In 1999 or so, editor Berin Golonu invited me to write an article for ART WEEK's issue on Surveillance. This was published in ART WEEK 31, No. 9, 2000.

THE ARTIST IS WATCHING BACK
    By Owen O'Toole
    Since Sony's introduction of the video Portapak in 1968, artists have been exploring ways in which video, so often aesthetically linked to the commercial complex of television production, can actually express the personal, the poetic, the sculptural and the political. Video is unique from film in its immediacy; the tape can be rewound and viewed instantly after recording, then recorded over again, unlike film which preserves a one-time record of events and must be chemically developed. Video recording is particularly well-suited to the long watch of documentary coverage, while film has been used more often to record and add cinematic flourish to premeditated drama or to rigorous plastic montage.
    A fascinating use of the video apparatus, something noted right off by artists and business interests, is what is called "closed-circuit television." The camera serves almost as an intercom, connected by wire to a distant television or monitor for viewing. No recording unit is necessary, just a camera and a monitor. This was seized by the business world as a marvelous security device and the era of surveillance video was born. Artists have used television's closed-circuit potential since that beginning. An amazing aspect of our market-culture is that these mass-produced tele-envisioning machines have gotten out into the hands of so many creative people. While the security-state minded world of business and finance viewed their surveillance apparatus as protection from external, or internal employee threats (and installed it everywhere), artists have elegantly used video's reflexive properties for self-portraiture; it has proven a medium with a capacity to be every bit as beautiful as painting (Mary Lucier, Bill Viola). The artist finds wonderful use for a machine which otherwise is used to blend, chop and grind.
    Ray Beldner, primarily a sculptor and installation artist, has done a number of works commenting on corporate uniformity. Surveillance appears as one aspect of the new urban landscape in which we have come to accept a man-made or mirror image of the world as the totality of our relations with nature. Beldner cleverly clusters channels of closed-circuit video beside monitors playing back prerecorded material to multiply and confuse the sense of live action. He also curated On The Money, a show in which artists altered legal tender, raising issues of "who is watching or reporting," since defacing money is illegal. Beldner's sewing of dollar bills into a sack to carry horse dung is a clear editorial statement, hopefully supported by the First Amendment. Other Beldner installations find racks of business suits standing for populations of office-commuting, white-collar workers. One popular piece, Converse/Confer/Conceit, has pigeon cages built above suit racks, allowing pigeon guano to paint the shoulders of the drab uniforms, revitalizing them. The effects of a society of surveillance are bound tightly to the technology.
    Of course, video cameras have become expert witnesses in cases against overly violent security forces (Rodney King). Even more so than film, the video camera gives anyone the power of being the "roving reporter," stirring up dirt or just being in the right place at the right time. Some strange contradictions are at hand, in which utopian possibilities of unfettered creativity and self-awareness meet seemingly opposed notions of "big brother watching," the dystopian present of a market-driven planet as viewed through TV-Darwinism, and the artist is watching back.
    Kim Trang's videotape Ocularis: Eye Surrogates serves as a miniature history of surveillance in a mere twenty-one minutes. Trang set up a 1-800 number and invited the public to call in episodes of surveillance from their lives, then wove those voices together with a variety of mundane video material, everyday camcorder shots slowed down or shot from above to simulate surveillance-mode, including footage of driving and waving at friends in another car (who also have a camcorder handy!). "Surveillance is kind of funny because it creates anxiety and boredom simultaneously. The searching gaze is anxious because surveillance is a form where one watches for something to go wrong. But it's also stultifying watching monotonous footage of real-time video," state the voice-overs. The tape is an argument for the basic joys of the video camera while also carrying several warnings on the box: Always have camcorder ready in case of imminent disaster!
    I think that a definition of art could be 'paying attention.'
    --John Cage
    Since 1984, Orwell's prophetic year, surveillance has increasingly been the subject-content of video artists' work. In 1987, Branda Miller and Deborah Irmas curated an extensive exhibit at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions titled SURVEILLANCE. The show was a major survey of such work and presented videotapes, photographs and installations. Miller expressed the purpose of the show as "stimulating the viewer to look beyond the fetishistic examination of the technology itself in favor of the multifaceted information gathering process' greater implications." The show was international in scope and featured many artists, including John Baldessari, Louis Hock, Martha Rosler and Michael Klier. The catalog even included a Freedom of Information Act kit, with a form and instructions on how to obtain FBI files.
    With the advent and growth of cable television, Americans--those who watch the tube--have been fed a diet of image-content which demands more and more of the same, feeding a voyeuristic syndrome which has peaked in the confrontation and exhibition of daytime talk shows like "Sally Jesse Raphael" and "Jerry Springer." MTV's "The Real World" plugged into the fever for so-called "reality TV" which now harvests cash crop with "Survivor" and "Big Brother" (though locking a group of strangers in a house, or island, and observing them like rats, or watching them eating rats seems a rather forced hand of reality). The blossoming Internet has also absorbed its weight of this surveillance-exhibition culture drift. Eyeball cameras and CU-See-Me software have turned college kids in dorm rooms into cyberspace celebrities available for viewing 24-hours-a-day. Charge it to your VISA and help pay my college tuition. Thank you!
    Video art has finally been entering the museum canon with big shows such as Seeing Time (selections from the Kramlich collection) at SFMOMA, and of course, Nam June Paik's Guggenheim show in New York, which may have been the art event of the year. In 1999, the M. H. de Young Museum invited curator Glen Helfand and artists to examine the museum from the inside out in an exhibition titled Museum Pieces. "The artists and I were, outside of practical restrictions, given an impressive amount of free reign. We scrambled through the attic, poked into files, gained access to security cameras, and navigated the internal bureaucracies," states Helfand in his voice-over narrative for the Museum Pieces video produced by artists Sergio De La Torre and Julio Morales. An installation by De La Torre and Morales that was included in the exhibition, mixed active surveillance video on an elegant rear-screen sculpture, making fun of the surveillance pre-occupation of institutions while offering up its aestheticised future.
    San Francisco and its southern Silicon Valley are at ground zero for the testing and questioning of this new media. Micro-technology develops and is used to support moving-image art in museums and galleries at just the time when we begin to move away from image in general. Steve Seid, curator of video at UC Berkeley's Pacific Film Archive, spoke of "a surveillance that doesn't necessarily involve moving images." For instance, Seid talked about a recent computer surveillance program called Spector: "Spector is more along the lines of where things are going. A lot of surveillance is displaced out of the image-world that we tend to think of. It's going towards the informational rather than the image, collating more and more data about everyone. It's more about consumption than policing." We've become trained through media saturation to police ourselves. "The kind of thing Safeway does when you belong to their club. They not only know what you buy, but when you do. Analysis gets into finer and finer detail, data becomes a (virtual) image of you. They no longer need an image or picture."
    The Bureau of Inverse Technology is a collective of artists working in close critique with science and technology. The videotape bitPlane is a remarkable work, an austere piece of surveillance video which manages to nose-in on the current state of technology from a new angle. Using a remote-controlled model plane equipped with a low-res video cam and transmitter, the Bureau invaded industrial airspace over the hi-tech campuses of Silicon Valley's major corporations, giving us a chaotic aerial mapping of the source-landscape of so much of our current technical necessities; a beautiful piece of pirate-radio surveillance. In her discussion of the Bureau's projects, theorist Natalie Jeremienko asks, "What is the political fabric of the information age? And what interventions can be made in a place where economics gets equated with politics, where diversity is rendered in homogeneous database fields, and where consumption forms identity?"
    Seid counters with a sobering glimpse into the future of consumer profiling: "You can go to a boutique on the Web, punch in your dimensions here, and they customize a mannequin with your dimensions. They put the blouse on you!"
    Owen O'Toole is a filmmaker and sound artist living in Northern California.

