Don Handelman writes:
I think on and off on how valuable it would be to have a journal
publishing articles in which the author does his or her analysis until
it falls apart, and then tries to analyze why it falls apart, and, so,
what the analysis is good for and what it isn't. Not a post-modern
deconstruction, but rather a construction leading to self-destruction
which leads to re-organization. Thereby, getting away from the
beautifully polished papers that thoroughly and neatly self-enclose
themselves, the loose ends neatly sliced away.
This is sort of the opposite from the intellectual lebensraum scenario that Bill Harris described.
In the mid sixties I started making films as a way of producing "language experiments" that would give me parallax on the kinds of questions Witt was asking in the PI. They were experiments and almost all of them were the kinds of failures from which I learned a lot, and from which others could also learn, so I showed them to colleagues - but never really "released" them. So this would be the equivalent of Don's idea. It worked just fine because then the world was very very small. There was no Film-Philo and there were only a couple of other people that I considered to be doing something like what I was doing...Hollis Frampton, Peter Greenaway, Michael Snow, AK Dewdney, Saul Levine. but in order for the works to have any impact I had to achieve a level of success in my own eyes that justified "releasing" the films and having them shown to a wider audience.
The world has evolved to where visual language experiments can easily be floated in a public space. Unjuried like Utoob, but within a corral like this salon.
My own predisposition is toward the unjuried, but I can see the other point of view. However, while I usually at least breeze through the posts on this salon, and curse the out of office bots and undeleated antecedents, looking for live meat. I pay far less attention to the journal, in which the writing is much more considered, dense and often obtuse.
My own lightheadedness I suppose...I'm often looking for environments in which prose can live and breathe, and in the jostle of academic jurymandering, a kind of self-censorship seems to stifle.
dan
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