Inquiry Observation Analysis

scribbled in my notebook during the screening of Sulphur’s Edge –

“A high budget purely aesthetic creation well produced but very shallow that attempts to create meaning through covered faces and awkward embraces. like the aesthetic of grunge w/o the angst”

issues of bitterness aside, I really questioned the value of Stuart’s film. It was beautiful. The locations in the Azores are dramatic and other worldly. The performers oscillate between beautiful, strange, awkward, and ugly. The costumes are eye-catching and fun. But it all seemed more like a surface-level exercise of bringing these elements together, and not even to see what could be created beyond them, the whole being greater than the sum of the parts kind of thing. The film seemed more like an exercise of budget and access that artistic inquiry. Like the dance aphorism says – don’t confused the size of a budget with the value of the project.

This response, though, must be couched in the feelings of regret and loss I had that crept up during the pre-show talk given by Peter Pleyer. He talked about the 5 month process of working with a group of dancers in Lisbon, then a week in the Azores, and Stuart’s new book, that has pictures of the screened films, and info about her other works. Wonderful stuff.

And as these thoughts washed over me, I thought to myself, that I will not likely have a group of dancers to work with for 5 months. That I do not have a fundus of costumes to access, and a videographer with a drone, and a video editor to work with to create an hour long film. The roll of the dice in the past, the choices I have made, the choices that others have made for me, all have led to this and these situations, these levels of access.

Makes me think of two things, of Cathy Park Hong, of how other people than the artist decide if what they make is good. And of Duchamp’s Coefficient, the idea that the art work is the dialogue between the phenomenon and the observer/consumer. Could the scene in the film in the muddy lake be interpreted as an homage to refugees struggling across the Mediterranean? an piece about access and dying and struggling to survive? Sure why not, it could easily be interpreted as such.

Or is the point of Stuart’s film simple to be an exercise in aesthetics, to chart new territory for the rest of us to observe, digest, and react to, a taste-maker, for the rest of us?