the more
impressionistic works described above, Waiting for Commercials (1972)
showcases an entirely different type of rhetorical interaction with both the popular
and intellectual culture of the era; it might be best described, following the
quotation above, as ironic. The seven minute film moves back and forth between
Paik’s trademark electromagnetic modifications of a televised lecture by Marshall
McLuhan and entire, unaltered Japanese television commercials. In a sense,
Waiting for Commercials is an intermedial experiment that serves as both a new
media manifesto and an evidentiary demonstration of television’s global
proliferation. Paik’s choice to foreground recorded material featuring media
spokesperson Marshall McLuhan was far from casual. In fact this selection draws
the viewer’s attention directly to the philosophical goals of the project and
highlights its relationship to the intellectual trends of its day.
In its transformation of a range of audio-visual materials, the intermedial
production process of Waiting for Commercials was rather elaborate. Before Paik
could perform any visual, transformative treatment to the footage of McLuhan,

202
Paik, Videa ‘n’ Videology, 49.

173
Yalkut carefully edited and resequenced a 16mm film transcription of a BBC
program in order to foreground the public intellectual’s most appropriate and
well-known sound bytes. Then the artists projected the work and Paik videotaped
the projection of this edited filmic version of McLuhan’s television presentation.
Paik then played this videotape on a monitor, and using his trademark
electromagnetic distortions, directly modified and distorted its imagery in
playback. These real-time transformations were captured by Yalkut on 16mm film
and analogue audiotape, and then edited together with the unaltered Japanese
advertisements that comprise the film’s other component. In the complex
intermedial conversions of this film’s production process, the artists performed an
intricate shuttling between media that directly demonstrates the differing artistic
and technical capabilities of film and video. However, in its deliberate
incorporation of materials that both directly address and represent the social and
economic functions of television technologies, the work considers the specific
ideological function of this medium as a mediating device for the dissemination of
international capitalism.
Through their repositioning and repurposing of broadcast footage of
McLuhan’s famous media proclamations, Paik and Yalkut place the new media
spokesperson in the position of an unknowing narrator for their work. At the very
beginning of Waiting for Commercials McLuhan enigmatically proclaims that
“TV is an X-ray.” The artists were fascinated by McLuhan’s hugely popular and
influential ideas – as was the USCO group in general – particularly his claims that

174
new technologies (including television) were transforming consciousness in rather
extreme ways. In a sense, a number of the Paik/Yalkut intermedial collaborations
were artistic experiments designed to test McLuhan’s specific theories concerning
the interactions of media forms in the television age; Waiting for Commercials
was the most direct in its demonstration of this reference. Though his popularity
may have waned somewhat since the 1960s, McLuhan’s had an influence on the
popular sensibilities and artistic strategies of his age that was unmatched by any
other intellectual authority of the era. Strangely enough, there has been little
recognition of his influence on experimental film and intermedial practices of the
1960s.
Paik had directly referenced McLuhan earlier in his career in a prepared
television piece that included his name as part of its enigmatic title; the piece
featured a mathematical equation as its title (and also included the names of Cage
and Norbert Wiener in the place of conventional algebraic symbols).
203
In its
repurposing of footage of McLuhan, Waiting for Commercials more directly
draws the viewer’s attention to the specific ways in which his thinking penetrated
Paik’s work, particularly in terms of the artist’s own blends of different media
forms. In his writing in Understanding Media (1964), McLuhan addresses the
ways in which encounters between media became moments of powerful artistic,
social, and psychic transformation. He argued that the meeting of two media can
call our attention to their specific, independent properties as well as their

203
This work appeared in the aforementioned “Electronic Art” exhibition, held at the Galeria
Bonino in 1965.

175
capacities to work together to create new forms. He writes, “The hybrid or the
meeting of two media is a moment of truth and revelation from which new form is
born.”
204
To McLuhan, hybrid media projects functioned as limit-testing
experiments capable of challenging the established social and experiential
patterns of perception and thought. Interestingly, Yalkut explained his
collaboration with Paik in precisely such terms:
I was very much into the McLuhanistic idea that you can isolate the effect
of the media from the content of media, and often from the package. So
you get inside a television set and you film what’s going on and you
transmute it through editing, superimposition, and any other filmic
experience. […] You make use of the imperfections of the medium and
you become more aware of what the limits of the medium are. I use the
limit of the medium to define it.
205

In some ways, all the Paik/Yalkut experiments in television, video, and film are
direct and conscious attempts to demonstrate McLuhan’s theories concerning the
aesthetic, social, and philosophical possibilities of intermedial encounters.
Waiting for Commercials is perhaps their most rhetorically direct effort to
philosophically interrogate the cultural and historical functions of these media
through an experiment in artistic practice.
In an openly self-referential gesture, Waiting for Commercials includes a
segment in which McLuhan explains his theory that the content of any new
medium is that which it displaces. In their promiscuous exchanges between the
forms of film and video, Paik and Yalkut engage McLuhan’s thesis concerning
the ways in which new media forms remediate the concerns of older ones.

204
McLuhan, Understanding Media, 55.
205
Quoted in Seth Thompson, “Jud Yalkut: A Video Beachcomber,” Afterimage 32, no. 2
(September/October 2004), 8.

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However, there is a sense in which their film-video image exchanges in fact
contradict McLuhan’s media teleology: More often than not, the content of their
film collaborations is in fact not the media that film replaced and remediated
(which were theater, the novel, and radio), but video, the one that would later
replace film. In this regard, because of film’s greater plasticity and durability,
Yalkut’s celluloid documentations of Paik’s gestural modifications of the
television signal form a moving image repository of the artist’s real-time
performances with television, before video provided a reliable and visually
adequate storage format.
206

Like the other works described in this chapter, Waiting for Commercials
features the elaborate conversion of pre-recorded television footage into abstract
shapes and ribbons of televisual noise. Interestingly, however, the film juxtaposes
these blasts of visual plasticity (which feature the radically modified talking head
of Marshall McLuhan) with complete, unedited Japanese commercials for
products like Pepsi-Cola and Nestle Goldblend instant coffee. (Before they had
been incorporated into the work, the commercials (on celluloid) had been

206
In this regard, Yalkut’s film documentation of Paik’s experiments shares a common historical
function to Warhol’s film Outer and Inner Space (1965) in which he used the apparatus of 16mm
film to record his experiments with the new video technologies of Norelco, open-reel, ½ inch
video. In fact, because of the obsolescence and obscurity of these early video technologies,
Warhol’s original video materials are no longer watchable. They can only be experienced through
their happenstance preservation through the much older medium of photosensitive film. This
example also poses an interesting challenge to McLuhan’s teleological, media determinism. Both
cases demonstrate that older media often provide much more reliable archival possibilities than
newer, less tested technologies, and in this regard, complicate the technophilia of McLuhan and
other varieties of naïve new media euphoria.

177
purchased by Paik, along with their rights for use.)
207
In Waiting for Commercials
these advertising vignettes are left intact and unmodified, functioning as found
media bracketed by plastically modified presentations of Marshall McLuhan’s
spoken presentations.
The last two advertisements in the film present the same line of Japanese
women’s clothing. The first ad for this brand features a number of women who
masquerade and dance in outfits that resemble the typical garb of the female love
interest in a 60s-era James Bond film. Their go-go dance routines are tightly
choreographed and spotlight a central trope in which the dancers’ outfits all
simultaneously change color – in a flash of profilmic special effects derived from
the originary stop-replacement techniques of early silent cinema – into new
ensembles of matching hue. The song that accompanies the visual fantasy of the
advertisement has the up-tempo lilt and melodic signification of musical
underscore from an action film of the era. In the Japanese song’s chorus, one
word is emphasized, as all the performers exuberantly sing, simultaneously, and
in English, “Coordinate!” The refrain repeats a number of times and the
commercial’s dynamic color and fanciful use of space blend with animated,
colored, geometric shapes and a cartoon depiction of a Samurai (a ridiculous
symbolic distillation of Japanese identity). After another Paikean transformation
of Marshall McLuhan, a second advertisement for this Japanese clothing line

207
“As far as Waiting for Commercials, Paik had purchased the right to use several of these ads
from Japanese television and he had used them in other video pieces and manifestations later”
(Author’s email communication with Yalkut, December 8, 2008).

178
follows. In it the women are now carrying tommy guns, and again their clothes
spontaneously transform both style and color spontaneously. After some dancing,
they then grow animated butterfly wings, as the visuals fluidly blend live action
photography with animation. The entire mise-en-scene of the commercial then
shifts to a wildly colorful cartoon as fuzz soaked guitars overwhelm the
soundtrack in a psychedelic bubblegum phantasmagoria of dancing go-go girls,
gangster film iconography, and hippie era butterfly patterns.
The commercials function multivalently by illustrating the theoretical
content which abuts them – by incorporating an outrageous televisual dynamism –
and simultaneously demarcating a strikingly divergent language of representation
from that employed by Paik and Yalkut. Most significantly, perhaps, because of
the fact that they are Japanese commercials, they express the global penetration of
Western codes of audio-visual marketing as described by McLuhan. However,
they do so with a different philosophical emphasis, one less concerned with the
international movement of capital, than with the power of information to travel
instantaneously through new media channels. In one of his most utopian and
heavily quoted statements from the period, McLuhan famously claimed that new
media forms (including, most significantly, television) were effectively
transcending geographic distances and national borders because of the rapid and
efficient proliferation of their broadcast technologies. In 1964, he wrote, “As
electrically contracted, the globe is not more than a village.”
208
And throughout

208
McLuhan, Understanding Media, 5.

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the era, “the global village” became a massively popular McLuhan-derived
catchphrase, which expressed both the proliferation of communications
technologies and a universalist sensibility that differed markedly from the
isolationist attitudes of the 1950s. Yalkut has explained how the work addressed
the language of television as both consumerist and universal, forming “a comment
on both commercialism and how it spanned the world and McLuhan's ideas about
the global village.”
209
Though the notion that a “global village” was created by
new media was one of McLuhan’s most popular ideas (because of its
compatibility with the countercultural ethos of the age), it was also a dangerously
naïve supposition. McLuhan wrongly assumed that the global proliferation of
media would bring people together into some kind of tribal intimacy in a “family
of man.” In fact, as Paik and Yalkut suggest by example (in their juxtaposition of
McLuhan’s most ambitious pronouncements with the most banal and ridiculous
television imagery), the global reach of media has always functioned primarily to
extend the powers of commercialism through the most flashy, forceful, and
visually distracting modes of communication.
This juxtaposition of a fluid, abstract visual palette with the visual
language of television advertising forms a strange, perhaps playful, but tonally
ambiguous bricolage of mixed forms. In a sense, Paik’s real-time, hand crafted,
abstract, gestural distortions of Marshall McLuhan’s television image visually
evoke an aesthetic sensibility that relates to the non-figurative and spontaneous

209
Author’s email correspondence with Yalkut, December 8, 2008.

180
painterly actions of Abstract Expressionism, while the film’s incorporation of the
readymade objects of television advertising represents an artistic strategy that is
more closely aligned with the commercial sheen of Pop Art. This internal
dissonance and audio-visual heterogeneity encourage an awareness of the
differing cultural registers that the work references. Interestingly, these sources
also comment on the specificities of the various media that are at play. Though
the commercials were in fact produced for television broadcast, they were made
on film, and remain so. In this sense, Paik acts as a kind of film curator, selecting
the advertising elements that are included in the work, in unaltered form. In fact,
though they are included alongside of Paik’s electromagnetic transformations of
television transcriptions, the unmodified commercials feature no video generation
and thus represent a moment in which the content of television was quite literally,
film.
Like Andy Warhol’s film, Soap Opera, (1964), in which the artist
juxtaposes silent vignettes of exaggerated emotional drama, performed by the
factory “superstars,” with the most banal mass-produced television commercials
(produced on film by Lester Persky) for a “roto-boiler,” “beauty set shampoo,”
and “ice-blue secret deodorant,” Waiting for Commercials utilizes these
commercials as readymade found objects. Waiting for Commercials, like Soap
Opera, resituates these commercial texts within the space of audio-visual media
art, using a strategy that differs significantly from the collagic methods of
integration and formal blending that would prove more popular in avant-garde

181
film of the coming decade. Instead of assimilating these chunks of commercial
imagery into the fluid space of experimental media they leave them whole and
intact, allowing them to glare at us with their overwrought visual and rhetorical
excesses. In this regard, Paik and Yalkut’s film, like Warhol’s, draws our
attention to its constituent components; it reminds us of precisely what it is that
television does. Rather than camouflaging television advertising within a diffused,
overlapping media space – as a number of collagists and visual artists had in the
post World War II period, including Robert Rauschenberg and Tom Wesselman –
these films draw the viewer’s attention to the specific idiosyncrasies of two
markedly different visual languages, one rooted in gestural abstraction and the
other based on an easily legible commercial iconicity. The film’s framing
structure, which utilizes a side-by-side juxtaposition of contradictory artistic
strategies, isolates and exemplifies the strange audio-visual excesses of global
television advertising, at a moment when its capacity to exert social influence, by
using the resources of entertainment, was becoming increasingly more obvious.

Beatles Electroniques:
Made roughly three years before Waiting for Commercials, Beatles
Electroniques (1966-69) is in some ways a more formally and philosophically
dramatic intervention into the ecologies of televisual materials. For its base
materials the work used filmed footage of live television broadcasts
(photographed off of the TV screen) and prerecorded video footage – as

182
transformed drastically by Paik and Yalkut – of the Beatles in performance (on
The Ed Sullivan Show) and acting on film (in A Hard Day’s Night (1964)). (The
raw television materials of Beatles Electroniques were likely taken from some of
the earliest examples of Paik’s work that Yalkut shot.) As Gene Youngblood
explains, the film was made using “live broadcasts of the Beatles while Paik
electromagnetically improvised distortions on the receiver, and also from
videotaped material produced during a series of experiments with filming off the
monitor of a Sony videotape recorder.”
210
The television footage was originally
black and white, but through his use of magnets and other signal processing
devices, Paik transformed this grainy broadcast footage into abstract colored
ribbons and waves of spectral electric light. Only three minutes long, the film is a
dramatic study into television’s mode of address and the role that the medium
plays in constructing the social function of celebrity.
In the film’s post-production modifications, Yalkut added layers of filmic
superimpositions such that multiple, overlapping planes of both black & white
and color interact with each other throughout the work. The faces of the band
members are only discernible for extremely brief moments, since they have been
forcibly distorted and transformed by the work’s televisual, videographic, and
filmic manipulations. Similarly, the soundtrack to the film is a largely abstract
mélange of music that, though clearly derived from popular sources, is
indiscernible as such. The repetitive and rhythmic soundtrack was composed by

210
Youngblood, 330.

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Ken Werner using methods related to those that were employed by the filmmakers
in their radical reconfiguration of its visual content. The composer transformed
selected, brief fragments of the Beatles’ pre-recorded music by altering their
speed and distorting their sound. In this regard, he treated the original sonic
source material as musique concret or found sound to be experienced abstractly
and texturally, in a way that disavowed or undermined its melodic energy, cultural
familiarity, and sonic legibility. Primarily utilizing the tools of sound editing to
produce this breakdown of meaning, Werner changed the significatory function of
this music in a way similar to other contemporaneous experiments in sound art
and experimental music.
211
As a result, when one listens to the soundtrack it is not
obvious that the piece is in fact composed exclusively of four repeated, looped
musical fragments from the Beatles’ discography. Therefore, the film’s sonic and
visual components both utilize a variety of creative strategies and technological
tools to distort and disguise well-known cultural content derived from the mass
media in order to transmute it into unrecognizable noise.
Beatles Electroniques exemplifies a disruptive model of audio-visual
image production that directly interrogates the technologies and ideological
functions of mass media. By aggressively reconfiguring the most familiar
signifiers of popular culture, Paik and Yalkut perform a modification of
mainstream audio-visual culture using the tools and creative strategies of the
avant-garde. Recently, in a book that reflects on a variety of transgressive and

211
In this sense, the soundtrack resembles the tape experiments of a number of minimalist
composers, including Steve Reich, whose pieces, “It’s Gonna Rain” (1965) and “Come Out”
(1966) similarly reconfigure human speech into abstract rhythmic and textural patterns.

184
transformative uses of television within art and culture, art historian David Joselit
has argued that this disruptive sensibility is Nam June Paik’s major
accomplishment within media of the television age. He writes that Paik’s
“fundamental contribution was the invention of formal models for disrupting
image ecologies.”
212
Images in mass media are trafficked for specific social and
material functions, within ecologies and economies that depend on their capacity
to accrue cultural value and capital. It is the smooth and direct iconicity of
television advertising that cues viewers to associate specific material symbols (the
Coca-Cola logo, or a clean, shiny countertop) with abstract emotional sensations
(happiness, comfort, etc.). Paik’s intervention into television’s flow of
information and image, like the most provocative media art of the period, was
fundamentally disruptive. What the artist pioneered, again in Joselit’s words, were
“malignant procedures by which a video signal was distorted or degraded into
mere ‘noise.’”
213
These antagonistic, aggressive, and disruptive strategies were
central to the most urgent and significant experimental media art of the era; Paik’s
work symbolically enacts one of the most powerful versions of this practice.
Gene Youngblood described the film as “an eerie portrait of the Beatles
not as pop stars but rather as entities that exist solely in the world of electronic
media.”
214
In this sense Beatles Electroniques is an experimental investigation
into the processes of televisual mediation and the means by which contemporary
communication technologies attempt to transmit the unique auras of star

212
David Joselit, Feedback: Television Against Democracy (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), 48.
213
Ibid.
214
Youngblood, 330.

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personalities and icons across the reproductive circuits of mass media. Like Andy
Warhol’s silkscreen portraits of Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley, Paik and
Yalkut’s film breaks down these pop culture symbols, these signifiers of absolute
uniqueness, into their underlying material basis – as mediated representations – of
electronic dots and scanning lines. In his modification of the technology and
content of the television signal Paik devised specialized techniques and tools that
would allow him to intervene into the electronic, audio-visual system of
television, by transforming its broadcast signal, something that he considered to
be “the most variable optical and semantical event” of the era.
215

Though much of the media art of the 1960s, including those works
described above, was entirely congruent with the ideas and language of
McLuhan’s influential thought, there were occasional points of disjunction in this
exchange of artistic and intellectual energies. Marshall McLuhan famously
claimed that “the ‘content’ of any medium is always another medium.”
216
It was
McLuhan’s argument that this transformation of one medium into the content of
another produced a teleological media history in which radio replaced the written
word, film replaced radio, television replaced film, etc. He argued that because of
their continuously evolving, specifically technological natures, all media are in a
continual process of reconstituting past forms through progressively newer and
faster communication technologies. For example, of early film, he writes, “The

215
Paik, Videa ‘n’ Videology, 5–6.
216
McLuhan, Understanding Media, 8.

186
content of a movie is a novel or a play or an opera.”
217
However, these works by
Paik and Yalkut represent active attempts to undo this linear and deterministic
pattern of media transformation by inscribing forceful critiques of television with
the materials of cinema. Like Andy Warhol’s Outer and Inner Space (1965), a
work that preserved the artist’s earliest experiments in videotape through the use
of film (the more physically stable of the two formats), these works used the
plastic materials of an older medium to unhinge the significatory potential of a
much younger mode of representation. In this sense, these film artists remediated
the technologies of what was then “new media” using the artistic resources of old
media forms. These inversions of McLuhan’s media teleology were also
aggressive attempts to rewire and scramble the patterns of television and its
forward march of ever faster, more efficient blends of commerce, technology, and
distraction into knots of cultural feedback and disturbance. The experiments in
television, film, and performance of Aldo Tambellini, perfectly encapsulate
another example of this willfully distressed and anxious interaction of these
technologies and their associated cultural connotations.

The Electromedia of Aldo Tambellini:
Though Nam June Paik was an innovator in the use of television as a
resource for art and experimental film, he was not alone in this endeavor. One of
the first artworks to incorporate a television image was a collage produced in the

217
Ibid., 18.

187
previous decade by the British artist, Richard Hamilton, which directly referenced
the contemporary languages of visual and text advertising in Just what is it that
makes today’s homes so different, so appealing? (1956). Such works were early
indicators of the expanding influence of television within the aesthetic register of
fine art. In the 1960s a number of other artists responded to the rapidly expanding
presence of television in all aspects of life; some artists, including Rauschenberg
and Warhol, responded to the media in their painterly work as well as their
performance and media projects, while others developed new forms that directly
utilized the concrete structure of the television set itself.
The first large scale public recognition of television’s significance as a
concrete medium for fine art was the pioneering exhibit “TV as a Creative
Medium,” held in May 1969 at the Howard Wise gallery in New York City. The
show featured work by twelve artists, many of whom, including Frank Gillette,
Ira Schneider, Eric Siegel, and Nam June Paik, used modified television sets as
their principal medium. In much of their work, these artists devised novel ways of
rebuilding and restructuring television sets and their signals, utilizing modified
cathode ray tubes, closed circuit video cameras, or the new technologies of
videotape. In this early stage of television art, many artists converted the flow of
the television signal from a representational figurative form of information and
entertainment into abstract, sometimes psychedelic visual patterns. Aldo
Tambellini, another New York based media artist, whose work was also exhibited
in the show, similarly spanned television, film, and performance. The shared

188
presence of Paik and Tambellini in this exhibit marks them as vanguard
innovators in the early history of television based art. But, there are a number of
other significant traits that their work shared, as it evidenced new strategies for
creating hybrid forms of electronic and film materials that interrogated the limits
between fine art and mass cultural forms. In the process of repurposing television
and other industrial, commercial materials, these artists questioned the limits
between forms of media – as well as strategies of authorship – while also
challenging the era’s prevailing attitudes concerning the interaction of avant-
garde and kitsch products within the mediascape of the 1960s. Most importantly,
by openly engaging with television, in their hybrid uses of both filmic and
televisual materials these artists juxtaposed and intermingled the tools and artistic
strategies of these media in ways that challenged the dominant cultural values of
the experimental filmmakers’ community in the period.
Though a number of filmmakers included assorted images from television
in their work, few were as rigorous or forceful in their efforts to transform the
medium’s electronic signal into a potential resource for artistic filmic
experimentation as Paik and Yalkut. Most experimental filmmakers of this era
were simply not interested in providing a direct commentary upon, or intervention
into, the televisual mediascape of the era.
218
Paik, Yalkut, and Tambellini, on the

218
Though a number of contemporaneous experimental filmmakers did incorporate television
material within their films – generally photographing this material directly off of television
screens – they generally did so sparingly. Consider, for example, uses of television imagery in
Bruce Baillie’s Mass for the Dakota Sioux (1963–64) and Stan Brakhage’s 23
rd
Psalm Branch
(1966/1978). A substantially more thorough incorporation of television materials can be found in
Peter Mays’ Death of the Gorilla (1964).

189
other hand, considered the relationship between media to be a fluid one in which
elements of electronic media, music, film, and performance could be productively
integrated into the shared social spaces of avant-garde art-making and
countercultural actions with the intention of producing an event that was greater
in scope and impression than the sum of its parts. In their efforts to pioneer, not
only new formal relations between the arts, but fresh social structures as well,
these artists often incorporated their media works into happenings and group
performance environments.
Throughout the 1960s Tambellini was the director of a number of
experimental art collectives and theatrical venues for the exhibition of new forms
of media art. In 1959, he founded The Group Center, a collective that encouraged
interaction between a range of artists working in a number of different media
forms and traditions (like USCO, the arts collective with which Yalkut was
associated, and with which Tambellini toured in the traveling exhibition
Intermedia ‘68). In addition to his experiments in multi-media forms, Tambellini
also operated a film screening venue, The Gate Theatre, as an experimental
exhibition space on 2
nd
Avenue, in New York City that was extraordinary for its
continuous around-the-clock screenings of avant-garde film, as well as
lecture/screenings (such as the “Psychedelia Tune-In” in 1966, and “Erotica
Neuratica”) and experimental theater (from members of the Theater of the
Ridiculous and the Living Theatre). Upstairs from The Gate Theatre, in the same
building, Tambellini and collaborator, Otto Piene, established the Black Gate in

190
1967, a striking and unusual experimental art venue that was painted entirely
black with no built-in lighting or seating in order to facilitate the presentation of
“electromedia art” and live media forms. Some of the events at this venue
featured performances utilizing video elements by artists such as Nam June Paik
and Charlotte Moorman, USCO (with Gerd Stern and Jud Yalkut), as well as
experimental theater/group performance by Yayoi Kusama. Tambellini also
directed his own multi-media events at the Black Gate and organized group
protests and social events related to the activities and spaces of his theatrical
venues.
219

Tambellini’s efforts to transform the social contexts for art-making in the
period were related to the collective authorial strategies of USCO, the radical
process-based works of Fluxus, and more specifically, the collaborative
multidisciplinary strategies of Paik and Yalkut, all of which emphasized the
drastic repurposing of contemporary communication technologies for artistic
purposes and socio-political commentary. These efforts demonstrated a shared
interest in challenging a model of artistic production that privileged the single-
authored, expressive works, produced in clearly defined singular media – e.g.
Abstract Expressionist painting – as celebrated by the most established modernist
critics. Tambellini’s efforts spanned a range of technologies and cultural practices
including television, video, film, live music, light shows, and performance.

219
Some of these career details are outlined in Aldo Tambellini, “A Syracuse Rebel in New York”
in Captured: A Film/Video History of the Lower East Side, ed. Clayton Patterson (New York: 7
Stories Press, 2005), 41–56. Others were gathered from conversation with the author on December
29, 2008.

191
Though many artists of this multi-media community drew openly from the
materials of popular music and mass culture – in a sense closely related to
Warhol’s Pop Art aesthetics – Tambellini’s multi-media projects, including Black
Zero (a semi-theatrical project that featured live music, dance, video, projected
light and film) were more directly oppositional and aggressively antagonistic
towards the conventionalized pleasures and commercial standards of
entertainment. He described these events as “not theater, not happenings, but a
clash between a variety of specific art forms.” Tambellini was perhaps the only
artist of this milieu to incorporate live avant-garde jazz rather than rock and roll as
the principal musical component of his multi-media presentations.
220

In his earliest film work, Tambellini, like a number of other artists in the
era, including Robert Whitman, Robert Rauschenberg, E.A.T. (Experiments in
Art and Technology, a group led by Billy Klüver) and Stan Vanderbeek, blended
filmic elements into theatrical, multi-media experiences that privileged the totality
of the event over the textual cohesion or spectatorial interest of any single film.
He explained this relationship between film and other media in his work as
follows: “Since my interest is in multimedia and mixed-media live events, and in
experimental television, I think of film as a material to work with, part of the
communications media rather than an end in itself.”
221
Tambellini’s multi-media
projects initially subsumed the integrity of singular film texts within the theatrical

220
Tambellini worked with Bill Dixon, Archie Shepp, Alan Silva, and other major figures of New
York’s avant-garde jazz community. His collaboration with the remarkable cellist, Calo Scott, was
one of his most extensive creative partnerships.
221
Youngblood, 311.

192
space of art events that utilized a number of media sources, including film and
slide projectors, strobe lights, and makeshift generators of abstract imagery.
However, as his experiments with film became more intricate and detailed, his
specifically filmic language became more complex and, as such, his efforts in this
medium attained a double status as event and artifact (as did the example of
Robert Breer’s Fist Fight, which was discussed in the first chapter of this study.)
His most accomplished films, including Black TV, functioned both as an
integrated audio-visual detail within larger multi-media projects, and an
autonomous film text. In this sense his films, like a number of other filmic works
described in this project, including those by Andy Warhol, Carolee Schneemann,
Robert Breer, Jud Yalkut, and others, had the dual status of raw material for
multi-media and expanded cinema presentations, and fully realized, self-contained
single film texts. The twofold identity of these works differentiates them from
films that only functioned as either the source material for expanded cinema
performance or traditionally exhibited, theatrically screened films. A number of
these dual-status films exist in multiple forms as single screen works, double
screen projections, or components of performances.
With Black TV, Tambellini produced an extremely elaborate, dense, and
fully realized artistic encounter with the material conditions of American culture
of the late 1960s as specifically mediated through the communication apparatus of
television. Like the works of Paik and Yalkut, Black TV achieved a sophisticated

193
blend of differing audio-visual languages derived from the traditions and
technologies of both commercial television and experimental film.

Black TV:
The culmination of Tambellini’s film practice is the work Black TV. Like
Beatles Electroniques, Tambellini’s 1969 film powerfully encapsulated certain
timely sensibilities concerning the function of television in everyday life. His
work staged literal and symbolic encounters between the specific technologies,
aesthetic possibilities, and social referents of television and film. In creating this
collision between media and their social significations, Tambellini directly drew
attention to the different registers of historical reference and social signification of
these discrete media.
The single screen version of the 16mm film Black TV begins with an
abrasive, loud visual and sonic barrage, featuring televisual white noise (or
“snow”).
222
Both the image and sound tracks for the film begin as busy, frenetic,
and strident assaults on the senses, and they continue relentlessly as such. From
the outset of the work, because of its rapid and aggressive sonic and visual
textures, it is difficult for the viewer to determine exactly what it is that is being
seen or heard; the images move so quickly and feature such visual distortion, that

222
The film has been projected as both a two-screen piece, with different image tracks side-by-
side, and as a single-screen film. Though Tambellini now prefers to show the work as a two screen
video, it circulated for some time as a single screen film. This is the version that was in
distribution through Grove Press for some time. It is also the version that won an award at the
Oberhausen short film festival and that was purchased for the permanent collection of the Museum
of Modern Art in New York.

194
they continually slip in and out of comprehensibility. Eventually, however, it
becomes clear that both registers of the work – its images and its soundtrack –
utilize broadcast television news footage as their primary content, albeit in a
radically modified form.
223
The film’s first discernible images feature African
Americans in scenes of public chaos, violence, and riots, followed by a scene of
someone being carried into an ambulance. It becomes clear, because of the
television text that flashes by, that the person being carried away is Robert
Kennedy. We then hear a news reporter’s voice, becoming discernible within the
film’s noisy collage of sound, frantically asking, “Senator Kennedy has been shot.
Is that possible? Is that possible?” (The famous recording featured the voice of
radio reporter Andrew West.) This dramatic phrase of the stunned newscaster is
then repeated numerous times and looped on the soundtrack, in sections of
various lengths, creating a rhythmic, semi-abstract sound collage related to the
sonic component of Beatles Electroniques. This repetitive composition of found
sound elements evokes a number of contemporaneous audiotape pieces by
minimalist composer Steve Reich, as described above (in the discussion of Ken
Werner’s transformation of the Beatles’ music). Following some visually
transformed television footage of Robert Kennedy’s assassination, we see images
of an Asian baby screaming, visually evoking the traumas of the conflict in
Vietnam, which was well underway when this film was being made.

223
The soundtrack of the film functions somewhat differently: Though the film’s soundtrack
emphasizes language and sound from television news broadcasts, it does however include
significant, additional, non-television material, in the form of abstract sonic elements, including
experimental electronic ambient sound produced by sound generators and wave oscillators (Aldo
Tambellini, conversation with the author, December 29, 2008).

195
Over this chaotic blend of network news tragedy, there are filmic
superimpositions of televisual materials, including jostled television scan lines
and the squirm of television grain, all of which are less fluid and substantially
rougher than Paik’s flowing, plastic, abstractions. In its aesthetics, Black TV is a
more aggressive and insistent work that those of Paik and Yalkut described above.
It proceeds at a breakneck pace of montage in both sound and image and displays
a different tonal strategy from the more meditative style of Paik and Yalkut.
Tambellini’s film integrates an aggressive assault of visual and sonic noise that
blends aesthetic strategies of disruption and dissonance with emotionally
symbolic footage. The rhetorical social force of this television news material is
modified and heightened by its incorporation into an audio-visual battlefield of
rapid montage, busy superimposition, and back-and-forth zooms that punctuate its
rhythmic presentation.
After this visual deluge of American historical crises, the film’s tone shifts
somewhat. The clamor of screams and reporters’ commentary is temporarily
replaced by a more ambient and rhythmic soundtrack of electronic sounds,
featuring machinic timbres. The film then displays the familiar brand icons of the
major television stations – ABC, NBC, and CBS – followed by footage of boxing
matches, skiing, rodeos, and car races. After this brief interlude of sport and speed
the film quickly returns to its previous register of reference as it cuts to more
serious acts of public violence, including scenes of policemen hitting protestors
and the explosions of mushroom clouds produced by atomic bomb tests.

196
Occasionally a word or two become selectively discernible on the film’s
soundtrack, including, tellingly, “syphilis,” “LSD,” and “rat.” Towards the end of
the film’s complex sonic and visual mesh, an image of a crying black child is
repeated with some insistence.
At times, it is clear that Tambellini has modified his source news footage
by photographing it from the television screen and changing its visual qualities
through the use of a variety of plastic film techniques. In his exceptionally agile
manipulation of the plastic film image, Tambellini incorporates a wealth of effects
that are particular to the medium including rapid montage, superimposition,
rhythmic zooms, and visual flicker to unsettle and attack the television image.
Similarly, his use of sound approximates the chaos and disjunction of the film’s
visual track. In his overall strategy for Black TV Tambellini recombines the
televised tragedies of the era into a violent and relentless cinematic attack on the
senses that use a radical formal blend of filmic techniques and televisual source
materials to induce an anxiogenic experience for the viewer that was entirely
congruent with the hostile social events that it depicted. This artistic strategy of
repurposing the social and historical content of live television through the
medium of film had powerful aesthetic and philosophical implications.
Tambellini explained that, “Black TV is about the future, the
contemporary American, the media, the injustice, the witnessing of events, and
the expansion of the senses.”
224
The film references the assassination of Robert

224
Youngblood, 311, 313.

197
Kennedy, the race riots of the late 1960s, the Vietnam War, poverty, and urban
decay. Perhaps most importantly, it also draws our attention to the ways in which
the visual and sonic representations of these historical problems were
communicated to the country’s population through the mediating language of
television. In a sense, the film argues that television determines America’s
understanding of its own experiences of social crisis, physical trauma, and public
upheaval. As it stages a violent encounter between a distinctively televisual,
electronic abstraction and the historically specific, figurative representation of
social traumas, Black TV demonstrates that television, like the history that it
illustrates, is noisy, intangible, and subject to a range of violent manipulations.
With a parade of images that shift in and out of visual legibility, the film presents
a wildly distorted kaleidoscopic view of contemporary social events in which the
era’s most traumatic social events are made fuzzy, blurred, fractured, and even
more violent as a result of these transformations. As the viewer struggles to
comprehend the quickly shifting parade of non-fiction images, he or she
inevitably becomes aware simultaneously of the violence of American life in the
1960s and the centrality of television to the public’s awareness, comprehension,
and understanding of that very brutality.
As it overloads the senses and overdetermines the force of its social and
historical iconography, Black TV argues, by way of example, that this interaction
between contemporary events and the mediascape of the country’s most
ubiquitous technology is one that necessarily provokes a severe anxiety about

198
both human history and our capacity to understand it through the reproductive
technologies of mass media. The crises that the film represents are also realized
metaphorically through the violent breakdown of its own imagery and its
mechanisms for communicating meaning. The film argues that television – a
technology then dependent on an ephemeral electronic signal passing through the
air – is an imperfect and volatile medium that encapsulates the philosophical and
social crises of its age through the irrational and inexplicable breakdown of its
capacity to mediate history to its viewers.
Black TV is a semi-abstract essay film that suggests that the social
violence of the era was also somehow implicit in its primary mass medium. To
effectively critique and break down the visual and sonic material of television,
Black TV uses the exceptionally plastic resources of experimental film (and its
capacity to create entirely independent and equally flexible soundtracks, as Paik
and Yalkut had in their collaborations). The result is a work that, though little
seen now, was a culturally, historically, and aesthetically urgent work closely
attuned to the zeitgeist of the era and its somewhat forgotten aesthetics of sensory
assault and psychic tumult.

“Cybernated Shock and Catharsis”: Viral Aesthetics, Expanded Cinema:
In Beatles Electroniques and Black TV, Paik, Yalkut, and Tambellini
renovated and repurposed materials of the most ubiquitous mass media sources –
popular music (in combination with its visual representation) and television news

199
– into abstract collages of densely interwoven layers of information that forcefully
reconstituted their original functions as entertainment and information into sonic
noise and visual clatter. By making popular music abrasive and news footage
incomprehensible, these artists attacked the very medium of television itself,
using strategies that defiled its coherence and its capacity to make conventional
sense in social, aesthetic, and rhetorical terms. Borrowing from the language of
author William S. Burroughs, art historian David Joselit has described these
disruptive strategies as “viral aesthetics.” Recently, he has written about the social
and aesthetic force of these transformative experiments in media history. In an
analysis of Paik’s strategies, he writes, “The purpose of viral aesthetics is to
interrupt the smooth reproduction of pattern in order to induce shake, quiver, and
noise.”
225
As both Beatles Electroniques and Black TV show us, the patterns of
mass media are not impenetrable, despite their inherent electronic potency for the
reproduction, distribution, and proliferation of audio-visual information streams.
These artists broke down and destabilized the communications systems of mass
media by forcing the established and normative audio-visual languages of
television to shake and quiver anxiously through the forceful plastic
transformations and distortions that were made available by the specific
technologies of the film apparatus.
This aesthetic of disruption was a major component of the cultural and
aesthetic zeitgeist of the period; its antagonistic gestures were realized through a

225
Joselit, Feedback, 63.

200
variety of media in efforts to transform the conventionalized experiences of art
and entertainment. As they undermined the medium’s capacity to create patterned
meanings, the experimental practices described above directly performed this
hostile breakdown of meaning and cultural convention by disrupting and
dismantling the television signal itself. However, these artists also contributed to
more performative, interactive uses of film and television materials. In live
presentations of this multi-media work, another register of audio-visual violence
was visited directly upon the viewers, gallery attendees, and witnesses who came
into contact with the confrontational modes of sensory experience described
herein. These major trends in confrontational, disruptive, anxiogenic art were
integrally connected to filmmaking experiments during the Vietnam era and they
have been neglected by most critical considerations of the period’s aesthetics,
particularly as they relate to experimental cinema.
226
This chapter considers some
of these strategies and the ways in which they figure – through the work of Paik,
Yalkut, and Tambellini – into a particular set of transformations and exchanges
between television, video, and film art.
***
The “electromedia” work of Aldo Tambellini provides a productive
example of such a disruptive, aggressive, multi-media project of the mid-to-late
1960s, in which television, video, and film served central functions. In a review in
the New York Times, critic Grace Glueck described Black Zero, a 1967 live multi-

226
Art historian, Branden Joseph has produced a major critical study of artist, musician, and
filmmaker, Tony Conrad that is an exception to this neglect. See Branden Joseph, Beyond the
Dream Syndicate: Tony Conrad and the Arts After Cage (Cambridge, MA: Zone Books, 2008).

