When One Man's Video Art Is Another's Copyright Crime
May 6, 2004
By ROBERTA SMITH
Jon Routson's exhibition of videos at the Team Gallery in
Chelsea is a kind of last hurrah, a farewell performance.
It is also a small eddy in the increasingly roiled waters
where art meets the United States' rapidly expanding
copyright laws.
A 34-year-old video artist living in Baltimore, Mr. Routson
has a very particular method of art-making, which will soon
be illegal in Maryland, as it already is in the District of
Columbia and five other states, including New York and
California. Like the appropriation artists of the early
1980's, who rephotographed existing photographs as a way of
commenting on society, Mr. Routson makes movies of other
people's movies.
Since 1999 he has been going to Baltimore-area movie
theaters, often on a feature film's opening day, and
recording what happens on and around the screen with a
small, hand-held camcorder. He shows the grainy, oddly
distorted results, which he calls recordings, as DVD
installations in art galleries.
Shot without consulting the view-finder, these diaristic
works are replete with the mysterious rustlings, irritating
interruptions, darkness and partial views endemic in movie
theaters. The shadowy images wobble, especially when Mr.
Routson shifts in his seat. You hear breathing and
throat-clearing.
On a recent Saturday at Team, for example, three highly
unstable recordings of Mel Gibson's "Passion of the
Christ," each made in a different Baltimore theater, were
being projected simultaneously (but not in sync) on walls
in the gallery's three small rooms. One, shot from the
front row of a full house, was steeply angled, with
fragmented subtitles.
Mr. Routson's work, which is not for sale, is the latest to
find itself in the murky zone between copyright
infringement and artistic license, between cultural
property rights and cultural commentary. On Oct. 1 a new
Maryland law will make the unauthorized use of an
audiovisual recording device in a movie theater illegal.
Last week two people were arrested in California for
operating camcorders in movie theaters. One was apprehended
by an attendant wearing night-vision goggles.
The Senate Judiciary Committee also recently approved a
bill to make the unauthorized copying and distribution of
movies a federal offense. The film industry has lobbied
fiercely for this law, arguing that up to 80 percent of all
illegal copies of films are made in theaters. (An AT&T Labs
Research report, published last year, found that most
illegal copies were either duplicates of stolen copies or
were shot from tripods in projection booths.) Mr. Routson,
who described himself in a telephone interview as
increasingly nervous on his visits to theaters, said he had
heard rumors that the management of one chain was offering
$100 to any employee who apprehended someone with a
camcorder.
It does not matter whether you think that Mr. Routson's
work is good or bad art; it is quite good enough, in my
view. It does matter that the no-camcorder laws may not do
much to stem pirating while making it increasingly
difficult for artists to do one of the things they do best:
comment on the world around them.
Our surroundings are so thoroughly saturated with images
and logos, both still and moving, that forbidding artists
to use them in their work is like barring 19th-century
landscape painters from depicting trees on their canvases.
Pop culture is our landscape. It is at times wonderful.
Most of us would not want to live without it. But it is
also insidious and aggressive. The stuff is all around us,
and society benefits from multiple means of staving it off.
We are entitled to have artists, as well as political
cartoonists, composers and writers, portray, parody and
dissect it.
Mr. Routson's portrayals are actually rather tender. There
is subversive intent in the individual titles of the
recordings: "Bootleg (Dogville)" and "Bootleg (The Fog of
War)," for example. But Mr. Routson also rightly described
them as "less than copies." Rather than duplicates, his
works are films of film showings. They reduce pristine,
overpowering big-screen images to fuzzy, low-tech
human-scale images that we can walk up to, almost like home
movies. They recreate and in a sense celebrate the
private-in-public space of the average moviegoer. You could
even say that they encourage moviegoing over watching DVD's
or videocassettes.
At once stolen and given away, Mr. Routson's works operate
somewhere between the manipulated magazine advertising
images of the 1980's artist Richard Prince and the
keep-the-gift-in-motion aesthetic of 90's artists like
Felix Gonzalez-Torres, whose sculptures included large
piles of wrapped candy, free for the taking, and Rirkrit
Tiravanija, whose first exhibitions consisted of cooking
curry and serving it to gallery visitors.
Mr. Routson said that after the Team show closed on
Saturday, he would be leaving his camcorder at home on
movie nights. He said he had always viewed the recording
series as finite, a phase in his development that would
come to an end. He also admitted that financial
considerations were an issue: he needs to earn a living
from his art. Declining to be photographed for this
article, he added that the tensions of recording movies was
destroying the pleasure of watching them. "I'm not a super
film buff," he said, "but I try to remain a fan."
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/06/arts/design/06VIDE.html?ex=1085285936&ei=1
&en=5aa5ef416218e90f
*
*
Film-Philosophy Email Discussion Salon.
After hitting 'reply' please always delete the text of the message you are replying to.
To leave, send the message: leave film-philosophy to: [log in to unmask]
For help email: [log in to unmask], not the salon.
**
|