SEEKING A FRIEND

The apocalypse film genre is one that draws me like a moth to the flame, so I took a rare film pass to see SEEKING A FRIEND FOR THE END OF THE WORLD, not because I'm a fan of Steve Carell or Kira Knightley. They both did a fine job in the film, but this movie is in some ways akin to a Bresson film, wherein the actors are there more as models to deliver their lines and let the ideas, the atmosphere, do the talking. There are a lot of good actors in SEEKING A FRIEND, but the film is made with such a casual demeanor that everyone gets to downplay their usual serious parts, even though the subject here is pretty serious: an Earth apocalypse by giant meteor. It's enlightening to watch people have to decide what's truly important in their lives and throw everything else away. With 3 weeks to live people turn to doing what is really important to them. I have watched some of Laura Linney's TV show THE BIG C recently and, diagnosed with advanced cancer, she goes about life in an entirely new way, no longer putting up with the bullshit that we often settle for in our assumedly livelong days. Linney's character waits several weeks to tell her family she has cancer, not wanting to fall too quickly into the trap of their sympathy and condolence. Carell and Knightley are drawn together in their final 3 weeks on Earth by a similar mutual detachment that allows them to make the most of the wretched situation and approach death somewhat at peace. While some people fall into the pit of their own worst qualities, these blessed souls find their higher selves at the final hour. It's an encouraging prospect: that apocalypse could be an opportunity for redemption on Earth and entirely unrelated to Christian legends of rapture and ascension. Goodness is its own reward. There is a funny scene at a TGIF-style restaurant named somewhat akin to a Hitchcock film, where the waiters seem to be all on ecstacy and the meal devolves into an orgy that must be escaped. Breaking into old friends' abandoned mansions and feasting from the restaurant grade freezer never tasted so good. There are also faint whiffs of THE OMEGA MAN in depictions of streets wandered by lost souls awaiting the end. The music theme, the High Fidelity-ish love for vinyl-- Kira walks through half of the film holding a short stack of LP favorites-- is amusing in a Music For A Desert Island way, but the retro-romantic Bacharach section was a bit indulgent to me. The sweetness of Things That Will Be Lost if we lose this world is definitely worth stating again and again and is a great function for film: to remind mankind not to crap his own nest, but Bacharach pushes the kitsch button in this instance. Otherwise I do laud writer-director Lorene Scafaria for her accomplishment; it's well written and shot, and I'll seek out her NICK AND NORA'S INFINITE PLAYLIST (writer) to see what else she's made of.