201
media event by Tambellini, explaining that the members of the audience “are
blitzed by such devices as eye-searing strobe lights, wailing sirens, the jumpy play
of images on a screen, and a huge balloon that bursts with the clap of a
thunderbolt.”
227
These events (organized by Tambellini and featuring a number of
collaborators) included live music, slide projectors, films, video installations,
performance elements, and theatrical effects (like the exploding balloon described
above), and like Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable, utilized extremely loud
and dissonant sonic elements that heightened the work’s efforts to challenge
conventional understandings of audio-visual pleasure.
228

As the tone of the New York Times article suggests, these experiments in
multimedia sensory assault were often met with dismay. Tambellini explained the
experimental frontiers of his work with a terminology that emphasized the
expansion of consciousness: “We are the primitives of a new era. With
multimedia you create an effect that is not based on previous experience. You
saturate the audience with images. It happens now – it has a live quality. It’s a

227
Grace Glueck, “Multimedia: Massaging Senses for the Message,” New York Times, September
16, 1967: 35, 37.
228
A related, collaborative, intermedial experiment in this history is the 1964 collaboration of
Warhol and LaMonte Young, in which the filmmaker commissioned the composer to provide
music to accompany excerpts of his films, Kiss, Eat, Haircut, and Sleep, which had been
transferred onto 8mm cartridges for continuous rear projection, using Fairchild 400 screening
devices (that resembled TV monitors) at Lincoln Center in New York. Young provided a newly
recorded version of his piece, “Composition 1960 #9” (1960) that may have been used for all four
excerpts. (The performances featured the voice of Marian Zarzeela and Young bowing a brass
mortar or bowl.) The three-minute looped sections of the films were played in the lobby of the
Philharmonic Hall during the New York Film Festival, however, because of Young’s demand that
they be played at extreme volume, the management demanded that they be made quieter, and as a
result, the composer withdrew his approval to use his music. As a result the films were shown
silent for the remainder of their exhibition at the festival. See Branden Joseph, “’My Mind Split
Open’: Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable,” Grey Room 1, no. 8, 84–86; Eugene Archer,
“Festival Bringing Pop Artist’s Films to Lincoln Center,” New York Times, September 12, 1964:
15.

202
total experience in itself.”
229
His comments emphasized the liveness of these
events, their capacity to saturate the senses, and their directed use towards the
production of new, previously impossible experiences. Though applied
differently, this reconfiguration of social and aesthetic patterns (which Tambellini
discussed, as cited above, in terms of semi-theatrical, live, multi-media events)
was also central to the aesthetic strategies that he employed on a different scale
within the textual limits of the single-screen version of the film Black TV.
A 1965 press release for Tambellini’s Group Center collective described
the social and aesthetic intentions of these multi-media environments.
It is not a ‘happening’ nor a film. It is a Space-Light-Motion Event built
on a series of experiences designed to bombard, propel and blast the
audience into what Group Center believes is “The New Reality” … The
psychological re-orientation of man in the Space Era … The exploration
of the Microcosm and the Macrocosm … The violent revaluations in our
social structure … [ellipses in original]
230

This press release provides a glimpse into the confrontational aesthetic mindset
that motivated much of the experimental media work of the era. Tambellini’s
Group Center promoted exhibition experiences that would “bombard” the people
who came into contact with their projects. These events were intended to function
as multi-media machines for the reconfiguration of conventional sensory
experience and the normative modes of thought that were associated with it. The
press release’s language of “bombardment” and “propulsion” represents an effort
to describe a register of performative artistic practice that openly pursued

229
Glueck, “Multimedia: Massaging Senses for the Message,” 35.
230
Dated November 9, 1965, Collection of Anthology Film Archives.

203
spectatorial discomfort for the benefit of an aggressively psychedelic,
transformative experience. Because of the film medium’s naturally immersive,
multi-media apparatus, it was a privileged tool for this type of experimentation
within the cultural landscape of the 1960s. By virtue of its large scale of
projection, its amplified soundtrack, and its inborn capacity for radical
juxtapositions by virtue of montage, film was commonly involved in many of
these immersive multi-media experiments. Yet, though much of Tambellini’s
language above relates to the extratextual histories of these works and their
conditions of exhibition, these aesthetics of disruption and assault were also
inscribed quite forcefully within the textual limits of the films themselves. In this
sense, though it may have been used as part of larger mediascapes and
performance presentations – as mentioned above, Tambellini’s film was also
realized as a two-screen installation – Black TV showcased a relentless aesthetic
attack that was directly related to the widespread countercultural effort to enact
social and psychic transformations with the tools of new media.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, this language of technological shock
and revolution was widespread and deeply inscribed within the aesthetic
sensibility of many experimental filmmakers (though this fact has been largely
ignored by most historians who have traced the narrative of American
experimental film in terms of a privileged visionary and romantic avant-garde).
Paik described his project in terms similar to those used by Tambellini and The

204
Group Center, noted above, presenting it as a corrective to the onslaught of
controlling social forces:
But if Pasteur and Robespierre are right that we can resist poison only
through certain built-in poison, then some specific frustrations, caused by
cybernated life, require accordingly cybernated shock and catharsis. My
everyday work with video tape and the cathode-ray tube convinces me of
this.
231

The artist here proposes that only by turning a medium against itself, “through
certain built-in poison” can we disrupt the “poison” of television and mass media,
which continuously direct their massive technological and social resources
towards the penetration of the public’s psychic space. Paik uses the metaphor of
television as poison to suggest that we ingest media, and only by repurposing
these technologies through strategies of shock and catharsis can we expunge their
poisonous functions. (This language is likely influenced by the “counter irritant”
strategies suggested by McLuhan, as described below.) The aesthetic sensibility
of Paik’s earlier performances – which included the smashing of pianos and
violins, drinking shampoo, dragging his head across the floor while covered in
tomato juice and ink – reminds us that his overall artistic program consistently
enacted a series of shocks that were intended to challenge, and perhaps, undo, the
public’s socially constructed understanding of aesthetic and ethical categories. In
his encounters with television and film, Paik aimed to unmask and attack the
electronic basis of the media’s social functions with a newly devised,
experimental set of tools that were specific to the cultural landscape of the era.

231
Paik quoted in “Manifestos” in Great Bear Pamphlet, originally published by Something Else
Press (1966) (and republished by Ubu.com, ubclassics imprint, 2004), 25.

205
The Critical and Intellectual Framing of an Aesthetics of Disturbance:
This notion of a purely filmic aesthetics was not a major consideration for
the intermedial experiments described above. Like a number of other artists who
were associated with the countercultural movement, the video-film hybrid
experiments of these filmmakers were based on non-hierarchical notions of the
relationship between different media. The disruptive aesthetic sensibilities of a
number of experimental film works of the 1960s and 70s need to be understood,
not as isolated experiments by visionary artists, but as significant practices that
share attitudes and energies with other developments across the artistic and
intellectual networks of the day. In a previous chapter, it was argued that acts of
profilmic provocation in experimental non-fiction works by Andy Warhol, Shirley
Clarke, and Yoko Ono, represented one filmic connection to trends in
performance and experimental theater of the era. Similarly, the film/television
works described above should be understood as acts of experimental artistic
violence upon both televisions and audiences that similarly represent combative
and anxious energies of the era. In fact, the freneticism, sensory overload, and
symbolic violence that underpinned many of these film experiments could also be
located in the performance, experimental theater, minimalist music, and
conceptual art of the 1960s.
In his compilation of essays, The New Bohemia, journalist John Gruen
traced changes in the timbre of artistic production and social life in the early-to-
mid 1960s, particularly as they affected the Lower East Side of New York City.

206
He argued that a range of social anxieties were visited upon the space of cultural
experimentation, through the activities of a group of young people he described as
“the combine generation.” Within this multi-media landscape of the period, he
argued that cinema in particular had a unique force as a tool for “derangement”
that made it a central and powerful component of the cultural atmosphere of the
era: “Its all-encompassing artistic drives and its all-out assault on the senses stand
as symbols of a movement bent on aggressively reevaluating and redefining every
artistic precept it can lay its hands on.”
232
(Here Gruen could easily be describing
the multimedia events of Tambellini.) The experiments in viral aesthetics by
artists in this chapter need to be repositioned in historical analysis as part of this
widespread cultural action, rooted in the medium of film, that embraced the
aesthetics of assault as cathartic and transformative social experimentation.
As has been suggested elsewhere in this chapter, these artists and
filmmakers described above were heavily influenced by Marshall McLuhan’s
argument that new media forms fundamentally transform the basic conditions of
thought and experience. In his new media cosmology, the artist acts as a seer of
sorts and defuses the potentially destructive power of these technologies through
acts of experimental violence. For McLuhan, the privileged sites of this
aggressive assault on established forms are the frontiers between discrete media.
He writes that,
The hybrid or the meeting of two media is a moment of truth and
revelation from which new form is born. For the parallel between two

232
Gruen, 112.

207
media holds us on the frontiers between forms that snap us out of the
Narcissus-narcosis. The moment of the meeting of media is a moment of
freedom and release from the ordinary trance and numbness imposed by
them on our senses.
233

According to McLuhan’s influential position, this encounter between distinct
media forms (and their associated perceptual expectations) creates an aperture for
artists to end the narcissistic and numbing influence of television and other media
forms. In fact, at the end of Understanding Media, he writes that all media can be
used as weapons, as tools for undermining established forms of control. In this
sense, McLuhan argued, in concert with a number of other thinkers – going back
to Dadaism and futurism perhaps – that art could, and should have, a combative
function. This counterattack, which repurposes media technologies in order to
undermine their conventions and established ecologies, was directed towards the
destabilization of the television medium’s smooth flow of information, and might
be therefore described, again using the contemporaneous language of McLuhan,
as an aesthetic “counter-irritant.” For McLuhan, this variety of directed
intermedial assault had a therapeutic function for society that could be uniquely
applied by artists. This idea was extremely influential for many filmmakers and
intermedial artists discussed in this project.
234

The philosophical underpinnings and rhetorical framings of these
anxiogenic and combative strategies differed or artist to the next. Susan Sontag, in
her seminal essay, “One Culture and the New Sensibility,” considered the shifting

233
McLuhan, Understanding Media, 55.
234
See McLuhan, Understanding Media, 41–47.

208
art forms of the 1960s, and argued that the developing trends of the era radically
undermined the social function of art as it had come to be understood in previous
historical moments. In these new works (that according to her, were produced by
artists like Stockhausen, Cage, and Warhol), the critic observed a sensibility,
which was literally experimental, in which art was used as a new kind of tool for
reconfiguring established notions of pleasure and aesthetic meaning, by
intervening into social space, and unhinging normative thought through
provocative challenges to sensory expectations. She argues that, “the most
interesting works of contemporary art […] are adventures in sensation, new
‘sensory mixes.’ Such art is, in principle, experimental – not out of an elitist
disdain for what is accessible to the majority, but precisely in the sense that
science is experimental.”
235
Art, in this context, was understood to serve the social
and psychic function of undoing established patterns of behavior and thinking.
This art-based obliteration of traditional aesthetic strategies was not only enacted
upon the media forms themselves, but was also directed towards the space of their
reception as they bombarded music audiences, gallery attendees, and film
spectators with different varieties of sensory overload. In her efforts to clarify
precisely what was new about experimental art in the period, Sontag explained it
as follows: “What we are getting is not the demise of art, but a transformation of
the function of art. […] Art today is a new kind of instrument, an instrument for

235
Sontag, “One Culture and the New Sensibility,” 300.

209
modifying consciousness and organizing new modes of sensibility.”
236
What
Sontag observed in the art of the period was a desire to use media to induce
psychic transformation, to devise new ways of interacting with media, with
society, with science, and produce what she described as “new modes of
sensibility.” (This was an idea that was entirely congruent with those of Artaud,
as discussed above, with which Sontag was both a devotee and an expert.) In
comparison to the historiography of art and popular culture, there is little
recognition in the scholarship on experimental film of the powerful influence that
this idea – which was explicitly articulated by many artists and critics, including
Jonas Mekas, Paul Sharits, Nam June Paik, Andy Warhol, Carolee Schneemann,
John Gruen, Calvin Tomkins, and Marshall McLuhan – had on various aspects of
film practice at the time.
As suggested earlier in this project, experimental art has been described by
both Allan Kaprow and John Cage as a way of intervening in the sphere of
aesthetics and public life with acts whose outcome cannot be predicted. In its
effort to uncover patterns of thought through systematic disturbance, this sense of
an experimental art that functions to test limits and conceptual problems suggests
something of the spirit of science. Many cultural critics of the era noted this shift
in the boundaries between the aesthetic sphere and the public one in terms of
scientific energies. Susan Sontag explained the shifting aesthetic sensibility as an
act of research into a set of problems. She argued that a “reaction against what is

236
Ibid., 296.

210
understood as the romantic spirit dominates most of the interesting art of today.”
She continued, “Today’s art, with its insistence on coolness, its refusal of what it
considers to be sentimentality, its spirit of exactness, its sense of ‘research’ and
‘problems,’ is closer to the spirit of science than of art in the old-fashioned
sense.”
237
In fact, Paik and Tambellini, like their colleagues in E.A.T. (and many
others) did in fact collaborate with scientists and engineers (from Bell Labs and
other scientific research institutions) to produce new television and broadcast
technologies. As Cage and Kaprow, spokespersons for the new aesthetics, were
arguing that the boundaries between art and life were eroding, a number of media
artists were also demonstrating the breakdown of a mutual exclusivity between art
and science in the spirit of research.
With “the new sensibility,” discussed by Sontag and others, there was a
sense that art could function as an investigative instrument, quite literally, for
experimentation, as an instrument for social, humanistic research. In this regard,
video, as an epistemological tool, presented distinctive possibilities from those of
film. Some filmmakers perceived these differing artistic and ontological attributes
as potential threats to their hard fought philosophical battles concerning film as a
medium for the production of significant advanced art. As suggested at the
opening of this project, in the correspondence between Stan Brakhage and
Annette Michelson, there was evidence of a marked ambivalence, or perhaps,
even a disdain, for the artistic practices associated with video, particularly as they

237
Ibid., 279.

211
were felt to be eclipsing the aesthetic, historic, and social potency of this older,
still under recognized medium for the production of art. In his letter to Michelson,
Brakhage mentioned that he had long “resisted the crows of video makers”
238
and
she responded by writing that “one begins, caught in the wave of retrenchment of
filmic resources and the onrush of video, to feel like a dinosaur, thrashing about in
a hostile landscape.”
239
By 1985, when their quoted exchange took place, video
had been firmly ensconced in the art world for some time, having achieved a
place in the gallery and museum establishment that would never, even today, be
available to experimental film. In fact, in 1975, video art was officially
incorporated into the Whitney Museum’s biennial exhibition, a major show for
gauging significant trends in the American art scene. Film would not be included
in Biennial exhibitions until 1979, even though it was a much older medium with
a rich and long history of experimental work by established artists. This situation
was indicative of wider trends in art criticism and curatorial practice that
demonstrate the differing treatment of film versus video in the institutional
contexts of the art world. This, perhaps, is the “hostile landscape” to which
Michelson was referring in her letter to Brakhage, a die-hard film devotee.

238
Letter from Stan Brakhage to Annette Michelson, June 7, 1985, collection of the University of
Colorado, Stan Brakhage Papers.
239
Letter from Annette Michelson to Stan Brakhage, June 16, 1985, collection of the University of
Colorado, Stan Brakhage Papers.

212
Conclusion: “From Nature to Culture”:
The video-film interactions of Paik, Yalkut, and Tambellini depended
primarily on corporate media sources to provide their foundational content.
Because of their repurposing of mass-produced television imagery, their media art
should be understood as part of a much larger shift in artistic sensibility, across a
range of media in the post World War II era, that emphasized the recycling of
mass cultural materials over the demiurgic and expressive creativity of the age of
abstract expressionism and bebop, which preceded it. As has been suggested
elsewhere in this project, Sontag noted that a “reaction against what is understood
as the romantic spirit dominates most of the interesting art of today.”
240
The
majority of the experimental video-film experiments in media art described above
should be understood as coextensive with other developments in postwar art,
including pop art and assemblage, which depended on the infinitely replicated
iconography of mass media to provide their principal themes, icons, and historical
referents.
In describing this shift in artistic values of the late 1960s and early 1970s,
art critic Leo Steinberg famously drew attention to the work of Robert
Rauschenberg, and what he described as “the characteristic picture plane of the
1960s,” in which Steinberg felt that the conditions of artistic production changed
markedly from those of a previous era.
241
As Rauschenberg both literally and

240
Sontag, “One Culture and the New Sensibility,” 279.
241
Leo Steinberg, “Other Criteria” in Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art
(Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 82. Steinberg’s “Other Criteria” essay
was published in the volume of the same name in 1972, but was based on a public lecture at the

213
figuratively turned his back on the live model as a source of subject matter, he
directed his energies away from nature and towards the representation of already
mediated images, by incorporating images from newspapers, magazine ads, and
pieces of comic books into his paintings, collages, and combine works. Steinberg
argued that Rauschenberg’s meditations on mediation embodied “the most radical
shift in the subject matter of art, the shift from nature to culture.”
242
He described
this transitional strategy of representation as “the foundation of an artistic
language that would deal with a different order of experience.”
243
In this regard,
Rauschenberg’s reflections on media and mediation marked a transition that was
wholly congruent with the changing experiences of America in the age of
television. Steinberg poetically articulated the way in which Rauschenberg’s
aesthetic shift from illusionism to media documentary aligned with larger cultural
changes:
What he [Rauschenberg] invented above all was, I think, a pictorial
surface that let the world in again. Not the world of the Renaissance man
who looked for his weather clues out of the window; but the world of men
who turn knobs to hear a taped message, “precipitation probability ten
percent tonight,” electronically transmitted from some windowless
booth.
244

As these quotations above demonstrate, Steinberg located in Rauschenberg’s floor
bound combines a major shift in the values of painting, however he suggests
earlier in his essay that the stakes of such claims extend well beyond the limits of

Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1968. The part of the essay concerned with Rauschenberg
and “the shift from nature to culture” was first published in Artforum in 1972.
242
Steinberg, 84.
243
Ibid., 85.
244
Ibid., 90.

214
any medium; the essay, in a more general sense, is a meditation on the
relationship between form and cultural context. In this regard, Steinberg’s essay
suggests implicitly that this transition was not particular to Rauschenberg’s
medium or artistic milieu. In fact, it is precisely this turn “from nature to culture”
that the video-film works of Paik, Yalkut, and Tambellini dramatize. This cultural
transformation drives the intermedial experiments in film and video while also
identifying an associative register that extends well beyond the philosophical
confines of personal expression, into the social and historical spaces of post
World War II America. In this regard, Beatles Electroniques and Black TV expose
the technological basis for the construction of social meaning and ethics within
the electronic spaces of television, and like Rauschenberg, direct their energies
toward a new notion of both aesthetics and visual pleasure in which all meaning is
mediated.
This move from nature to culture marks a significant shift in the aesthetics
of experimental cinema. Though a number of artists in the era had incorporated
mass cultural detritus into their work in film, Paik, Yalkut, and Tambellini took
the most common visual materials of their age to be their principal subjects.
Because of the fact that it shares a recording medium with Hollywood,
experimental film has always been inscribed with some trace of mass culture.
However, as these works above demonstrate, evidence of shifting artistic and
philosophical priorities can be located in this change in emphasis that manifests a
conscious choice to foreground materials derived from broadcast television.

215
Beatles Electroniques and Black TV utilize the source materials of mass culture
rather those of nature because in the age of mass media, television has replaced
nature as the public’s immediate referent. Though artists would continue to make
personal, expressive works throughout the history of the medium, such efforts
must necessarily be understood and evaluated in relation to the effects and
functions of popular media forms that provide the historical context for the
production and reception of such projects. The efforts of Paik, Yalkut, and
Tambellini demarcate a concerted effort by experimental filmmakers, not
precisely to distance themselves from commercial modes of mass cultural
communication, but to engage directly with them, using their native materials and
technologies. By reconfiguring these objects and technologies using strategies of
disruption and distortion (in ways that were particular to the medium of film),
these artists dramatized the breakdown of television’s normativity as a
determinant of the structure and content of the popular history of the United
States.

216
Chapter 4: Appropriation, Assemblage, and Collective Authorship on
the West Coast

“The American mind is an assemblage.” – Allan Kaprow (1966)
245

In the years after World War II, the dominant philosophical and
representational imperatives of avant-garde art in the United States shifted away
from an expressive practice associated with the energies of abstract expressionism
towards alternative representational tactics that often engaged directly with the
audio-visual materials of mass culture. In concert with the experiments in
television and film discussed in the last chapter, other more well known,
established artistic movements and trends incorporated the materials of
industrially produced, commercial culture. For example, the painters associated
with pop art – including Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and James Rosenquist –
openly imitated the iconography and tonal palette of commercial advertising,
cartoons, and corporate logos in their work. Similarly, in a more direct mode of
citation, a number of collage artists, like Ray Johnson, Jess (Collins), and Wallace
Berman, utilized elements of mass produced commercial catalogues and pulp
magazines in their two-dimensional constructions. The semi-sculptural medium of
assemblage expanded the logic of collage into three dimensional spaces. As
practiced by artists like Robert Rauschenberg, George Herms, and Bruce Conner,

245
Kaprow, Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, 73.

217
assemblage provided a way of incorporating everything from newspaper images,
photographs from pornographic magazines, costume jewelry, to broken furniture
into a type of mixed media work that signaled an increased material involvement
with American industry and the economics of waste. Though collage was first
introduced into fine art practice in the era of Cubism and Kurt Schwitters during
the 1920s, its logic and methods of repurposing the discarded, disposed materials
of mass culture gained their most widespread artistic currency in the United States
later, during the late 1950s and 1960s. Though it had always had a presence in
20
th
-century modernist art, assemblage became a more prevalent artistic form in
the post World War II period, and as art historian Lucy Lippard accurately
describes it, “emerged as a major instead of a minor trend during the 1950’s.”
246

The influence and historical reach of these strategies of assemblage and
reappropriation extended across a range of media, and thus functioned in tandem
with other aspects of cultural practice that favored citation and quotation as
representational methods.
247

In film history, the mode of production that most powerfully adopts the
logic of recycling and recontextualization is generally described or categorized as
found footage filmmaking. Though the footage used by Conner and other
filmmakers may not literally have been “found” as much as sought out, this

246
Lucy Lippard, Pop Art (London: Thames & Hudson, 1970), 72.
247
It should be noted that French theorists were also radically revising the understanding of
authorship and textual construction in roughly the same era as the artists described above. See
Michel Foucault, “What is an Author?” (1969) in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, trans.
Donald F. Bouchard, Sherry Simon (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 124–127; Roland
Barthes, “The Death of the Author” (1968) in Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New
York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 142–148.

218
approach to film production assembles, edits, and resequences filmic materials
derived from a range of popular and commercial sources into new artistic forms.
This practice of filmmaking developed in a period roughly contemporaneous with
the postwar acceleration of collage and assemblage in fine art practice.
Assemblage artists and found footage filmmakers used a diverse, open-ended
range of materials, from discarded toys to candy wrappers to Hollywood B films,
as the raw material of new hybrid forms of art. Philosophically speaking, this
pronounced trend towards the recontextualization of throwaway mass culture
suggested a transformed conceptualization of artistic authorship, in which an artist
need not depend exclusively upon the force of his or her imagination as a singular
artistic resource. Rather than creating art that was inspired by an isolated artistic
ego – creating something from nothing (creatio ex nihilo) – assemblage artists and
found footage filmmakers engaged in a kind of widespread material collaboration
with the media environment that surrounded them in mid-20
th
Century America.
In the context of experimental film practice, it was Bruce Conner, an
established assemblage and collage artist (though until recently,
underrecognized), who extended the recombinatory logic of these forms into his
filmmaking practice. Conner almost single-handedly established the practice of
found footage film art, in which he created new film texts from the unlikely
materials of industrial documentaries, low-budget film serials, and semi-
pornographic stag films. Conner’s remarkably prescient output across a range of
media demonstrates a particular brand of anti-elitist iconoclasm that challenged

219
the supposed division between the precious domain of fine art and the
commercialized media space that surrounded it. His varied and heterogeneous
work forged new relationships between the artist and his environment. He
demonstrated that any medium – be it painting, performance, conceptual art, rock
& roll light shows, collaborations with Hollywood filmmakers, photography, jug
band music, assemblage, collage, video, or film – was an appropriate platform for
his particular breed of cultural intervention. Conner’s shift from nature to culture
was so direct, in a sense, that he often made films without a camera, instead
making the juxtaposition of commercially produced imagery his sole artistic
strategy for the production of new film works. Conner often said, “I only own the
splices,” suggesting that many of his films were, in a sense, the product of a range
of industrial labor that greatly exceeded the author’s editorial contributions.
Conner consciously undermined categories of artistic signification through a
strategic dismantling of their structures of value. This aspect of his work was so
continuous and forceful that, regardless of medium, it begs to be understood as
such, as part of an artistic practice whose philosophical purpose, critically
speaking, overcomes the differing material conditions of his chosen media.

Like the work of other artists discussed in this project, Conner’s films
catalyze an anxious interpretative experience in which the cultural crosstalk and
iconographic oversaturation of the work’s multiple messages overwhelms the
possibility of a single coherent understanding of its rhetorical or symbolic

220
functions. As his films and assemblages provocatively challenge conventional
notions of good taste and craftsmanship, they initiate dialogues between a range
of culturally opposed dichotomies: the exploitative energies of pornography
versus the libratory sexual attitudes of the counterculture, the control of social
institutions versus the popular language of psychic expansion, the formulaic
nature of popular music versus its utopian sentiments and energies. In short, the
films and assemblages of Bruce Conner engage with the most significant social
and philosophical concerns of Cold War America by presenting a visually and
sonically concise analysis of them. However, as Conner’s films attack these
socioeconomic structures of control and repression, they nevertheless remain
always anxiously indecisive and ambivalent texts.
This chapter will consider strategies of found footage filmmaking and
other uncommon varieties of modified or redefined authorial collaboration in
cinema. In some of these examples, creative intervention is shifted away from the
space behind the camera to the editing bench upon which the filmic materials are
assembled. Other case studies present provocative varieties of filmic collaboration
with a cultural environment or other non-traditional strategies of modified,
aleatory, or collective authorship. This discussion will consider the ways in which
Conner’s assemblage based filmmaking – as well the collaborative film practices
of Robert Nelson, perhaps Conner’s most significant devotee – defy the dominant
understanding of experimental film as an imaginative, gestural, expressive, and
rhetorically uniform practice by substituting significant elements of humor,

221
sarcasm, irony, and structural heterogeneity that often culminate in works
dominated by ambivalence and ambiguity. The films of these two artists
demonstrate related efforts to transpose the practice of experimental cinema into a
fresh tonal register by utilizing innovative authorial strategies that share
philosophical imperatives with other trends in art and media, including most
notably, assemblage. In addition, as the work of these two filmmakers represents
a philosophically dissimilar approach from that of the romantic avant-garde, it
also demonstrates a sensibility that is perhaps more typical of the San Francisco
Bay area than of New York City, where both of these artists created much of their
defining work. In this regard, the current chapter will attempt to shift some of this
dissertation’s arguments away from the East Coast by presenting case studies
derived from an alternative geographical locale.

Assemblage, Critical History, and the Problem of Social Reference:
It is important to consider the critical history of assemblage in order to
understand the relationship, in general terms, between art and its environment
within the criticism of the period. Such literature is also significant because it may
partially compensate for an absence of attention within the film literature of the
time to the methods of appropriation and assemblage.
Though Conner’s first found footage film was made in 1957, there was at
the time virtually no major philosophical consideration of the relationship
between such films – of the independent, artisanal, or experimental variety – and

222
the mediascape that surrounded them. Nevertheless, as Conner’s artistic
production and written commentary indicate, he was intimately aware of the
distinctive emotional, sexual, and significatory force of the cinematic apparatus as
a device to provoke both pleasure and anxiety – sometimes simultaneously – and
his work trafficked directly in the social, referential, and affective potential of
these systems of representation.
In 1961, William C. Seitz, an associate curator at the Museum of Modern
Art in New York, organized an influential show of mixed media works titled,
“The Art of Assemblage.” This traveling exhibition collected a heterogeneous and
eclectic international group of semi-sculptural artworks that emphasized artistic
appropriation. A catholic survey of the practice, Seitz’s exhibition collected an
extremely diverse range of object, from pre-war European modernist artist,
associated with Cubism, Dada, Surrealism, Suprematism, and Futurism, like
Pablo Picasso, Hannah Höch, Kurt Schwitters, Andre Breton, Marcel Duchamp,
Kasimir Malevich, and Max Ernst, to a range of international contemporary, so-
called “neo-dada” artists including Americans like Conner, Herms, Ed Kienholz,
Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Lucas Samaras, George Brecht, and Robert Watts. In
its historical, geographical, and conceptual diversity, the exhibition functioned as
a kind of summary study or historical codification of the diverse forms of collage
and assemblage that recycled the trash and refuse of 20
th
Century cultural
production. By gathering such varied materials in his show, Seitz helped to define

223
a multi-media practice not by its media and its materials, but by its method of
production as well as, most importantly, its mode of cultural reference.
Through his historical analysis of art and poetry from the late 19
th
century
to the early 1960s, Seitz created a sturdy rhetorical support for the extremely
diverse range of work that he displayed. Central to his argument, and perhaps one
of its most novel aspects, is the idea that assemblage art represents a new type of
artistic collaboration, founded on the interaction of a singular, unique fine artist
with a diffuse, undifferentiated commercial media environment produced by an
anonymous, non-descript blend of corporate and industrial forces. He writes that,
“The artist must cede a measure of his control, and hence of his ego, to the
materials and what transpires between them, placing himself partially in the role
of discoverer or spectator as well as that of originator.”
248
Seitz identifies a new
trend in art in which the artist’s practice becomes refigured as a semi-curatorial,
organizational undertaking rather than as demiurgic practice of pure creative
origination. Seitz writes, that purely plastic, “professional art materials such as
paint, plastic, stone, bronze, etc., are formless and, in the Platonic sense, are pure
essences of redness, hardness, ductility. Found materials are works already in
progress: prepared for the artist by the outside world, previously formed, textured,
colored.”
249
In this regard, it can be argued that in fact assemblage artists, like the
media artists discussed in the last chapter, are intervening and interacting with
processes of image production and circulation that are already in progress, and

248
Seitz, 39.
249
Ibid., 85.

224
thus consciously involve themselves in a new variety of technologically mediated,
social collaboration that was simply unavailable, in a literal sense, before the
technologies of mass media made them possible.
Such a transformed understanding of authorship undermines the classical
valorization of the artist’s unique volition and vision in the process of making an
artwork. In this sense, assemblage embodies a shift in emphasis, away from both
subjectivity and abstraction – celebrated values for the dominant strains of
modernist criticism – and towards a network of concerns that are in fact involved
with objective, external frames of reference including the social and economic
flows of information and capital. These changing artistic interests marked
transitions that were congruent with the tendency of American avant-garde art in
the wake of World War II (and into the 1960s) to subvert the dominant critical
hierarchies of elitist museum culture and its value systems, and challenge the
divisions between life – as something common and shared – and art – as
something precious and rarefied.
250
By incorporating the familiar iconography and
textures of mass media imagery, these artists – who worked variously in collage,
assemblage, and found footage filmmaking – transformed the common debased
materials that were recognizable to all spectators as components of their shared

250
It might be suggested that, contrary to my position above, collage and assemblage artists were
not collaborating with a diverse range of cultural forces so much as they were transposing them
(and their associated material detritus) into the elitist spaces of museum culture, thus instantly
valorizing them as precious, rarefied art objects that could be marketed and sold. However, at least
with Conner, such an evaluation would prove inappropriate for both economical and critical
reasons; his work neither gained the material support nor the cultural esteem of genuine, elitist
museum culture. In addition, it was not easy to contain or collect. In fact, he did not sign his works
and often said that he intended for them to simply fall apart and decompose (something that often
happened to the instability and organic nature of many of his materials).

225
cultural landscape. As these artists oriented themselves towards the external
mediascape, in Seitz’s words, “They violated the separateness of the work of art,
and threatened to obliterate the aesthetic distance between it and the spectator.”
251

Interestingly, Seitz quotes Allan Kaprow on this subject, and argues, by proxy,
that the same interests in undermining cultural hierarchies that led to conceptual
art, happenings, and avant-garde performance also underpinned assemblage art
and its unique blend of iconographic and social experimentation.
Like Seitz, the English critic and curator Lawrence Alloway wrote
enthusiastically and influentially about the new hybrid art forms that presented a
dynamic and fresh interaction with the mid-20
th
-century mediascape. In the same
year as “The Art of Assemblage” show, Alloway wrote the essay, “Junk Culture,”
which, like Seitz’s catalogue, celebrated the philosophical innovations of this new
work that was, in fact, critically unpopular. Alloway’s essay functions as a critical
endorsement of a mode of art-making that had disavowed traditional values of
painterly control, formal perfection, rhetorical coherence, well executed craft, and
conventional notions of beauty. Both Alloway and Leo Steinberg suggested that
much work of the 1950s and 60s requires a significantly revised set of critical
tools and an interpretative language that must inevitably refer to the same cultural
and social contexts that the work foregrounds. In this sense, in order to understand
assemblage, one had to consider the environment to which it referred. Its force of
reference and its traffic in popular iconography and discarded materials were

251
Ibid., 23.

226
inextricable from its significatory, textual attributes. In fact, the work
foregrounded these elements. The truth of this critical observation, however
obvious it may seem, was in fact rather controversial to modernist critics, yet it is
essential to any responsible consideration of art in the 1960s, including found
footage filmmaking.
Concerning the relationship that assemblage methods have with their
environment, Alloway writes:
Junk culture is city art. Its source is obsolescence, the throwaway material
of cities, as it collects in drawers, cupboards, attics, dustbins, gutters,
waste lots, and city dumps. Objects have a history: first they are new
brand goods; then they are possessions, accessible to few, subjected, often,
to intimate and repeated use; then, as waste, they are scarred by use but
available again. […] Assemblages of such material come at the spectator
as bits of life, bits of the environment. The urban environment is present,
then, as the source of objects, whether transfigured or left alone. In
addition, the objects are frequently presented in terms that dramatize
spread, flow, extension, trespass.
252

In this quotation, the English critic foregrounds the often ignored material
economies that precede the production of artworks, and thus defies the modernist
tendency to occlude the social and economic functions of the works in
question.
253

252
Lawrence Alloway, “Junk Culture,” Architectural Design 31, no. 3 (March 1961), 122.
253
It could also be argued that social reference is negatively present in Greenberg and Fried,
through its glaring omission, as a result of the historical conditions in bourgeois society that have
defined the avant-garde as an autonomous realm of cultural practice. (I thank David James for this
critical observation.) For a more thorough, though polemical, theoretical discussion of the way in
which the history of bourgeois culture has conditioned the avant-garde, see, Peter Bürger, Theory
of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).

227
For many of critics of the time, one of the most salient and provocative
aspects of appropriation was the way in which it suggested a new understanding
of the artist’s identity. For Alloway the definition of the artist had been
transformed to such a significant extent that it became functionally de-
professionalized. In his words, the ideas behind assemblage “combine to subvert
the compact, professional image of the artist as the possessor and exponent of
unique skills.” This implies that there is no specialized labor or rarified set of
talents that were exclusive to the domain of the professional, trained artist. He
continues, “As a result, the reach of the artist has been increased and the area that
could be claimed as art has expanded. The definition of art has dilated, like
cinema screens in the Big Screen revolution of the 1950s.”
254

This trend towards a more democratic definition of the artist aligned
interestingly with the widespread impulse of the period in which all kinds of
creative people (as described in the introduction to this dissertation), felt that, as
Amy Taubin did, anyone could and should make films.
255
So, to echo Alloway’s
statement above, when relatively untrained artists like Andy Warhol produced
films that they did not shoot, write, or edit, the filmmakers’ community was upset
by the lack of labor, specialized or otherwise, that these amateur auteurs
contributed to their work.
256
Conner’s found footage cinema, in which he often

254
Ibid.
255
Quoted by Arthur in “Films the Color of Blood” in The Film-makers’ Cooperative Catalogue
no. 7, vi..
256
Annette Michelson addresses this problem in passing in her essay on Warhol’s interdisciplinary
practice. See Michelson, “’Where Is Your Rupture?’ Mass Culture and the Gestamtkunstwerk” in
Andy Warhol, ed. Michelson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 91–110.

228
made films without lifting a camera or exposing any celluloid, could also pose
provocative interpretative and philosophical issues for the definition of a film-
specific authorship that did not actually include original motion picture
photography.

Media Refuse and Film Art: The Case of Bruce Conner:
“However, anything which was taken for granted as not serious, not art,
just things that are thrown away, were exactly what I paid attention to.” –
Bruce Conner
257

“In recent years we have had the artist as a sort of pre-theatrical
impresario (Happenings), as performer (notably Robert Morris and Robert
Rauschenberg), and more recently as movie-maker – including Andy
Warhol and today’s example, Bruce Conner.” – Brian O’Doherty, New
York Times, April 26, 1964
258

The second quotation was taken from Conner’s first lengthy, major review
in a national daily newspaper on the occasion of a ten year gallery survey of his
work in assemblage and drawing. Despite the reviewer’s emphasis on Conner’s
cinematic works, no films were screened as part of the exhibition. Though the
critic’s appraisal of the exhibit was overwhelmingly laudatory, it infuriated
Conner nonetheless, because it catalyzed an anxious crisis of identity concerning
the artist and his work that would never be resolved, in any context, be it in the
critical literature, the gallery circuit, or the community of avant-garde film: was
he an artist or a filmmaker? The quotation above implies the basic supposition

257
William C. Wees, Recycled Images: The Art and Politics of Found Footage Films (New York:
Anthology Film Archives, 1993), 79.
258
Brian O’Doherty, “Conner and His Films: The Artist as Director, Performer, and –
Occasionally – as Artist,” New York Times, April 26, 1964: 21.

