When creating a piece of art, there are three main things to remember... It doesn’t need a narrative, it should be aesthetically beautiful and it should be emotionally crippling.
Moving image doesn’t need to have a straight narrative. The story doesn’t need to be obvious. Although it can have a meaning behind it. An audience should have to work hard to understand what is happening. Some say that the author is dead. And that the audience should be left to create the story and be involved in it. Overall the final piece will interpreted differently by every person, so why not present it in a way that they will find more enjoyable? People like to feel like they are a part of something and belong.
The work should be aesthetically beautiful. This can take shape in different forms and sometimes the “beauty” can be horrible but be aesthetically grounding. A piece art should provoke you, it should make you think about what you see and how you see it, it should make you look at an object and wonder how it works and why it works and all the pieces that come together to make it do that, and why we use it in the ways which we do. Good art should make you question everyday things it should be presented in a way which makes the known unknown.
The piece should be emotionally crippling. It should stop you in your tracks and just hold you there for that split second, it should provoke an emotion, whether it be anger or sadness or whatever. Art should make us question our position in the world.
Christian Markley is a sound artist who uses the excess sounds that people don’t want. He uses turn tables and assembles the music together. Markley is also a film maker and sculptor. The main theme of his work always stays the same, and it’s about music. One of his films was of a guitar being dragged along roads in America on the back of an old pickup truck. This piece caused outrage and was even discussed in the Whitehouse. After seeing it I didn’t understand why people would be outraged but after hearing what it was representing, I understood better. Markleys work provoked outrage and it made people think “Have we progressed?” “How can a guitar being destroyed cause more anger than a black person being killed? And what does this show about us as a society? How could an object have more worth than a human?”
Bill Viola is video artist. In class we seen clips from one of his films "the passing" in which he filmed the birth of his child and the death of his mother. i can't really understand how he could film the death of his own mum. I'm wondering did he do the editing straight away or did he wait until he had come to terms with the death? or maybe because they knew she was going to die they had come to terms with it before it happened? I don't know whether to think Viola is a genius, or heartless. I know the film does have the balance of life and death because it has the child being born, but i just feel that because its real footage of a woman actually dying its horrible. Because we can relate to the themes in the work it is hard to detach yourself from the it. In Hollywood films, there are births and deaths, but they are acting, its not real and you know its not real so you can detach yourself to a certain extent.
Willie Doherty is a video artist. His work is similar to Violas because he uses similar techniques such as slowing the timing, having a constant focus, and the theme of his work, which is being on a journey. I seen one of his films “Ghost town” in the Ulster Museum in Belfast. It was strange. The room the screen was in was pitch black and the screen was huge. I remember we stood and watched the whole thing, waiting for something to happen, or for something to appear on the road. It was hard to leave the room because the piece almost stopped you. It kept you there, waiting to see what happened. I can’t explain it but the piece did leave me feeling a bit funny, probably a combination of the quiet dark room and the huge screen, with the loud, single voice doing the narration in a type of drone. When I came out of the room everything just felt far away.
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