There were a few passages that caught my attention in the Rhizome conversation between Hito Steryl and Daniel Rourke, within the questions posed, answers given, and even in the reference points made by the two. The first point of intrigue was within a question posed by Rourke.
In the title of your collection of essays, The Wretched of the Screen, I hear echoes of Georges Duhamel, who saw the spectacle of cinema as “a pastime for helots, a diversion for uneducated, wretched, worn-out creatures” (referenced by Walter Benjamin). I also read a direct reference to Frantz Fanon’s work, The Wretched of Earth. For Duhamel the masses were subjugated by the flickering images of popular-culture, and for Fanon, by the machinery of colonialism. For Fanon, at least, there was hope in the lumpenproletariat: the abject peasant class, forgotten by industrial rule and, perhaps, beyond psychological subjugation. The only hope of revolution lay with them. In your essay In Defense of the Poor Image, it is images themselves that are wretched, beyond redemption as subjects. Do you see the digital image as a contemporary lumpenproletariat?
I don’t know the works referenced here, but I get a sense, and I may be projecting, that the elitism of the academic and fine artist class are rearing their ugly heads. Suggesting that something like cinema is for the poor, uneducated, subjugated classes, for people to be brainwashed by colonial propaganda. And though there are certainly, I suspect, instances of this, many perhaps, there are just as many individuals, certainly in contemporary culture, that question what is given while acknowledging what artistry there is in a form like cinema. The term lumpenproletariat was a new one for me, and Hito’s response was intriguing. She stated that in the “current moment of globalisation I see a new mob: people who cannot form a class but constitute the refuse of all classes.” And, that many artists fall into this category, where the experience is less about subjugation and more about a scrappy survival instinct. She also connected this idea to the “low art” of wood paintings from Japans’ past and the idea of cheap reproduction. I’m a little tangled up by this part of the conversation. There’s a lot to unpack here with the tension of the “tension” of “poor images”.
It was refreshing to read, “If artists don’t expose themselves to the workflow & economies w/ contemporary means of production they become souvenir peddlers. But it seems to me that she very correctly described a quite ludicrous analog nostalgia in a specific corner of the artworld. Next time I see another 16mm film projector rattling away in a gallery I will personally kidnap it and take the poor thing to a pensioners home.” As someone with one foot in the fine art world, I find a lot of references to the past for aesthetic reasons, and then with some faulty forced meaning squeezed into an old medium. It reminds me, in dance, of the common downtown dance scene’s obsession with the avant garde minimalism in the way they choreograph. They essentially offer the exact same style of presentation (often doing nonsensical things in the nude) and classify themselves as very modern, when they are just souvenir peddlers. This may be a stretch in terms of connection. As someone who also works in arts marketing, I am constantly disgusted with how many luddites live in the dance world, both when making, and distrubuting work as well as in how they promote it. This response by Hito was very well received.