229
that these are mutually exclusive identities. Throughout Conner’s career, this
assumption has heavily influenced the historicization of his oeuvre, leaving a
legacy of interpretation that has cleaved, perhaps inappropriately, along medium-
specific boundaries inherited from modernist art criticism.
Nine years after the exhibition, Conner described this high profile review
and its effects on the reception of his work, in an interview with Paul Cummings
for the Smithsonian Archives of American Art:
The review came out and it was spectacular. It was like one-third of a
page, on Sunday. Three-quarters of it was about the movies. People came
to the gallery and said, ‘Where are the movies? What is this junk on the
walls?’ I was very proud of the show. I wanted people to see what I had
done. This kind of notice was something that I had always wanted. It
meant some attention was going to be paid. But it was totally diverted and
twisted around. The gallery sold two things out of the show. Didn’t make
enough money to pay for the announcements. I decided to make a movie
to ruin my reputation as a filmmaker.
259

Conner did not want to be defined as a filmmaker. To him the appellation “artist”
was more catholic, open-ended, and appropriate to his range of work. Despite
Conner’s frustrations with the review, and in particular, its emphasis on him as a
filmmaker, in fact this New York Times piece attempts to connect the artist’s
filmic and non filmic works, and seemingly unrelated disciplines, within a shared
interpretative matrix: “one can look at Bruce Conner’s new exhibition at the Alan
Gallery, 766 Madison Avenue, and his two films […] as expressions of the same
attitude and fundamentally the same technique applied to different media. At the
moment, assemblage as a technique is permiating [sic] all the arts with

259
Cummings Interview, Smithsonian Archives of American Art, April 16, 1973, 25–26.

230
extraordinary vigor.”
260
The reviewer explains that Conner’s films utilize
strategies closely related to those of his assemblages, both of which foreground a
“montage of found materials.” In this regard, O’Doherty’s review was singular in
its advanced if somewhat anachronistic understanding of the overlapping
sensibilities of materially distinct artistic practices, regardless of the fact that it
called more attention to Conner’s films than the artist might have liked.
O’Doherty’s review presents an interesting historical snapshot of the
contemporary critical response to Conner’s work in the mid-1960s, as it calls
attention to commonplace suppositions about art and media in the era while also
attempting to suggest new modes of understanding the diversity of operative
artistic strategies. The reviewer tellingly groups Conner with a number of other
artists who experimented with a range of performative, multi-media, and
dematerialized practices that were, in his words, no longer “physically limited by
the four sides of the canvas,” a statement that clearly echoes the language of
Kaprow’s influential writing on Pollock (discussed earlier in this project). To the
reviewer, Conner, like Morris, Rauschenberg, and Warhol, Conner was an
“allrounder who can perform within the category of what we think of as ‘art’ and
outside it, in other areas [e.g. film], when he so feels.”
261
It is unclear precisely
how O’Doherty or his reading public, circa 1964, might have conceived of the
limits between art and other disciplines, but this essay seems to suggest that it
would be unlikely for any mainstream art critic or gallery visitor to think of art

260
O’Doherty, 21.
261
O’Doherty, 21.

231
and film as being potentially integrated or even related artistic undertakings. Yet,
at the same time, it seems that the reviewer is trying to challenge this popular
supposition of mutual exclusivity by suggesting that this conceptual opposition
between discrete media is not necessarily productive in the analysis of an artist’s
entire practice, and thus could be overcome, philosophically speaking, through the
careful scrutiny of multi-faceted components of an artist’s output.
Certainly, Conner thought of his films as art, though he may not have
defined himself as a filmmaker (and certainly not exclusively or predominately as
such). The reviewer concludes the essay dramatically, in an effort to group the
artist’s different materials within one cohesive project: “Conner clarifies the
artistic usage of ‘reality’ – objects and photographs and film clips – in a new way
of coping with the environment. His films are revolutionary.”
262
This final
rhetorical gesture helps to solidify O’Doherty’s overall picture of Conner’s
practice in summary, as a way of coming to terms with a material environment,
suggesting that its multi-media mix of objects, photographs, and films, is an
appropriate and perhaps revolutionary response to a diverse cultural network of
media, material objects, and social history that display related values and
processes of signification. In this regard, the 1964 New York Times review of
Conner’s work initiated a mode of intermedial interpretation of the artist’s work
that remains largely unrealized in the subsequent literature.
263
After a bit more

262
O’Doherty, 21.
263
There are a few exceptions to this segregation of media within the interpretation of Conner’s
work. One recent effort to situate various strands of the artist’s work in relation to each other can
be found in a relatively short, but excellent introductory book titled Secret Exhibition: Six

232
consideration of the historical directives of the early critical writing on the
intermedial relationship between Conner’s films and art, this chapter will present
a case study of related works produced by the artist in disparate media.
Since the publication of the New York Times review almost fifty years ago,
various journalists, critics, and scholars have addressed the ways in which
Conner’s artistic practices have foregrounded repeated thematic interests,
particularly concerning commercialism, repressed sexuality, militarism,
misogyny, violence, and their representations in American popular media.
However, little critical writing has made this claim simultaneously about
Conner’s work in more than one medium, and in fact, a medium-specific cleavage
along traditional, disciplinary lines was particularly pronounced in
contemporaneous reviews published in the earlier years of the artist’s career. To
some degree, this division continues to affect the critical interpretation of the
artist’s multi-media oeuvre. In 1990, Conner described the short-sighted critical
response, resulting from the limited understanding of the artist’s materials that
dominated most writing on his work: “I couldn’t conceive of restricting myself to

California Artists of the Cold War Era (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1990), in which
Rebecca Solnit situates a range of Conner’s projects within the geographic and social milieu of
beat and post-beat art production in California. More recently, the catalog for the last major one-
man show of Conner’s work, organized by the Walker Art Center, attempted to address a range of
the artist’s media projects. However, most of the essays, though they make reference to the artist’s
other practices, segregate his output according to medium, with one essay on assemblage,
drawing, and photography; one essay on conceptual and performative projects; and one essay on
film, all of which are strong summaries of Conner’s interests and methods. See 2000 BC: The
Bruce Conner Story Part II, eds. Peter Boswell, Bruce Jenkins, and Joan Rothfuss (Minneapolis:
Walker Art Center, 2000). Most recently, Kevin Hatch a doctoral candidate in the department of
Art History at Princeton, completed a dissertation that addresses a range of Conner’s projects, in a
number of media from 1957 to 1967 (Kevin Hatch. “Looking for Bruce Conner, 1957-67” (PhD
Dissertation: Princeton University, 2008).

233
one medium. […] This confused a lot of people, and they couldn’t see any
connection between the various bodies of work I’ve done. For me, however,
there’s a clear relationship between all these forms.”
264
Not all reviewers
overlooked these connections, but many were influenced by the limits of their
own disciplinary, professional, and social networks, as well as the legacy of
Greenbergian modernism.
In one of the most significant early essays about Conner in an art
publication, Artforum editor Philip Leider eloquently described the uneasy and
unsettling blend of sexuality and violence that interacted complexly in the artist’s
assemblage work. In this essay, Leider takes a somewhat defensive tact because
so many reviewers took offense to the artist’s debased materials (taken from trash
heaps and exploitation magazines), their collective defiance of classical notions of
beauty, and their disturbing social and historical referents. Leider attempted to
justify the formal idiosyncrasies, thematic negativity, and disarming iconography
of the work in order to counter the reviews that simply dismissed the work as ugly
and nihilistic. For example, in 1960, one reviewer described Conner’s work as a
“sampler in the cult of ugly”
265
and in the same month, in a different journal,
another critic wrote that the artist’s work “represents the high speed conversion of

264
Quoted in Kristine McKenna, “Bruce Conner in the Cultural Breach: Decades of Antagonizing
the Status Quo Has Brought Critical Acclaim for the Brilliant yet Eccentric Multimedia Pioneer,”
Los Angeles Times, June 10, 1990, 4.
265
Sidney Tillim, Arts 34, no. 6 (March 1960), 59.

234
avant-garde art into academic expression. It makes Rauschenberg look like a
model of classic purity.”
266

As Seitz had done in his landmark exhibition and accompanying catalog
of the previous year, Leider attempted to explain the historical context of
Conner’s output: “Looking at his work, one conceives of a mentality which must
obsessively re-cast all it observes into the imagery of the most unutterable horrors
of our times. The imagery comes to him ready-made out of the history of this
century.” In his review, Leider describes Conner’s work as demonstrative of
nothing short of a “New Sensibility,” “a new way of seeing things, a strange re-
casting of experience in terms of a sensibility we have not before encountered.”

267
Yet, in his basic assertion that Conner’s work demonstrated a fresh sensibility
and a provocative response to social phenomena, he, like most art critics of the
age (with the notable exception of O’Doherty), did not mention the artist’s film
work at all. This critical silence serves as evidence of an interpretative myopia in
the art world that prevented, and generally continues to prevent, the full
appreciation of a field of practice extending beyond the traditionally understood
limits of its privileged media. (In this regard, O’Doherty’s review was truly
anomalous.) Unfortunately this medial hierarchy affected some of the most astute
critics of the day, including Leider. Few art historians and critics had the
appropriate range of cultural awareness to properly understand the total breadth of
an artist as multi-faceted as Conner. Even as late as 1974, after Conner had been

266
Lawrence Campbell, Art News 59, no. 1 (March 1960), 62.
267
Philip Leider, “Bruce Conner: A New Sensibility,” Artforum 1, no. 6 (November 1962), 30.

235
exhibiting art publicly for almost twenty years, Paul Karlstrom, an historian
conducting an oral history for the Smithsonian Museum, had not seen most (or
perhaps any) of Conner’s films before conducting an extensive career
retrospective interview for the institution’s Archives of American Art program.
268

While art critics, with the exception of O’Doherty, restricted their
discussion of Conner to his assemblages, some contemporary film critics had a
surprisingly more informed and holistic comprehension of his work. One can find
traces in writing in journals like Film Culture and Film Quarterly of efforts to
interpolate Conner’s rather idiosyncratic films into the scope of a wider, artistic,
intermediary discourse (though this trend was perhaps abandoned by the mid-
1970s). In 1966, in a short discussion of Conner’s Report (1963-67) in Film
Culture (the principal literary mouthpiece of the cinematic avant-garde), David
Mosen discussed the artist’s films in relation to other media forms: “the films
offer a convenient parallel to Conner’s other art work of the past ten years: his
physical assemblages of clearly recognizable everyday junk such as old couches,
suitcases, and women’s underwear. The films are also an extension of Conner’s
welding of death and comedy.”
269
Then, in 1967, in one of the most ambitious
contemporaneous reviews of the artist’s films, Carl I. Belz astutely drew the
reader’s attention to themes in Conner’s films that related to the context of
contemporary art more generally.

268
Interview with Bruce Conner, Conducted by Paul Karlstrom, San Francisco, August 12, 1974,
Smithsonian Archives of American Art.
269
David Mosen, “Short Films: Report,” Film Quarterly 19, no. 3 (Spring 1966), 54.

236
At the beginning of his essay, Belz explains that the underground cinema
in America was achieving a remarkable level of public attention; he felt, rightly,
that a newfound popularity would pose fresh interpretative problems. He writes,
“this growing recognition of an avant-garde cinema will undoubtedly be
accompanied by growing problems of an historical and critical nature as well. The
relationship between contemporary painting and sculpture and cinema is such a
problem.” Specifically, the problem to which Selz addresses his statement is the
challenge that experimental film posed to conventional art criticism, at a moment
when there were few cultural critics capable of truly comprehending the complex
interaction of diverse media forms. He continues, “The relationship [between film
and the other arts] is actually suggested by the artists themselves, especially
individuals like Bruce Conner who, during the past five years, has made
contributions of dramatic significance in both media [visual art and film].”
270
This
quotation is fascinating for its unusually prophetic understanding of the changing
cultural status of the cinematic avant-garde, at the point of its perhaps greatest
public recognition, before it eventually receded back into the cultural peripheries
of an underground social and aesthetic practice. In his review of Conner’s early
films, Belz was also savvy enough to recognize that his cinematic works were
somehow more modern, more congruous with other developments in fine art, than
those of his contemporaries within the avant-garde film world. He writes, “Unlike
other ‘experimental’ film artists – for instance Kenneth Anger or Stan Brakhage –

270
Carl I. Belz, “Three Films by Bruce Conner,” Film Culture 44 (Spring 1967), 57.

237
Conner’s art builds on the discoveries of contemporary expression in general. He
avoids completely the now trite vocabulary of Surrealism and abstraction, as well
as the heavy handed symbolism and fetishistic devices which seem to plague so
much current work.”
271
Such a review, like that of O’Doherty, was extremely
uncommon and in fact, few film critics, academics, or curators would demonstrate
an interest in actually considering Conner’s films (or those of any other
experimental filmmaker) within the same cultural landscape of fine art, despite
the fact that roughly half of the artist’s films actually debuted in art galleries.

Intermediary Dialogue, the Pin-Up Girl, and the Nude:
In much of Conner’s work, his subject of artistic reflection was the
distinctively American method of mediating sexuality, through mass produced
images of the female form. The complex, unstable, and often exploitative
interpenetration of sex, violence, and capital in American mass culture produced a
wellspring of representational codes that provoked Conner’s most enduring
artistic interventions into the cultural landscape of the 1960s and 70s.
Throughout a range of media, Conner interrogated Hollywood’s visual
methods for commodifying sexuality. In assemblage, he created essayistic
tableaus in which he selected images from cinema – using either film stills or
promotional photographs – and placed them within the visual spaces of semi-

271
As Selz suggests, Conner had a markedly different social and artistic agenda from many of the
artists that P. Adams Sitney would later group within his moniker of “visionary” filmmakers
(Ibid., 58).

238
sculptural, stationary media, thus activating the associative symbology of these
images within an entirely different visual economy. In this process, Conner
performed a kind of intermedial transference in which he repositioned the mass
culture iconography of Hollywood stardom in order to call attention to its
extraordinary potency for cultural signification. His assemblage works of this
variety, including HOMAGE TO JEAN HARLOW (1963), HOMAGE TO MAE
WEST, HOMAGE TO MINNIE MOUSE, draw much of their affective and
associative force from their capacity to reactivate the embedded cultural
associations of their subjects, which had been achieved through their circulation
within an entirely different medium and socio-economic network.
272
In his work
in both assemblage and cinema, Conner argued by visual example that Hollywood
filmmaking is perhaps the most powerful force in the almost militaristic
combination of exploitation and repression that is typical of the American
entertainment industry. And the central icon of this perverse commercial
mechanism is the mass produced image of the starlet or pin-up girl, a 20
th
-century,
mechanically reproduced version of the female nude.
In this sense, one of the principal functions of industrial film production
has always been, and likely will continue to be, the commodification of female
sexuality. To Conner, the commercial iconography of female sexuality – whether
embodied in the promotional glamour shot, the pin-up, or the stag film – was the
most provocative and overdetermined visual currency that American popular

272
Conner preferred that the orthography for the titles of his works be written in all capital letters.

239
culture had to offer. Because of his compulsion to comment upon and intervene
into his media environment, Conner was drawn to some of the most potent visual
signifiers of commercialism and sexuality in Hollywood, from Jean Harlow to
Marilyn Monroe.
Conner’s work engages with femininity and sexuality, in ways that are
often refracted through and mediated by the most exploitative of mass culture
sources, including moving image pornography, television advertising, and a
variety of popular photographic images and magazines. His assemblage,
LOOKING GLASS (1964) and his film, MARILYN TIMES FIVE (1968-73), both
feature semi-pornographic content and express persuasive, though sometimes
ambivalent, critical statements of these modes of representation. The overlap and
exchange between these works provides a productive case study of the ways in
which postwar intermedial art practice engaged a variety of provocative, debased,
and at times, puerile energies within its exchanges of information and imagery in
which avant-garde art and mass culture drew from the same sources of popular
erotic imagery.
LOOKING GLASS (1964) is an assemblage work that explicitly
foregrounds both sexual imagery and the popular act of looking at it. In its
rectangular shape and vertical orientation, it featured a slightly more conventional
vertical picture plane than that of some of his more structurally sculptural work,
like HOMAGE TO JEAN HARLOW, for example. However, it has a number of
structural and thematic similarities to his other work as well. LOOKING GLASS is

240
clearly divided into two sections. The top half features a densely crowded,
overpacked amalgam of materials including a woman’s shoe, a beaded purse,
pieces of cloth, silk, a stuffed blowfish (wrapped in pantyhose), women’s silk
undergarments, costume feathers, dangling tassels, and two centrally placed
female mannequin arms and hands adorned with bright red nail polish. In its use
of mannequin parts, this assemblage includes anthropomorphic sculptural details
that directly present a life-size display of false femininity. Beneath this dense
display of feminine finery and inexplicable exotica (a stuffed blowfish?) there is a
white shelf upon which the mannequin arms rest, as if sitting atop a woman’s
dressing table. Within this crowded array of female finery, there are a few
commercially produced pin-up photo reproductions (or “glamour shots”) likely
taken from popular men’s magazines, including the legendary Playboy spread of
an ivory skinned, nude Marilyn Monroe on an iridescent red background.
273
In a
sense, the top portion of the work resembles a disheveled version of a nightclub
dancer or actress’s dressing room, in which a variety of clothes and scarves have
been draped across the mirror, and next to which, she has pasted a photograph of
the icon whom she aspires to emulate.
Beneath the assortment of female clothing and jewelry, there is a tasseled
wooden shelf, and beneath it, dozens of torn and fragmentary images of female
nudes. They were likely taken from semi-pornographic magazines of the 1950s

273
In a suggestive conflation of identities, which would be replayed almost a decade later, Arline
Hunter – the star of Apple Knockers and the Coke (and the subject of Conner’s MARILYN TIMES
FIVE) – imitated the very same photo spread of Monroe for a later issue of Playboy. From the
visible evidence, it is difficult to tell which one is in fact included in Conner’s assemblage.

241
and 60s, and feature an array of women posing, vamping, and splaying
themselves out before a still camera in clichéd poses typical of so-called girlie
magazines. The images are torn, scratched, often incomplete, covered with
staples, or partially occluded by fabric dangling from above; these ripped and torn
photographic fragments display disembodied legs, segments of torsos, and
incomplete faces and bodies. The images have been defaced in a sense, and
communicate a compositional encounter between violent decollage and an
adolescent’s slapdash locker room shrine to his sex idols. In this sense, the bottom
half of the work communicates the repressed, libidinal alter ego of the
hyperfeminized, debased glamour of the work’s upper section.
On one level, the piece’s title suggests how it works rhetorically. If it is
meant to be seen literally, as a looking glass or mirror, then it might be suggested
that the piece presents some kind of reflected image of either its viewer or its
maker. In this sense, Conner implies that the work is an ideological mirror of the
average American psyche, as it showcases semi-pornographic imagery and
clichéd signifiers of commercialized femininity pertaining to shared unconscious
associations. On the other hand, we could also understand the work as a kind of
window-on-the-world, something not dissimilar from Joseph Cornell’s surrealistic
and libidinally infused boxes.
274
In LOOKING GLASS, we find something
altogether different from Cornell: a plain, grungy compendium of girlie photos
pasted together sloppily and serially below a shelf holding three-dimensional

274
Though Cornell’s art also often featured Hollywood starlets as its central sources of visual
interest, they were involved in an imagined fantasy world motivated by enraptured personal and
affective associations in an entirely different emotional register from that of Conner.

242
icons of the most conventional and trivialized notion of the feminine. This was the
last of Conner’s works to use these materials – pantyhose, women’s
undergarments, costume jewelry, etc. – that were typical of his assemblage work
in the late 1950s and early 1960s. It was consciously intended as his final
statement on this phase of his career, as a summary of his work thus far. Its
fetishistic and sexual associations are loudly inscribed throughout the entirety of
its visual space, presenting an obsessive sexual energy has boiled over from his
earlier work in which such energies were more restrained.
LOOKING GLASS is persistent in its formal repetition as it features
photographic elements that are not configured in order to create a structured
picture logic of illusionistic space. In this sense, the collage component of the
work differs markedly from the dominant representational strategies of this mode,
as one would find in the work of a range of well-known collagists including, for
example, Pablo Picasso in a cubist mode, Max Ernst in a surrealist vein, or
Richard Hamilton working with the visual language of pop art. Instead, Conner’s
photographic fragments of nude women, which are the work’s principal visual
content, are organized serially, without any effort to incorporate them into an
atmospheric configuration like that of narrative or diegetic space, thus relating the
work to a variety of composition that is more typical of decollage. Conner has
addressed this formal distinction between his work and the precious,
compositionally deliberate work of other collage artists in terms of painting:
“There are an awful lot of predominately painterly attitudes towards collages. The

243
attitudes that I had were much less painterly.”
275
As Conner pastes these images
together without modification, he draws the viewer’s attention to their nature as
popular photographs and their materiality as magazine cutouts. As a result, most
viewers of the work would be consciously aware of the sources of the images, and
thus be implicated explicitly in the basic conditions of viewing a kind of
pornographic assembly line of commodified, stereotyped femininity.

MARILYN TIMES FIVE:
In some sense, the seriality of Conner’s assemblage reflects the apparatus
of cinema and the mechanized nature of image production in the related
technologies of popular print media and television.
276
Conner once said, “Movies
are collage in my mind … a series of individual photographs that are stuck
together.”
277
The artist’s approach, unlike that of a number of other found-footage
filmmakers, foregrounds the inescapable seriality of the medium. His film of
1968-73, MARILYN TIMES FIVE, is a hyperbolic instantiation of an obsessively
repetitive method of film organization. In the work, Conner assembles five
sequences of film from a semi-pornographic short stag film titled Apple Knockers
and the Coke (1948), each time accompanied by the song, “I’m Through With
Love,” sung by Marilyn Monroe. The duration of the film is thus the cumulative

275
Karlstrom, 19.
276
It might be argued that Conner’s work relates conceptually to that of Warhol, in which the artist
conveyed an interest in seriality and repetition in general terms that were not solely applicable to
his film art.
277
Peter Boswell, “Bruce Conner: Theater of Light and Shadow” in 2000 BC: The Bruce Conner
Story, Part II, 32.

244
length of five repetitions of the song: thirteen-and-a-half minutes. The actress in
Apple Knockers was a Marilyn Monroe look-alike named Arline Hunter, who for
years was thought by many, including Conner himself, to be the iconic actress
herself.
278
The original film is roughly eight minutes long and features a few
different striptease sections in which the actress removes her top, rolls an apple
over her bare breasts, and suggestively drinks a coca-cola from a bottle, playfully
spilling it over her semi-nude torso.
In Conner’s film, the original material has been selectively excised,
heavily edited, and judiciously reprinted. MARILYN TIMES FIVE reconfigures a
small amount of the original footage into five easily distinguishable sections.
Each of the five segments of Conner’s film presents one extremely brief section
of Apple Knockers (less than ten seconds each) over and over, each time giving
the viewer slightly more footage of the scantily clad actress. Here the film
formally enacts a performance parallel to that of the profilmic striptease itself, in
which there also exists an alternation between occluding visual access to the
naked female body and exposing that same information, in a peek-a-boo play
between hiding and revealing taboo imagery. In Conner’s film, between very
short clips of the actress undressing, suggestively drinking from a soda bottle, or
eating an apple, there are lengthy sections of empty screen space, produced by the
extensive use of black leader. In fact, these breaks from the film’s flow of
lascivious visual content are so significant in duration that, of the film’s thirteen

278
Monroe is purported by some to have made a few unseen striptease movies herself before
beginning her “legitimate” film career. This widely circulated myth likely fueled speculation
concerning the identity of the performer in Apple Knockers.

245
and a half minutes, more than half feature a black screen, a condition that openly
frustrates any puerile expectations that the film’s viewers may have Conner, like
the actress of Apple Knockers and Coke, teases the viewer as he shows and hides
and shows and hides the increasingly naked female body, reminding us, in an
openly self-reflexive way, that we are looking at a woman who is taking off her
clothes in order to be looked at. Like LOOKING GLASS, MARILYN TIMES FIVE
is a meta-peep show. The thematic crossovers, shared philosophical promises, and
overlapping artistic strategies of these works demonstrate that Conner’s artistic
practice exceeds the material differences of his chosen media.
The rhetorical consciousness of Conner’s work relates directly to the
characteristic content of cinema (and popular culture in general) as well as its
apparatus and mode of production: Hollywood cinema is a machine for looking
and exploiting, and Conner’s work in assemblage and film draws the viewer’s
attention to this ideological function of the medium. Conner was certainly not the
first film artist to foreground this fact. As many critics have indicated, filmmakers
including Josef Von Sternberg, Alfred Hitchcock, and Brian De Palma have
repeatedly utilized and referenced these voyeuristic tropes of Hollywood film
language, in the context of commercial filmmaking. And in experimental cinema,
filmmakers including Cornell, Warhol, Jack Smith, and the Kuchar Bros. have
played on Hollywood’s techniques of the sexualization of a glamorized,
exaggerated female body. However, in MARILYN TIMES FIVE, Conner
forcefully estranges the apparatus of cinema from its conventional methods for

246
objectifying the female form and producing visual pleasure by converting a
striptease film into a series of hyper-truncated fragments of obsessively repeated
gestures. Through their pathological repetitions, these mediated movements
become mechanical and thus forcefully draw the viewer’s attention, not to the
performed eroticism of the profilmic space, but to the materiality of the medium
itself and its innate seriality.
The reflexivity of MARILYN TIMES FIVE, like that of LOOKING GLASS,
functions to make its viewers aware of their own acts of visual consumption. Both
of these works are self-conscious studies – pitched in the register of art, in which
cultural materials have been reframed and reconditioned – into the processes of
representational objectification and sexualized viewing in American culture. In a
mode of critique, which was later enacted more explicitly and didactically in
feminist film theory of the 1970s, MARILYN TIMES FIVE encourages its viewers
to think about their own processes of looking and their associated experiences of
visual pleasure. But unlike much of the theory-inspired feminist film of the 1970s
– including Laura Mulvey’s Riddles of the Sphinx (1977) or Yvonne Rainer’s
Lives of Performers (1972), for example – this film does not entirely efface the
conventional visual pleasures that might be associated with a striptease stag film.
Many people find the film particularly unnerving because of its ceaseless visual
and sonic repetition without closure – again, “I’m Through With Love” is played
five times – but many viewers likely take some pleasure in its teasing images of
an uncanny Marilyn Monroe look-alike who rolls around semi-nude for the

247
camera. This tension between a simple pleasure of sexual curiosity and a rigid,
almost mathematical structure of continued and systematic repetition frustrates
simple Hollywood-style identification with the objects that cinema normally
shows us. Like the film work of Andy Warhol, MARILYN TIMES FIVE utilizes a
variety of hyperextended duration in which standard temporal expectations are
frustrated. In this sense Conner’s visual approach complicates the transparency of
Hollywood’s visual and rhetorical strategies as it makes its viewers aware of the
meaning of these images as signifiers of repression and exploitation, while it also
forcibly reminds them of their own processes of looking.

In a letter to art collector Ed Janss, Conner explained the conditions under
which he assembled this film, highlighting the significance of the work’s
materiality and grain. In this film, he was
using footage from a girlie movie that Marilyn Monroe made in the
forties. The soundtrack is “I’m Through With Love” sung by Marilyn in
the movie “Some Like It Hot.” I started with 400 ft. of film from the girlie
movie and threw out 350 ft. of it. The 50 ft. saved was the footage that had
some kind of grace or humor or meaningful motion. I limited all the
images to exactly what was on the film of the girlie movie (including just
specks on the print). I haven’t added anything else except black leader
between shots. The footage, which was maybe 20
th
generation by the time
I got it, was grainy. I emphasized the grain with high contrast printing and
I repeated images.
279

As Conner’s description of the work suggests, it was intended, like many of his
other works in assemblage and film, to reconfigure the debased materials of the

279
Letter from Bruce Conner to Ed Janss, November 24, 1972, Smithsonian Collection of Bruce
Conner Papers.

248
most exploitative commercial mass culture by transposing them into a work of
homage. However, as he enhanced the grain and visual noise of the work, Conner
intentionally undermined the mimetic force of the imagery, thus challenging its
capacity to transfer an index of the once-living, once-breathing Monroe, across
history. Like his film REPORT, which reflected upon the televisual
commodification and symbolic transformation of President Kennedy’s image,
MARILYN TIMES FIVE is as much about mediation – in its emphasis upon the
specific materials of cinema and its systematic analysis of its conventions – as it is
about the mythology of Marilyn Monroe.
In 1974, Conner and a Monroe expert/enthusiast exchanged some
correspondence concerning the identity of the performer in his film. (Though their
letters were intended to be included in Film Quarterly magazine, [and were
addressed to the editor, Ernest Callenbach], they were not published.) James R.
Haspiel, the author of Marilyn and the Other Monroe Girls, wrote to Film
Quarterly magazine in order to complain about a review (published the previous
month) in which Conner was quoted as identifying the performer in his film as
Marilyn Monroe. In Haspiel’s view, Conner’s refusal to acknowledge that the
performer was not the famous sex symbol was indicative of his ignorance, “in
what comes off as a pathetic attempt to elevate the importance of his tawdry film
effort.”
280
Conner’s response to the letter demonstrated that this question – was it
really Marilyn Monroe? – was not terribly relevant to understanding the film’s

280
Letter dated December 3, 1974, copy in the collection of Pacific Film Archives, Berkeley, CA.

249
relationship to the iconographic potency of the star’s image. Conner’s
comprehension of the interaction of celebrity, identity, and selfhood in American
culture was more complex than a simple one-to-one correspondence between a
body and a name. The intricate nexus of cultural signification includes an
exchange of visual information and symbolic meaning with the society in which
these icons circulate. Conner’s work powerfully demonstrates that visual meaning
is created through social process.
He responds to the criticism by writing the following:
MARILYN TIMES FIVE is an equation. It is not intended to be
completed by the film alone. The viewer completes the equation.

M X 5 uses pictures and sound alleged to be the image and voice of
Marilyn Monroe. The image, or Anima, of Marilyn was not owned by
Norma Jean any more than it was owned by Arline Hunter. Images can
sometimes have more power than the person they are supposed to
represent. Some cultures consider an image to be a theft of the soul or
spirit of a person. They will dwindle and die. The film attempts to reveal
some of the powers hidden within itself and far removed from the original
source. […] The illustrious dead quickly gain guardians who also define
the image that they have enshrined.
281

For Conner, the question of the performer’s identity was not what was most
important about the work. Instead, MARILYN TIMES FIVE dramatized social
processes of meaning construction and image comprehension. Whether or not the
film was a photographic index of Norma Jeane Baker (Monroe’s real name), it
nevertheless was a symbolic representation of Marilyn Monroe, the star, the icon,
and the victim of sexual objectification and exploitation. Like many fans who
lamented the death of the starlet, Conner felt that when the Hollywood industry

281
Letter dated January 18, 1975, copy in the collection of Pacific Film Archives, Berkeley, CA.

250
converted Baker into Monroe, it initiated an exploitative process that culminated,
almost inevitably, in her tragic death. To Conner, Monroe (like Harlow) was a
symbolic representation of the collateral damage that American commerce enacts
on its victims, as a systematic mechanism for the mistreatment of women through
the visual control of their sexual identities. In a more general sense, it must also
be recognized that this film about celebrity, mass culture iconography, and the
traffic of meaning within the entertainment industry engages, like most of
Conner’s work, with the same networks of signification as advertising, pop art,
and television.
All of Conner’s films, and many of his assemblages, directly address
themselves towards the processes by which moving images are endowed with
cultural force. The majority of them foreground mediation in ideological or
philosophical terms, and thus serve as important early experiments (beginning in
the late 1950s), into the ways in which non-industrial film can interrogate
dominant media forms. This mode of pointed critical inquiry was certainly not the
dominant strategy for experimental filmmaking in the period. Conner’s films and
assemblages were known for their shared capacity to provoke audiences in both
aesthetic and ideological terms. In its extreme structural systematicity, MARILYN
TIMES FIVE is formally rather distinct from Conner’s other films, yet in its
content it continues to provoke the same tensions as his earlier work. Film curator
and educator Steve Anker recalled a contemporaneous reaction to the film upon
its earliest screenings:

251
Conner has often been at the center of controversy, even within the avant-
garde. I remember a radio interview between Jonas Mekas and Ken Jacobs
in the early 1970s, broadcast over WNYC in New York, in which Mekas
attacked MARILYN TIMES FIVE as being exploitative; Jacobs defended
the film, as did others soon after MARILYN TIMES FIVE was released.”
282

An ideological anxiety often results from situations like that of Conner in which
seemingly enlightened, well-intentioned artists attempt to criticize retrograde and
destructive social forces, while still trafficking in some of the corrosive energy of
their targets of critique.
By their very natures, works like these often provoke people to ask, is it
exploitation or is it art? Before considering such an ethical question, one must ask
an ontological one: Even if it were Conner’s desire to create a critical, politically
progressive work, how could a striptease film of Marilyn Monroe ever be truly
evacuated of its exploitative force? Its history of exploitation is embedded in the
work like an index. It might even be suggested that the grain of the film itself is
complicit in the exploitative action that it represents. Like so many artists who
developed their mature voices in the commodity saturated landscape of the mid-
20
th
century, divisions such as these would often prove trivial – like that between
life and art – and thus demand complex and philosophically provocative artistic
investigations into the spaces of moral and artistic anxiety and ambivalence.

In LOOKING GLASS and MARILYN TIMES FIVE, Conner reconfigured
icons of commercialized femininity and degraded sexuality, at least partly in order

282
Steve Anker, “Correspondence and Controversy: Social Studies or I Left My Avant-Garde in
San Francisco,” Film Quarterly 40, no. 3 (Spring 1987), 57.

252
to interrogate them in both visual and philosophical terms. Yet something about
the significatory and rhetorical functions of these pieces remains rhetorically
unstable, regardless of the medium in use. In 1989, art critic Anne Ayres
described the complexity of reading tone in Conner’s work.
283
She writes, “An
interpretative unease (which has always plagued the reception of Conner’s work)
arises from the questionable line between Conner’s exposé of hypocrisy and his
delight in eroticism and the seamy side of contemporary popular culture.”
284
In
fact, this provocative artistic strategy was not only clear to academics and critics
who make professions of such observations; it was also a common response from
a range of viewers. In 1962, a reader of Artforum wrote a letter to the editor
expressing a similar sentiment of distaste and revulsion. She writes,
I consider Mr. Conner an evil genius with fantastic power for
expression. My admiration for his work is as great as my revulsion
for it and I only wish that someone, not excluding Mr. Conner
himself, could convince me that his work is prompted more by a
desire of exposing a degenerated, suicidal generation, than an
actual sadistic sexual involvement with the work itself.
285

This tension between critique and a seemingly complicit visual pleasure is
not easily resolved in Conner’s art. This is a fact recognized and embraced by
Conner himself. He openly describes his own work in such terms, by suggesting
that, “for the art to have its full meaning it should have a certain amount of
wonder to it. The reactions to it, or what it is, shouldn’t be programmed at the

283
To my mind, this is a problem for all found image formats, because authorial traces are largely
limited to editorial choices, rather than representational style.
284
Anne Ayres, Forty Years of California Assemblage (Los Angeles: UCLA Art Council Annual
Exhibition, 1989), 130.
285
Silvan Simone, “Letters” in issue after Artforum 1, no. 6 (November 1962). The letter was
written by gallerist Silvan Simone.

253
time. That stands in the way of any kind of direct relationship.”
286
He was
consciously aware of the mixed messages and responses that his work produced,
such that this ideological anxiety is built intentionally into the work. He has
explained that this diversity of possible responses is an indication of the work’s
openness, a condition that connects his rhetorical strategies in cinema to his works
in assemblage in which gallery and museum visitors are forced on occasion to
confront rather simple repurposed objects without a clear ideological frame. It is
Conner’s belief that the totemic icons of 20
th
century commerce, like religious
icons of the past, are capable of provoking a diverse range of associative and
affective responses: “Things that have the most power are those that have the
widest variety of responses.”
287
This significatory ambivalence or tonal ambiguity
is in fact, in some sense, the conceptual engine that drives the artist’s work.

Conner’s Influence: Robert Nelson, Documentary, Irony, and Collective
Authorship:
Conner’s legacy as the preeminent found footage filmmaker in the history
of American avant-garde cinema is widely recognized. Filmmakers and artists
including Craig Baldwin, Abigail Child, Paul McCarthy, and Phil Solomon have
readily acknowledged his massive influence on their strategies of appropriation
and citation. However, Conner’s legacy should not be traced exclusively through
filmmakers who deal primarily with found footage. In an aesthetic sense,

286
Conner interview with Paul Karlstrom, San Francisco, August 12, 1974, (Smithsonian Archives
of American Art), 27.
287
Joan Rothfuss, “Escape Artist” in 2000 BC: The Bruce Conner Story Part II, 183.

254
Conner’s historical innovation extended beyond the formal choice to utilize
commonplace or found materials. Conner’s work, in both its consistent
interrogation of popular culture and its novel reconsideration of the tonal and
rhetorical possibilities that were posed by experimental film, presented not only
fresh formal possibilities for non-commercial (as well as industrial) filmmakers,
but it also showed new avenues for rhetorical and tonal experimentation.
Before Conner, many of the most celebrated works of American avant-
garde cinema displayed a staid tone, largely inherited from various brands of
European cinematic abstraction and high modernist drama and poetry. With a few
exceptions, including the works of Jack Smith, Ron Rice, Vernon Zimmerman (as
well as much of Warhol) which were conceived in the register of camp, the
American avant-garde cinema of the 1950s foregrounded dramas of psychological
introspection, dire formalism, or personal, lyrical approaches that were similarly
somber in tone. Conner’s filmmaking, like that of a handful of other West Coast,
countercultural filmmakers – including Ben Van Meter, Scott Bartlett, Kenneth
Anger, and Will Hindle – presented a visually heterogeneous, pop culture infused
psychedelia that was both more accessible to a large group of people and more
ludic in its tonal register. Though Conner would produce an occasional work of
formal austerity (for example MARILYN TIMES FIVE), his overall artistic project
also managed to maintain significant traces of anarchy and ambivalence in spite
of its sometimes biting criticality. This is an important, neglected part of Conner’s
historical legacy as a film artist; it is particularly evident in pop infused films like

255
COSMIC RAY, BREAKAWAY, and VIVIAN. The filmmaker who most powerfully
exhibits Conner’s influence in this regard is Robert Nelson, another moving
image artist whose foundational work was produced in the same social and
geographic milieu of the San Francisco Bay area as Conner.
Nelson, like many experimental filmmakers, began as a painter. Through
his exposure to the movement known as San Francisco Funk at the San Francisco
Art Institute (then known as The California School of Fine Arts), he formulated
an understanding of creative authorship that was substantially more collaborative
and anti-authoritarian than earlier artistic conventions dictated. Similarly, as
someone who came to the arts during the bohemian transition between the beat
era and the counterculture of the 1960s, Nelson was drawn to varied intermedial
interactions that defied the clean divisions between artistic forms that were of a
function, in part, of classical disciplinary education. From their very beginnings,
his efforts in cinema emphasized collaborative undertakings with a range of Bay
Area artists, including painters William T. Wiley and William Allan, theatrical
director of the San Francisco Mime Troupe Ron Davis, rock and roll group the
Grateful Dead, poet-playwright Michael McClure, multi-media artist Bruce
Nauman, and minimalist composer Steve Reich, among others. Due to Nelson’s
interest in the expanded field of art production during the 1960s, he naturally
found his way to cinema, a medium that served as a model of totalizing,
immersive art in the period. But, it was largely Conner’s influence that led him
there. In an interview of the late 1970s, Nelson explains:

256
I wanted to be won over if there was anything there, but I didn’t see
anything. Until I ran into COSMIC RAY. And that was the first one, that
did it, and that was what really made me realize that somehow it was
possible. Obviously it didn’t cost any money, relatively speaking,
compared to what movies are supposed to cost and it was the first one that
really made me realize that some amazing power could generate from
images that you put together at home.
288

What Nelson found in Conner’s work was an accessible, inexpensive, amateur
production model that impressed him with the conditions of artistic possibility
that it seemed to suggest. Nelson’s subsequent work in the medium was varied in
format, tone, and representational strategy – much more so than Conner’s in fact –
but it exhibited the same aversion to artistic and intellectual pretension. Conner
once explained his overall attitude towards experimental film in such terms: He
writes, “I’ve always known that I was outside the main, mercantile stream. I have
been placed in an environment that would have its name change now and again:
avant-garde film, experimental film, underground film, independent film, etc. I
have tried to create film work so that it is capable of communicating to people
outside of a limited dialogue within an esoteric, avant-garde or cultish social
form. Jargon I don’t like.”
289
Following Conner, Nelson pioneered his own
irreverent representational strategies that experimented with more idiosyncratic
and playful forms, carefully avoiding the sin of pride that is so typical of self
important film artists who often proclaimed their aesthetic pretensions rather
loudly. By engaging with conditions of chance and collaboration, which were
drawn partially from the open-ended creative and social strategies of the

288
MacDonald, Canyon Cinema, 303.
289
Wees, 77.

257
counterculture, Nelson produced a wealth of works that were massively varied in
their artistic methods, wildly anarchic in their defiance of the avant-garde’s
valorization of carefully constructed, symbolically layered artworks, and
representative of a fresh vision of filmmaking as play.
Because of their radical difference from so much of the formalized,
structurally rigorous work of the American avant-garde, Nelson’s films have
garnered little critical recognition. All of his films demonstrate a casual approach
to authorship that quite directly challenges classical and normative notions of
artistic creativity and controlled expression. Within his taxonomic study of the
avant-garde, P. Adams Sitney did indeed create a new title, “the participatory
film,” for a mode of filmmaking initiated by Nelson’s Bleu Shut (1971). But, the
inclusion of Nelson’s film within Sitney’s narrative does not sufficiently address
the artistic complexity, iconoclasm, or philosophical innovation that his works
represent in toto. Still, it is no surprise that his films have remained outside of
film canons founded upon the modernist values of artistic vision, heroic
innovation, or creative genius. Nelson’s artistic intentions have always been
significantly more humble than most of the celebrated so-called masterpieces of
the avant-garde – works like Stan Brakhage’s epic personal drama Dog Star Man,
or Hollis Frampton’s masterpiece of systematic organization Zorns Lemma. These
are complex projects of careful planning and organization, inscribed within
deliberately controlled textual fields. Nelson on the contrary, has proudly

258
explained that some of his films were “barely authored at all.”
290
As suggested
throughout this study, such works posed major challenges to filmmakers and
critics who were still proudly holding onto classical notions of film craft, personal
expressivity, and controlled authorship.
With The Great Blondino (1967), Nelson began his artistic partnership
with William T. Wiley, a like minded painter drawn to conceptual gags,
wordplay, and irrational, performative experiments in the illogical and absurd.
Blondino continued the semi-dramatic, improvisatory mode of Nelson’s earlier
works and reflected the same formally eclectic sense of bricolage and
heterogeneous composition. With The Off-Handed Jape (1967) and Bleu Shut
(1970), Nelson and Wiley continued their collaborative enterprise with a spirit of
revelry and wild play that inevitably spills off the screen into the spaces of film
spectatorship. Each of these films features a kind of inexplicable riddle as its
generative subject. In the first, the performers attempt to enact a variety of
gestural non sequiturs, including the elusive “off-handed jape.” After filming
spontaneous, unscripted attempts by each of the artists to display an array of
ridiculous facial expressions and bodily exercises, the artists then quickly
recorded a simple voiceover in which they commented on their performances, e.g.
“that was a good one,” “that was quite a jape,” etc. Their back-and-forth banter is
simultaneously natural and absurd, like an in-joke between two friends. Bleu Shut
follows a similar strategy, though the subject of the film’s enigmatic riddle is a

290
Robert Nelson at Redcat, Los Angeles, January 21, 2008.

259
naming game involving reproduced magazine drawings of boats in which
ridiculous, incongruous are titles superimposed upon them. In both films, the
artists produced the soundtracks without actually looking at the images that the
audience sees. The results of these playful, spontaneous experiments in
performance and sound-image correspondence are textual knots whose source of
enigmatic comic energy is both immediately recognizable and conceptually
indecipherable.
In their total disdain for artistic self importance and exalted authorship,
Nelson’s films evoke the high-spirited and frolicsome energy of the experimental
art scene of San Francisco. In particular, his works of the late 1960s and 1970s
exude a wooly energy that is largely absent from experimental films made in New
York in the same period, where the tendency to produce works of extreme
structural rigor and mathematical organization was becoming progressively more
pronounced. Discussing his earliest films, in 1970 Nelson wrote, “None of us
knew anything about making movies at that time, but we all knew about art
(namely, that it had something to do with having a good time).”
291
In this
statement (and in his film practice), Nelson provocatively redefines the central
function of filmic aesthetics as a social enterprise rooted in camaraderie,
friendship, and conceptual play. This aesthetic enterprise, however rare in cinema,
was relatively common in the artistic atmosphere of San Francisco in which Tom
Marioni, a Bay Area conceptual artist mischievously titled an exhibition of his

291
Robert Nelson, “Robert Nelson on Robert Nelson,” Film Culture 48-49 (Winter/Spring 1970),
23.

260
work, “The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends is the Highest Form of Art”
(1970). Nelson’s films openly parade their irreverence for the avant-garde
filmmaking tradition that emphasizes craft, labor, and training. In fact, Nelson’s
irreverent and iconoclastic artistic sensibility had a significant influence upon the
filmmaker’s cohort and the Bay Area arts community.