A HOLLIS FRAMPTON ODYSSEY

Last week, my friend Jeff Plansker forwarded me a NYTimes article about Hollis Frampton's 1968 film SURFACE TENSION, which contains a race-walk through New York from the Brooklyn Bridge to Central Park using single-frame "timelapse". Writers Andy Newman and Michael Kolomatsky, as lovers of the New York they report on, have held the clip up for examination on the Times' website, including the repeated appearances by Frampton's then-girlfriend, and they also created a side-by-side comparison of the walking tour from Frampton's film and from their own cellphone.

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/surface-tension/

The interest and excitement, it turns out, comes from the fact that Criterion has just published a 2dvd set titled A HOLLIS FRAMPTON ODYSSEY, which contains 24 films by HF made between 1966 and 1979. SURFACE TENSION is one of the 24 films. Each of the films in the set merits the kind of re-examination that SURFACE TENSION has gotten on the NYTimes website. Last night, Jeff and I made our monthly pilgrimage to Amoeba Records in Hollywood, where I hoped to pick up the new Frampton set. What a long time coming... to be able to walk into a record store and buy the new Hollis Frampton record (Do You Feel Like We Do jokes aside) is very much a Holy Grail achieved. Similar to the recent find of film of the Rams vs. Giants Yankee Stadium game I attended with my father in 1970. In 1985 I made a short film titled FRAMES FOR FRAMPTON, an optical printer expansion of 1 roll of super8 film into 7 minutes of 16mm film. The super8 was shot in October of 1984 en route to Buffalo from Boston and back, to see a show of Frampton's work at the Albright-Knox Gallery. Frampton had died just earlier that year. The MIT Press publication RECOLLECTIONS AND RECREATIONS may have been the catalogue raisonne for that Frampton exhibit, which included many photographs, xerography, even books with bullet holes in them ("The Tortures of The Text"). The evening of my overnight visit, the entire HAPAX LEGOMENA series of films was screened, almost 3 hours of film. I shot my roll of super 8 around the Albright-Knox and ran into the nearby Forest Lawn Cemetary with the Beaulieu 4008ZM running around 8fps.

After finishing FRAMES FOR FRAMPTON, I arranged a screening of the film at a gallery in Boston as part of David Kleiler's Rear Window series. I rented Frampton's SURFACE TENSION to accompany FRAMES FOR FRAMPTON and to see the film myself, since no one else was showing his work. Fortunately, P. Adams Sitney and others had written gushing descriptions of Frampton's film triumphs. One of the great properties of Frampton's work is its conceptual nature: even a verbal description could create a strong filmlike image in your head. I devoted the next 5 or 6 years of my life to studying and promoting Frampton's work. I rented ZORN'S LEMMA and projected it one Saturday in the Somerville Theater on a Kodak Pageant arc projector the theater owned, part of a series of "Extended Theater" shows my friend Lenny DiFranza organized. I became somewhat obsessed with Frampton's MAGELLAN project, his metafilm history involving the creation of a film (or more) for every day of the year. I rented WINTER SOLSTICE and projected it on Dec 21 several years in various locations. WINTER SOLSTICE is the film that I most love Hollis Frampton for, and its inclusion in this Criterion set must be heralded as a landmark in experimental film publishing. I don't know of any film which has so completely taken me into a space of ecstatic film rapture. Focusing on the intense activity within a steelworks, we are treated to long passages of cascading showers of sparking steel fragments against an austere black background. The camera shutter creates motion effects akin to abstract animation, as flurries of yellow sparks fly in all directions. By his definitive capture of this light show, moreso than Dziga Vertov in Enthusiasm, Frampton has defined what an industrial art can be: a machine which reveals. He is a little bit Vulcan, a god of metals, through this film. I have't yet watched the dvd transfer. Frampton made films that made the day you saw them important. With Magellan, he also said that each day is invaluable, could be a day of Great Inspiration for the creative mind. I never met him but learned so much from him. He is sorely missed but finally celebrated publicly with this Criterion release.