In 1966, three artists collaboratively produced a playful pseudo-
documentary titled Fishing for Asian Carp. Multi-media artist Bruce Nauman met
painter William Allan at UC-Davis, and they conceived of a number of extremely
simple films together. Their projects were all shot silent and documented basic
actions. For this unpretentious fishing film, they enlisted the help of Robert
Nelson to aid with the soundtrack. He narrated the film with Allan in a casual
voiceover conversation, like that of the Off-Handed Jape, which was recorded
spontaneously, in an off-the-cuff manner after the film was shot. Though the idea
for the film is generally credited to Nauman (who conceived of it and shot it),
Fishing for Asian Carp serves as a curious historical bridge between the art and
experimental film communities of the Bay Area in the mid 1960s. This little seen
film clearly displays Nelson’s auteurist imprint while it also serves as an unusual,
minor footnote in the filmographies of all the artists involved.
Fishing for Asian Carp has the feel of a student film in its unabashed
disregard for conventional craft and its ludic embrace of the most basic
collaborative aspects of non-industrial filmmaking. The film suggests an

261
uproarious afternoon of a few men fishing and thus demonstrates a pronounced
irreverence for elitist notions of both fine art and experimental film. The film
begins with simple black and white titles. It is shot in color and is less than three
minutes long, likely the length of the unedited fifty-foot reel of 16mm reversal
film. The filmmaker follows a fisherman (Allan) as he prepares a hook, casts a
line, and then catches a few Asian carp in a river. The visual imagery is rather
straightforward and presents a simple action in a series of a few casually framed
shots, as a home movie might. The film’s visual composition is not particularly
elegant and it even includes some flash frames, indicating that some of the editing
was likely done in-camera at the time of filming. Most descriptions of the film
suggest that it begins when the fishing starts and ends when Allan catches a carp,
but in actuality, he catches more than one fish. In this regard the film is not as
formally austere nor as straightforward as some descriptions might suggest.
The soundtrack of Fishing for Asian Carp is the primary source of the
work’s rhetorical framing, as well as its comedic content. On it we hear Allan and
Nelson lightheartedly discuss the carp that are being caught. They debate the
fish’s tenaciousness and its potential edibility. There is also some comedic,
anthropomorphic speculation of the fish’s ferocity. Overall however, their
conversation is rather matter-of-fact, as Allan explains what it is that he is doing
on the image track: baiting a hook, casting a line, catching a fish, etc. In this
sense, the soundtrack functions as an offscreen descriptive commentary, like that
of the live narrator who accompanied silent films and explained them in-person,

262
in real time to film-going audiences. Behind their conversation, Nelson (or
perhaps Nauman, or whoever was serving as the sound recordist) layered some
melodramatic music and the sound of running water. Towards the end of the film,
Allan is seen pulling the fish from the river as he explains that he did not have a
net or a gaff, so he held the fish up by “finger gaffing,” triggering an uproarious
laugh from Nelson that continues until the film’s conclusion. Like a number of
Nelson’s collaborations, this work by Nauman functions as an in-joke produced
almost exclusively for the benefit and pleasure of its producers. The film, like
Nelson’s work in general, displays an unusual capacity to index its extratextual
history by openly displaying its process of coming into being while
simultaneously transmitting the pleasures experienced by its producers to its
viewers. For works like these, the stakes are simply different from those of other
experimental films. Yet in many cases Nelson’s films (and those of his cohort) do
represent authentic experiments, e.g. what would happen if we simply shot
William Allan trying to catch a fish? In this sense, the outcome of the experiment
– the fact that he did indeed pull a carp from the river – was largely determined by
chance. And the soundtrack’s spontaneous and playful verbal exchange is greater
evidence of the work’s fresh embrace of a casual happenstance that is the basic
result of collaboration between friends.
Though rarely discussed, this casually produced film provokes a
consideration of some of the most significant artistic concerns of its era. As the
later work of Bruce Nauman would demonstrate, he was profoundly interested in

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the chance interactions between humans, unplanned events, and recording
technologies; consider for example, his surveillance work, Corridor Installation
(1970) or later, Mapping the Studio I (Fat Chance John Cage) (2001). Similarly,
this collaboration provides a vision of artistic community that defies the
dichotomy between “artists’ films” and “avant-garde films,” that continues
plagues both the historiography and exhibition practice of experimental cinema.
In Fishing for Asian Carp, we have a soon-to-be established media artist, his
painting teacher, and an experimental filmmaker (associated with “the coop
avant-garde”) all collaborating together in the context of a lighthearted collective
project. Behind this event, one can also trace the influence and sensibility of John
Cage who pioneered the incorporation of chance processes and atmospheric
contingency into the space of artistic production, while also embracing a notion of
art-making as play. Like much of Cage’s work, this project uses a pre-determined,
relatively arbitrary structure as its framing device (something that Nelson would
do again with his Awful Backlash (1967)). Though Fishing for Asian Carp is a
minor film in the filmographies of all artists involved, it nevertheless exhibits
attitudes and artistic strategies that would continue to exert influence over the
work of both Nauman and Nelson for many years to come.
292

292
Though I have used an example from the San Francisco Bay area to make a point about the
false divisions between so-called artists’ films and experimental cinema (and the overlapping
social communities of these groups), I could have just as easily have discussed an entirely
different group of filmmakers and artists who were working in concert or in some kind of
conceptual proximity. For example, in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 70s, one finds a vibrant
community of filmmakers and artists experimenting with the moving image and applying the
strategies of conceptual art to cinema, including John Baldessari, Ed Ruscha, Morgan Fisher,
Thom Andersen, and Jack Goldstein, to name a few.

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More, Nelson’s Collaborative Documentary:
Perhaps the most ambitious and large scale collaborative work of Nelson’s
filmography is a project that he completed in conjunction with a number of his
students and other amateur filmmakers in Upstate New York in 1971. While
teaching at Ithaca College, Nelson produced No More, a collaborative full length
feature film. Like many of his films, No More was a singular experiment with an
entirely different set of artistic strategies from those that he used in his other
projects. It was a collective experiment in filmmaking, such that when the film
was started, he had no real idea how it would look in the end. In No More Nelson
and his collaborators edited together an expansive collection of often unrelated
film exercises and shorter vignettes into one rollicking, almost unwieldy multi-
author film assemblage. Using a variety of creative methodologies, all of Nelson’s
films, including No More, demonstrate a sustained and rigorous investigation into
the very questions of film authorship through their use chance, the arbitrary
juxtaposition of contradictory sign systems and visual styles, repurposed footage,
and collaborative experimentation. In aggregate, Nelson’s unruly group of film
works utilizes the medium, not as an expressive resource, but as a philosophical
toy applied to the investigation of film’s inborn and unusual capacity to witness
profilmic realities and reconstitute them within collective social practice.
The final product of No More’s ambitious collaboration was a work of
extreme bricolage that simply falls apart at the seams. To Nelson it proved
artistically inadequate and, after a few early screenings, he took it out of public

265
circulation. However, there were aspects of the project that he later felt were
worthy of reconsideration. For this reason, the filmmaker has recently returned his
attentions to this film, reconfigured parts of the footage, in order to whittle it into
smaller, more artistically and tonally manageable new works. (Like Conner,
Nelson has often re-edited his films, destroyed old versions, or entirely re-
organized fragments of unfinished projects.) In his continuing experiment with
authorial strategies, he basically excised one of the more unusual sections of the
film and considered it a new, autonomous work, which he titled, More.
After its excision from the longer, sprawling No More, and two or three
minor edits, in 1998 More was simply declared a new work. In its original
construction as a collaborative, democratically conceived project and in its new
state as a kind of filmic readymade, the work functions as an ongoing experiment
in novel approaches to film authorship. In its current form, the film is about
fifteen minutes in length, and features three sections or episodes. The first portion
of the film is an observational documentary – shot with multiple cameras and
featuring live sound (unusual technical opportunities for experimental cinema) –
that follows an amateur softball game and the social rituals that surround it. The
sync-sound, handheld-camera presentation of the sports event features no
voiceover and no clear rhetorical frame to guide the viewer. With the look of a
cinema a Direct Cinema project it is an observational documentation of a typical
American ritual. Yet, in the context of experimental cinema and fine art of the

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1970s, the work is far from typical; it is an anxiously irreverent, indescribable
work.
More opens with two sports announcers who are seated at an outdoor table
in front of two microphones, animatedly narrating the goings-on of the not yet
seen sports event. We see the game when it is already well underway. The camera
follows the action of the game, but it also presents a significant amount of footage
of the crowd sitting close by. Though there are two teams, the camera persons
direct their attentions almost exclusively to the playful antics of the team wearing
jerseys that read, “TRUCKING STEVES / RECORDS / EDDY ST.” The record
store team, sporting long hair, headbands, and jeans, seem to be enjoying
themselves as they drink beer, horse around, and make mischievous gestures and
lighthearted comments to the filmmakers. At one point, a player speaks directly to
the camera as he reaches into his pocket and pulls out a bottle of cough syrup (a
popular recreational drug of choice in the early 1970s) and holds it up to the
camera saying, “The secret to a winning team.” The players often sit with their
friends by the sidelines, so that the only way to distinguish those playing the game
from the fans is through the team jerseys. There are dogs running around, small
children (white and African-American), and a cable news van in the background.
(Presumably the sportscasters that we saw earlier were providing commentary for
the televised local cable transmission of the sports event.) We see a bit of the
game’s action, though the social activity surrounding it seems to be more central
to the interests of the filmmakers.

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The camerawork is entirely handheld, but the movements and pans are all
extremely fluid and even. The overall organization of the footage displays a visual
economy related to that of television sports coverage, through its excited editing,
its occasional insert shots of player close-ups, and its extended displays of the
fans’ excited faces. The energy builds as the game’s action becomes more
frenzied, and the film’s cutting and camera movement accelerate in order to
match the profilmic energy of the social event. People cheer excitedly as it
becomes clear that the team from Trucking Steve’s Records has won. All the
players run together and pile into a group, enthusiastically celebrating their
victory by jumping up and down in an exuberant huddle. Briefly, the word
“SPORTS” is superimposed over the image of the jubilant team in extremely
understated, small white lettering. It is an eccentric and unexpected authorial
intervention over the diegetic world of the sports event. It is a hyperbolically brief
modification of the film’s visual texture, but because of its strangeness it suggests
that the film may not be the simple observational object that it initially seems.
After the game, the players and fans review their score sheets, and then celebrate
their success by sharing a joint. Firecrackers explode while the athletes and their
friends guzzle together from a large jug of wine. In the midst of all the
excitement, the film’s sound drops out. In capital letters, in relatively small print
towards the bottom of the screen, some superimposed text briefly fades in again,
reading, “AUDIO LOST NO SCORE.” Then in much smaller print, the original

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film’s title immediately follows, reading, “NO-MORE,” as the first portion of the
film comes to an end.
There is an abrupt cut to the second section of the work, an atypical,
homespun advertisement for an old car. It begins with a medium shot of the
automobile, seen from the side, in front of a large Tudor mansion. An attractive
young woman opens the car door and superimposed text rolls over the screen. It
reads as follows: “This 1951 Chevy in good working order will be given away
free to the first person to call the following phone number after Sept. 1, 1971: 607
273 5818 / (people associated with the making of this film not eligible).”
Filmed in a more tightly edited fashion than the previous section, this
short mock advertisement is shot largely with a wide angle lens to exaggerate
perspective. It also features a blend of rather extreme camera angles, including a
long shot from directly above the automobile (taken from the roof of the large
house behind it), and a number of tight close-up insert shots, which are typical of
television advertising emphasizing the luxurious details of high end cars. In this
context, these close-ups teasingly draw the viewer’s attention to the somewhat
ramshackle nature of the car’s interior. The same young woman showcases the
car’s features, calling attention to the lighter and the radio console with her
gestures, which are punctuated with close-up insert shots of these details. She then
opens the hood of the car and we see a close-up of the engine accompanied by the
sound of its warm purr. A series of highly stylized shots follow: a rapid, clean,
and dramatic three-hundred-and-sixty degree tracking shot demonstrates an

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extraordinary filmic control, as it showcases the car’s exterior; an extreme
overhead high angle shot from the mansion’s rooftop places it in its luxurious
surroundings; a large dog is lead inexplicably out of the car’s back seat by the
film’s female model; a close-up of the car’s hood ornament, shot with a wide
angle lens, distorts the car’s size and stylizes its visage; and an extreme close-up
of the automobile’s hubcap ends the advertising sequence. These carefully staged,
highly stylized tripod shots are accompanied by the most saccharine elevator
music, forming a rather deft student reconstitution of the language of television
advertising.
The next section of the film begins with a brief flash of clouds in the sky
accompanied by the chiming sound of one note played by a xylophone. This cues
a concise transition to the documentation of the ongoing American social ritual
that began the film. A title card introduces the final scene; it reads, “EDDY
STREET / ITHACA, NEW YORK / JULY 7, 1971.” In this concluding section of
More, the filmmakers return us to the cast of characters who played softball and
began their celebration in the opening of the film. The ethnographic spectacle of
the day’s events resumes in the early evening as the athletes, many still wearing
their jerseys, celebrate their victory en masse in a public park in a college town in
Upstate New York. The team and their many enthused friends have become even
more excited and energetic; a number of them are clearly intoxicated. They make
nonsensical exclamations towards the camera operators, including seemingly
unmotivated non-sequiturs like, “You can’t stop America. Fuck you!” The mood

270
is festive, mischievous, and irreverent. The softball players are joined by many of
their friends and the diverse crowd seems to grow as the film progresses. There
are a number of young men and women present, teenagers, younger children, and
the crowd features white, black, and Latino celebrants. The scene gives the
impression of a spontaneous street festival for the young adults of the town.
Following some public celebration, the police show up, but seem to be
assuaged of their concerns, perhaps because the group appears peaceful and in
good spirits. People play bongos and tambourines; there is chanting and much of
the film foreground the ebullient dancing of the town’s young men and women. A
gyrating, entranced man fixes his eyes on his two hands as he twiddles his fingers
in front of his eyes, likely the effect of an experience with some variety of
hallucinogen. (This sequence seems intentionally to mimic the crowd scenes from
Woodstock (1970).) The camera and boom operators move throughout the large
public gathering in an agile fashion, providing visual and sonic access to many of
the different social groups while demonstrating textbook control of the film’s
fluidly moving, observational camera. The sound is entirely synchronized, though
there are insert shots that punctuate the smooth visual representation of the social
activity that is the central subject of this collective auto-ethnographic drama.
At one point in the film’s action an older man becomes engaged in a
conversation with one of the main softball players (who we saw in the first section
of the film); he is likely the team captain. It appears that the older man may be a
local business owner or perhaps a neighbor who is concerned about the gathering

271
of such a large crowd of young people. (We later find out that he may work for
the fire department, though he is not wearing any uniform to indicate this fact.)
We overhear their conversation and witness it from a slight distance. It is clear
that our softball playing protagonist is pleading with the man to allow them to
continue with their festivities. Twice in their conversation, seemingly at random,
the filmmakers add brief superimposed text over the profilmic action. In an
authorial gesture that perhaps mocks the traditional methods through which
conventional documentaries introduce people, text appears over the middle of the
screen that reads “CHARLES W. WEAVER.” Then in smaller text, the
filmmakers introduce the title “MR. WEAVER” at the exact moment when the
young softball player says his name. It is a strange moment of synchronicity that
announces the coordination of this unusual textual component with the film’s
soundtrack. Eventually it becomes clear that Mr. Weaver is willing to let the
young people celebrate. The long-haired softball player proudly proclaims to the
older man and the crowd that has gathered around, “You don’t have to worry. …
God bless Mr. Weaver, Fire Department. He’s a good man!” Then in a simple
gesture of pride and excitement he exclaims, “Look how happy we are!”
The conversation described above continues, but the sound blends with
some muffled, up-tempo music, and the camera cuts to dancing woman. (We saw
her in a number of shots in the first part of the film; she might be described as the
film’s co-star.) The camera follows her exuberant, kinetic body closely. Again,
superimposed white titles appear over the profilmic action, which in their brevity

272
and small scale give the impression of an offscreen comment, perhaps a whisper
of extreme irony, made by the filmmaker. This title reads: “CINEMA VERITE.”
It quickly fades away. At his point, it is later in the evening and the screen has
become much darker. People are frolicking more wildly now, as a new song
begins and a man in a tie-dyed t-shirt does a rowdily ecstatic full-body dance that
is reminiscent of Joe Cocker’s performance at Woodstock. At the conclusion of
this section of the film, the filmmakers engage with this changing mood through
quicker cutting and panning that recognize the collective profilmic energy of the
experience. We see another man flailing wildly – it is the team’s captain again –
as he lifts his shirt, drops his pants and rhythmically flaps his now exposed penis
in the middle of a dance circle. The camera pans away from the action, as if
embarrassed. There is a cut, and the final superimposed titles appear over the
crowd. They read “ADULT SHORT SUBJECT.” As before, they flash on and off
the screen very briefly, again providing an understated, brief, and unusual
authorial commentary on the genre of the film and its various types of content and
filmmaking modes. It then ends abruptly with a cut to black and a truncation of
the soundtrack.
The first and third sections of More comprise a two part auto-ethnography
presenting a pair of related public social events that display the extroverted
tendencies of young Americans who play sports, drink beer, consume recreational
drugs, dance, and loudly celebrate their youth. Their exuberance is clearly
spontaneous and sincere, and the film’s improvisational style perfectly captures

273
this energy. Considering these filming conditions, it is all the more telling that the
filmmakers chose to add these occasional and incredibly brief asides to the
audience in the form of small superimposed text that briefly flashes over the
film’s action. The statements that these interventions provide are incredibly
simple, “SPORTS,” “MR. WEAVER,” “CINEMA VERITE,” “ADULT SHORT
SUBJECT.” They are declarative, but entirely unnecessary as information. They
provide a jocular commentary on the interaction between film form and the
spontaneous flow of life that the apparatus records. They also mock the
conventions of non-fiction filmmaking, or perhaps film genre more generally. In
some sense, they are so absurd that they are entirely inexplicable and challenge
the significatory potential of the entire film text. These interventions are
extraordinarily sparse, a fact that further causes the viewer to feel that they are
carefully chosen and perhaps significant in some rhetorical sense. But at the point
of the softball game’s climax, in a particularly understated fashion, amid a roar of
cheering and physically expressed excitement, the simple word “SPORTS”
appears over the action, in very small letters, for only a few seconds. What could
such an unusual rhetorical intrusion aim to convey?
Nelson’s sense of humor, like that of Bruce Conner, is subtle and
disruptive as it destabilizes – ever so slightly – the textual cohesion of established
audio-visual codes. As it divides this spontaneous non-fiction portrait of small
town revelry with a visually and thematically unrelated mock car advertisement, it
undermines the rhetorical force of both representational strategies. As Yalkut and

274
Paik had done with Waiting for Commercials, Nelson and his students draw
attention to the markedly different modes of address that are associated with
distinct filmmaking genres, be they informational, commercial, or fictional.
Nelson’s use of text in More, like his choice to incorporate a highly stylized
advertisement for a free car, is certainly mischievous; it undermines both the
sobriety of documentary filmmaking and the commodity fetishism of television
advertising. Though there has been little consideration of the significance of both
observational documentary and television advertising in relation to experimental
film, Nelson’s film demonstrates that these two languages are always looming
somewhere in American visual culture, in the background of even experimental
film work. More is an unusual, idiosyncratic engagement with both the visual
language of documentary and that of television advertising that juxtaposes them
against one another within a ribald, irreverent frenzy of youth and excess. This
eccentric amalgam of styles and tone allegorizes the unusual production
conditions of this unruly experiment in collective authorship.

Place, San Francisco, and Subculture:
In addition to the erosion of traditional divisions between the arts that
occurred in the United States in the 1950s and 60s, the history of the nation’s
artistic culture was influenced by other kinds of borders and limits, be they
institutional, social, or geographic. Most of the networks of influence and
exchange that underpinned the histories of experimental art and cinema in post

275
World War II America revolved around the gravitational center of New York
City. (This is particularly true of the gallery culture of fine art that depended on a
market-based economic structure with ties to the affluence and industry of the
urban upper class and its social milieu.) However, the experimental art and film
practices that are the subject of this dissertation were not exclusively localized
around New York City. Because of its grass roots, low budget models of
production and distribution, experimental film cannot be convincingly restricted
to any one city or geographic locale in the United States. In fact, in the period
discussed herein, lively experimental film communities existed in Pittsburgh, Los
Angeles, Buffalo, San Francisco, and Boston, among other cities.
293
Between
these areas of creative activity, there were productive dialogues, however these
exchanges were limited by both physical distance and the scant material means
that were available to most of these filmmakers, factors that reinforced the
relative isolation between these spatially localized communities. Due to the
geographic, material, and social differences between these areas of experimental
film practice, significant aesthetic and thematic distinctions interpenetrate their
histories. Therefore, alternative regional histories of non-industrial cinema
deserve more consideration, such that they can provide historical perspective on

293
There have been a number of significant recent considerations of local experimental film
cultures in a range of cities. Robert Haller has edited Crossroads: Avant-Garde Film in Pittsburgh
in the 1970s (New York: Anthology Film Archives, 2005). Scott MacDonald edited Canyon
Cinema: The Life and Times of an Independent Film Distributor (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2008). There is a large forthcoming volume on San Francisco Cinema, to be
produced in part by the Pacific Film Archive. Undoubtedly, the most ambitious effort to challenge
the absolute centrality of New York in the history of experimental cinema is David James’s The
Most Typical Avant-Garde: History of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2005).

276
the dominant practices of New York, while demonstrating that the trends,
sensibilities, and modes of production that were typical of the East Coast art
capital were by no means the only possibilities that the medium offered.
In understanding Conner’s work, a consideration of his Bay Area, West
Coast social milieu helps to explain a number of the most significant contextual
factors of his career, including his outsider status in relation to New York art of
the 1960s (the primary locus of the art market) and his semi-insider status within
the Hollywood film community. The relation between the New York art world
and the sphere of Hollywood film culture is an extreme instantiation of the
polarity between the aesthetic discrimination, cliquishness, and the elitist
presumptions of the New York art world, on one hand, and the mass-produced,
populist, formulaic productions of Hollywood film, on the other. To Conner, both
forces represented the most crass kind of consumerist, capitalist, market-based
economics. He once dismissed the entire notion of the gallery circuit as a banker’s
exercise, saying, “The only reason the art world exists is because the check has
been cashed.”
294
Nevertheless, Conner’s work intervenes within these two
different cultural registers by being simultaneously implicated in both of them, in
material terms, while willfully distancing itself from them through its ambivalent
ideological and philosophical stance.
The bohemian communities of the West Coast provided alternative
cultural contexts for the exhibition and marketing of fine art. Though there were

294
Rothfuss, 173.

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galleries in San Francisco, in which artists could show a range of multi-media
work, it is important to recognize that there was little economic infrastructure to
support the art community of that area. The California artists of Conner’s circle
and cohort – Jay DeFeo, Wallace Berman, Wally Hedrick, George Herms, Jess
(Collins), Manuel Neri, and Ed Kienholz – lacked substantive gallery
representation, and only he had a New York dealer. As Tom Crow argues in The
Rise of the Sixties, the California artists of that decade “lacked any stable structure
of galleries, patrons, and audiences that might have given them realistic hopes for
worldly success.”
295
Many of these artists, because of their economic exile from
the New York art market, often worked in the junk-based modes of collage and
assemblage, in Crow’s words, “to make sense of their own marginality, recycling
the discards of postwar affluence into defiantly deviant reconfigurations.”
296

Conner is one of the pivotal figures of this history, though his exclusion from the
New York art world was only partial and, some might suggest, determined by the
artist’s own voluntary choices.
Writer and essayist Rebecca Solnit provocatively argues that Conner’s
decision to leave New York for the West Coast – just as he was becoming
established in the gallery scene – profoundly influenced the way in which his
work has been critically understood and historically situated.
If he had stayed in New York, it is conceivable that undergraduate art
history texts would now speak of Johns, Rauschenberg, and Conner (or at
least Conner, Oldenburg, and Kaprow). But he didn’t […] In choosing San

295
Crow, The Rise of the Sixties, 23.
296
Ibid., 25.

278
Francisco over New York, he turned down the possibility of large-scale
success and chose instead art as a lifestyle in a close-knit community.
297

By moving to California, Conner chose to focus his attention on small galleries
run by friends – like the Batman gallery, a small grassroots local art space – rather
than on the Madison Avenue location of his New York representation. These
alternative, fly-by-night venues, though more comfortable for Conner, lacked the
air of legitimacy that was required by the commercial enterprise of the art market,
and because of their marginality, could not promote the wide-scale commercial
success of his art.
Like New York, San Francisco had a thriving bohemian counterculture in
the 1960s that had grown directly out of the social and artistic experiments of the
Beat movement of the postwar period. In terms of experimental filmmaking, the
legacy of the Beat generation exerted a perhaps more powerful influence on the
Bay area’s artists than it did in New York. Many experimental filmmakers whose
work reached its maturity in the Bay area, including Bruce Baillie, Christopher
MacLaine, Sidney Peterson, Harry Smith, Chick Strand, James Broughton, Robert
Nelson, and Bruce Conner, exemplified the shared philosophical, aesthetic, and
social interests that were central to the countercultural ethos of the region.
Much of the film work of San Francisco film artists of this period featured
an emphasis on spontaneity, a use of music as an inspirational model, the
representation of outsider cultures, a profound sense of social alienation in its

297
Rebecca Solnit, Secret Exhibition: Six California Artists of the Cold War Era (San Francisco:
City Lights Books, 1990), 60.

279
subjects, a celebration of literary poetics, an interest in individual spiritual
revelation, and the embrace of personal pleasure, as achieved through the
transfiguration of the senses. In an article titled “San Francisco’s Hipster Cinema”
of 1967, Thomas Kent Alexander describes the overall atmosphere of the film
culture in the area:
The main thematic preoccupation of the San Francisco film-makers is that
of the nonconformist reacting against the mechanical and impersonal
society. Whether it is lyrical, as with Baillie or William Hindle, or ironic,
as with Robert Nelson or Bruce Conner, or ecstatic, as with Ben Van
Meter or Kenneth Anger, the San Francisco cinema has a verve, energy,
and sense of self. […] The artists are also firmly attached to the more vital
movements in their society. Although they have shrugged their shoulders
toward the rat race, or even given society a more passionate gesture, they
still submerge themselves in the people and movements that surround
them. They can be found at the sit-ins, the marches, and the riots as well as
the dances and light-shows of San Francisco nightlife.
298

As Alexander suggests, the influence that this shared set of concerns exerted over
the area’s film artists was partly a function of the community atmosphere of
filmmaking around San Francisco in the 1960s and 70s.
Conner reiterates Alexander’s sentiment in hindsight, from 1981, as he
stresses, in particular, the communal aspect of film practice in the specific time
and place in which he was most artistically prolific and socially active:
Let me make a contrast between the situation in the Sixties and now.
There were filmmakers banding together to create a new environment for
their films to be viewed in, to distribute their own films, to control them,
to speak of their own films directly, and to redefine the values of the film.
Nobody was taught how to make films. The production of films usually
was in the simplest economic ways. What was happening was a social

298
Thomas Kent Alexander, “San Francisco’s Hipster Cinema,” Film Culture 44 (Spring 1967),
70.

280
phenomenon whose direction was toward a new view of film and its
place.
299

The humble production conditions and independent sensibility of the work
continually surface in anecdotal descriptions of experimental filmmaking in the
Bay Area, and should necessarily frame any historical consideration of the
relationship between artistic practice and its social determinants in the region.
Canyon Cinema, founded by Baillie in 1960 as an itinerant, community
experiment in public film exhibition, had grown by 1967 into an independent,
artist founded collective, like the Filmmaker’s Cooperative of New York,
dedicated to the distribution of work by experimental and independent
filmmakers. (Robert Nelson and Bruce Conner were both involved in the early
organization and development of Canyon Cinema.) Both of these cooperatives
initially began as shared, communal projects run by artists that also functioned as
social organizations through which filmmakers met, socialized, and exchanged
ideas. However, by all accounts, the social atmosphere of Canyon Cinema and the
San Francisco film community was substantially more similar to a commune in its
day-to-day social operations than was the more serious, manifesto-minded work
of the New York-based experimental film group. These social values permeate the
area’s experimental film culture in terms of its extratextual production histories as
well as its subjects, themes, and overall content. The works of Bruce Conner and

299
Mitch Tuchman, “Bruce Conner Interviewed by Mitch Tuchman,” Film Comment 17, no. 5
(September/October 1981), 75.

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Robert Nelson exemplify these factors through their social contexts and their
dependence on collaborative modes of artistic practice.
Though Conner made many of his found footage films and recycled
material assemblages largely by himself, he often collaborated with other artists.
For example, a number of his films either depended on the assistance of his social
circle or showcased their talents. Dancer and singer Toni Basil; actor, director,
photographer Hopper; painter Jay De Feo; minimalist composer Terry Riley;
painter Joann Brown; and actor, filmmaker Dean Stockwell, all assisted or
contributed to Conner’s films. The filmmaker also interacted with the Semina
group of the Los Angeles area who were involved in an art movement that has
sometimes been described as early Funk art. Included in this group were well-
known assemblage and collage artists Wallace Berman and George Herms, as
well as a number of the Hollywood actors and celebrities mentioned above. The
interests that Conner, the Semina artists, and the Hollywood circle shared in
assemblage art, collage, celebrity culture, popular music, hallucinogenic drugs,
and cinema produced an unusual and fascinating blend of experimental media and
popular art activities of the 1960s. (Berman’s image was even included on the
cover of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band LP.) These social,
extratextual details are important determining influences upon the historical
conditions in which Conner’s work was produced. In terms of his basic social and
material activities of the mid-to-late 1960s, Conner made few films and publicly

282
disavowed “museum art,” instead selling beads in Haight-Ashberry, and working
in rock and roll light shows at the Avalon ballroom.
As mentioned above, the Semina circle overlapped with that of Hollywood
and Conner became a close friend to many celebrities, including counter-culture
icons Hopper and Peter Fonda. Conner was directly involved in much of their
work of the late 60s, including the pre-production of Hopper’s Easy Rider (1969)
– Hopper himself has often cited Conner as a massive influence on that film – and
Fonda’s Hired Hand (1971).
300
Some of his most supportive art buyers and
friends were the most famous Hollywood movie stars and rock and roll musicians
of the time, including Grace Slick (of The Jefferson Airplane), Hopper, and Dean
Stockwell, and thus his material support was often a function of these friendships.
So, though Conner was critical of the mainstream media, he still found a place for
himself on the fringes of the popular counterculture.
301
Most importantly,
Conner’s film and assemblage work needs to be understood not simply as a set of
collaborations with various artists, but as an artist’s practice that was developed in
an extremely productive and powerful dialogue with a number of close-knit artist
communities of both northern and southern California.

300
In fact, Conner performed the actor’s wedding ceremony to Michelle Phillips of the Mamas and
the Papas in New Mexico in 1970 (letter from Conner to Universal Life Church, November 6,
1970, Bruce Conner Papers, Smithsonian Archives of American Art).
301
In a letter to Shirley Clarke, the artist reflects on some details of popular culture and his place
in that sphere, presenting a short resume of his associations. He excitedly outlines his pop culture
pedigree: “I was in THE TRIP by Roger Corman […] The producer of THE MONKEES has
proposed that I travel with the next Monkee tour and make a movie of them […] Richard Lester
[director of the Beatles’ film A Hard Day’s Night (1964)] is making a movie here which I will try
to get in” (Shirley Clarke Papers, Wisconsin Historical Society, University of Wisconsin,
Madison).

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Thomas Albright, the art critic for The San Francisco Examiner describes
both the social and thematic fixations of this group (and its relation to
developments on the East Coast):
But the day broke more quickly on the East Coast, and the balance
of forces there was fundamentally different. Conner, Berman, and
other funk artists on the West Coast developed their work
organically from a core of personal and social experience which
remained central to it. They leaned more toward absurd and savage
comedy than the first-generation Abstract Expressionists, but in
their own way they were just as impassioned, uncompromising,
and morally concerned.
302

The social history of groups like these represents the interpenetration of influence,
happenstance, friendship, artistic authority, social trends, and the flow of capital
within a specific historical moment. This socio-historical context should help us
better to understand and interpret the cultural contingencies that underpin works
of art such as those described in this study.
303

Like Conner, Robert Nelson was part of a social enclave in which he
interacted with a variety of artists from a range of disciplines, many of whom
served as collaborators at some point in time. One of Nelson’s collaborations with
these artists has been described above, with the intention of suggesting that the
social landscape of the arts in the Bay Area in the mid-1960s was one that

302
Thomas Albrigh, Art in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945-1980 (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1985), 109.
303
In a similar sense, it is often also reasonable and productive to be aware of the ways in which
different intellectual and artistic histories have influenced specific developments within, for
example, the Semina group. Consider the appearance in Berman’s mimeographed, hand-
assembled literary and artistic journal Semina, of translations of Antonin Artaud. The dramatist’s
theories likely reached the group through McClure and demonstrate an unusual moment of
intellectual synchronicity between the artists and filmmakers of the West and East Coasts.

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espoused a kind of bohemian willingness to connect disparate aesthetic
sensibilities and media forms. It should also be stressed that these collaborations –
particularly between Nelson and Wiley – relate, in a profound sense, to major
transformations, not only in cinema, but in fine art and painting in the Bay Area
as well. Though Nelson’s film projects have never been considered in relation to
the shifting aesthetic timbre of mid-60s Bay Area art, they deserve such a
contextualization. Specifically, films like The Off-Handed Jape relate directly to
Wiley’s early foundational experiments in conceptual art (which would prove
profoundly influential upon Bruce Nauman) as well as Nelson’s later work,
including More, which reflects a particular blend of conceptualism and
performative irreverence that was specific to Nelson and his social circle.
Wiley’s art historical sensibility was proudly outrageous (so was, as one
might expect, Nelson’s notion of film history). In one example of Wiley’s many
historical/conceptual art riddles, he produced a work whose title describes its
enigmatic relationship to the major movement that preceded it: One Abstract
Expressionist Painting Rolled and Taped (1966). In its exhibition, it is shown as a
rolled canvas with its title stenciled mechanically on its exterior. Thus it is unclear
if the front of the canvas actually bared the traces of any paint, brushes, or
gestural design. Instead, Wiley’s project lampoons the gravity and earnestness
associated with the painterly index of Abstract Expressionism and its associated
critical values of opticality and abstraction. In works like this, Wiley carved out
an aesthetic project that was defiantly open-ended and lighthearted, echoing

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Nelson’s statement, quoted above, that these artists “all knew about art (namely,
that it had something to do with having a good time).”
304
Much of this fun was of
course, conceptual. Wiley explains his relation to the seriousness of this earlier art
movement: “Abstract Expressionism was revolutionary in its way, but it became a
heavy moral trip. If you drew a line it had to be grounded to God’s tongue or the
core of the earth to justify putting it there.” In opposition to the serious
metaphysical and philosophical imperatives of Abstract Expressionism (and its
entrenchment within modernist critical history), Wiley explains, “I was struck by
what an incredible concept art was [. . .] nothing moral, no good or bad.”
305
Wiley
was a massively important figure in Bay area art, and like Nelson with whom he
shared an artistic practice and a philosophical sensibility, he had a significance as
both an example and an influence needs that needs to be taken into consideration
in subsequent histories of the area’s overlapping experiments in art and cinema.
306

The mood in Bay Area art had obviously shifted between the murky
tableaus of Conner’s earlier assemblages and the later jocular, conceptual
experiments of Nelson and Wiley. This change in artistic tone also resonated
across the overlapping cultural field of experimental cinema. The darker
thematics of Conner’s art (and that of his social circle) were replaced in the mid-
1960s to early 1970s by the work of Wiley, Nauman, Nelson, and others that – in

304
Nelson, “Robert Nelson on Robert Nelson,” 23.
305
Albright, 119.
306
Thomas Albright explains that Wiley’s “attitude and personal style provided a model for the
laid-back, life-is-art rusticity that became prominent in much Bay Area art after the mid 1960s”
(Ibid.).

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both art and film – embodied a ludic notion of art’s social function. Albright
writes that, “The hip, flippant parody of [Wiley’s] Funk art, the ingratiating
outrageousness of its adolescent iconoclasm and sophomoric humor, appealed to
an audience that was increasingly won over by the growing ‘youth culture’ of the
1960s.”
307
With their iconoclastic tone of play Nelson’s films communicate much
of the same energy as the Funk art in which he was schooled, as well as the
philosophical imperatives of the Bay Area counterculture, which included
communities dedicated to fine art, experimental cinema, street theater, and
conceptual art.
In the early-to-mid 1970s, when Nelson brought his films to New York, he
was exposed to the markedly dissimilar conceptual direction that local avant-
garde cinema had taken. Nelson immediately realized that the East Coast
experimental film community had embraced a severity of form that was entirely
distinct from his own work and that of his West Coast cohort:
I think New York, it reminded me of what I imagined Egypt to be like at
the height of some majestic dynasty. Because, the artistic formalism, the
formalism everywhere, in every expression, even on TV, was very
exciting. And to come with a film [. . .] once I got there, the film [of mine]
looked to me in the context of that formalism in New York, it looked to
me like something a gypsy brought in a blanket and rolled out on the sand,
like a bunch of hairy handmade objects that were all sort of laying there.
That was the reaction I had to the film, in New York. That it looked very
hairy.
308

It is precisely this “hairiness” that defines Nelson’s cinema – as well as that of
Conner and other Bay Area filmmakers whose film experiments developed in

307
Albright, 128.
308
Macdonald, Canyon Cinema, 307.

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tandem with the Funk art of mid-1950s to the early 1970s – and which
distinguishes it from New York film culture. California-based critic Peter Plagens
reiterates this basic aesthetic distinction: “But Los Angeles art […] at least
acknowledges New York art issues, while the Bay Area goes its own way.” As
Plagens defines it, assemblage art was an artistic development with markedly San
Franciscan roots: “Ultimately, assemblage is the product of a Bay Area bric-a-
brac sensibility.”
309
As both Nelson and Plagens explain, in the San Francisco
area, there existed a localized aesthetic sensibility, marked by a “hairiness” and a
“bric-a-brac” sensibility that differed significantly from the severe forms and
aesthetic systematicity of New York’s art trends, including Information Art and
Structural Film, which valorized rational structures, mechanized actions, and grid-
like constructions. The formalism that Nelson observed in New York cinema of
the early-to-mid 1970s, showed signs of a shift in the principal aesthetic modes of
experimental film. But Nelson was not the only filmmaker who was caught off-
guard by these developments in filmic systematicity and formulaic structures. The
next chapter will consider other philosophical and aesthetic developments that
challenged the dominance of the mathematical precision and extreme formalism
of New York experimental cinema of the early 1970s, while also resonating with
lingering artistic problems concerning presence and its mediation through media
art.

309
Peter Plagens, Sunshine Muse: Art on the West Coast 1945–1970 (New York: Praeger, 1974),
94.

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Chapter 5: Somatic Cinema: Presence, Performance, Crisis, and the
Problem of “Structure”

In the age of commodity conscious art movements like Pop Art and
assemblage, the legacy of Abstract Expressionism continued to exert a surprising
influence over artistic production. As Kaprow and others suggested at the end of
the 1950s, the bodily contingencies that underpinned Abstract Expressionism, as
ontologically and historically integrated functions of artistic, gestural, somatic
activity, continued to wield some degree of authority. In happenings, radical
theater, avant-garde dance, performance art, and experimental film, the personal
imperatives of abstract expressionism, which were powerfully contingent upon
the forces of human presence and bodily action, found new material and social
territories for their inscription. In the 1960s and 70s, this somatic energy was
partially revitalized by artists whose sensibilities reflected a range of political
projects including feminist, anti-war, and minority liberation movements. In their
inheritance of certain humanist attitudes, these movements emphasized the human
body, its capacity to register suffering, and its role in representing cultural
difference. Projects like those of Vito Acconci, Hanna Wilke, Chris Burden, Yoko
Ono, and Carolee Schneemann foregrounded conceptual and ideological anxieties
in the realm of bodily performance.

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The cultural and social anxieties of the era manifested themselves in
performance practices, a number of which were documented with various audio-
visual media and recording technologies, including photography, film, and video.
Because of film’s function as a recording apparatus, a number of performance
artists – including those mentioned above – utilized it to transcribe their actions.
Thus, for many of these artists, the apparatus of cinema was intended to function
in a way that, philosophically speaking, matched the observational rhetoric of
direct cinema documentarians like Richard Leacock, D.A. Pennebaker, Fred
Wiseman, and others. As an ephemeral art form, performance art remains difficult
to discuss apart from its visual, physically mediated indexes in other media.
However, in a fundamental way, the principal medium of much performance
based work was the artist’s body itself. So, because of their desire for
observational simplicity, few performance-based artists attempted to intervene in
any meaningful way in the production of related film works. An exception to this
is Carolee Schneemann, an artist whose achievements as a feminist performance
artist are well established, but whose remarkable experiments in the profilmic,
filmic, and exhibition contexts of film art have been insufficiently assimilated into
most histories of experimental cinema.
Within the dominant narratives of non-industrial film art in America, Stan
Brakhage’s name remains perhaps the most central – and for good reason. In
many ways, his work perfectly embodies the conceptual ambition and dogged
perseverance of an artist working in an outsider practice like postwar

290
experimental film. However, Brakhage’s work developed in dialogue with a range
of other artists and filmmakers, and demands to be understood as such. One of the
most powerful influences on Brakhage was Schneemann and he was one of the
most significant influences on her. These two artists maintained an impassioned
correspondence through the years, meeting whenever they could, heatedly
exchanging arguments and artworks, and sharing friends and ideas. Though
Schneemann’s name is well known in the art history contexts of the academy as
well as museums, Brakhage’s has never penetrated either of those intellectual
spheres. Conversely, Schneemann’s films deserve greater attention within the
context of experimental film history. A case study of their interaction should
provide some perspective on the historical opposition between an art world
insider, who reveled in the social, sexual, and performative opportunities
presented by the art world of the 1960s, and a hermetic experimental filmmaker,
who chose to distance himself from the New York art scene.
This chapter will present a discussion of artistic challenges that
Schneemann and Brakhage commonly faced in their personal efforts to define
new territory for filmmaking in the early 1970s, particularly in relation to the
specific challenges of non-fiction film and its explorations of subjectivity in mid-
20
th
-century America

The most remarkable artists and theorists of cinema have always
consciously engaged with the unique and enigmatic relationship that exists

291
between the material of film and the historical real that mediates. Kitch’s Last
Meal (1973–76) by Carolee Schneemann and Brakhage’s Act of Seeing With
One’s Own Eyes (1971) are both efforts by experimental film artists to balance
the seemingly contradictory observational impulses of the documentarian and the
imperatives of a personal art practice conceived in the wake of Abstract
Expressionism and the rise of performance. This chapter will consider this nexus
of concerns as it reflects on the aesthetic, historical, and philosophical challenges
of an experimental non-fiction as practiced by Schneemann and Brakhage. The
works discussed herein challenge the conventional understanding of a plastic,
abstract, oneiric, demiurgic, heroic, visionary film practice – which is, according
to the dominant narratives of film history, essentially Brakhagean – and
encourage a recognition of an alternative, observational aesthetics of experimental
film (practiced by both Brakhage and Schneemann) that, rooted in the particulars
of everyday experience, represents a profound innovation in the ontology of
cinema while also challenging the conventional expectations of expressive film
art.

Carolee Schneemann’s “Neuro-Muscular” Art:
In a fundamental way, the aesthetics of both Brakhage and Schneemann’s
cinematic enterprises can be tied historically to the legacy of Abstract
Expressionism. Both artists came of age in the 1950s and developed their
understanding of themselves as artists in the wake of this movement. To these two

292
artists, the representational transformations of Pollock, De Kooning, and the other
New York painters of this generation exemplified a greater freedom for plastic
and visual abstraction as well as an absolute emphasis on diaristic gesture and
bodily contingency. Recently, art historian Amelia Jones has considered the way
in which “the Pollockian Performative” affected the generation that developed in
the artist’s wake. In her analysis, Pollock functions as a point of transition, not
causing this shift towards either a greater abstraction or an expanded notion of
performance, but as “an ambivalent figure – both quintessentially modernist,
formalist genius, and origin of the performativity of postmodernism.”
310
It is
precisely in this interstitial space between plasticity and presence that Pollock’s
ambivalence and cultural urgency can be located; it is also here where we can
situate his influence on experimental film. This unresolved tension is closely
related to that of Warhol, who attempted, through so many media forms, to track
new models of subjectivity, none of which perhaps, was more powerful than that
devised in his cinematic work.
311
David Joselit has suggests a similar historical
trajectory: “The legacy of Abstract Expressionism led in at least two ostensibly
contradictory directions – toward an increasingly severe formalism, and toward a
performative erasure of distinctions between aesthetic and social space.”
312

Joselit, like Jones, finds this opposition to be illusory, suggesting that these same

310
Amelia Jones, Body Art / Performing the Subject (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press,
1998), 61.
311
As suggested earlier in this dissertation, Stephen Koch once argued that the representation of
human presence was Warhol’s greatest concern. Perhaps it was for this reason that Warhol was so
enthused about the possibility of making a biopic about Pollock. Supposedly, Warhol also had at
least one painting by Pollock in his collection.
312
Joselit, American Art Since 1945, 34.

293
forces were not mutually exclusive, but instead were often realized in the spaces
of the same works.

As Kaprow predicted in his 1958 essay, “The Legacy of Jackson
Pollock,” some of the most innovative art of the following two decades made
more extensive use of the human body and the three-dimensional spaces that it
occupied, all of which extended well beyond the limits of the painterly canvas that
had provided the dominant frame for the modernist model of art history.
Schneemann’s artistic legacy perfectly encapsulates this shift in emphasis.
Trained as a painter whose visual style is indebted to the animated and emphatic
painterly line of Pollock and his cohort, she shifted its visual energies (as did
Rauschenberg, Jim Dine, and others) towards the spaces of semi-theatrical
experimentation. Schneemann’s work in this vein – including Meat Joy (1964),
Snows (1967), Up to and Including Her Own Limits (1973-76), Interior Scroll
(1975, 1977) – represents some of the most urgent and influential work of
feminist performance. In addition to their significance as new artistic forms and
political strategies, Schneemann’s performance works, with their emphasis on
taboo-breaking sexuality, social interaction between performers, anti-war
energies, and the blending of various media forms, powerfully embody the
counter-cultural, social energies of the era. Thus, like many other figures
discussed herein – including Cage, Paik, McLuhan, Sontag, and Warhol – she

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needs to be considered in two different interpretative registers, as both an
independent creative artist and a historical registration of her cultural milieu.
In historical terms, Schneemann’s significance has been well-established
in narratives of performance and visual art, yet her film works remain
unassimilated into the central narratives of art history. Yet, like Breer, Warhol,
Ono, Paik, Tambellini, Conner, and others, her practices in other media overlap
historically, formally, and philosophically, in integral ways with her experiments
in cinema, and thus demand to be understood as components of the same artistic
field. By considering Schneemann’s involvement in a variety of performance
derived, at least partially, from the energies of Pollock, this chapter aims to
provide an interpretative context for the historicization of her innovative,
provocative and unassimilated film works, which incorporate “the Pollockian
Performative” in either their profilmic, filmic, or exhibition spaces.
Schneemann’s legacy as a performance artist is largely tied to a group of
events that she staged in the United States and Europe in the 1960s and 70s. As
part of an artistic community that included performance artists, painters,
musicians, dancers, dramatists, filmmakers, and poets, Schneemann organized
and directed a number of works in the early 1960s whose point of origin was the
social space of the New York based avant-garde community. Specifically feminist
in its orientation, Schneemann’s work began within the locus of the Judson
Memorial Church, but extended to a range of other venues associated with various
other media forms, including the Living Theatre, The Filmmaker’s Cinematheque,

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Brooklyn Academy of Music, New Poets Theater, and then in the 1970s, The
Kitchen and Anthology Film Archives. Throughout these spaces, Schneemann led
a number of events that famously showcased her own body (often nude) in the
context of work that she described as “kinetic theater.” These projects put bodies
in motion, and emphasized a range of somatic interactions between performers,
the physical spaces that they occupied, their audiences, and the representational
limits of various media (including painting, music, and cinema). Perhaps the most
famous work produced by Schneemann, in any medium, was one of her first, a
project titled Meat Joy.
Performed in Paris, London, and lastly, New York, in 1964, Meat Joy was
a landmark work of body art (which took place in the same year as another major
feminist achievement in performance, Ono’s Cut Piece, discussed in Chapter 2 of
this project). Like the Happenings of Kaprow, Oldenburg, and Robert Morris (a
number of which featured Schneemann as performer), it was a partially scripted
work. In many ways, a number of semi-clothed male and female performers
interacted with dance-like motions, in contact with one another, as they rolled on
the floor with raw meat, painted each other’s bodies, and staged a kind of
Dionysian contact performance, while short rock-and-roll and pop songs era
played over speakers within the venue. The work began with an edited tape
recording of the artist herself reading her notes for the work in a sonic montage,
cut together with a French language primer and street noises from Paris. Lights
were carefully choreographed and the overall dramatic structure of the work was

296
well established before the performances took place. Schneemann rehearsed Meat
Joy, but also welcomed unplanned, performative divergences. She explains that
“certain parameters of the piece function consistently. Sequence, light, sound,
materials – these were planned and coordinated in rehearsal.” Yet, she clarifies
that other details, specifically those related to bodily actions, could and should
vary. She continues, “Attitude, gesture, phrasing, duration, relationship between
performers (between performers and objects) became loosely structured in
rehearsal and were expected to evolve.”
313
Overall, Meat Joy emphasized the
performative presence of its contributors, foregrounding their gestures as its
central aesthetic determinations.
As its title suggests, the tone of Meat Joy was lively and celebratory. Its
performers shuffled around and rolled on the floor in piles of meat and paper,
semi-clothed and splattered with paint, as they smiled and laughed to the sounds
of Elvis Presley, The Beatles, and The Supremes. Though Schneemann’s work
would grow more rhetorically and ideologically severe in the following years, at
this point, it presented a kind of excited, somatic optimism about gestural art and
its capacity to advance a vision of sexual equality. In this regard, the work
presented a ludic study of bodily experience, gender, sexuality, and physical
pleasure, in the context of semi-theatrical public performances. Schneemann
describes it as follows:

313
Carolee Schneemann, Imagining her Erotics: Essays, Interviews, Projects (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 2003), 62.

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Meat Joy has the character of an erotic rite: excessive, indulgent, a
celebration of flesh as material: raw fish, chickens, sausages, wet paint,
transparent plastic, rope, brushes, paper scrap. Its propulsion is toward the
ecstatic – shifting and turning between tenderness, wildness, precision,
abandon: qualities which could at any moment be sensual, comic, joyous,
repellent.
314

In its visual, affective, and associative excesses, Meat Joy embodied the optimism
of an artist who clearly felt the conditions of possibility that performance offered;
in a sense, she was intoxicated by them. But, it also represented a condition of
social possibility, of a democratic interaction of bodies, sharing space with one
another, exchanging meat, blood, touches, and gestures, reinterpreting the
materials of classical art forms (paint and sculpture) as well as newer modes of
popular culture (including rock and pop musics). Meat Joy was a performance-
based event that negotiated new territory for gesture, paint, and sound within the
cultural landscape of a period in which feminist imperatives were gaining in
urgency.
In 1964, Meat Joy perfectly embodied a timely vision of art as social
activity. Perhaps by considering the history of the American avant-garde of the
1960s, as precisely that – a form of social activity – we can better understand the
historical contingencies that underpinned works like Meat Joy. Socially Carolee
Schneemann perfectly straddled the period’s overlapping networks of art and
media experimentation. Her romantic partner was James Tenney, a talented
pianist who collaborated with John Cage and Merce Cunningham. She performed

314
Schneemann, More Than Meat Joy: Complete Performance Works and Selected Writings, ed.
Bruce McPherson (New Palz, NY: Documentext, 1979), 63.

298
in the happenings and performances of Oldenburg and Morris, and directed a
work by Kaprow. She collaborated with a group of dancers from the Judson
Dance Theater. She appeared in films by Stan Brakhage and Stan Vanderbeek,
and when she decided to shoot her first film project, Breer, Vanderbeek, Jacobs,
and Brakhage lent her their cameras. She socialized with the most famous painters
of the day including Warhol and Rauschenberg (on whose bare shoulders she
famously appeared nude and laughing at the New York party for The Monkees’
film, Head). She moved fluidly between a number of social circles, citing
friendships with Marcel Duchamp, Abbie Hoffmann, and Janis Joplin.
Schneemann was well-connected, talented, extremely intelligent, and beautiful.
So, it is no surprise that she was a central figure in the cultural landscape of the
New York avant-garde of the 1960s. However, as her experiments in kinetic
theater, and later film, met with disrespect from the largely male power structure
of the art world, including its most well-known artists and critics, she became
progressively more disenchanted with the contemporary art and its misogynistic
tendencies. As a result, her work became more politicized and militant, such that
by the late 1960s and early 1970s, the optimism of Meat Joy had been sublimated
into a powerful critique of masculinity and American male chauvinism.
Schneemann’s painting always demonstrated a debt of influence to the
Abstract Expressionists; however there were aspects of their milieu that she
distrusted. Initially, when she came to New York from Illinois (in her early

299
twenties), the artist claimed to have “followed them around like a shadow.”
315

(She was particularly interested in the blend of portraiture and abstraction that
was practiced by De Kooning, and her early work – including a 1958 portrait of
Jane Brakhage – clearly demonstrates this influence.) However, the male bravado
of this group, with its drunken fistfights and raucous arguments, represented a
kind of artistic and intellectual pissing contest that was largely, if not exclusively,
masculine. (As Schneemann saw it, the Cedar Bar’s legacy of a largely male
clique of self-appointed art world royalty loomed over the generation that
followed and caused significant rifts between her and her peers.) To many artists
of the period, including Schneemann and Warhol, the Abstract Expressionist
group exuded a heterosexist misogyny that influenced their art’s extratextual
social history. The critical language that surrounded much of the work was also
controlled by domineering male voices (like that of Greenberg). In her painting,
performance, and films, Schneemann attempted to wrestle the heroic, muscular,
dancing gestures of Pollock’s painting away from its sexist associations and
determinations, and make it personal to her own experience as a woman.
Few artists of the early to mid 1960s were schooled in the history of
feminist philosophy and female art history; in this regard Schneemann was a
notable exception. While in college and in her early twenties, Schneemann
studied the writings of Simone de Beauvoir as well as the histories of neglected
female artists and painters. These studies would provide the theoretical

315
Schneemann, “Interview With ND” in Imagining Her Erotics, 117.

300
groundwork for her artistic innovations of the 1960s, which represented major
feminist achievements well before the mainstream women’s movement gained
public recognition. In terms of the explicit expression of her sexuality,
Schneemann found intellectual and artistic inspiration in her studies of
psychology and aesthetics, particularly in the works of Wilhelm Reich and
Antonin Artaud, two thinkers in whom she located a particular license to break
from the repressed and misogynistic attitudes of previous generations of male
artists. Reich was a German psychiatrist who had created international
controversy in his endorsement of a liberated attitude towards human sexuality
divorced from the structures of guilt and ownership and removed from
conventional, patriarchal value systems. In the 1960s, Reich’s work was partially
responsible for a shift away from the sexual repression of the previous era. As has
been suggested earlier in this study, the writing of Antonin Artaud was one of the
most powerful influences upon avant-garde performance in the 1960s. In her
efforts to undermine the material and philosophical limits of conventional
theatrical performance and dance, Schneemann found a catalyzing influence in
the philosophy of Artaud, because of his absolute emphasis on the body as both
an artistic resource and a target of aesthetic aggression.
In 1960, the actress Liz Hiller gave Schneemann a copy of The Theater
and its Double. It was a work that encouraged a return to primitive structures,
social ritual, and the pleasures and pains of bodily experience. The notion of an
intellectualized, abstracted theater – like that practiced by modernist playwrights

301
like Ionesco, Brecht, and Beckett – was anathema to Artaud’s project, as it would
be to Schneemann’s. Artaud’s emphasis on bodily presence and somatic theater
was precipitously synchronous with the lingering influence of Abstract
Expressionism and its emphasis upon contingent, physical expression as a mode
of mapping psychic activity. The precise significance of the body in Artaud’s
writing has been recently described by Allen S. Weiss in a way that suggests an
interesting compatibility between these historically remote artistic developments:
“For Artaud, the pure presence of the body was both the absolute site of
contingency and the source of psychic energy.”
316
In this sense, Artaud located
the spirit and the mind in the body, and for Schneemann, perfectly drew an
intellectual connection between the physical action of artistic gesture and the
sexual identity of the artist herself. In her notes from the 1960s, she made it clear
that she had digested Artaud, when she wrote, “I decided my genital was my
soul.”
317
As has been suggested earlier in this dissertation, Artaud’s writing – as it
was interpreted and popularized amongst the New York avant-garde of the late
1950s and 60s – bolstered a range of artistic developments that encouraged social
provocation, aggressive action against established values, the triggering of
discomfort, and the overload of the spectators’ sensoria.
Like a number of other artists of her generation, Schneemann would take
up a 1960s version of the aesthetic and social challenge that Artaud’s theories
implied. Her work aimed to confront conventional value systems and aesthetic

316
Allen S. Weiss, “Artaud’s Anatomy” in The Senses of Performance, ed. Sally Banes, Andre
Lepecki (New York and London: Routledge, 2007), 201.
317
Schneemann, More Than Meat Joy, 55.

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structures by creating work that openly undermined the traditional expectations of
sensory experience in art, while also challenging the strictures of bourgeois taste,
which circumscribed the limits of social and artistic appropriateness. It was her
intention to stretch the senses and the intellects of her spectators through a kind of
psycho-sexual assault. In a notebook fragment from the early 1960s, before
Schneemann completed Meat Joy, her intermedial theater projects, or her major
film experiments, she wrote the following statement (which is a perfect invocation
of an Artaudian aesthetics of distress blended with the utopian interests in social
transformation that were typical of the era):
I assume the senses crave sources of maximum information; that the eye
benefits by exercise, stretch, and expansion towards materials of
complexity and substance; that conditions which alert the total sensibility
– cast almost in stress – extend insight and response, the basic responsive
range of empathetic-kinesthetic vitality. […] I have the sense that in
learning, our best developments grow from works which initially strike us
as ‘too much’; those which are intriguing, demanding, that lead us to
experiences which we feel we cannot encompass, but which
simultaneously provoke and encourage our efforts. Such works have the
effect of containing more than we can assimilate; they maintain attraction
and stimulation for our continuing attention. We persevere with that
strange joy and agitation by which we sense unpredictable rewards from
our relationship to them.
318

Like many other artists and theorists discussed herein, Schneemann sought to
elicit a condition of spectatorial anxiety in which she would disarm normative
sensory expectations and conventional value structures through artistic action. For
her the principal device for undermining these artistic and ideological conventions

318
Schneemann, “The Notebooks, 1958–63” in More Than Meat Joy, 9.

303
was the register of erotic representation, which she would use to overwhelm the
predilections of her viewers and the social and textual limits of her chosen media.

Fuses and the Challenge of Sexual Representation:
Schneemann first came to understand the possibilities of film as an art
form through her friendship with Stan Brakhage. The filmmaker was a childhood
friend of her romantic partner, James Tenney. Beginning in their college years,
the three artists engaged in heated conversions about aesthetics and the potential
relationships that could be negotiated between diverse media.
319
(At that point,
Schneemann still defined herself exclusively as a painter.) In her words,
“Brakhage introduced film and film process to us.”
320
During their extended
sojourns together, in Vermont or later in Schneemann’s country home in upstate
New York, Brakhage sometimes filmed the young couple together. One or both of
them appeared in four of his films, Daybreak (1957), Whiteye (1957), Cat’s
Cradle (1959), and Loving (1956). In viewing these films, Schneemann felt that
there was something about Brakhage’s approach that undermined her subjectivity
and challenged her authority as an independent individual. She decided to
counteract Brakhage’s representation of her sexuality: “Brakhage made Loving
because of his fascination with the erotic sensitivity and vitality that was between

319
Schneemann met Tenney in May 1955 and encountered Brakhage for the first time only a few
months later. She was introduced to Brakhage, in her words, “in a 42
nd
Street spaghetti restaurant
where we shared one bowl. Stan was going to 42
nd
Street films afternoon and evenings”
(Schneemann email correspondence with the author, July 13, 2009).
320
Schneemann quoted in Women of Vision: Histories in Feminist Film and Video, ed. Alexandra
Juhasz (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 70.

304
Jim and me. […] But I felt that Loving failed to capture our central eroticism, and
I wanted to set that right.”
321
She continues, explaining that she felt a need to be
the constructor of the images and not simply their subject. When she appears in
other people’s films, she explains, “I always feel a tremendous distortion has been
enacted on me, despite my hope that some coherent self will come through.”
322

After her experiences with Brakhage and other filmmakers, Schneemann decided
that she would attempt to define her visual representation according to her own
terms.
323

The first film experiment that Schneemann began was Fuses, a project that
would achieve some cultural notoriety and eventually become her most famous
work in the medium. Begun in 1964 and not completed for three more years, the
film was a diaristic account of lovemaking between Schneemann and Tenney in
the space of their home that, in its final state, shares the seemingly paradoxical
functions of filmic documentation and painterly expression. Partially modeled on
the form and content of Brakhage’s films, it would eventually reflect his influence
while challenging his mode of vision and overall representational strategies. In a
number of his films, including Wedlock House: An Intercourse (1959), Flesh of
Morning (1956/1986), and Window Water Baby Moving (1962), Brakhage

321
In addition, Schneemann has often cited Window Water Baby Moving (1959), Brakhage’s film
of his wife’s experience in childbirth, as a work that powerfully catalyzed her own desire to learn
the craft of filmmaking and produce her own self-authored works in the medium.
322
Schneemann in MacDonald, A Critical Cinema: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers, Vol.
1, 142. She also appeared in films by Stan Vanderbeek, Bill Brand, and Stephen Dwoskin.
323
Hollis Frampton describes Brakhage’s particular directorial stance in relation to his subjects:
“he’d like to be on both ends [of the camera]: he’d like to be seen and at the same time he would
like to be in control of the way in which he is seen” (Frampton in MacDonald, A Critical Cinema,
Vol. 1, 75).

305
undertook a thorough autobiographical filmic investigation into the most private
aspects of his life, including sexual intercourse, masturbation, and the birth of his
children. But in its democratic exchange of visual perspective and artistic
direction, Schneemann’s film demonstrates a more equitable division of both
artistic and sexual control within the space of the artwork, the domestic activities
of the home, and the act of sexual intercourse.
In its post-production methods and visual style, Fuses reflects Brakhage’s
influence. For the project Schneemann radically modified the filmic image by
optically printing superimpositions, modifying its speed, physically painting on
the film’s surface, and burning it and scratching it as Brakhage had famously done
in a number of his films. However, Schneemann’s major achievement was her
inscription within her own experience of sex, as an action between equals, but
experienced by a woman, into the filmic texture of the work. In her elaborate,
complex, and careful post-production process, Schneemann attempted to inscribe
her own subjectivity into both the performative profilmic and painterly filmic
spaces of Fuses. In its blending of visual texture, the film creates an
indistinguishable somatic flux that visually metaphorizes the act of sexual fusion
that is achieved in intercourse. In Schneemann’s film, male and female genitalia
meld into one another and the material specificities of sexual difference are
obscured through superimposition and the material transformation of the film’s
visual texture.

306
In her preparatory thinking about Fuses, Schneemann intended to
undertake an experiment in film language. She attempted to determine – through
the act of an artistic experiment – if it would be possible to make a sexually
explicit film work that offered both a philosophical and representational
alternative to the exploitative tendencies of pornography or clinical tone of
science films. (This was a challenge that Brakhage would face on numerous
occasions as well, including in his film The Act of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes,
which will be discussed later in this chapter.) The result was a film that
challenged the narrative positioning of Brakhage’s own camera eye by
recalibrating the visual field of the work and undermining conventions of visual
identification and genital objectification. Though its historical innovation was
significant by any definition, Fuses has been left out of many narratives of
American experimental film (including Sitney’s). David James has written the
most persuasive and articulate account of Schneemann’s film: “The film so
thoroughly interweaves shots of Schneemann and shots from her point of view,
shots of Tenney and shots from his point of view, and shots of the two of them
from no attributable point of view that narrator positioning is entirely
dissolved.”
324
His analysis rigorously identifies the ways in which the optical
perspective of the experimental film camera has been reconfigured, not as a
heroic first person, but as a mode of vision that “disperses authorship and

324
James, Allegories of Cinema, 319.

307
subjectivity as generalized functions of an indeterminate erotic field.”
325
In her
eroticization and somatic, sensuous transformation of the profilmic and filmic
registers of Fuses, Schneemann created her most sexually explicit project.
Because of the film’s particular material conditions as a recording technology, it
catalyzed in Schneemann’s hands a powerful investigation into the effects of
technologically mediating an erotic exchange. One of the most thorough and
elaborate feminist experiments in film practice, Fuses is an innovation in both
non-fiction and experimental cinema, as well as in the ontology of sexual
representation that has been omitted from almost all theoretical interventions in
feminist film historiography.
326

Still, there is no doubt that in the medium of cinema, Fuses is
Schneemann’s most highly acclaimed work. Though it was rather hard to see for a
time due to censorship laws and social taboos concerning the explicit
representation of sexual intercourse, the film did have some public visibility. For
example, in the early 1970s it toured theatrically as part of a package of erotic
films (presented by Grove Press), which also, curiously enough, included Apple
Knockers and Coke, the short grainy, semi-pornographic film that was Conner’s

325
Ibid., 320.
326
Schneemann is not mentioned in Patricia Mellencamp’s Indiscretions: Avant-Garde Film,
Video, & Feminism (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990); nor is she
considered in any of Laura Mulvey’s writing. (Mulvey is the most influential feminist film
theorist; her most well known essay is “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” in Film Theory
and Criticism 7
th
edition, ed. Leo Braudy, Marshall Cohen (New York and Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2009), 711–722.) As Schneemann once said, Mulvey “talked to me about the
rupture Fuses made in pornography – how important Fuses was as an erotic vision. It was going to
change the whole argument and discussion of filmic representation of sexuality and … then she
couldn’t touch it. Mulvey has never mentioned my films” (Schneemann in “Interview with Kate
Haug” in Imagining her Erotics, 27).

308
source material for MARILYN TIMES FIVE.
327
Yet, it must still be recognized that
the film was quite provocative and confrontational in its attack on well
entrenched, commonly held beliefs concerning the representation of sex on
screen. In 1968, during a public presentation at Cannes, the film caused a near riot
in which people tore up seats and created a rather massive public disturbance.
(Schneemann has suggested that the crowd’s reaction at this screening was the
result of the fact that they expected Fuses to be more sexually explicit and puerile
than it actually was.) Still, there were precedents for sexually explicit work in
experimental film, including the films of Stan Brakhage, Andy Warhol, and
Barbara Rubin. The 1963 project, Christmas on Earth, was an experiment by a
teenage Rubin in the representation and exhibition of polymorphous sexuality, in
which homosexual and heterosexual acts were blended together visually, through
a novel experiment in film projection. In its exhibition, Rubin’s film presented a
spectatorial experience of expanded cinema in which the film’s sexual openness
was reflected in its screening context. In public presentations, two different reels
of the film was shown simultaneously on two projectors in which two
independent streams of imagery were superimposed on top of each other, on the
same screen, while a radio played the popular music of the day. Like
Schneemann’s Meat Joy, Rubin’s film was a playful bodily romp set to the sounds
of mass media, but it was a work that, because of its explicit display of
homosexual behavior, was more challenging to normative sexual sensibilities. In

327
David Thompson., Black and White and Blue: Adult Cinema From the Victorian Age to the
VCR (Toronto: ECW Press, 2007), 169.

309
this sense, Rubin’s work was less susceptible to cooptation by the sensibilities of
heterosexist pornographic exploitation.
Some critics have argued that through her use of her own body,
Schneemann created works that played into heterosexual male fantasy. In her
essay, “European and American Women’s Body Art,” first published in 1976,
Lucy Lippard compared the perceptions of male and female body art. She argued
that the sexual acting out and exhibitionist tendencies of artists like Vito Acconci
and Lucas Samaras were considered acceptable by the critical male establishment
while the efforts of Hanna Wilke, Carolee Schneemann, and Lynda Benglis were
met with much less approving responses. To her, this was largely due to the
sexism of the art world, but there were other considerations as well, particularly
when the women involved, like Wilke and Schneemann, were a “glamour girl” or
a “body beautiful,” respectively.
328
She writes, “Men can use beautiful, sexy
women as neutral objects or surfaces, but when women use their own faces and
bodies, they are immediately accused of narcissism. […] Because women are
considered sex objects, it is taken for granted that any woman who presents her
nude body in public is doing so because she thinks she is beautiful. She is a
narcissist, and Acconci, with his less romantic image and pimply back, is an
artist.”
329
Lippard mocks the simplicity of the rhetorically reductive formulations
of art criticism that, in their analysis of body art of the 1960s and 70s, conflate
ugliness with artistry and beauty with self-exploitation. Still, she agrees that at

328
Lippard, “European and American Women’s Body Art” in From the Center, 126
329
Ibid., 125.

310
times the use of the nude body provokes a necessary consideration of the
ideological stakes of self-representation. In discussing Wilke, an artist who courts
the conditions of self-exploitation and who described her own work as
“seduction,” Lippard also draws a connection to Schneemann. She explains that
Wilke’s “own confusion of her roles as beautiful woman and artist, as flirt and
feminist, has resulted at times in politically ambiguous manifestations that have
exposed her to criticism on a personal as well as on an artistic level. Another case
in point is Carolee Schneemann.’”
330
Lippard’s criticism suggests that even when
one is aware of the political intention of such work, it can create results that,
textually speaking, are “politically ambiguous” and thus, like the work of Conner
discussed in the last chapter, engage a potentially anxiogenic ethical ambivalence
concerning the interplay of authorship and exploitation.

In chapter two, I quoted Jonas Mekas’ description of the social milieu of
underground film, a movement dedicated to, in his words, “breaking down the
phony privacy walls.”
331
Like Clarke’s confessional work, Portrait of Jason or
Ono’s Cut Piece, Schneemann’s literal baring of herself provoked sexual
excitement, political distrust, and all too rarely, critical respect. However, despite
what pleasures certain spectators do or do not take from their experiences with her
work, it functions as a significant historical provocation. She explained that her
use of her own naked body was predicated on strategies of provocation:

330
Ibid., 126.
331
Mekas, Movie Journal, 281.

311
To confront paradox that we deal with created images. […] To bridge the
conventionally public/private areas of experience. […] To let my body be
a further dimension of the tactile, plastic character of the construction.
[…] [t]o break into the taboos against the vitality of the naked body in
movement, to eroticise my guilt-ridden culture and further confound this
culture’s sexual rigidities – that the life of the body is more variously
expressive than a sex-negative society can admit.
332

Politically and aesthetically, her goals were entirely congruent with those of other
exhibitionist artists of the period (including Otto Muehl or Vito Acconci) though
as a woman she was more subject to the criticisms of a sexist public that
conceived of her as a sex object first and an artist second. She writes, “I did not
stand naked in front of 300 people because I wanted to be fucked; but because my
sex and work were harmoniously experienced.”
333
Such a provocative
understanding of bodily performance was then, and remains, threatening to
dominant notions of sexual representation within art.

Film as Environment and Text:
Historically, Schneemann’s first experiments with cinema as a medium for
her own creative practice were tied to Fuses. The project was begun in 1964, but
not exhibited publicly until 1967; in its evolution over the intervening period, she
screened portions of it for friends and peers as a work-in-progress. With Fuses,
Schneemann first began to learn the craft and technology of cinema. Because of
her close friendship and correspondence with Brakhage, she was entirely aware of
the difficulty that he had in trying to establish his chosen medium – an

332
Schneemann, More Than Meat Joy, 92–94.
333
Ibid., 194.

312
independently, artisanally produced branch of non-narrative, largely silent film –
as a legitimate mode of art. Thus, her experiments in this medium were conducted
with a full awareness of the artistic stakes that would be involved in her virtual
defection to a medium that was not accepted as a legitimate format in the art
world. She explains, “I had internalized all these very serious, almost religious
attitudes about film. I had witnessed the messianic battle Brakhage had had to
endure to establish the nature of visual film. That was very serious for me.”
334

One of her ways of sidestepping Brakhage’s battles to legitimize non-industrial
film as art was to move the materials of film into the intermedial domains of
performance and expanded cinema. Though Brakhage would never produce work
of this variety, due to a belief in the textual sanctity and purity of the film
experience, Schneemann was able to interpolate the materials of film into the
other realms of her work, and this move proved both aesthetically and historically
productive.
Initially, the filmic materials that she used in her kinetic theater events
were not her own. She explains:
My first performance to incorporate film – film as a material element –
began when Gerd Stern asked me to collaborate with USCO on a
film/performance event for the new Cinematheque, where Jonas Mekas
had arranged a series of special evenings. The year before I had started to
edit the first footage of Fuses in my loft. […] Until that time I’d
considered filmmaking only as an independent, discrete, self-contained
language. But studying the film as it was split into multiple moving
images and planes shifted my reticence about including film in
performance.
335

334
Schneemann in MacDonald, A Critical Cinema, Vol. 1, 137.
335
Schneemann, More Than Meat Joy, 97.

313

Though Schneemann initiated Fuses in the context of the American avant-garde
cinema – which she then understood in fundamentally Brakhagean terms, “as an
independent, discrete, self-contained language” – she would eventually expand
her understanding of the medium’s performative capabilities, partially as a result
of her interaction with other artists who were working in intermedial contexts,
such as the USCO group. Her first performance work to incorporate projected
film was Ghost Rev, in which she worked together with dancer Phoebe Neville
and various artists and technicians associated with the USCO group (including
filmmaker Jud Yalkut who shot the footage that was used in the project). In the
performance of this semi-theatrical, kinetic work, she juxtaposed the bodily
movements of herself and her collaborator, in an effort, in her words, to “work
against the physical integrity of the film.”
336
As Schneemann’s description
suggests, through her first-hand experiences with both film and performance, she
realized an open-ended concept of cinema’s possibilities for producing new
aesthetic experiences in the shared social spaces of semi-theatrical events. In
general, Schneemann’s intermedial experiments in film and performance
demonstrate an integrated understanding of the medium’s possible uses within
diverse art practices.
337
This sensibility differed significantly from Brakhage’s
purist approach in which the space of film exhibition was conceived as an almost
hallowed hall of silent worship.

336
Ibid.
337
She explained, “Anyway, film as part of performance remained something that was in the
studio along with all the other rough materials being tried out” (Schneemann in MacDonald, A
Critical Cinema, Vol. 1, 137).

314
Throughout the rest of the 1960s and early 1970s, Schneemann continued
to integrate film into her performances, often, but not exclusively, using materials
filmed and created by herself. Apart from Fuses, her other major film works of
the period, Viet Flakes (1965), Plumb Line (1968–71), and Kitch’s Last Meal
would be screened both as independent, self-contained works, and as integrated
components of kinetic theater projects. The dual condition of these works echoes
that of her contemporaries who were active both within the world of the
experimental film community (or the “coop avant-garde” as Peter Wollen
described it) and in the performance art network (that overlapped with the social
circles of dance and happenings). Schneemann’s film works functioned
simultaneously as part of the conventional register of single-screen film
exhibition, generally associated with the avant-garde film community, and one of
open-ended semi-theatrical conditions, which was more closely connected to
traditions of performance and visual art.