Todd Edwards' LET'S BE FRANK at The Improv Lab

Todd Edwards is a filmmaker and comedy writer I met through our sons being at the same pre-school. He's from the midwest, where he made an indy film called Chillicothe, which went to Sundance and got a lot of attention. Todd and brother Cory then made Hoodwinked (2005), a feature length animated film which gained distribution with the Weinsteins and did big box office. Todd has since made another indy feature called Jeffy Was Here, a music video for the Hansens, he writes constantly and has several projects in the pipeline. In his spare time, or to create an outlet for his ideas outside the sometimes slow process of studio greenlighting, Todd decided to present a night of his monologues, which took place on Monday, April 9th at the Improv Lab on Melrose in Los Angeles. The event was a benefit for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society of Los Angeles. I thought we might see Todd do several long pieces ala Spalding Gray, but instead he curated a set of pieces by eleven talented performers, largely of his own writing. It was a variety show, almost like a radio show, revolving around the core of Todd's formidable talent.

LET'S BE FRANK opened with a musical introduction by Frank Simes, the only true Frank on the bill. Frank played amplified acoustic guitar and sang two songs, I IMAGINED YOU and TOUCH ME NOW, both examples of his power pop talent earned from 30 years in the Los Angeles music scene. It would make a nice opening to any Hollywood evening, Frank's music being so well rooted in the clubs and stages of this town, besides being freshly returned from a tour of Italy with Roger Daltrey's band. The chorus of I IMAGINED YOU has been running through my head ever since.

Next, Todd hit the stage, dressed in the 80's finery of a leather jacket with sleeves pushed up and a kamikaze headband, to tell us the story RECORDS, about a sad sack who lost his record collection to an ex-girlfriend. Deciding to re-take his collection, he stands outside her apartment with field glasses and explains the convoluted reasoning behind his predicament. The absurd honesty of the character's self-absorption is familiar to any of us who live in our heads and depend on others being "less smart" than ourselves. Stalking appeared as a theme across the evening, in the over-the-top physical comedy of Vanessa Ragland, whose FRANKIE loudly pantomimed a hussy's unelegant attempts to mate at a dance bar, and with Katie Hooten she drawled the hip-hoppish girl duo music video HEY BOY, warning a one-time lover of how she would return to fuck up his world. FRANKIE and HEY BOY, written by Ragland and Hooten, who just happens to be Todd's sister, are both Fatal Attraction nightmares. The night could have been dubbed STALKERS, a night of monologues.

Cooper Thornton did a great Marine commander in MOON ATTACK, the pep talk given to a squad of soldiers preparing to offload on the moon and fight a group of threatening aliens. Again, Edwards' non-stop twisted reasoning corners the listener at the corner of fucked-up and funny. The story is a twist to the homophobic and plays well in our era of Santorum. A simple bleak drone in the background created an appropriate doomsday vibe.

Phil Lamarr performed POET, a spoof of radical chic poetry crossed with a pop culture crash on Billy Joel's ass. His delivery was a Howl and hootin was had later on. Jeff Grace did Todd's ORIENTATION, advising the audience as a group of maternity ward babies on the dos and don'ts of joining the general population. Samm Levine and Vanessa Ragland (again!) did a spoof of the I Can't Believe It's Not Butter commercial, each trying to overreach the other on how buttery or not the darn stuff might be.

There was not an INTERMISSION. But then Todd was back in a gentile wig and light blue windbreaker for SMUT CUTTERS, his portrayal of a religious video editor on the phone assuring a client he could and would rake any improper languange, violence, nudity or sexual situations from their movies, although he might also masterbate. Tim Hooten, the evening's MC and host/representative for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, blasted us with a parody of his own doctor's visit, when he was informed of his own leukemia. Fortunately, I have drunk beers with this man and know when he's being funny. In much of the evening's work there was a thin line between humor and frightening, and thus: LET'S BE FRANK. Todd and Tim and Vanessa and Katie are Seriously Funny, to quote the title of a book on the great American comics of the 50's and 60's (George Carlin, Woody Allen, Syd Ceasar, Lennie Bruce, among others). Finally, Cristine Rose turned the night upside down with GRAND OPENING, the hilarious telephonic brainstorm of a businesswoman trying to create an unforgettable store opening and throwing the kitchen sink at the problem.

Much of Todd Edwards' work depends on his deep resources for conjuring laundry lists of absurd ideas and situations, akin perhaps to another FRANK: the great radio theaterist Joe Frank, heard for many years on Pacifica Radio. Todd put together a night of entertainment that flowed like a radio show. There were many clever musical cues. He made it look easy to put on this kind of show and I could imagine him doing it again and again. A curator of smiles to beat the shit out of cancer.