Kitch’s Last Meal:
In the late 1960s, Schneemann experienced a personal crisis of sorts, in
which all the cataclysmic social, aesthetic, and philosophical energies of the
1960s triggered a personal breakdown. In 1977, she explained the situation with
the benefit of hindsight:
I was flipped out for several years – and if this is a representation of the
implosion of my generation at a certain time (’69, ’70), I still alone had to
struggle to fight back into relevance, coherence, the unities of functional
behavior. And the total loss of a functional self has not only to do with the

315
excesses of social and esthetic determinations – the materials and energies
of the sixties – but of the individual who faces, endures, an hourly state of
dis-location, dis-orientation, fears, ineptitudes and a sinister
transformation of all ordinary things, objects and actions.
338

The dislocation that she describes was partially a function of the sexist treatment
that she received in the 1960s, during an era in which the language of liberation
and equality was spoken but rarely practiced in terms of sexual politics. For one,
Schneemann felt that she was never adequately accepted by the boys’ club of the
happenings and performance scene, though the artists often involved her in their
work (though generally only through the incorporation of her body as “an image”
not “a maker of images”).
339
In performances like Robert Morris’s Site (1964) and
Oldenburg’s Nude Bride (1969), Schneemann felt instrumentalized, because of
her treatment as a muse for the works rather than an active agent of their
construction. In the early 1970s, Schneemann relocated to Europe, living in
England and Paris. Upon her return to the States, she spent much of her time with
her partner, the English filmmaker and artist Anthony McCall, in a regular weekly
retreat to the quiet life of teaching, painting, and living together. This relationship
and its historical conditions would eventually produce a non-fiction film work
partially removed from the social context and cultural maelstrom of the New York
avant-garde of the 1960s.
One of its most significant aspects of Schneemann’s artistic output in the
early-to-mid 1970s was Kitch’s Last Meal, an epic film project in which the artist

338
Schneemann, More Than Meat Joy, 191.
339
Ibid., 194.

316
documented the quotidian experiences of her life in rural New York with
filmmaker Anthony McCall and their cat Kitch. She explains that the film was
“based on the continuous textures of a shared daily life of a couple – both artists –
living in the country.” The film engages with the ways in which art and life
intertwine: “The visual imagery touches on the practical efforts which actually
surround art practice – in this case: gardening, chopping wood, cleaning, grounds
work, cooking, typing, jobs, reading, travels, the appearance of friends, the
movements of the cat through the center of the home and grounds, and the
recurrent passage of a train which runs close behind the house.”
340
It is a film
project that continues the autobiographical trajectory of her work, while shifting
its emphasis towards a more unrestricted, open-ended diaristic mode of
filmmaking.
Produced on Super-8mm with a separate soundtrack on tape, Kitch is a
work of remarkable scale and formal complexity for this extremely inflexible
small gauge film that had been initially intended as an amateur, home-movie
format for hobbyists. To have produced a five hour super-8 epic is an unusual, if
not unprecedented feat.
341
She explains that, “Kitch’s Last Meal took its form due
to the nature of Super 8: close to the body, compact, cheap film, three minute
cartridges – immediacy and simplicity, fixed durations.”
342
However,
Schneemann’s Super 8 epic was somewhat atypical in form, because unlike many

340
Ibid., 225.
341
The materials of Kitch – Super-8 film – are extremely difficult to edit due to the tiny size of its
frames and the thin, spidery quality of its film stock.
342
Schneemann, More Than Meat Joy, 225.

317
other works originally produced in this format, hers was a tightly edited and
carefully orchestrated work.
In its exhibitions over time, different portions of the work have been
screened, in varying length from twenty minutes to almost five hours. After the
film’s completion in 1976, Schneemann’s preferred mode for exhibiting the work
has been in a vertically oriented, two-screen film, with the top image slightly
larger than the one below. She has also shown Kitch’s Last Meal with live
voiceover accompaniment or as part of a performance work titled Up to and
Including Her Own Limits (1973-76). It is now available only in composite two-
screen versions on both 16mm and video, both of which are fifty-four minutes
long.
343

In structure, the film is ostensibly based on the last days of an elderly
female cat who was seventeen years old when Schneemann began the project of
documenting the animal’s twilight years. The artist assumed that Kitch would not
live much longer and thus planned to organize the film around a series of the cat’s
meals, filming one every week as a record of the animal’s life. At the time of the
project’s beginning Schneemann could not have known that her cat would live to
be twenty years old, well beyond the life expectancy of the species.
Each section of the film features a handwritten title that introduces us to
the historical period included in each reel. The first reel of the restored version

343
These versions are slightly different because of their differing sound formats. For the exhibition
of the film, Schneemann chooses to circulate the soundtrack as a separate, independent source.
The result is a less rigid registration of sound and image synchronicity in exhibition.

318
(which is the top image of the work’s two-screen vertical orientation) begins with
the following text:
Kitch’s Last Meal
18 years old
Reels 9 and 10, 1974
By Carolee Schneemann

The text is painted on a panel of glass; behind it, we see a train moving in the
distant landscape, as the filmmaker prepares a makeshift profilmic
superimposition of text over action. The soundtrack is atmospheric, beginning
with the rhythmic rumbling of the train. Like its visual representation, this sonic
icon of modernity and movement functions throughout the film as an auditory
leitmotif that bridges and joins disparate materials through its rhythmic evocation
of a rural landscape. Schneemann’s figure then enters the film, as she is seen
sweeping the front porch of her home in the saturated color of this small gauge
film. Behind Schneemann is the verdant expanse of her front yard. The bottom
projector then begins and the second image now enters and introduces the film’s
protagonist, a cat who relaxes outside while Schneemann continues her domestic
labors in the top section of the projection.
We are then introduced to the disheveled, tousled interior of the house,
which is covered with scattered papers and boxes strewn across the floor. (This
disarray was the result of a theft by a previous tenant to whom she had sublet her
home.) Schneemann continues to labor outdoors, and the frequent footage of her
suggests that, like Fuses, the filmmaker and her partner shared the responsibilities
of operating the camera. The top and bottom panels often show related, tightly

319
choreographed imagery, demonstrating Schneemann’s claim that the film “is cut
like a straightjacket.”
344
Sometimes the footage in the two panels is almost
identical; at other times images seem to circulate between levels as dictated by the
different points of emphasis and associative connections that the discrete film
strips provide. (In general, the two panels give an impression of simultaneity that
is similar to that of Warhol’s The Chelsea Girls, a work that similarly
communicates a blend of profilmic looseness and deliberate organizational
structure.) In the next section we see simultaneous footage on both panels
showing Schneemann engaging in various acts of domestic labor, including
scrubbing the floor, doing laundry, and picking blueberries.
345
As Schneemann
hangs wet clothes on a clothesline, the soundtrack abruptly shifts from the
atmospheric clamor of the train to the more noisy interaction of a typewriter’s
percussive clanging and a barely intelligible radio. The muddled soundtrack
presents a sonic equivalent of the home’s interior disarray. An abrupt cut follows,
and the first of Schneemann’s voiceover narrations begins.
(For the context of the discussion here concerning experimental film, its
historiography, and Schneemann’s role within it, this extended voiceover is
perhaps the most rhetorically significant component of the film. In the pages that
follow, it will be quoted in detail.)
I met a happy man, a structuralist filmmaker. He said, “But don’t call me
that. It’s something else that I do.” He said, “We are fond of you. You are

344
Schneemann in MacDonald, A Critical Cinema, Vol. 1, 151.
345
In its emphasis on the household work of a woman, the film predates both Chantal Akkerman’s
landmark feminist critique of domestic labor, Jeanne Dielmann (1975) and Martha Rosler’s video
work Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975).

320
charming, but don’t ask us to look at your films. We cannot. There are
certain films we cannot look at, the personal clutter, the persistence of
feelings, the hand-touched sensibility, the diaristic indulgence, the
painterly mess, the dense gestalt, the primitive technique.”

During the above voiceover, we see images of Schneemann petting Kitch, giving
her medicine with an eyedropper, picking beans, and preparing food in the
kitchen. We also see dirty dishes in the sink, a clear instantiation, in literal terms,
of the aesthetic attributes described in her voiceover, including the “personal
clutter,” “painterly mess,” and “diaristic indulgence” of her art. In this section of
the film, the register of Schneemann’s personal, quotidian experience and that of
her artistic enterprise are fluidly melded by both her sardonic voiceover and its
ironic interaction with the film’s image track. The visual components of this
section also clearly evoke the gendered implications of a conventional sexist
division of labor that relates to the space of the kitchen versus that of the art
studio. We see mason jars and the smiling face of McCall, a structuralist
filmmaker, though he is not the one that is the target of her commentary. (This
will be discussed in greater detail later.)
Schneemann’s voiceover continues:

I don’t take the advice of men. They only talk to themselves. Pay
attention to critical and practical film language. It exists for and in
only one gender. I said to him, “You have slithered out of excesses
and vitalities of the sixties.”

He said, “You can do as I do too. Take one clear process, follow its
strictest implication, intellectually establish a system of
permutations, establish their visual set.”

I said, “My film is concerned with diet and digestion.”

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“Very well,” he said, “then why the train?”

“The train is death and there is ‘die’ in ‘diet’ and ‘di’ in digestion.”

He said, “Well then you are back to metaphors and meanings.”

In her visual accompaniment to the voiceover narration, quoted above,
Schneemann presents more images of domestic activity, including an extended
sequence in which she stands in front of her kitchen stove carefully preparing jam.
Having picked the blueberries, she cooks them, boils the mason jars, and places
the jam in its receptacles (likely in preparation for the coming winter). Like a
number of other sections in Kitch, this portion of the film demonstrates how
carefully the artist synchronized her film and audio elements, as her culinary
labors provide a perfectly timed visual representation of the soundtrack’s allusion
to diet and digestion. During this episode, in the lower screen Schneemann is seen
painting in her studio, preparing a large expressionistic, semi-figurative canvas.
The visual and sonic elements of the film cohere, in an associative fashion, to
make a provocative rhetorical statement concerning the indivisible connections
between craft, domesticity, and female identity in Schneemann’s artistic and
political project.
The voiceover continues with this almost Socratic dialogue on film
aesthetics between Schneemann and “a happy man, a structuralist filmmaker”:
He protested, “You are unable to appreciate and understand the system of
the grid, the numerical and rational procedure. You simply do not follow
the problematic, the Pythagorean cues.” I saw my failings were worthy of
dismissal. I’d be buried alive. My works would be lost.

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He said, “We can be friends equally, if we cannot be artists equally.” He
told me he had lived with a sculptress.

I asked, “Does that make me a filmmaker-ess?”

“No,” he said, “we think of you as a dancer.”

This polemical voiceover provides a rhetorical element to Kitch’s Last Meal that
was absent in her other films. Though her earlier works were polemical and
ideologically charged (including, most notably, Fuses and Viet Flakes), they were
not didactic. With her use of the soundtrack to provide her own aphoristic
narration in Kitch, Schneemann shifted the timbre of her work. However, the
diaristic audio fragments of the film give productive clues to the overall
philosophical underpinnings of this particular film and to the rest of her work
more generally. In a most basic sense, this imagined exchange with “a happy man,
a structuralist filmmaker,” perfectly identifies significant conceptual,
interpretative, and social binaries that were operating in the field of experimental
film practice in the early 1970s. The opposition that Schneemann describes
between “the rational procedure” of the structuralist filmmaker and the “painterly
mess” of her own work was in fact an operative aesthetic tension that polarized
the avant-garde film community of the period. And in the imagined filmmaker’s
emphasis on the system of the grid, he connects his rhetoric to the critical legacy
of modernist, Greenbergian art criticism.
Following this introductory meta-polemic about film practice,
Schneemann brings the film back to an impressionistic register that is its
dominant mode, featuring poetic, collagic voiceover and atmospheric sound to

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accompany a mélange of imagery featuring her cat, her home, and her quotidian
interactions with her partner. At times, there are additional fragmentary
pronouncements on the soundtrack, though none as long or as detailed as the one
described above. In one case, Schneemann draws critical attention to a quotation
from Sitney, suggesting an implicit sexism in his writing, which she demonstrates
by reading his printed text aloud. She quotes an excerpt of something that had
written about a film still from Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon, in which
she is shown looking reflectively out of a window. Schneemann quotes the
section in which Sitney describes the film still, writing, “it is a calm image, it is
practically an icon of a person looking into himself.” These brief observations
concerning sexism and language punctuate the observational texture of the rest of
the work as it shifts registers between conversation, personal reflection, and
feminist commentary. In all, the soundtrack to the film is a blend of feminist
critique (which, like Schneemann’s quotation of Sitney, is aphoristic), personal
and diaristic reflection upon the artist’s own life, some meditation on the
conditions of filmmaking, and observational, atmospheric sound of the artist and
her partner in conversation, blended with the sounds of passing trains and their
purring cat. (The film’s sonic montage of first person diaristic commentary with
casual, fragmentary sound, muddled conversation, and synchronized sound/image
commentary relates to the films of Jonas Mekas in both tone and overall artistic
strategy, including for example, Walden or Reminiscences of a Journey to
Lithuania.)

324
Throughout the film, the cat is generally present; she is seen frolicking,
interacting with the couple, tending to herself, and perhaps most often eating. At
one point, she rides in the front seat of the car with Schneemann and McCall as
the artist films the landscape through the window of the moving vehicle. On the
soundtrack Schneemann tells a story about Fuses and complains about a recent
robbery in which some of her films and much of her correspondence were stolen.
(Though she does not explicitly indicate it in the film, Schneemann lost all of her
lengthy and intense written correspondence with Brakhage to this theft). She
includes a range of tonal registers in her commentary, blending personal
comments, like, “In December, Jim [Tenney]’s father killed himself” with
discussions of her artistic working methods, demonstrating that within her artistic
practice, even her relationship to the specific technologies of film are personal,
tactile, and somatic. In her voiceover, she describes two recent conversations with
moving image artists:
A video expert asked me, “How did you get into sound recording?” The
question was bewildering. If I need a medium, I go and teach myself to
use it. The forms are in my mind. I go to find what the materials can do.

I said, “I teach myself, so long as I can get my hands on it.”

“Of course,” he said, “access.” I meant touch.

A super-8 filmmaker from Europe called to talk shop. He asked, “What is
the most important piece of super-8 equipment you have?”

I said, “I’ve been waiting for someone to ask me that. It’s a clothespin.”

As this portion of voiceover suggests, Schneemann conceived of her relationship
to her materials in organic terms, as extensions of her musculature and her bodily

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experience. To her, as to Brakhage, film is a tactile medium, to be engaged with
by hand, to be held, touched, and created within the domestic space of daily life in
which cats play, jam is put into jars, and strips of film are hung with the same
clothespins that hold undershirts onto clotheslines.
Following this discussion of film technology and artistic materials,
Schneemann talks a bit more about her history with the medium and the ways in
which it has affected her domestic life. Curiously, she describes how her cat came
to learn about cinema. Kitch’s experiences match those of Schneemann. “Kitch
was struck by the ritual of it [film viewing]. Of course, the first films she saw
were Brakhage films. Perhaps the Brakhage films prepared her to enjoy
commercial cinema.”
346
The reels end and a new section starts with handwritten
titles:
Kitch’s Last Meal
19 years old
Reels 11 and 12, 1975

On the soundtrack we hear Schneemann read the titles aloud as we simultaneously
see them onscreen. In this section the seasons have changed, the fall has become
winter, and Schneemann shows us a range of snowy exteriors. With the change of
seasons the tempo and style of the film shift somewhat, to a rapid montage,
organized into a filmic texture of greater visual plasticity and frenetic camera
movement, more akin to the visual style of Brakhage than the previous sections.
Like Brakhage’s work, these reels also demonstrate a careful framing and

346
Such a claim has likely never been made in reference to a human, unless it maybe referred to
one of Brakhage’s children.

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attention to composition. The rapid edits and image shifts between the top and
bottom panels create an unusual, unsettling optical flicker that shuttles in a
rhythmical fashion along the vertical axis of the work’s two-screen projection.
In this winter footage, Schneemann demonstrates the dramatic range of
color and luminosity that super-8 film can produce. In one overwhelming shot,
she shows a dazzling bright pink sunset behind a trail of slowly moving clouds.
Through her careful editing of the film, Schneemann blends this footage of nature
with images of her own body in motion, as she had in Fuses where she visually
melded the act of sexual intercourse with the landscape outside of the couple’s
window. This section of the film also shows the pleasure and jubilance of
Schneemann’s family life, as she dances while the cat plays on the floor and
McCall calmly drinks coffee. The soundtrack includes an atmospheric
combination of largely indecipherable, seemingly commonplace, everyday
conversation, to accompany footage of the two artists feeding their cat a variety of
unlikely foods (including an avocado and a fried egg). The top and bottom panels
of the film often achieve a remarkable geometric patterning; in one sequence the
top screen shows a train as it passes by the window of their home while the
bottom image features an artfully framed, synchronous shadow of the living cat.
This juxtaposition achieves a kind of spontaneous visual symmetry that is
partially created through happenstance. As camera movements within the two
sections push the visual momentum of the diptych in opposite directions, the film
creates interaction between the upper and lower panels that, though carefully

327
coordinated, also creates a whole range of unintended effects that would be
impossible in regular, single-screen projection.
347

In addition to home movie footage of the family at play, Schneemann also
shows us elements of both her and McCall’s artistic labors and creative processes.
In a comparison that evokes the binary of “structuralist filmmaker” vs. “hand-
touched sensibility,” she presents footage of Tenney with a ruler and pencil as he
prepares a graphic score for one of his works. He is seen carefully mapping a rigid
organization of white and black squares on paper, while she touches and
manipulates strands of super-8 film in a cluttered room filled with her expressive,
brightly colored canvases. This moment of self-reflexivity suggests that, in
addition to being a diary work, Kitch is also an essay film. Though the film is
visually demonstrative of a particular set of rhetorical associations, its soundtrack
provides its most explicitly essayistic content and commentary.
Like Schneemann’s other work, Kitch incorporates the overt presentation
of sex as a significant component. We see the artists together nude, laying in bed,
and lightly caressing each other. The tone of the film begins to change at this
point, and Schneemann’s voiceover becomes somewhat sullen: “I’m really
depressed because I ended up getting my period, and I’m getting the flu, and I
have a performance in a few days and I don’t think anyone will come to it, and the
people who do come are going to hate it.” Visually, the language of the film
becomes more abstract, presenting bright, indeterminate flashes of light and

347
The same could be said of the both planned and happenstance parallelism of Warhol’s kinetic
imagery in The Chelsea Girls.

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intangible shapes, as the camera moves more rapidly and the film’s plastic texture
becomes more vibrant. This outburst of dynamic visual energy precedes long
sections of black leader in both panels of the film. This intentional breakdown in
the film’s optical field introduces a major change. As we will learn in the film’s
next reel, the cat whose life gave the film its basic structure has passed away. This
abstract shift in the film’s rhythms and visual texture, followed by long expanses
of an empty black screen, mark the cat’s transition from life into death. Of the
many topics upon which Kitch’s Last Meal meditates, death is one of the most
central: it is prefigured even in the film’s title.
348
The abstract flashes of light and
color that precede the dark portion of the film correspond to the cat’s last flickers
of life. On the soundtrack, Schneemann tells a story of bringing the cat into the
city to be embalmed, as she prepares us for images of her dead pet.
Following this non-figurative visual symbolization of death, Schneemann
gives the viewers concrete representations of the cat’s fatality in the last two reels
of the film. Like the others they are labeled with text in Schneemann’s hand, here
painted in blue on a white background:
Final Reels
The cat Kitch is 19 yrs old
1976

It is now spring, life is rejuvenated, and the next reels begin with images of the
lovers in bed together. There is footage of the cat playing, as if it had been reborn,
shifting the temporal expectations of the film’s seemingly linear diary structure.

348
This is a point made by Scott MacDonald in “Carolee Schneemann’s ‘Autobiographical
Trilogy,’” Film Quarterly 34, no. 1 (Fall 1980), 27–32.

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Schneemann presents footage from an airplane window and travelogue imagery of
the streets of France. Sexual imagery returns through Schneemann’s extended
shots of a nude McCall. In an effort to reverse the stereotypical composition of
pornography made for heterosexual men, Schneemann includes numerous close-
ups of McCall’s genitalia, fragmented, and removed from his body through
selective filmic composition, objectifying his sex and its physical basis in his
physiology. Schneemann’s montage of McCall’s sexual organs and nude body
amounts to a carefully constructed visual mini-essay on the objectification of the
male form. The couple then frolics, partially nude (in a section of the film shot by
a third party), which concludes with a dramatic and carefully framed close-up of
the couple locked in a kiss. (The composition and camera movement in this
section are rather remarkable and invoke the precision and dynamism of
Brakhage’s filmmaking – could he have shot this portion?) The couple move
about playfully in the yard and snippets of pop and classical music fill the
soundtrack. McCall cleans a fish outdoors and feeds its entrails to a hungry Kitch
– a cat that we know has passed away – showing the intertwined nature of life in
which different species live, die, and feed off of each other.
Then, as the film approaches its end, we see Kitch nearing death. She
seems sick and lethargic, and for the only time in the film, appears uninterested in
food. The artist then holds her dead cat that has entered rigor mortis. Schneemann
looks up at the camera, or perhaps at her lover, who is holding it. At this moment,
for one of the few times in the film, she gazes directly out at the viewer, her eyes

330
now filled with tears. During this dramatic and transitional section of the film, the
lower panel explodes with flashes of color, scratches, and bits of illegible text, in
a last gasp of expressive energy, which as before, visually evokes the film’s
subject matter and the fragility of its own cellular material. The film then returns
to where it started, with images of a train passing in front of a window and
rhythmic sounds of its movement on the soundtrack. There is snow outside; the
seasons have changed again.

With Kitch’s Last Meal, Schneemann produced a work that blends the
imperatives of a first-person diaristic cinema (influenced by both Brakhage and
Mekas) with a more essayistic style (like that practiced by political and feminist
filmmakers). In its visual texture, in its mode of rhetorical address, in its
comprehensive representation of the grain of everyday life, Kitch is an
impressionistic survey of an artist’s quotidian experience. It documents her
chores, her art works, her interactions with her lover, the cycles of nature, and in
its unassuming simplicity, the calm passing of time. Kitch has a personal
intimacy, expressed in both visual and sonic terms, that seems unguarded,
uncensored, and natural in its frankness. The film’s intimacy is partially a
function of Schneemann’s openness towards the discussion of her own
experiences in which records her life without restraint. But it also results from the
flexibility of the amateur filmmaking mode of Super-8 that allows a tiny camera
to be introduced into almost any setting. Like surveillance technologies, light,

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handheld film equipment allows the artist to create a sensation of closeness and
intimacy that is achieved by limiting the imposition of the apparatus. Schneemann
explained the filming process as being fundamentally transformed by her
encounter with a new technology and her related, new working sensibility: “This
camera was a very straightforward, domestic, simple partner to work with, and I
wanted to be more and more accepting of the obviousness and ordinariness of
things.”
349
Like Kitch the cat, Schneemann’s camera lived with the artist and her
partner, observing the most banal or remarkable moments that they shared,
without discretion. This openness to plain, everyday experience frames
Schneemann’s project in autobiographical terms, and the lack of extreme filmic
intervention – like the painting, scratching, and multiple superimpositions of
Fuses – allows the profilmic space of the work to communicate content more
directly to the viewer, in a way that, as Schneemann suggests, is both more
obvious and ordinary.
Autobiography is infused throughout Schneemann’s work. In her various
projects she often describes her own personal experiences, making her life her
principal subject. Kitch’s Last Meal has been described by Scott MacDonald as
the third film in Schneemann’s autobiographical trilogy, which also includes
Fuses and Plumb Line.
350
As autobiography, all three of these films partially
chronicle the demise of romantic relationships, and thus frame the experiences of
romantic love, eroticism, and domestic partnership as inextricably connected with

349
Schneemann in MacDonald, A Critical Cinema, Vol.1, 150.
350
Again, see MacDonald, “Carolee Schneemann’s ‘Autobiographical Trilogy.’”

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loss and suffering. Kitch’s Last Meal is an artist’s film about her own home life as
well as a domestic meditation on art itself. As she described it in a quotation
above, the film presents the ways in which art is always integrated into the texture
and labor of daily experience, such that the film’s “visual imagery touches on the
practical efforts which actually surround art practice.”
351
In this sense,
Schneemann’s film is an unusual documentary manifestation of the cultural
sensibility of the time that stressed the irreducible integration of life’s experiences
with those of artistic creation. Throughout Kitch, the filmmaker continually
returns to images of landscapes, greenery, and scenes of her country home in its
verdant natural surroundings, presenting a small space of domesticity within the
remarkable visual expanse of nature. The film argues, by example, that it is
impossible to properly understand an artist’s practice without considering the
extratextual determinations that frame it philosophically and historically.
Schneemann’s film is a personal document of her own efforts to integrate her life
and art into the landscape of nature, and as such, represents a heterogeneously
textured interweaving of the social, artistic, and phenomenal realms of her
experience.
Kitch’s Last Meal presents an idealistic, perhaps utopian vision of an
artistic practice integrated with nature, creating an audio-visual instantiation of
the artist’s desire to blend the conceptual developments of avant-garde and
feminist art with a somatic, personal, artistic presence. In its visual and historical

351
Schneemann, More Than Meat Joy, 225.

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associations, one sequence of Kitch’s Last Meal perfectly encapsulates this
network of artistic impulses. Schneemann explains its genesis:
One spring day in ’73 a new neighbor came to prune an apple tree. He had
a harness and ropes by which he raised and lowered himself and his tools
through the branches. […] I asked if I could try them. He said fine, and
was perhaps as surprised as I was when the impulse to float naked in the
harness took effect. Then Anthony came and took some footage of my free
float. Once suspended in the harness – free of normal gravity – something
started which was slowly to evolve into a new performance work over the
next four years – paralleling and including the footage of Kitch’s Last
Meal (which in turn included these first images of “flying” in the tree).
352

Though footage of this event is not included in the currently circulating fifty-four
minute version of Kitch, a remarkable set of images of this event can still be seen
as reproductions in Schneemann’s book More Than Meat Joy (1997). In the two
photographs taken by McCall, Schneemann’s form hangs suspended above the
ground, spinning with her limbs extended outward in imitation (perhaps
unconscious) of the spidery trees that surround her. This image presents a
remarkable metaphorical distillation of the work’s overall vision that shows an
artist integrated into her landscape through a series of ecstatic, unrestrained bodily
gestures.
353

352
Ibid., 226.
353
The film materials produced in Kitch’s Last Meal were integrated into a performance piece of
hers titled Up to and Including her Own Limits (1973-76). The historical evolution of the
performance closely paralleled that of the film. It featured Schneemann, nude, suspended in the air
with a series of ropes and harnesses. Throughout the work, she swung sometimes forcefully,
sometimes slowly, around the space of the gallery, with crayons in hand, marking the walls with
long abstract streaks while the film elements of Kitch’s Last Meal were projected in an area that
overlapped with her performance space. The work also featured sculptural and video elements.
Schneemann explained some of the history that led to the production of this work: “The
works of Pollock, de Kooning, could only be viewed with optical muscularity – the entire body
was active. Up to and Including her Limits was the direct result of Pollock’s physicalized painting
process” (Schneemann, “Statement for Texte Zure Kunst (1999)” in Imagining Her Erotics, 164–
65). In its expressionistic streaking of the gallery’s walls and floor with painterly marks, the

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“Step Out of Your Frame”: Structural Film and Performance:
Though few art or film historians have seen Kitch’s Last Meal, either as a
composite double-screen projection or as part of Up to and Including Her Own
Limits, there is one aspect of the project that has attained a forceful historic
notoriety and should be familiar to most people with even a passing knowledge of
Schneemann’s career. In both her 1977 version of Interior Scroll, Schneemann
famously read some of the text from her voiceover narration in Kitch’s Last Meal.
In this performance the artist appeared wrapped in a sheet, then removed it,
painted her body with a few streaks, and slowly extracted a scroll of text from her
vagina, reading it aloud as she imitated the conventional poses of a life model for
a drawing class. Her reading began as Kitch’s Last Meal had: “I met a happy man,
a structural filmmaker . . .”
This performance of Interior Scroll was an unplanned response to the
conditions that surrounded the presentation of Schneemann’s film Fuses, at the
Telluride Film Festival of 1977. She had been invited there by Stan Brakhage to
present her work as part of a program titled “The Erotic Woman.” Together with
her long-time friend, she curated a program of sexually themed films by women.
However, the presentation conditions of the program bothered her – particularly a

performance clearly references Pollock’s gestural abstraction, however in the context of an art
event, these actions become exaggerated and more dramatically self-reflexive. In addition, in its
integration of Schneemann’s own naked body and her personal filmic portrait of her domestic life,
it adds extra layers of feminist self-consciousness and intermedial reference that forcefully cast the
work further into the register of artistic autobiography. In her performances of the work in
February 1976, Schneemann included the body of her dead cat Kitch, as a part of its mise-en-
scene. Like Kitch’s Last Meal, such a performative gesture shows the lengths to which
Schneemann was willing to go in order to present a vision of life and art as inextricably
indivisible.

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brochure for the Festival that featured a flasher in a raincoat with the words
“Fourth Telluride Film Festival” written on his chest. She felt compelled to
respond to the circumstances of the screening with a second performance of
Interior Scroll. She explains her compulsion:
The last thing I wanted to do at the Telluride Film Festival was an
‘action.’ I was looking forward to seeing films, old friends, to being in
Colorado again. […] Then the troublesome voice started nagging at me the
day before the film program [...] I was saying ‘leave me alone I just want
to have a nice time;’ She was saying: ‘live body action steps into area of
discrepancy.
354

In her reflection on the event, she presents an aphoristic string of proclamations
intended to describe the motivational voice of conscience that compelled her to
respond to the conditions of her film screening with an act of feminist
performance. In her impressionistic catalogue of her feelings at the time of the
event, she poetically describes her anxiety concerning the conflict between film
and performance and the need that she felt at that moment to distinguish the
passive experience of film viewing from something more unpredictable and
uncontrolled:
step into the fissure between live action and filmic images / the tension is
there between distancing of audience perception and fixity of projection /
an actual reality triggering filmic reality as coherent present / the lens
standing between us and the material embodiment / a live action beside
illusionistic actions / images an antagonistic field where the spectators
must find their move / and to see it has to make sense and move
thoroughly not just in twenty minute film segments for an evenings
viewing / as filmmaker you must stand out step out of your frame
355

354
Schneemann, More Than Meat Joy, 236.
355
Ibid.

336
This compendium of ideas and impressions coheres around a knot of anxieties
that concern the philosophical limits between film projection (described as fixed
and illusionistic) and performance (as a live, somatic action). To Schneemann this
confrontation with her audience, artistic materials, spectatorial context, and sexual
identity, form “an antagonistic field” in which the stakes of her work were laid
out in dramatic fashion.
The performance was provocative and triggered the intended response.
However, in an almost roundabout way, it also draws a connection to the work of
Stan Brakhage that is far from coincidental. Schneemann’s description of her
encounters with “a happy man, a structuralist filmmaker” lay out the
philosophical underpinnings of her artistic practice as well as its conflicts with
other tendencies in the American avant-garde cinema. In the text that she read in
both Kitch’s Last Meal and her performance of Interior Scroll, Schneemann
establishes an opposition between the systematicity of so-called “structural” film
and her own practice, which her imagined opponent describes critically as marked
by “the personal clutter, the persistence of feelings, the hand-touched sensibility,
the diaristic indulgence, the painterly mess, the dense gestalt, the primitive
technique.” In this imaginary encounter between herself and a male structuralist
filmmaker, Schneemann presents a diatribe that was actually directed towards the
female art and film critic Annette Michelson. (The descriptive phrases above were
adopted by Schneemann from comments that were passed on to her by

337
Michelson’s students.)
356
This imagined encounter marks a divide between
seemingly opposed philosophical notions of experimental film practice at the
beginning of the 1970s. One, aligned with Brakhage and Schneemann,
emphasized affect, personal involvement, and expressive, painterly detail, while
the other mode, made by filmmakers like Hollis Frampton, Ernie Gehr, Michael
Snow, and Paul Sharits (and celebrated in print by Michelson, Krauss, and
others), was based on extreme systematicities and pre-determined formal patterns.
Schneemann’s text above directly opposes (and perhaps exaggerates) the
distinctions between these different modes of artistic practice – as did Brakhage’s
numerous public dismissals of “structural film” – yet, on a basic level, this
opposition helps to contextualize and historicize one of the most urgent conflicts
within the development of the American experimental cinema in significant years
of cultural transition.
Though no American filmmakers actually accepted the term “structural”
to describe their work, the word nevertheless gained cultural potency following its
introduction by P. Adams Sitney in an essay in 1969, when he famously wrote,

356
On Michelson: to MacDonald: “… that quotation you mentioned is a secret letter to a critic
[Annette Michelson] who couldn’t look at my films. It’s a double invention and transmutation: it’s
not to a man but to a woman. The projected quotes are from her students. After years of saying she
really wanted to see my films and was very interested, there was this festival where she slept
through my program. I mentioned to a friend of mine, who was also a student of hers, that I was
just astonished that she really couldn’t bear to see them. […] Anyway, the student said, “Well,
look, there are certain films she simply cannot look at: the diaristic indulgence, the hand-touch
sensibility,” and so on (Schneemann in MacDonald, A Critical Cinema, Vol. 1, 143–144.)
In the fall of 2008, when I discussed the subject with Michelson, she expressed surprise
at the fact that this well-known feminist performance work, with which she was familiar, was
actually directed at her, a feminist critic (Author’s Conversation with Michelson, New York City,
October 2007).

338
“Suddenly, a cinema of structure has emerged.”
357
In its precision, Sitney’s
explication of this trend – drawn from his studies in the morphology of literary
style – amounts to an attempt at a prescriptive definition, rather than a description
of an historical trend. The films that he discusses exhibit some mixture of four
characteristics: “fixed camera position,” “the flicker effect,” “loop printing,” and
“rephotography off of a screen.”
358
He writes, “Theirs is a cinema of structure
wherein the shape of the whole film is predetermined and simplified, and it is that
shape that is the primal impression of the film.”
359
It was this basic assertion,
which remains truly convincing despite its controversy, that was most troubling to
both Brakhage and Schneemann. Sitney’s efforts at creating a perhaps overly
precise definition of the movement, along with his inclusion of films that were
simply incongruous, were the two factors that proved most troublesome to a
number of artists and readers of the essay. In hindsight there can be no doubt that
Sitney, an extremely articulate and precise observer of cinema, was right to
recognize a shift in the later 1960s towards a greater formal severity and
systematicity in the avant-garde works of filmmakers like Michael Snow, George
Landow, Ernie Gehr, Hollis Frampton, Tony Conrad, and Paul Sharits. However,
it was a function of both Sitney’s rhetoric and his social position as a

357
P. Adams Sitney, “Structural Film,” in Film Culture Reader, 326. The version included in the
Film Culture Reader was slightly revised in the winter of 1969 from its previous version published
in the summer of that same year. The description of structural film that Sitney included in his
Visionary Film was further modified.
358
Sitney, “Structural Film,” 327.
359
Ibid. See also Sitney, “The Idea of Morphology,” Film Culture 53/54/55 (Spring 1972), 1–24.

339
spokesperson for the avant-garde that proved most problematic, both then and
today.
Almost immediately upon the publication of Sitney’s polemical essay,
filmmakers went to great lengths to differentiate themselves from his taxonomic
classification of the avant-garde. Perhaps the most dramatic public retort – which
was both philosophically concise and rhetorically inflammatory – was George
Maciunas’ visual chart, published in Film Culture, in which he described Sitney’s
essay as being founded upon “3 ERRORS: (wrong terminology, wrong examples-
chronology and wrong sources of origins).”
360
Maciunas claimed that Sitney’s
explanatory and historical missteps in the explanation of “structural film” were
the results of at least four distinct problems: “Misplaced dictionary,” “ignorance
of art-philosophy such as definitions of Concept-art and Structure-art,”
“Cliquishness and ignorance of film-makers outside the Coop. or Cinematheque
circle,” and “Ignorance of precursory monomorphic examples in other art forms,
such as music, events and even film.”
361
For the purposes of our considerations
here, it is worth recognizing Maciunas’ insights on at least two counts. First,
Sitney’s model of the avant-garde, as suggested earlier in this dissertation, was
derived from a study of literature, not the visual art, experimental music,
performance art, events, and happenings that Maciunas felt were most influential
upon experimental film in the period. In fact, Sitney’s attempt to assimilate artists
like Conrad and Warhol into his definition of structural film showed signs of an

360
George Maciunas, “Some Comments on ‘Structural Film’ by P. Adams Sitney” in Film Culture
Reader, 349.
361
Maciunas, 349.

340
anxious apprehension concerning the interconnectivity of experimental film and
the other (non-literary) arts. Secondly, Maciunas was absolutely correct in
recognizing that there was a cliquishness to the circle of avant-garde filmmakers
that revolved around the Filmmaker’s Coop, the Cinematheque, and Film Culture,
which encouraged a myopic understanding of cinematic experiments by artists
who were not part of their group.
Despite the fact that this cliquishness was actually exhibited by both the
artists’ community and that of the avant-garde filmmakers, there were overlaps –
as has been argued throughout this study – in both conceptual and social terms.
For instance, Jonas Mekas, despite his affiliation with Sitney and the foundational
institutions of New York avant-garde cinema, had important connections to
Fluxus, popular culture, and the artist’s community of New York through his
activities as an organizer of both art and cinema. For example, it was because of
Mekas’ close friendship with Maciunas (a fellow Lithuanian) that one of the first
semi-permanent locations of his cinematheque was located in the same Fluxhall in
which Maciunas lived and many of the most significant Fluxus performances took
place. Similarly, the Filmmaker’s Cinematheque, which was directed by Mekas,
was also the site of major experiments in performance and happenings including
those of Schneemann, Oldenburg, Paik, Kaprow, and Rauschenberg. Though
there were significant tensions between the filmmaker’s community and that of
visual artists and performance artists working in film, there was also great
material, social, and conceptual exchange between them. Even Stan Brakhage’s

341
Metaphors on Vision, his landmark manifesto of romantic, expressive,
individualist film poetics, was in fact designed by Maciunas himself.

Brakhage and Schneemann shared a distrust of the systematic work
celebrated by Sitney, Michelson, and other critics. Sitney’s detailed, almost
prescriptive definition of structural film was an act of boosterism that was too
prescriptive in language to describe, in any comprehensive way, the movement
towards systematicity that he observed in the film culture of the era. For example,
in his response to Maciunas’ criticism of his essay, he writes, “It is unfortunate
that the films I am discussing have been confused [by Maciunas] with ‘simple’
forms or ‘concept art.’ It is precisely when the material becomes multifaceted and
complex, without distracting from the clarity of the over-all shape, that these films
become interesting.”
362
Such a prescriptive and restrictive critical position was
incapable of appreciating the experiments in form and authorship that were
achieved by Paik’s anarchic performance, LaMonte Young’s drone music, or even
their precedents in the earlier ready-mades of Marcel Duchamp. Sitney’s absolute
adherence to a romantic program of personally invested authorship made his
appreciation of systematic form truly impossible. This move towards more severe,
conceptual, and even mathematical filmmaking was a real historical development,
but it could not be neatly circumscribed with Sitney’s “intellectual toolkit” (as
Frampton called it). Schneemann’s almost flippant portrayal of structural film

362
Sitney, “Structural Film,” 329.

342
within Kitch’s Last Meal (and later Interior Scroll) might serve as a more
appropriate definition of the tendency that Sitney observed: “Take one clear
process, follow its strictest implication, intellectually establish a system of
permutations, establish their visual set.”
Films like Peter Kubelka’s Arnulf Rainer (1960), Hollis Frampton’s Zorns
Lemma (1970), Paul Sharits’ Ray Gun Virus (1966), Michael Snow’s Back and
Forth (1969), Ernie Gehr’s Serene Velocity (1970), all basically fulfilled
Schneemann’s description of structural film as carefully plotted work with origins
in formulaic systems and controlled structures. Many of these films were based on
mathematical or geometric charts that achieved the trademark aesthetic severity of
the so-called “structural film,” which was based, at least partially, on the
unflinchingly systematic execution of some basic organizational principle. Here,
one could consider, for example, the graphic, geometric organization of black and
white frames in either Kubelka’s Arnulf Rainer or Tony Conrad’s The Flicker,
each of which could have been executed by any film technician from the simple
optical scores upon which each film was based. To Brakhage and Schneemann,
such work, however rigorous and conceptually interesting, defied some of the
basic principles that their mature work shared, and which Abstract Expressionism
had layered across mid-century art by redefining the horizons of personal
possibility and somatic gesture within cultural practice.

343
Taste, personality, and the ebb and flow of social history played
significant roles in the historical conceptualization of Sitney’s “structural film.”
For example, because Sitney’s teleology of the avant-garde was also a kind of
personalized reflection of his tastes, he managed, through a bit of rhetorical slight
of hand, to slip the work of Brakhage into the unlikely category of Structural
Filmmaker. On the contrary, Brakhage’s work was painterly, impressionistic,
associative, organic, personal, and lacking in any overt form of a priori structure.
Hollis Frampton describes Sitney’s problematic incorporation of Brakhage into
his teleology of “structural film” when he says, Sitney “made one of those
wonderful valiant efforts to tie it all into the tradition so that the grandpappy of us
all became [sarcastically] that kindly and fatherly figure, Andy Warhol [...], and
poor Stan – hog-tied lassoed and branded, clothes-lined and sandbagged – got My
Mountain made into a structural film.”
363
To Brakhage Sitney’s reduction of his
artistic process to a structural principle seemed a profound disservice to his
philosophical purpose. As described in the second chapter of this dissertation,
Brakhage argued that “the most valuable of the parts of the process of creativity”
were the spontaneous, personal choices “wherein the maker is called upon to
work with what he or she doesn’t know at every frame’s existence. Whether it
shall be or whether it shall not be […] as an act of absolute urgency.”
364
In 1978,
Paul Arthur precisely described the philosophical and aesthetic presuppositions of
structural film that directly contradicted the sensibilities of Brakhage and

363
“Hollis Frampton in San Francisco,” in Canyon Cinema: The Life and Times of an Independent
Film Distributor, ed. MacDonald, 269.
364
Brakhage, “Some Arguments: Stan Brakhage at Millennium, November 4, 1977,” 67.

344
Schneemann: “What is most universally suppressed in structural films is the
linear, shot-to-shot accumulation of meaning; namely associative editing.” He
goes on to explain this definition in rather precise terms that relate directly to the
spatio-temporal conditions of authorship that are exclusive to the film medium:
The nature of film production is significantly different from that of other
art forms in the number of successive interruptions – in which the material
is separated from contact with the artist – between impulse and “finished”
artifact. At each of these stages (developing, printing, etc.), conception is
subject to direct, external intervention: even when that intervention is not
crucial it breaks, and in so doing mystifies, the inscription of continuity of
process in the final work. Varying modes of organization confront this
problem by collapsing successive stages of production or designating one
stage as the primary locus of decision-making. […] One “solution” offered
by structural films is to shift the locus of decision-making to a point in
advance of camera or editing processes.
365

To Brakhage and Schneemann both, the idea that a film could basically be
structured before it was shot seemed a dismissal of that which they most valued in
the process of filmmaking. For them, “the primary locus of decision-making” was
within the moment-to-moment choices in which the filmmaker, as both camera
person and editor, chooses to compose a frame in a particular way or to make an
edit at precisely a certain moment, or to connect certain shots through an
associative, organic chain influenced only by his or her intellect and feelings
about the material at hand. Brakhage described Michael Snow’s La Region
Centrale, a three-hour film, shot by a spinning, unmanned, robotic crane, as
“lazy” and “boring.”
366
Such a notion of artistic practice is clearly based on an

365
Arthur, “Structural Film: Revisions, New Versions and the Artifact, Part 2,” Millennium Film
Journal 4–5 (Summer/Fall 1979), 125.
366
Stan Brakhage, “Some Arguments: Stan Brakhage at the Millennium, November 4, 1977,” 67,
73.

345
outdated idea that defined artistic craft as specialized labor, a position that in
1977, at the time of this public debate at Millennium in New York, would have
seemed reactionary and ignorant of other trends in the arts, including for example,
the conceptual art of Sol Lewitt or the simple, streamlined forms of minimalist
sculpture.
Annette Michelson responded to Brakhage’s comments – which celebrated
craft, personal expression, virtuosic control, etc. – with an attempt to
contextualize them in relation to advanced painting and sculpture despite
differences in both the formal and social histories of the distinct media that she
was discussing. She said to Brakhage:
There are other ways of thinking and feeling which aren’t predicated on
the constant intervention of the artist from moment to moment, or that
sense of risk. And you could say, as I think by now some of us have said
in the past, that if you look at the history of filmmaking in this country
over the last, say, twenty years, it does have certain parallels in the history
of painting. One heard some ten or fifteen years ago, Franz Kline and the
members of his generation of painters saying the kinds of things you’re
saying about people called the structuralists but about painters whose
names were Stella, sculptors whose names were Robert Morris, and so on.
[…] We understand that this is not your kind of filmmaking, that you have
a very different conception of filmic structure, of filmic purpose, and so
on. But I don’t think that you’re fighting a current battle. […] The young
filmmakers […] aren’t really thinking in terms of that old opposition.
367

As Michelson suggests, Brakhage often had a tendency – as did Sitney, his most
sympathetic critic – to define his aesthetics in conditions and terms rooted outside
of history. In his flippant response to Michelson, he claims that the artistic
changes that she observed simply had not penetrated the provinces in which he

367
Michelson quoted in Brakhage, “Some Arguments,” 68–69.

346
lived and worked, saying “maybe the happy news has not yet arrived to
Colorado.”
368
As this exchange implies, the 1970s were difficult years for Stan
Brakhage’s art. Though he was often defensive and bombastic in his rhetoric, he
was never monolithic or simplistic in his cinema. Like any relevant experimental
artist, he continually challenged the limits of his own philosophical suppositions.
Before art practice in the 1970s imposed intolerable pressures upon his work –
which pushed it to the limits of interpersonal and philosophical crisis described
above – Brakhage established a mode of artistic production that deserves to be
understood as integral to the overall direction of American art in the period at
hand.
Brakhage’s hard won achievements as a film artist were not realized in a
vacuum. In the section that follows, the intense interrelationship between
Brakhage and Schneemann will be presented as a model for understanding their
shared antimony to the “structuralism” described above. Hopefully, it will also
help to situate Brakhage’s work more closely to other developments in the arts
and further from the caricature of the lone heroic artist that has overly influenced
both the historiography of Brakhage’s cinema and that of the American avant-
garde more generally.

368
Brakhage, “Some Arguments,” 69.

347
Organic Cinema and the Anxiety of Influence:
Brakhage’s early experiments in film did not represent precisely the same
values that his more well known works exhibited, including Reflections on Black
(1955), Mothlight (1963), Dog Star Man (1961-64), exhibited. Many of his
formative early films featured elements of narrative and emphasized
psychodrama, symbolic associations, and conventional acting in ways derived
from surrealism and imagistic poetry. In a rather clear sense, this chapter of his
work was inspired by the oneiric films of the European avant-garde, such as Luis
Buñuel’s and Salvador Dali’s Un chien andalou (1929) and perhaps most
importantly, Jean Cocteau’s Blood of a Poet (1930). Following these models,
Brakhage’s early psychodramas, which included Desistfilm (1954) and
Reflections on Black (1955), characterized the work of a developing young artist
who had not yet established his own innovative strategies for the use of the
medium. A number of factors intervened in Brakhage’s own history, including the
influence of filmmaker Marie Menken, an encounter with Joseph Cornell, and
perhaps most importantly, a dialogue with Carolee Schneemann that directed his
work towards a more elemental and modern notion of film art. Of all these
influences, Schneemann’s has been largely omitted from discussions of
Brakhage’s development as an artist. However, if one studies the chronology of
their interactions, Brakhage’s filmography, and related correspondence, the
historical and philosophical determinations of their works manifest themselves as
much more complex and volatile than most histories would have us believe.

348
Specifically, by moving away from the obsessive performed interiority of
the semi-narrative, non-experimental, imagistic dream film Brakhage initiated his
first major step towards an authentically new and untried visual language for
cinema. In the transitional years of the mid to late 1950s, Brakhage was involved
in a continual questioning of his artistic enterprise. The obsessions of the early
period would continue, from the mid 1950s to the early 1970s, to influence
Brakhage’s filmography and catalyze a powerful vacillation between a faith in the
demiurgic power of an expressive cinema (influenced by a range of precedents,
not the least of which is Abstract Expressionism) and an observational restraint
related to the practice of the documentary.
369
This tension, which underpins
Brakhage’s most important work, as well as that of some of the most interesting
experimental film of the 1960s, is situated in the conceptual and philosophical
space between the film camera’s function as a recording apparatus and its use as
an artistic tool, a condition that relates cinema to a prescient and timely an anxiety
concerning the inscription of authorial subjectivity in art. The first ventures that
Brakhage made as an observational artist were the 1955 films, The Wonder Ring

369
Michelson relates Brakhage to Abstract Expressionism in “Camera Lucida / Camera Obscura,”
Artforum 11, no. 5 (January 1973), 30–37; reprinted in Stan Brakhage: Filmmaker, 36–56”
In addition, the filmmaker himself often invoked Pollock as an example of a artist who,
despite common perceptions, was a master of painterly control. Brakhage was particularly fond of
an anecdote (perhaps apocryphal) that demonstrates the painter’s absolute mastery of the medium,
even though his use of gestural abstraction gave the impression of a seemingly casual approach to
composition. According to Brakhage, someone once suggested to the painter that his work
incorporated chance. Pollock supposedly responded by flinging paint off the tip of his brush, such
that it traveled all the way across the room and hit a distant doorknob squarely – as if directed
towards a bull’s eye – without dribbling a drop in the process. For Brakhage’s retelling of this
story, see the bonus interview materials on By Brakhage: An Anthology (Criterion Collection,
2003).

349
and Tower House (films that he shot as commissions for Cornell).
370
These
projects had no stories, performers, or pre-determined literary structures, and thus
encouraged a shift in filmmaking strategy towards a non-fiction approach that,
according to Sitney, was achieved “almost by accident.”
371
From the chronology,
it does seem that Brakhage’s first film experiments in documentary may have
been the result of an almost happenstance request for commissioned non-fiction
material.
Around roughly the same time that Brakhage was producing his first
experiments in a purely non-fictive, spontaneous filmic observation, he developed
a friendship with Carolee Schneemann. She was the romantic partner of his
childhood friend, the musician James Tenney. Beginning in 1955 they spent
extended lengths of time together (often in the countryside), traveling to visit each
other (from New York to Denver), living in close proximity (in Vermont), and
most importantly, collaborating on art and discussing their sometimes shared,
sometimes contradictory aesthetic sensibilities. Sitney describes Brakhage’s
transition from psychodrama to his mature style as being gradual:
The encounter with Joseph Cornell opened a new direction for Brakhage’s
work. […] In his works of the following two years, we see side-by-side
the purging of the black-and-white trance film – Flesh of Morning (1956),
Daybreak and Whiteye (1957) [originally conceived as two separate films]
– and the growth of a more abstract color form – Nightcats (1956) and
Loving (1957).
372

370
After these films were shot, Cornell edited materials that Brakhage had given him and made
new films from either the outtakes (used in Gnir Rednow (1955– )) or the original footage (as in
Centuries of June (1955–)).
371
Sitney, Visionary Film, 159.
372
Ibid.

350
It cannot be a matter of coincidence that Schneemann and Tenney appear in three
of these five films that Brakhage produced in this transitional period. It was
during this phase that Schneemann and Brakhage initiated their debates
concerning the differences between an art informed by narrative and language and
an art dedicated to the close study of nature and painterly detail, as seen in his
mature work.
373

Schneemann has discussed her early aesthetic debates with Brakhage on a
number of occasions. It is clear from her descriptions, both published and not, that
she remembers in great detail the powerful exchanges that these twenty-
something artists shared; they had resounding effects on the careers of everyone
concerned. In her recollection, these conversations often centered around an
opposition between the artistic functions of symbolic psychodrama (as realized in
Brakhage’s early films) versus those of an observation of natural, organic forms
(as represented in Schneemann’s painting). It is clear to anyone with even a
passing familiarity with Brakhage’s early filmography that he shifted his work
precisely between these two registers in the period when their friendship first
began to cohere.
In a published interview of 1991, Schneemann suggests that the history of
their artistic relationship should be reconsidered. The interviewer asks, “I was

373
Schneemann situates this exchange historically: “This discussion would have taken place after I
saw Stan’s B&W early films and he would have come to stay with us in South Shaftsbury,
Vermont where I was painting from landscape.” She also recalled that “WONDER RING was
underway when I met Stan; his friendship with Cornell was much discussed between us”
(Schneemann email correspondence with the author, July 13, 2009).

351
wondering if Stan Brakhage had a lot of influence there in the ideas you were
following.” She responds with a declarative statement:
Check the dates. I guided him towards an organic visual universe. When I
met him, he was doing psychodrama films and working with invented
situations. One of our early arguments sprang from my feeling that a
visual artist had to be able to build a vocabulary with nature in order to
break with inherited theories. He went into that.
374

The chronology and social history of the interaction between Brakhage and
Schneemann perfectly fits her description. Despite Sitney’s claim that Brakhage’s
move towards a simultaneously more observational and more expressive cinema
was simply the function of “accident,” it seems clear that the shift to his mature
style was, to a significant degree, determined by Schneemann’s influence, her
sense of aesthetics, and her knowledge of the history, not of film, but of painting.
It was she who first engaged Brakhage in extended conversations concerning
Abstract Expressionism, a movement that would have a profound impact on both
of their creative legacies. In 2003, Schneemann published an open letter to the
recently deceased filmmaker in which she reflects on a long, productive, and often
trying artistic and personal relationship with him: “There I open DeKooning,
Pollock, and Cezanne books. I would tell you, your ‘psycho dramas’ will be a
dead-end. You must look at painting, visual history and nature!”
375

She explains this interaction in more detail, in an unpublished letter from
1975 to critic and filmmaker Wanda Bershon:

374
Schneemann, “Interview with ND” in Imagining Her Erotics, 124.
375
Schneemann, “It Is Painting” in Stan Brakhage: Filmmaker, 81.

352
it was I who insisted visual language be based in observation of nature; we
fought spiritedly over that; when we met his nourishments were poetic,
surreal, symbolic. […] I was building, humbly concentrating on the source
of the language of gesture, light, color, the movement of form. […]
Someday someone will perhaps see the direct link -- that the prolonged
times Stan spent studying my paintings, living with him [Tenney] and me,
led him to nature as a resource rather than dream and fantasy as the base
of visual language. […] our battles were terrific
376

In this description, Schneemann perfectly encapsulates the difference between the
young, formative Brakhage “whose nourishments were poetic, surreal, symbolic”
and the mature artist who came to embrace and essentially transform the filmic
meaning of “gesture, light, color,” and “the movement of form.” In his pioneering
works like Anticipation of the Night (1958) and his remarkable artistic manifesto,
Metaphors on Vision (1963) (which he was drafting and conceiving during this
period of intensive artistic and philosophical inquiry), Brakhage began to outline a
new trajectory for his artistic enterprise that would break from the traps of
language and symbolism. It was a project that, in its balancing of the directives of
observation and expression, would continue for the rest of his life. But in his first
engagement with the elemental considerations of nature and aesthetic form,
Brakhage’s philosophical project can and should be traced directly, if not
exclusively, to his interactions with the painter Carolee Schneemann, before she
became the performance artist and filmmaker who would continue this shared
directive of somatic and sensuous experimentation.
377

376
Letter from Schneemann to Wanda Bershon, 24 July 1975, Collection of Carolee Schneemann
Papers, Getty Research Institute, Special Collections.
377
This history of influence is omitted from Sitney’s comprehensive and sympathetic reading of
Brakhage’s work for at least three reasons: Brakhage did not publicly offer this history because he
was not always supportive of Schneemann’s film projects and likely wanted to distance himself

353
Brakhage, Documentary, Expressionism:
Following Pollock’s example, Schneemann’s emphasis on bodily
expression and the somatic index of gestural performance philosophically align
with her efforts as both a painter and an aesthetician who resisted the pre-
determined structures of genre or the representational grid of geometric
abstraction. She encouraged Brakhage to consider artistic practice first and
foremost as a transformation of the materials of nature – specifically through a
bodily experience of perception – and thus directed him towards an artistic
sensibility that was organic in structure and association. As art historian Kristine
Stiles wrote in 2002, Schneemann’s major contribution “has been literally to draw
the eye back to the body that sees: both to the body’s inextricable connection to
what is seen and to its role in determining the nature of the seen.”
378
This
emphasis on a somatic, organic notion of vision would also be adopted by
Brakhage. So, it follows that both Schneemann and Brakhage resisted the
intensive pre-planning, formal mapping, and mechanicity of structural film.
Brakhage also extended his opposition to the aesthetics of structure to his
encounters with other filmic modalities. To him, the formulaic and rhetorically
predetermined structures of fiction film and documentary posed the same ethical
and philosophical problems as structural film. From within an organic aesthetic
worldview, which is centered on the body of the artist, all of these

from them; Sitney was not particularly impressed with Schneemann’s films; and finally, as a
student of English language poetry his “nourishments,” like those of Brakhage, were also “poetic,
surreal, symbolic.”
378
Kristine Stiles, “The Painter as an Instrument of Real Time” in Imagining her Erotics, 11.

354
representational strategies seem to perform a disservice to the flux of life by
imposing some form of a priori structure upon the organic materials of nature and
sensuous experience.
Brakhage described this tension as one between “two pictorial extremes of
human thought process – The Geometric and […] Meat-ineffable.”
379
In his
consideration of the wide ranging aesthetic implications of this binary, Brakhage
explains the history of painting in terms that reflect this conceptual opposition. To
him, the most interesting modernist painters resisted the pre-determined limits of
the framed canvas and the grid of geometric abstraction: “they thus resist
geometrical authority. They, Jackson Pollock, and others hypnagogically inspired
(from early Kandinsky to Olitsky) can be seen to be attempting to depict cell-
shape’s most immediate radiance.”
380
As Brakhage describes it, the works of
Pollock and other non-geometric painters were actually concerned not exclusively
with representing the twists and turns of their psychological and affective
experiences, but perhaps, even more importantly, the cellular structures of their
own bodies and musculatures. After a film screening in 1967, Brakhage made the
following statement that clearly confirms this reading of his work: “I think art is
the expression of the internal physiology of the artist.”
381
(This statement is also
uncannily congruent with many of the writings and public statements made by
Schneemann.) In The Act of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes, Brakhage engaged in

379
Brakhage, “GEOMETRIC versus MEAT-INEFFABLE (1994),” The Chicago Review 47, no. 4
(September 21, 2001), 47.
380
Ibid, 49.
381
Brakhage, “Eight Questions” in Brakhage Scrapbook, ed. Robert Haller (New York:
Documentext, 1982), 116.

355
an experimental encounter with death and the limits of the documentary as a
rhetorical form that literalized this tension between abstract consciousness and
somatic being. It is an anxious work of extreme personal and philosophical crisis
that perfectly encapsulates some of the most severe and significant
representational, ontological, and ethical tensions of Brakhage’s artistic career.
Historically, many critics have argued that Brakhage’s major contribution
to art was his singular focus on the demiurgic power of the artist’s imagination,
through his attempt, using cinema, to approximate the structures of human
consciousness and “to chart the depths of his own psyche.”
382
In one of the first
major appraisals of his work outside of small film journals, Annette Michelson
famously described this aspect of Brakhage’s art as celebrating the “imperial
sovereignty of the Imagination.”
383
(Notice the symbolic use of the capital “I.”)
Of course, this interpretation of Brakhage’s aesthetics would not be so common –
P. Adams Sitney and Parker Tyler argue for Brakhage as the visionary demiurge
as well – if it were not largely accurate. In much of his work, Brakhage focused
on an imagined approximation, through celluloid, of the experiences of first-
person perception, what he called “moving visual thinking,” a fundamentally
subjective, ahistorical, egocentric undertaking. Paul Arthur explains that in most
of his film work, Brakhage’s traffic with the real was generally conceived of in
the past tense, as a variety of authorial inscription that re-imagines past perceptual
experience. He astutely states that Brakhage’s “conceptualization of the eye’s

382
James, Allegories of Cinema, 35.
383
Michelson, “Camera Lucida, Camera Obscura.”

356
states precedes their transposition into approximating images. The emphasis, then,
is less on an immediate ‘seeing’ – a quality Sitney points to in the ‘lyrical’ film –
than on re-constructing the ‘seen.’”
384
However, with the film that is the subject
of this section, Brakhage attempted to reconfigure his ontological relationship to
the real in terms of a hyperbolically contingent experience in which the conditions
of historical encounter would be undeniably indexed in the texture of the filmic
medium.
In Metaphors on Vision, Brakhage formulated a poetic film aesthetics that
sought to reclaim sensory experience from what he considered to be the tyranny
of language, socially imposed, controlling, thought structures, and Cartesian
subject-object divisions. For Brakhage, mankind became alienated from its
environment as soon as it became too dependent on these abstract and geometric
systems of understanding. Most importantly, the imposition of intellectual and
philosophical systems upon the visual flux of nature – including the naming of
colors or the systematization of representational space (as achieved in
Renaissance perspective) – was an act of disservice to humanity’s experience of
perception. The filmmaker famously wrote that there is no one color “green” in
nature. Instead, the natural landscape of the planet is filled with an infinitude of
different gradations of color, so that the imposition of any one single word on that
limitless eyescape of varying pigment would be an act of violence. In the opening
to Metaphors, he asks, “How many colors are there in a field of grass to the

384
Arthur, “Structural Film: Revisions, New Versions, and the Artifact,” 10.

357
crawling baby unaware of ‘Green’?”
385
This question was a simple and effective
instantiation of his overall interest in demonstrating how we have become
alienated from the terrain that we inhabit by imposing inappropriate linguistic and
conceptual structures upon nature. So, Brakhage’s work involves an attempt,
through the analogue of cinema, to return to that prelapserian moment when
vision and thought can be reconstituted as innocent and untainted by the
“geometric” controls of language, those controlling structures from without.
In a number of his films, including The Act of Seeing With One’s Own
Eyes, we can find evidence of another working method in which Brakhage
directed himself toward nature and the external, phenomenal universe, and thus
devised an artistic experiment intended to bridge the experiential space between
the phenomenal world and the perceiving self of the artist. Contrary to the most
basic shorthand understanding of Brakhage’s artistic enterprise, some of his most
remarkable work represents an effort to overcome the Cartesian anxieties
concerning the perceiving self and its relation to the external world. In this regard
Brakhage attempted through his art, to integrate himself – following the lessons of
Schneemann – into the world around him, in order to avoid becoming trapped in
the spaces of narcissism and solipsism by conceiving an ambitious film practice in
which self, other, and nature would be inseparable parts of the same shared
experience of perception and immanence.

385
Brakhage, Metaphors on Vision (excerpt) in Essential Brakhage: Selected Writings on
Filmmaking, ed. Bruce McPherson (New York: Documentext, 2001), 12.

358
Brakhage frequently described himself as a documentary filmmaker
because he felt that his work enacted a kind of continual autobiography of
perception, in which through his films, he re-imagined his own personal
experience of vision. Regarding this topic, he said, “I am foremost a
documentarian, among all other things you might call me, because I photograph
not only what’s out there, but the act of seeing it. I’m documenting the very
process whereby something is perceived.”
386
It is clear that he understood this
project of documenting perception to be a primarily non-fiction undertaking. At
some point in the mid-1970s, he became more interested specifically in the
ideology and rhetoric of a more straightforward non-fiction filmmaking. He called
it “Ol’ Doc.” As is obvious to anyone who has seen a Brakhage film, he was a
man enamored with the phenomenal beauty of the outside world, and thus,
ontologically speaking, he had a great artistic and philosophical investment in the
real. However, to Brakhage this perceptual and philosophical connection to the
real world was largely absent from documentary history. In its place, he found a
series of rhetorical gestures and teaching tools. In his thinking of the period, in his
exchanges with Hollis Frampton, and most notably in his document films of “The
Pittsburgh Trilogy,” we can find a provocative attempt to provide a corrective to
the imperative rhetoricity of documentary cinema.

386
Brakhage in MacDonald, A Critical Cinema 4: Interviews With Independent Filmmakers
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 93.

359
The Act of Seeing:
In the early 1970s, Stan Brakhage made three films dealing with various
institutions in the city of Pittsburgh. Deus Ex (1971) focused on a county hospital
and featured surgeries and other medical procedures. eyes (1971) was made as the
filmmaker followed city police officers and documented their daily routines and
encounters. The third film in the series – it would be the last – featured autopsy
footage filmed in the Allegheny County Morgue. The film that resulted from that
intense and challenging encounter was The Act of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes
(1971). It was shot over three consecutive days in late September 1971, and films
the activities of the county coroner as he performs the detailed measurement,
analysis, dissection, dismemberment, disemboweling, and cleaning of over a
dozen bodies. It is an extremely difficult film to watch. In this sense, it is one of a
number of avant-garde films that truly test the limits of spectatorial pleasure.
Filmmaker Willie Varela describes his experience with the film:
we and Brakhage had traumatic parting, as we were in a sense
‘run’ out of the theater by a terrifically powerful new film he had
just finished called The Act of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes. […] I
was simply not up to it. It was then that I wished I had known what
I was getting into before I had stepped into that theater.
387

It is excruciating to watch the coroner peel the skin off of the face of a dead man,
then saw his head open, and remove his brain. For the filmmaker too, the process
was so painful that, at one point, he thought he would not complete the film.

387
Willie Varela, “Program Notes for Lumiere/Brakhage Films: February 14, 1979,” Southwestern
Alternate Media Project (Collection of Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, CA).

360
As he was finishing his shooting in Pittsburgh, he wrote a letter to his wife
in which he summarized the daily crisis he faced:
Oh Jane, it is . . . I just don’t know how to write about it. The dead, cut
open in autopsy, look like two incongruities: dress dummies and meat.
The scalp is cut, pulled down over the face. The face, like a mask, retains
its features even when loosened from the bones. The body gapes. It is a
chasm attached to model limbs. The organs are removed and weighed in a
scale. The Doctor ‘sums up’ this body in a tape recorder, “passes
judgment,” “weighs,” etc. […] But I know less about this filming, have
much less sense of what I’ve photographed, than ANY film previously.
[…] I’ve had fearful dreams every night. The tags are put on the big toe of
the corpse’s foot; and I dreamed one night I was compelled to bite one of
these toes. I woke up almost screaming – teeth clenched. […] One of my
other nightmares sticks in the mind: The Doctor (Dr. Davis) and his
assistants kept insisting that I lie down on the autopsy tables, kept saying
“Come on now, YOU try it!”
388

Like much art of the era that concerned itself with the representation of
subjectivity, The Act of Seeing embodies a crisis – akin to that of Schneemann’s
art – in which the artist placed himself in a situation that was ethically,
aesthetically, and personally incredibly anxiogenic and volatile. As his description
above indicates, in the production of this film Brakhage tested the limits of his
artistic process, ethical tolerance, and affective sensibility, in such a way that the
finished work is, in a sense, an index unrelenting crisis. It is clear that Brakhage
was working far outside of his comfort zone, both in content and style, as he
immersed himself in an experiment, with an outcome that was entirely unknown
to the artist at the time of its commencement. He was testing the limits of his own
aesthetic system, and by choosing the most difficult, almost unbearable visual

388
Stan Brakhage letter to Jane Brakhage, “2
nd
Tues in Pittsburgh Sept. 1971” (perhaps September
14
th
). From Brakhage’s writing, it is unclear if he is writing on his second Tuesday in Pittsburgh,
in September 1971 or on the second Tuesday of September 1971 (Stan Brakhage Papers,
University of Colorado, Boulder).

361
spectacle of death as his subject, he was also testing the limits of the medium’s
capacity to register subjectivity and affect without the imposition of a guiding
rhetorical directive.

Brakhage shot roughly an hour-and-a-half worth of footage over the
course of those three days in the Allegheny County Morgue. The film that he
made from that material was thirty-one minutes long, about one-third the length
of the total footage. In the final film, Brakhage left chronology roughly intact,
cutting away that which felt somehow extraneous. We see a new corpse brought
in, measured, dissected, analyzed, drained, and cleaned. This process happens
with each body, though all procedures are abbreviated. Importantly, Brakhage
maintains the profilmic, historical chronology of the autopsies – their basic
sequential integrity – in his finished film. He describes the editing process of The
Act of Seeing: “One good look at the footage … and I knew it was impossible (for
me anyway) to interrupt THIS parade of the dead with ANYthing whatsoever, any
‘escape’ a blasphemy, even the ‘escape’ of Art as I had come to know it. This
gathering of images (rather than editing) had to be straight.”
389
In order to pay
appropriate respect to the dead, Brakhage felt that it was important not to delve
consciously or forcefully into the hyper-stylized representation of his own
subjectivity (which of course runs contrary to much of his most well-known work
before this film). He knew that he had to try to eliminate the “artful” traces of

389
Stan Brakhage, letter to Robert Creeley, November 22, 1971. Stan Brakhage Papers, University
of Colorado Boulder; Also quoted in Nesthus, “The Document Correspondence of Stan Brakhage”
in The Chicago Review 47, no. 4 (September 21, 2001), 144.

362
Brakhagian filmmaking, stating, “I whittled my editing responsibilities down to
Tone and Rhythm.”
390
In his combining of footage from the autopsy experience,
Brakhage consciously avoided the symbolic and poetic tendencies of his earlier
work that had been the subject of Schneemann’s critique. Brakhage defined his
project such that the images would mean nothing other than what they show.
Brakhage’s efforts to limit the influence of his artistic ego are extremely
interesting here, because as so many people have pointed out, generally it has
been the very process through which the ego perceives that most interested him.
Here, because of a very peculiar kind of content and a return to the arguments that
he shared with Schneemann in their formative years, Brakhage took a markedly
different tack from much of his other work. For Sitney, Brakhage had always
been troubled by (in Sitney’s words) “anxieties about the natural world” and “the
horrors of solipsism,” so in his Pittsburgh Trilogy, he made “attempts to ground
his perception in a firmly established exterior reality […] as a break to his
excessive and frightening tendency to interiorize all that he sees.”
391
This outward
move has massive implications in relation to the artist’s philosophical and
ontological concerns, as well as to his chosen style.
The Act of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes is an end-to-end assemblage of
images taken by the filmmaker while moving about within the space of the county
morgue. Because of the fact that the film is basically a collection of close-ups, it
does not provide an objective visual perspective; there are few establishing shots.

390
Brakhage, letter to Ed Dorn, November 24, 1971 (Stan Brakhage Papers, University of
Colorado, Boulder; also quoted in Nesthus, 148.)
391
Sitney, Visionary Film, 388.

363
What Brakhage is after is a closeness, a proximity of encounter. As a result, the
entire project coheres around visual details: a slow-moving close-up of a bone-
saw cutting a man’s skull open, a soft pan across the arm of an elderly woman as
the coroner takes measurements of her limbs, the corner of a young woman’s eye
as it leaks a few drops of blood. These details combine to produce a work that
presents a series of different views sharing common content. So, there is no
pronounced dramatic arc; there is little drama outside of that which the material
itself produces (by virtue of its striking subject). Stylistically, it was the
filmmaker’s intention to remove certain traces of his own style, particularly if
they would obscure the force and meaning of the represented material. Though it
is more montagist than, say, Frederick Wiseman’s treatment of the same material
might have been, it is substantially less so than the rest of Brakhage’s work. His
working methods shifted substantially for this film (and the two other titles in the
Pittsburgh trilogy).
For this film, Brakhage shot long strips of footage and kept them largely
intact in the finished film, without significant modification in post-production
through either editing or optically printed effects. Many of the edits that we see in
the final work were actually done in-camera, and thus retain traces of their
contingency (as evidenced through the film’s frequent flash frames). In this sense,
Brakhage shifted his overwhelmingly plastic approach to film construction
significantly, moving away from the densely layered, highly montagist strategies
of a film like Scenes From Under Childhood (1970) – which featured four distinct

364
layers of interwoven, optically printed footage – and towards a more historically
coherent recording of a photographic event with a significantly less modified
historical chronology. (This shift is particularly noteworthy when one considers
that these strikingly different films were completed roughly a year apart.) By
shifting the locus of his artistic concentration away from controlled space of post-
production (which include the expressive tools of an editing block and optical
printer), he reconstructs his practice as one that foregrounds the artist’s
photographic encounter with his profilmic subject. Through this shift, Brakhage
emphasized his own historical presence over the plastic modification of the film
image that had previously dominated his work. Thus, Brakhage redefined the
space of his artistic action and inscribed his film texts with an element of
contingency that was not previously active to anywhere near the same degree in
his earlier work.
To dull the force of the editing and to limit the collision of the montage in
this film, Brakhage often begins and ends his shots in this film with quick fades
to, and from, black. The result is a film that does not move with the same frenetic
pace or montagist force of most of his work. There are historical, philosophical,
and aesthetic reasons for Brakhage’s movement to a modified visual language.
Most importantly, this film represents a shift in style that is also a shift in
ontology (related in a roughly chronological sense, to the beginnings of
Schneemann’s experiments in the non-fiction, observational cinema of Kitch’s
Last Meal). To further support this point, it is worth noting that Brakhage

365
carefully controlled the exposures and fades in this film through the careful use of
his camera’s aperture rather than through the post-production modifications that
are much more flexible, in their allowance for the controlled re-calibration of light
and color. In this sense, Brakhage’s work is an index of his own visual and
temporally contingent encounter with the bodies in the Pittsburgh morgue as
experienced by his bodies own interaction with the physical apparatus of his
motion picture camera. Like Warhol’s use of entire unedited camera reels,
Brakhage’s emphasis on in-camera edits and real-time image modification is
evidence of a method dedicated to conserving the historical conditions of
encounter between an artist and the phenomenal world.
392

Visually, this film is substantially different from the style that we
generally associate with Brakhage. For example, it is significant that almost every
single shot in this film is made in very crisp focus. In most of his films, Brakhage
presents images that are at the threshold of visual intelligibility due to his
extremely plastic sense of framing, focus, and exposure. Generally in his work, it
is light and texture that are most important. (His 1974 film, Text of Light is over
an hour long and features only one source of visual content, light refracted
through a glass ashtray.) This need to make cinematography abstract and visually
indecipherable is directly connected to his efforts to simulate consciousness,
“moving visual thinking,” through abstract cinematic techniques. In The Act of

392
There observations were made through the slow frame-by-frame analysis of the reversal,
camera-positive original film that Brakhage shot in 1971. I thank Mark Toscano at the Academy
Film Archive for allowing me to joint him for his inspection of Brakhage’s original elements for
The Act of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes.

366
Seeing, however, Brakhage’s approach has shifted towards a more simply
observational authorial stance that aspires to a closeness with nature itself. He
wants the viewer to be able to recognize that it is a real human onscreen who is
having his heart removed from his chest. The filmmaker made a significant effort,
not to present us with an associative experience of hypnagogic vision, but to show
us things that we can recognize. The affective force of this film is very much
dependent on the viewer’s need to understand exactly what it is that he or she is
seeing. One has to be able to see it with one’s own eyes.
This encounter with death in its most tangible, embodied, somatic form is
one that is determined entirely by visual content. Like most of Brakhage’s work,
this film has no soundtrack, a situation that heightens the austerity and emotional
weight of its images. The film’s title, The Act of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes is a
literal translation of the Greek word “autopsis” from which “autopsy” is derived.
To perform an autopsy, is to see how and why someone died; it is an act of
gathering information in order to find an explanation, to uncover evidence. It is a
scientific undertaking that basically suggests that no one can die without our
knowing why; every death must be understood, at least in its material
determinations. In discussing the Pittsburgh films, Brakhage has said that he was
after something entirely different from his usual work: “Beyond simply being the
document every work-of-art is, that image also comes thru to me like … what? – a
report, that’s it! […] like those images from gun-cameras, periscopes, and the

367
like.”
393
Here, he is describing his camera as a scientific tool to gather
information.
394
And that is exactly what he is doing: he is showing us something
that most of us have never seen before. A camera can bear witness to events, and
give us the opportunity to see with our own eyes. By sharing visual information
with us, Brakhage is bringing us into indirect contact with real objects in the
world. In this sense, this film continues the diaristic impulses of some of his
earlier work, but it does so in a distinctive aesthetic register, in a context of a
pronounced personal and ontological crisis. It is partially this difference in tone
that distinguishes this film from both Brakhage’s other diary films and the work
of other experimental diaries, including Kitch’s Last Meal and Walden.

Direct Cinema, Objectivity, and Innocence
The stylistically restrained, hyperbolically observational chapter of
Brakhage’s film practice does not serve the rhetorical or propagandistic function
that is common to most so-called documentary films. In their correspondence on
this topic Brakhage and Frampton attempted to establish a new artistic and
rhetorical frame to distinguish their non-fiction work from the documentary. In

393
Brakhage, letter to Robert Creeley, November 22, 1971 (Stan Brakhage Papers, University of
Colorado, Boulder; also quoted in Nesthus, 140–141).
394
However, it should also be noted that this film is not a purely clinical undertaking that aspires
to some naïve version of observational objectivity. Brakhage acknowledges the camera’s role in
mediation. For example, he intentionally chose to use four different film stocks for this project,
each of which features a particular speed, color temperature, and granular appearance. (Such
choices were rarely casual for Brakhage.) In this sense, though the filmmaker has limited the
usually extreme range of his plastic modifications to the photographic image, he nevertheless
openly creates a film that foregrounds its own process of mediation through its willful use of
markedly different representational materials. (Again, I thank Mark Toscano for identifying the
different film stocks used by Brakhage in this film.)

368
Frampton’s description, the problem with the documentary is that, “In a word,
documentARY is always careful to tell us HOW TO FEEL about what we see.”
395

There is a variety of observational “document” filmmaking – exhibited by a range
of experimental filmmakers including Brakhage and Schneemann – that resists
this prescriptive mode of instruction that so forcefully dominates the history of the
documentary.
The Act of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes is a kind of apotheosis of the
movement described as Direct Cinema. Brakhage was a close associate of Richard
Leacock, and knew a number of other contributors to that documentary
movement. In many ways, Brakhage’s film aspired to the same purity of
observation that the members of that group intended. Brakhage made a film that
was “plain and clean” (in his words) and that was founded upon a sincere effort to
remove many markers of the extreme expressionism that was typical of his work
(what Frampton described as his unmistakable “camera diction”).
396
He made a
sober and difficult effort to limit the artful impositions that normally comprise the
central stylistic project of his other films. Now of course, it is a film full of
choices: framing, camera movement, exposure, focus, film stock, yet these
decisions do not seem to significantly transform the meaning of what we see – by
imposing any predetermined set of values or geometrical abstract intentions –

395
Quoted in Nesthus, “The Document Correspondence of Stan Brakhage,” 154.
396
In an interview with Bill Simon, Frampton situated Brakhage’s style in precisely the context of
Abstract Expressionism: “Like de Kooning, Like Kline, Like Pollock […] Brakhage not only does
that, he does it all the time. He does it for plenty of reasons, but he does it, one would suppose, out
of some core conviction that that diction is the mediator, that it is the discipline of the camera, that
it is the center of the circle” (Bill Simon, “Talking About Magellan: An Interview With Hollis
Frampton”, Millennium Film Journal 7–9 (Fall/Winter 1980), 20).

369
though they do shade it. The filmmaker’s editing choices, as stated above, related
primarily to “tone and rhythm” as he edited according to real historical sequence,
in which he would “not try to thicken the plot.” The drama of this film is meant to
be derived largely from the real conditions of the filming circumstance, not from
the artist’s manipulation of those events. In this sense, it was a profoundly
experimental work for Brakhage, in which he attempted to come to terms with the
tragedy of death through a real world encounter with it, within a visual language
that was substantially dissimilar from the one that he had pioneered and fought so
hard to perfect and legitimize.

It is important to recognize that, unlike the rhetoric that surrounds Direct
Cinema, Brakhage’s discussion of the work omits the language of objectivity,
because for him, this film is always, again, an approximation of the real.
397

Brakhage makes no claim of a one-to-one equivalence between image and thing,
but this work does represent an attempt to create a substantially closer connection
between those two registers. The nature of the relationship between the profilmic
objects of the world and the represented images in his work, as has been argued

397
Of course, most people who discuss such topics in the contemporary moment, under the sway
of postmodernism’s license for total relativism, respond cynically to the idea that film has the
capacity to show us anything true or real from the phenomenal world. However, although many of
Brakhage’s comments about the film suggest that he tried to make a particular kind of work that
lacks ideology, superimposed drama, identificatory manipulation, etc., he acknowledges that the
role that he plays as recorder is always inscribed with a viewing subjectivity and with the material
conditions of the work’s construction. At no point does he ever equate his film with the historical
real that it represents. As he himself frequently argues, any non-fiction film is always an
approximation of that historical real. (As mentioned in an earlier footnote, his intentional use of
four distinctive film stocks in this work demonstrates his awareness of the film’s unique
characteristics as a form of mechanical representation.)

370
above, constantly changed throughout Brakhage’s filmography. Many people,
including P. Adams Sitney, have argued that these open document texts of the
early 1970s are inferior to Brakhage’s other work because they differ markedly
from what most critics feel to be the distinctive Brakhage style. (Annette
Michelson is the only major critic of the avant-garde to have openly endorsed
these works.) Brakhage’s feud with Sitney on the topic of “document”
filmmaking was continuous. He describes it in an interview with Hollis Frampton:
Brakhage: I said I am the most thorough documentarian in the world
because I document the act of seeing as well as everything that the light
brings me. And he [Sitney] said nonsense, of course, because he had no fix
on the extent to which I was documenting. He and many others are still
trying to view me as an imaginative film maker, as an inventor of fantasies
and metaphors.
Frampton: You are saying, along with Confucius: “I have added nothing.”
Brakhage: Yes, I have added nothing.
398

In this exchange we can get an interesting glimpse of Brakhage’s desire to
minimize his own traces of additive artistry. In addition, it is worth noting that the
“fantasies and metaphors” that Brakhage dismisses in this exchange were
precisely the artistic devices that are the targets of Schneemann’s critique.
Despite the aesthetic success of Brakhage’s “mythopoeic” (to use Sitney’s
word) epic, Dog Star Man, he did not want to repeat himself by making, in his
words, “Son of Dog Star Man, Dog Star Man Returns, Dog Star Man Meets the
Wolf Man.” (According to Brakhage these were the works that critics Jonas
Mekas and P. Adams Sitney wanted him to produce.)
399
So, as David James

398
Brakhage, “Stan and Jane Brakhage (and Hollis Frampton) Talking” in Brakhage Scrapbook,
188.
399
Stan Brakhage, “Interview With Richard Gossinger” in Ibid., 200.

371
argues, although Brakhage was initially interested in seeking “to chart the depths
of his own psyche,”
400
he would occasionally move towards a model which,
drawing on various influences from poetry, including Charles Olson’s
objectivism, was concerned with “the reintegration of man as continuous with
reality rather than discrete from it,” “the dynamic experience of what is
phenomenally present, the engagement of consciousness by nature,” and a desire
“to go beyond imagination to unmediated perception.”
401
Brakhage’s move into
the world “out there” (in the words of Jane Wodening Brakhage), is the primary
subject of this consideration of the filmmaker.
402
And it should be understood as a
historical function of Brakhage’s relationship and dialogue with Carolee
Schneemann.

Reflecting on this film, Hollis Frampton, who also documented autopsies
(for his unfinished Magellan film project), wrote:
What was to be done in that room, Stan? And then, later, with the footage?
I think it must have been mostly to stand aside: to ‘clear out,’ as much as
possible, with the baggage of your own expectations, even, as to what a
work of art must look like; and to see, with your own eyes, what
coherence might arise within a universe for which you could decree only
the boundaries.
403

As Frampton suggests, in this work Brakhage brings us close to the facts
and visual details of the newly deceased. By limiting his own intervention,
Brakhage wanted to make a film of a universe in which he “could only decree the

400
James, Allegories of Cinema, 35.
401
Ibid., 40.
402
Brakhage, “Stan and Jane Brakhage (and Hollis Frampton) Talking,” 182.
403
Canyon Cinema Catalog online, www.canyoncinema.org.

372
boundaries”: the profilmic intervention is limited only to the filmmaker’s control
of the camera. Nor is there any of the typically Brakhagean modification of the
filmic texture of the work, which generally included painting on film, rapid
camera movement, frenetic editing, and symbolic, associative combinations of
images. What we have is a collection of visual details that, to some degree,
parallels the shift that Schneemann made from her semi-Brakhagean work in
Fuses to the more plainly stated observation of Kitch’s Last Meal. In The Act of
Seeing, it is Brakhage’s intention – perhaps following his conversations and
youthful debates with Schneemann – to bring himself and his audience closer to
the details of natural phenomena. The artist’s role in this process is understood
primarily as an intensification of this perceptual contact, through the act of
selection, a “decreeing [of] boundaries”: a showing of visual examples which the
audience can see with its own eyes. If we simply accept, as Brakhage did, that
experiences in cinema are always informed by both subjectivity and a historical
real, than we can find a place for a meaningful and truthful observational film
practice, of which The Act of Seeing may be the most extreme and accomplished
experiment. We also have to admit that there are varying degrees of evidentiary
force in any text; every film makes different kinds of truth claims. Brakhage’s
mind (or camera) did not create the dead bodies that he filmed; their physical
constitution preceded the moment when he turned his camera on. So, there is a
basic factual truth – these people died and they are being dissected – that precedes
the act of Brakhage’s filming.

373
Brakhage connected his work with the original Latin meaning of the word
that gave us “documentary”: he writes that, I am “hoping to get the Latin’s
documentum sense of ‘example’ in the first place.”
404
What is significant about
Brakhage’s choice of words is that it indicates his desire to create an open text,
rather than the complex weave of meanings and reference that was typical of his
earlier, more literary-minded works. Nothing inside of the frame stands for
anything else; there is no symbolism or consciously imposed ideology. (In this
regard, though it shares a sense of witness with Kitch’s Last Meal, The Act of
Seeing lacks the explicit overarching rhetoric of Schneemann’s work.) The Act of
Seeing is a collection of visual indexes, an assemblage of images of the dead,
traced delicately in celluloid. Following his poetic inspiration, Brakhage aspired
to make a work that reflected William Carlos Williams’ mantra: “no ideas but in
things.”
Like all non-fiction The Act of Seeing displays contingency through its
inherent dependence on a spatio-temporally inscribed, historical real. This film,
forces us to see the greatest contingency of all, the limit of bodily presence, the
material boundaries of life itself. Our consciousness, our self-awareness, our
selfhood are all contingent upon the body in which they are housed, and the work
of Brakhage, like that of Schneemann reminds us of this somatic truth. Our
capacity to think is contingent upon the bodily presence that is the main concern
of this film. Clearly, The Act of Seeing tests certain taboos of filmic representation

404
Brakhage, letter to Frampton, November 22, 1971, collection of Stan Brakhage papers,
University of Colorado, Boulder; also quoted in Nesthus, 145.

374
through its display of blood, death, and dismemberment. However much it aspires
to be factual, this film then is far from neutral in terms of affective meaning.
There are no topics more riddled with emotional and personal association than
death.
If this film brings the audience into closer contact with the basic visual
facts of death, then it does so as part of a conceptual program in which Brakhage
had been involved for many years. Since early on in his life as a filmmaker, he
had documented the most intimate details of his personal life, including
intercourse with his wife, the birth of his children, and masturbation. For the
filmmaker, nothing was taboo. More precisely, from his point of view, it is the job
of the artist to show and investigate the limit cases of both the human condition
and his or her chosen medium. As he wrote famously in Metaphors on Vision, his
work, like that of any serious artist, is “essentially preoccupied by and deal[s]
imagistically with – birth, sex, death, and the search for God.”
405
(These were also
central concerns of Schneemann.) In Wedlock House: An Intercourse (1959), he
films him and his wife having sex and arguing. In Window Water Baby Moving
(1959) and Thin Line Lyre Triangular (1961), Brakhage films the births of two of
his children. In Sirius Remembered (1959), the family dog dies and we watch its
body decompose over the winter months. Like The Act of Seeing, all of these
films show us unique spectacles of somatic contingency. They are singular events
that cannot quite be repeated in exactly the same way. It is the unrepeatability of

405
Brakhage, Metaphors on Vision (excerpt) in Essential Brakhage, 13.

375
birth, sex, and death that make them particularly interesting as topics for cinema,
a medium that has the capacity to do something that almost no other art can really
do: it can repeat the singular event ad infinitum. Something that happened once
and lasted an instant can be shown again and again and again.
Finally, The Act of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes is an open,
underdetermined film. It is an almost perfect instantiation of Susan Sontag’s
thinking on the text that resists interpretation, (something that according to that
critic is particularly unique to the medium of film):
Ideally, it is possible to elude the interpreters in another way, by making
works of art whose surface is so unified and clean, whose momentum is so
rapid, whose address is so direct that the work can be [...] just what it is. Is
this possible now? It does happen in films I believe.
406

The Act of Seeing comes as close to this ideal as any film. It tells us little or
nothing about how to read it. It does not announce its purpose in rhetorical terms.
The film aspires to be like the death that it records, something inexplicable and
horrific whose meaning is derived from the simple fact of its existence. In this
sense much of Brakhage’s most compelling work performs an unscripted,
anxious, and experimental encounter with the world itself, something that was
first engaged by Brakhage as a result, perhaps, of the influence of Carolee
Schneemann (though this artistic strategy was hyperbolized and pushed to its
limits in The Act of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes). The meaning of this type of art
is necessarily different from that of other more systematic, rhetorical varieties

406
Sontag, “Against Interpretation” in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Dell,
1966), 21.

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whether they be structural film or documentary. Brakhage’s film does not
encourage, through any textual clues, a move to decode, distill, or explain its
cultural references in intellectual terms. By virtue of its openness and its
experiential texture, the film seems to argue that it is properly understood by
simply sharing space with it, by bearing witness to the flux that it shows.

Seeing with One’s Own Eyes: Artistic Agency in the Films of Schneemann and
Brakhage:
In Kitch’s Last Meal and The Act of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes,
Schneemann and Brakhage presented the world visually in fundamentally
different terms from their previous work. At the juncture between world and artist
is an encounter, and that meeting is the place in which act and text, event and
transcription, exist. Schneemann’s and Brakhage’s work shows its viewers that
between self and world, visual meaning is co-constituted; it is a product of this
encounter between subjectivity (or subjectivities) and phenomenal detail. In this
sense, the observational use of cinema represents an attempt at overcoming, at
achieving a kind of union with nature (in its most horrific manifestation), a
breaking away from the solipsism of alienated modern and postmodern
subjectivity. This is the function of both Fuses and The Act of Seeing, two
rhetorically and ideologically dissimilar films that share and foreground
ontological conditions of somatically defined subjectivity through its inscription
upon a cinematic index. These works aim at an overcoming alienation by way of a

377
visual object that shares space with both an authoring subjectivity and an
historical real.
The Act of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes represents a transitional phase in
Brakhage’s filmography to a mode of filmmaking (along with the other films of
The Pittsburgh Trilogy) that is more observational than expressive, and as such,
corresponds to perhaps related transformations in Schneemann’s non-fiction film
practice of the early-to-mid 1970s. In both The Act of Seeing and Kitch’s Last
Meal, Brakhage and Schneemann – two artists who had obsessively concerned
themselves with the inscription of their own authorial subjectivities – embraced
an observational mode of filmic encounter and directed their cameras towards the
outside world. In their considerations of mortality, death, and the somatic
contingencies of consciousness, these artists shifted away from their own stylistic
obsessions and directed their cameras towards the outside world and the bodies of
others, in order to transform the obsessive egocentrism of their earlier work. Yet,
the stakes of artistic agency were never abandoned by either artist.
The challenge of meaningful ontological and cultural representation
loomed over the entirety of art in the 1960s and early 70s. In the art history of the
period, there has been substantial consideration of the relationship between
subjectivity and technology. The writings of Rosalind Krauss, Hal Foster, and
Anne Wagner (amongst others) have attempted to explain and evaluate the
relationships between representation and indexical inscription in the mediated

378
performance works of artists like Joan Jonas, Bruce Nauman, and Dan Graham.
407

Because of the institutional limits and intellectual trends of the past thirty years, it
is no surprise that these critics do not mention film in any of their considerations
(though the artists listed above (Jonas, Nauman, Graham) produced important,
relevant work in that medium).
One of the major questions of the critical writings on subjectivity and
media art in the early 1970s concerns the relationship of selfhood and bodily
presence to their material transcription. As Wagner wrote in 2000, much of this
art confronts the basic ontological conflict between the self and its representation
by dramatizing the ways in which these media keep the “gears of selfhood from
being able to engage.”
408
The works of Brakhage and Schneemann discussed in
this chapter foreground precisely the same themes and challenges that dominate
critical writings on video and performance art from the 1970s to the present.
409

Their films powerfully dramatize this historical anxiety concerning the
relationship between individual, embodied experiences of artists and the
powerfully unsettling limits of their subjectivities, through the use of the specific
technologies of cinema. Partially because of the ascendancy of identity politics

407
See Krauss, “Notes on the Index: Part 1” in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other
Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 196–209; Hal Foster, The Return of the
Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996); and Anne
Wagner, “Performance, Video, and the Rhetoric of Presence,” October 91 (2000), 59–80.
408
Wagner, “Performance, Video, and the Rhetoric of Presence,” 80.
409
David Joselit could have been discussing Schneemann and Brakhage when he recently wrote,
“One of the deepest and most unsettling legacies of the 1960s is the sometimes violent, sometimes
ecstatic revelation that the ostensibly private arena of the self has become a public
battleground.”
409
(Of course, he was not discussing these filmmakers here; Joselit, like the critics
described above, generally avoids discussing film, presumably like most art historians, he has an
institutionally inscribed and historically determined aversion to it.)

379
and video in the 1970s, Brakhage has been entirely omitted from dominant
narratives of American art, even though his work directly addresses the same
conflict between subjectivity and its technological mediations as the more
celebrated artists listed above. Similarly, Schneemann’s experimental film work
has not received much attention in art historical narratives, though her visionary
feminist approach has made her more popular as an object of study that that of her
close friend. Nevertheless both artists produced film-based experiments that
determined, transcribed, and provoked extreme encounters of somatic tension and
ontological crisis in order to reveal the fault lines between contingent human
bodies, their registrations of affect and identity, and the technologies that
circumscribe them in art.

380
Chapter 6: Paul Sharits, Perceptual Tumult, Bodily Trauma, and the
Dilemma of the Film Artist

By the early-to-mid 1970s, the American avant-garde cinema had reached
a point of institutionalized semi-legitimacy. Many filmmakers had found a degree
of economic stability as teachers within the university system, a number of their
films were being shown in classrooms, and the movement received its first
ambitious scholarly study in Sitney’s Visionary Film (which was first published in
1974). However, all was not well. The social and economic viability of non-
industrial cinema had waned dramatically since the high point of its popularity
with the unprecedented box office success of The Chelsea Girls in 1966. The
taboo-breaking gestures of the underground of the 1960s had lost their potency to
scandalize public taste and morality, due to the breakdown of true censorship in
Hollywood cinema, and thus their public appeal atrophied significantly. Most
importantly, the struggle to gain any substantial recognition for experimental
cinema within the contexts of art history and art criticism reached an institutional
stalemate. The desire that most filmmakers expressed to achieve public
acknowledgement as artists was continually frustrated by museums, galleries, and
grant-giving institutions (though in its obstinacy and insularity the film
community itself cannot be completely absolved of responsibility). Despite the
fact that many of these filmmakers found some scant economic viability within

381
academia, few felt any degree of true cultural esteem. The anxieties that had
plagued experimental cinema persisted into the mid 1970s and, in the work of
artists like Paul Sharits, reached a fever pitch of philosophical distress.
By the time Sharits completed his film experiment, Epileptic Seizure
Comparison (1976), the innocent exuberance of the cinema of the late 50s and
early 60s had petered out and had been transposed into darker registers of cultural
association. On the one hand, the systematicity of the so-called “structural” film
was evidence of a new filmic epistemology, but it also represented a death knell
for the humanist and utopian promise that the art form pursued in the previous
decade. Though experimental film was always cloistered from both art and
popular culture by the transgressive threat that it posed to normative cinema, this
alienation was felt even more profoundly by the mid-1970s. In fact, the anxious
cultural position of experimental film was inscribed not only in its social history –
as evidenced in anecdotes, correspondence, and communications from these
filmmakers – but, as Epileptic Seizure Comparison demonstrates, it is also loudly
inscribed within the textual limits of the film objects themselves.

Sensory Aggression, Violence, and Referential Content in Sharits’ Early Cinema:
In general, Sharits’ films engage with celluloid as a plastic medium for the
composition of color and visual rhythm, rather than the material of real time,
motion picture photography. In this sense, like Breer’s Fist Fight (the first film
that was discussed in detail in this dissertation), Sharits’ films are composed in a

382
frame-by-frame fashion. However, though they are assembled using the same
technological principles as animated films, they are not, strictly speaking, part of
the same artistic genus, because of their general aversion to the illusion of
movement, the convention that guides the totality of industrial cinema. Almost all
written commentary on Sharits describes his work as profoundly anti-illusionistic,
because of its eschewal of both a manufactured temporal continuity and figurative
or representational imagery.
410
However, such descriptions are overly simplistic.
In general, the films of Sharits feature either pure fields of color (photographed on
an animation stand) or selective, often sparse representational, non-moving, still
images. In many of his films, Sharits rapidly alternates these frames of pure color
and photographic imagery in order to achieve a synthesis of visual tone and
rhythm that approximates the experience of music. However, Sharits was entirely
opposed to the notion that his films were abstract. Because of their attention to
their own materiality and their open thematicization of cinema as a mechanical
apparatus, he often argued that his work was about cinema itself; it was the
apparatus itself that was his subject. In this sense, Sharits’ work can be
understood as a kind of meta-cinema. As one might expect, it was rather common
for critics to connect these film efforts to the processes of modernist self-

410
See, for example, Krauss, “Paul Sharits” in Paul Sharits, ed. Jan Beauvais (Dijon: Les Presses
du reel, 2008) 47–55; and Michelson, “Screen / Surface: The Politics of Illusionism,” Artforum 9,
no. 1 (September 1972), 58–62. Sharits respectfully disputes Krauss’s evaluation of his work as
purely abstract and non-representational: “Actually it’s an interplay between purely abstract
imagery, if such a thing exists, and highly representational imagery. I like to slide between those
barriers” (Sharits in Gary Garrels, “Interview, October 1982” in Mediums of Language
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1952), not paginated.

383
definition celebrated by Greenberg and Fried.
411
Nevertheless, however
appropriate these rhetorical connections may seem, they tend to reduce Sharits’
efforts, philosophically speaking, to investigations of basic film conditions –
including the representational frame, the spectrum of color, the luminosity of
projection, the synchronicity of sound and image, etc. – and thus undermine much
of their philosophical complexity.
Much of Sharits’ most interesting work in fact challenged any simplistic
notion of pure cinema, by instead proposing the consideration of what he
described as the medium’s innate “dualisms.” (He also described himself as
having a “nearly schizoid obsession with extreme polarities.”)
412
Sharits’ films
were often conflicted works that isolated and magnified philosophical tensions or
paradoxes inherent in the medium, including for example, the opposition between
illusionism and abstraction. Similarly, in his careful and selective use of
affectively loaded photographic imagery, the filmmaker produced work that was
meaningfully referential, thematic, and even political. In his most successful
realizations of these philosophical, conceptual, and ontological tensions, he
managed to achieve the rare feat of sublimating the themes of his films into the
realm of form. Sharits’ films propose a new purpose for the cinema apparatus,
such that – perhaps more so than any other experimental filmmaker – they are not
what they show, but what they do.

411
See, for example, Stuart Liebman, Paul Sharits (St. Paul, MN: Film in the Cities, 1981), 7.
Also see Regina Cornwell, “Paul Sharits: Illusion and Object,” Artforum 10, no. 1 (September
1971), 57. She connects Sharits to Fried’s notion of “deductive structure.”
412
Sharits letter to Brakhage, April 18, 1968, Collection of Anthology Film Archives.

384
Sharits describes the function that he imagines for his work:
The film does what it is. Non-filmic images and stories are not allowed to
interfere with the viewers’ awareness of the immediate reality of
experiencing the film. Light-color-energy patterns generate internal time-
shape and allow the viewer to become aware of the electrical-chemical
functioning of his own nervous system. Just as the “film’s consciousness”
becomes infected, so also does the viewers’: the projector is an audio-
visual pistol; the screen looks at the audience; the retina is a target. Goal:
the temporary assassination of the viewers’ normative consciousness.
413

As his quotation suggests, Sharits’ cinema performs an act of sensory aggression
on its audience. (This of course, is a fundamental connection between his work
and much of that which has been discussed in this study.) The projection of these
films creates a rapid-fire assault of image and sound that attacks the audience with
its forceful utilization of the mechanized seriality of the film apparatus (an aspect
of the medium that in fact shares some of its foundational technologies and
history with the invention of the semi-automatic machine gun). These works
depend on a radical, mechanized visual rhythm, common to all forms of cinema,
in which a flicker is created by the movement of the celluloid strip through the
film projector’s gate at twenty-four frames per second. As his quotation above
suggests, Sharits does not mask these rapid transitions as Hollywood does, but
rather makes them the most fundamental creative resource of his work.
The majority of Sharits’ films, from the early work of Ray Gun Virus
(1966) to 3
rd
Degree (1982), all utilize the flicker of filmic projection as a central
aesthetic resource. They have often been categorized as “flicker films” because of
their dependence on the extremely brief flashes of light that result from the serial

413
Paul Sharits, “Notes on Films, 1966–1968,” Film Culture 47 (Summer 1969), 14.

385
nature of mechanized frame-to-frame shuttered projection. Because of the shock
and distraction that this effect can cause, Sharits’ cinema imposes an audio-visual
barrage upon its viewers that loudly defies the conventional illusion-based
pleasures of industrial motion pictures. Rosalind Krauss, in one of her rare essays
to focus on a filmmaker (an institutional condition that will be considered later),
Rosalind Krauss addresses the unique viewing conditions of Sharits’ work. In
particular, she highlights an important structural function of this variety of
cinema: “The flicker film […] produced by a single frame technique not unlike
that of animation, creates its affective reality under the composite conditions of
montage.”
414
Though Sharits’ films may not actually feature editing, by virtue of
their juxtaposition of entirely different frames (as Krauss accurately points out),
they achieve the visual effect of an extreme experience of montage. This hyper-
rhythmic, pulsatile aesthetic is unique to this genre of films (which also includes
Kubelka’s Arnulf Rainer and Conrad’s The Flicker). In this sense, for much of his
film work, color and montage serve as Sharits’ primary artistic tools.
Sharits’ early flicker films include Ray Gun Virus (1966),
T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G (1968), and Piece Mandala/End War (1966). In differing ways,
the titles of these works allude to the formal conditions and spectatorial
experiences that they create. Ray Gun Virus was the filmmaker’s first project to
pioneer use of cinema as an apparatus for presenting various rhythms of pure
color. It is a formal manifesto of sorts, a tour-de-force repurposing of the

414
Krauss, “Paul Sharits” in Paul Sharits, ed. Jan Beauvais (Dijon: Les presses du reel, 2008), 53.

386
apparatus to exclusively project light of various shifting tonalities of color and
visual rhythm. The work’s sense of abstract movement is achieved through
variations in exposure, tempo, and chromatics. It is a difficult film to describe
because it is evacuated of any referential content other than that which is implied
by its self-reflexive foregrounding of the apparatus that is its subject. Like the
painting of Barnett Newman or Ellsworth Kelly, it represents a historical
challenge to conventional notions of painterly craft, while it also reinvents its
medium as a field for sensuous experience. However, unlike the color field
painters, Sharits was also involved in a temporal art, and therefore, his use of
tremendously rapid and dramatic shifts in color orchestrated an experience that
was much more caustic and sensorially.
With Piece Mandala/End War and T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G, Sharits combined
Ray Gun Virus’s sensorial assault and chromatic experiments in visual rhythm
with identifiable photographic imagery and sound and thus triggered fresh
registers of cultural and affective resonance for the viewer. As its title suggests,
Piece Mandala/End War is an abstracted, literalization of the “make love, not
war” motto of the mid-1960s. Like Ray Gun Virus, the film is primarily a
chromatically and rhythmically dense patterned juxtaposition of pure color
frames. It flickers and flashes rapidly by, as colors blend sensuously or abut each
other dramatically due to their extreme tonal differences. Like Sharits’ flicker
films, the work features rhythms of montage that accelerate and decelerate
through an artistic orchestration modeled on music. However, this film differs

387
markedly in its use of photographic content. There are three different still images
used in the film that are repeated frequently. These images feature Sharits
performing cunnilingus on his wife, the same couple engaged in a kiss (with their
bodies shifted across the visual axis from the other sexual image), and a shot of
Sharits facing the camera in a medium close-up with a gun to his head (as in a
mock suicide). Visually, all of these images have been heavily modified using
filters in order to bring out a vivid and saturated color palette that closely matches
the bright hues of the film’s frames of pure color. In its use of representational
imagery, this early Sharits work powerfully foregrounds some of the artist’s most
significant thematic interests, personal obsessions, and affective associations.
On one level, Piece Mandala is a work about violence. As its intentionally
misspelled title suggests, it aims to imitate the meditative form of a mandala, a
sensuous, symmetrical visual vehicle for meditation; it is a peace mandala
intended to illustrate, at least partially, the pleasurable, somatic alternatives to
war. In its explicit representation of male and female nudity and the act of
cunnilingus, it links its formal structure with the rhythms of sexual intercourse.
Though this work does communicate an anti-war ideology, it is also incredibly
aggressive in its rapid pace and relentless sensorial assault, and as the image of a
suicidal Sharits shows, it is also concerned with darker associations and
connections between sex and death (as were Conner’s films, like Cosmic Ray,
which foregrounded cultural connections between militarism and sexuality).

388
In an episode typical of the era, Piece Mandala was withheld by the film
lab that was processing it, due to some concern that it contained illegal,
pornographic content. Sharits wrote to the lab in 1967:
First I want to say that PIECE MANDALA is a work of art and not
pornography; it is a political statement and has strong socially redeeming
values.[…] Being an aesthetic, moral, social and political document, I
believe it is protected by our Federal Constitution; as a practicing artist-
filmmaker and a college educator I would never sanction the destruction
of my art and so I am ready to take the issue to court if that is
necessary.”
415

This amazing conflict between Sharits and a Texas film lab demonstrates the
cultural context in which his work was being materially produced. (In fact, Sharits
requested letters of support from Jonas Mekas and other influential and well
known artists to encourage the lab to release his print.) Most importantly perhaps,
this anecdote draws attention to the social function of the work, a massively
neglected component of both Sharits’ filmography and that of so-called structural
film. (The film was initially produced to be part of a traveling film series
presented by the New York Filmmaker’s Cooperative titled, “For Life, Against
the War.”) Though he made a number of films that had no referential content and
no use of language, when he did choose to incorporate such elements, as his letter
indicates, Sharits did so for both ideological and aesthetic reasons. Though Piece
Mandala is not a polemical, didactic essay film, featuring, for example, a
prescriptive voiceover, describing the atrocities of the Vietnam War, it is
nevertheless the product of an ethically committed artist who transposed the real

415
Letter from Sharits to Color Processing Station, Dallas, Texas, February 27, 1967, Collection
of Anthology Film Archives.

389
violence of world history – perhaps as a personal therapeutic action – into the
register of montage and discontinuous, disconcerting references to sex and
suicide. The associative chain of this work, however far it is abstracted from the
literalism of social advocacy and political documentary, nevertheless addresses
and draws attention to real historical problems through its abstract reflection upon
corporeal limits and violent form.
416

As the images of Sharits himself suggest this work should also be
considered, at least partially, within the register of autobiography. Many of his
works featured images related to suicide – including most prominently perhaps,
Razor Blades – and he spoke of it often. Unfortunately, it was a fate that would
eventually befall the filmmaker, his mother, and effectively, his brother as well.
Sharits was bipolar and often unstable, and his works address the extreme
paroxysms and anxieties of his own life through a radical reconfiguration of
cinema. For our purposes here, it should be recognized that the connections that
Piece Mandala makes between war, sexuality, and suicide, delineate a nexus of
associations that are apt for a work of art produced in the shadow of the Vietnam
War. However, it was also a creative act, a film which he described as “a very

416
David James argues that the structural film, because of its formal severity and its seeming lack
of cultural awareness, constructed a complex, possibly repressed relationship to the spaces of
political and social reference in the age of Vietnam. In such work, “the social and the cinematic
were internalized as questions of film” and by implication, form (James, Allegories of Cinema,
275–276). Thus, James suggests, perhaps implicitly, that this systematic, rigid approach to the
moving image transposed social trauma into the realm of form. Such a translation – of social
violence into sensorial violence – is entirely operative in the work of Sharits. However, it might
also be added that in his cinema this transposition is not entirely structural (nor is it situated
exclusively in the space of the apparatus), but is in fact an explicit part of the work’s visual
iconography, which occasionally explodes into images of bodily trauma and sex.

390
beautiful, lyrical work with a strong sense of social sense.”
417
His interest in the
mandala as a meditative form underpinned many of his films in this period, and
represented in his mind an alternative to destructive acts of violence like those
inherent in war and suicide.
Piece Mandala is a work dedicated to the symbolic demonstration, in
Sharits’ words, of “the viability of sexual dynamics as an alternative to
destructive violence.”
418
He describes these connections in his published notes on
the film: “Color structure is linear-directional but implies a larger infinite cycle;
light-energy and image frequencies induce rhythms related to the psychophysical
experience of the creative act of cunnilingus.” He then suggests that the film’s
aggressive tempo and conflictual elements “make more cosmic sense as conflict
models than do the destructive orgasms the United States is presently having in
Vietnam.”
419
The sensorial aggression of Sharits’ work – like that of Paik,
Tambellini, and others mentioned earlier in this study – manifested the energies of
a counterculture directed against dominant mechanisms of social violence through
its use confrontational artistic actions and spectatorial feedback.
Made two years later, T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G, is a project related to both of
those described above. However, in it Sharits made an overwhelmingly more
intense, violent, and disturbing work. The first thing one notices upon an initial
viewing this film is that it has a soundtrack, which like its visual component, is
extremely repetitive and unrelenting in its delivery. Throughout the twelve minute

417
Sharits letter to Color Processing Station, February 27, 1967.
418
Sharits, “Notes on Films, 1966–1968,” 13.
419
Ibid., 14.

391
film, one word is repeated over and over: “destroy.” The same utterance of the
word is mechanically reproduced, replayed, and edited slightly differently, such
that it is sonically transformed and made to sound robotic because of the
mechanicity and abruptness of edits that sometimes cut off parts of letters or make
others blend together. For the spectator of the film, this process results in an
experience of a word losing meaning through overexposure and an almost autistic
repetition. Through this process of semantic transformation, viewers of the film
naturally hear variants of the word “destroy,” including non-denotative fragments.
Regina Cornwell reports hearing phrases like, “it’s off,” “it’s cut,” “his straw,”
“history,” and others.
420
Through this unprecedented use of film soundtrack,
Sharits performs an unsettling experiment in auditory processing and the
perception of linguistic cues. In its sonic content, the film powerfully distills its
thematic associations into a single verbal command, an imperative issued from an
assertive, indiscernible offscreen authority, as if from god on high.
Of all Sharits’ early flicker films, T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G has the most
referential visual content. Throughout the film the poet David Franks (who is also
the man who utters “destroy” on the soundtrack) is shown facing the camera, in
medium-close-up, in a variety of poses that appear in quickly flashing single still
frames. In one image he stares aggressively into the camera, in another his mouth
is covered by a woman’s hand, in another he holds a pair of scissors up to his
tongue as if preparing to cut it off, and in another the woman’s hand scratches his

420
Cornwell, 59. A related sonic experiment is an important component of S:TREAM: SECTION:
SECTION:ED, in which the repeated word is exochorion, a term that, echoing the genesis of Dada,
Sharits supposedly discovered through a game of chance incorporating a dictionary.

392
face with her fingernails and draws blood. Like the photographs in Piece
Mandala, each of these single frame images is heavily modified using color filters
and chromatic processing, giving them an abstracted, artificial look. This effect
exaggerates the saturated color palette of the woman’s bright green fingernail
polish and the blood that her nails draw out. The film also includes two additional
images likely taken from sources of entirely different origin. One features a close-
up of male and female genitalia in the act of intercourse, and the other shows a
close-up of a surgical operation upon a human eye.
Because each of these images appears only for 1/24
th
of a second, they
flash by quickly and are basically indiscernible to the viewer. Likely taken from a
scientific and a pornographic film, they are associatively potent images that the
filmmaker intersperses sparingly. They uncannily punctuate the experience of
film viewing by arousing the subconscious and indescribable associations that,
like the film’s use of sound, encourage connections between materials and ideas
that would not normally seem natural or logical. Visually, the film utilizes a vivid
range of colors that flash and flow in rapid fire, machine gun rhythms of montage.
In T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G, Sharits also makes extensive use of optical reprocessing by
presenting the images described above in both positive and negative exposure.
The result is a previously untried variety of flicker that makes the images
themselves more strikingly weighty in their potential references and more
astringent in their visual assault. In a sense, Sharits has taken the color palette and

393
visual effects of both avant-garde and commercial psychedelia and transmogrified
them into a fever dream of destruction and violence.
Within the ebb and flow of the film’s musical, dynamic shifts of color and
rhythm, the filmmaker regularly intersperses the letters of the film’s title, flashing
the letter “T” for one frame, then two minutes later, “O,” etc. These recurrent
textual elements provide the film with an overarching structure that guides viewer
anticipation (such that every two minutes a new letter will appear to indicate how
much time has passed and how much is left). This is precisely the kind of
compositional tool that drew Sitney’s attention, in 1969, to the idea of a new kind
of organizational principle for filmic structure. Though Sharits respected Sitney’s
observations and his erudition, he took issue with certain aspects of his
formulation of “structural film.” In an introductory statement on film structure –
printed on a syllabus to his film class, “Film Aesthetics: ‘Structure’ as
Information Matrices” – Sharits writes the following about Sitney’s “structural
film” formulation: “The term is as good as any art ‘movement’ label, if it is
regarded as merely functional and vaguely descriptive; what is untenable is that
the term is being used theoretically.”
421
Like Hollis Frampton, Sharits was a
filmmaker whom Sitney included in his taxonomy, and like Frampton, his
criticism of structural film is one of the more astute and levelheaded of all the
published, casual, written, or anecdotal responses to the category. In a letter to
Sitney, Sharits also objected that his taxonomy of the avant-garde was “quite

421
Sharits, syllabus for “Film Aesthetics: ‘Structure’ as Information Matrices,” Collection of
Anthology Film Archives.

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literary oriented,” implying that an audio-visual medium required modified
critical categories from those of American poetics. Sharits’ film work
demonstrates this, in a sense. Both in its conceptual motivations the concrete
conditions of its exhibition, Sharits’ work begs to be understood as an
intervention not simply into the history of the film medium, but in art more
generally.

Locational Film Installation and the Transformation of Film Exhibition:
In 1971, Sharits completed his first locational film installation, Sound
Strip/Film Strip. Though he had experimented with modified projection before in
his two-screen works, Sears Catalogue (1964) and Razor Blades (1965-68), his
first isotropic, gallery based film installation represented a transformation in the
temporal structure of his cinema, the conditions of its exhibition, and the
institutional associations of its socio-aesthetic context. After a period of personal
and artistic crisis in the late 1960s, Sharits reevaluated the totality of his practice
and began to produce new varieties of work that could be shown in a range of
projection and exhibition formats, including super-8 loops, 16mm loops, multiple
projector exhibitions on gallery walls, and “frozen film frames” in which he
exhibited the strips of celluloid themselves within clear pieces of cellulite
(positioning them as framed static objects to be viewed on a wall). He describes
this shift to locational exhibition: “‘Film’ can occupy spaces other than that of the
theatre; it can become ‘Locational’ (rather than suggesting-representing other

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locations) by existing in spaces whose shapes and scales of possible sound and
image ‘sizes’ are part of the wholistic [sic] piece.”
422
It was during this period that
Sharits began to become disgruntled with the conventional limitations, both
formal and ontological, of the projected motion picture. He wanted to expand his
practice in a sense, to open it up to different social and artistic possibilities.
Sharits described this new tendency as a move towards the
democratization of his work:
I believe that cinema can manifest democratic ideals in several ways: (1) if
it exists in an open, free, public location […] (2) if the form of the
presentation does not prescribe a definite duration of respondent’s
observation […] (3) if the structure of the composition is non-
developmental […] (4) if the content does not disguise itself but rather
makes a specimen of itself.
423

For Sharits, the first three of these requirements marked a break from the
dominant tendencies of the experimental cinema, which was generally shown in
darkened movie theaters, with specific exhibition times, and temporally shifting,
evolutionary structures. However, the expansion of his practice beyond these
limits did not produce a clean break with the traditions and exhibition strategies of
his earlier work. Instead, many of his locational film installations were also made
available through the standard avenues of independent film rental (through the
Film-makers’ Cooperative) and could also be shown in conventionally projected,
linear, single-screen exhibition.
424
A number of these films then exist in at least

422
Sharits, “Statement Regarding Multiple Screen/Sound ‘Locational’ Film Environments –
Installations (1976),” Film Culture 65–66 (1978), 79.
423
Ibid., 79–80.
424
Bruce Conner too presented isotropic installations of his films using looped prints and specially
engineered screening set-ups. With EVE RAY FOREVER (1965), Conner produced a three-screen

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two possible exhibition formats, within both single-screen theatrical projection
and continuous gallery-based installation exhibition. Sharits’ locational projects
of the early to mid 1970s included Sound Strip/Film Strip, Synchronou-
soundtracks (1973-74), Vertical Contiguity (1974), Damaged Film Loop (1973-
74), Shutter Interface (1975), Dream Displacement (1975-76), and Epileptic
Seizure Comparison (1976). As their titles suggest, the majority of these
experiments engage in the systematic analysis of various aspects of the cinema
apparatus, and often exclude illusionistic, conventional cinematic content within
the film frame. In this sense, much of his work in cinema, be it locational
installation or conventional exhibition, would continue the trajectory first initiated
by Ray Gun Virus. However, in 1975, Sharits began a project using repurposed
footage from medical films and created a work that, like T,O,U,C