State of the Union
We hung up a piñata that had Xeroxed copies of President George W. Bush’s face haphazardly taped on an otherwise generic store bought pumpkin design. Sarah had liberated the Halloween leftover from her office party just a few days before. The idea, however dangerously ill-fated in retrospect, was to introduce some stick-like, or bat-type weapon into a crowd of party-goers drunk on red-state/blue-state Jell-O shots and Budweiser (The Cindy McCain Special) just at the moment that the inevitable Obama victory was confirmed. It never came to that. Just as the band was beginning their set with “A Change Is Gonna Come” and the tiny TV with rabbit ears hooked up to the screening room projector struggled to maintain reception – we all noticed that the animated network graphics on the screen fluttered: “Obama Victory”. I was wearing a blue wig, standing in a crowd of mostly strangers, screaming and being doused in beer by someone spraying a can of bud, when above the sea of indistinguishable bodies I saw several fists emerge and they began beating down the piñata, swinging from the ceiling, with their bare hands.
This spectacle flies in stark contrast to the scene four years earlier. Exhausted and over-extended I sat in my living room with some roommates and watched in horror as John Kerry conceited defeat and Bush secured his reign of oppression for another four years. On my way to class, I got a phone call from my conservative father extending his condolences that “my guy” hadn’t won. With a hoarse, slobbering voice I shouted back into the phone like a rejected lovelorn middle-schooler, “He’s not MY guy!” He wasn’t my guy; he was just a guy, who was cooler than the other guys. And anyway, it’s not like I’m regretful about trying to get a better policy maker into office; about the year’s I had spent protesting an immoral war and defending reproductive freedom; about the months I had spent registering voters; about the fact that the day before I had been in two states mobilizing voters to get out to the polls; documenting all of it with my hi-8 camera – because it wasn’t about that guy or the other guy. It was about something bigger – that my twenty year-old self was better able to explain than I am right now. Something to do with civic responsibility, or art-making, or corporate conglomerates – four years later and I’m a little fuzzy of the details.
Something worth mentioning about life four years ago is that there was no such thing as You Tube. Way back then, some 1,460 days ago, anytime heinous civil rights abuses went down, we would send our tapes to IndyMedia.org. [Video of police marching their horses into a crowd of peaceful ant-war protesters in NYC on Feb. 15, 2003; of the violent attacks by the NYPD on Critical Mass riders on Aug. 28th 2004; of the mass arrests and unlawful detainment of anyone walking the streets of New York during the 2004 Republican National Convention] Even with Google, the internet of 2004 was not the interconnected-social-networking-twittering-viral-video-blogfest contemporary Mecca it is today. Consider the disparity between then and now in this recollection: Two-thirds of the programming at VIDEO D.U.M.B.O in October of 2004 featured video of attacks on protesters – really violent, horrific images, one after the other played to a room of forty people. Then we all went home. This past summer, when an NYPD police officer was caught on camera assaulting a critical mass biker, the video was posted to You Tube, became “viral” (to use the parlance of our times) and the officer was suspended to desk duty shortly thereafter.
If technology is propelled mostly by the consumer driven economy, and the same corporate interests that control the television networks and print media were also the ones pushing laptop computers, cell phone cameras, and various consumer grade electronics like they were the last legal drug – then perhaps the most unintended consequence of this hyper disposable technology boom has been: the democratization of media. There are cameras everywhere – but not exactly in the 1984 context we had all agreed would be the future. When video artists Lynn Sachs and Marc Street presented their work at Union Docs this past fall, Lynn lamented, “A few years ago, when you were on an airplane and the person next to you asked what you do, and you answered ‘I’m a filmmaker’ – they would reply ‘Wow! Have I seen anything you’ve done?’ Now when you tell someone you are a filmmaker they reply, ‘Really? So am I!’”
Now that politically relevant videography is no longer just fodder for the artists and opportunistic tourists, four years later, what is the role of independent media today? New York Media Arts Map lists 100 independent media arts organizations in NYC alone. Terms that were once sanctioned to the lexicon of the few just four years ago, now seem to be a few clicks and key strokes away for anyone below the age of 45 with a high speed internet connection. Terms like “uploading”, “blogging”, “self-publishing”. Four years ago I sat in a classroom and bemoaned the injustices of media monopolies. I stopped being able to watch TV, movies, and read like a normal person thanks to a re-education à la Paper Tiger TV. Paper Tiger TV (PTTV), a group that innovated the video art/independent media landscape in the 1980’s, is still thriving today. But during a PTTV retrospective at Union Docs this fall, this question of relevance was posed to the two presenting members from the organization and the apprehension in their response was palpable to even the most disengaged observer. The two looked at one another for a moment before conceiting that there had been quite a bit of “discussion and debate” surrounding that issue within the group for some time.
So what of the artists and media activists of yesteryear? What is there to say about these vanguards once marginalized to the fringes of filmmaking in the ghetto of “experimental” or “political” work? Maybe it’s fair to say they have been absorbed into the general mass that now possess the same skill set and resources. Is it really necessary to bring your high 8 to the protest when any general bystander with a cell phone camera can and will capture deviant police practices? I keep having this re-occurring thought. That that guy on You Tube, doing the Beyonce dance in that homemade video, is kind of making the same shit that I am – only I think my shit is slightly more conceptual than his. But no judgment here, because he is clearly way better received than I will ever be.
Any joker that calls themselves a video artist or a performance artist or, as I usually refer to myself, “a performance-based video artist,” will tell you how frustrating it is to explain yourself to people outside of the community. Holiday dinners with distant relatives or drunk re-aquaintances with anyone I haven’t seen since high-school usually quickly devolve into the following exchange, “No, I said ‘non-narrative’, never mind, I just make weird videos that I’m usually in.” Needless to say, the conversation will inevitably dissolve with me looking like some kind of intellectual pervert. To this a professor once said to me, “I always tell people that I make unpopular culture.” The canons of “unpopular culture” are antithetical to the persuasions of the mainstream corporate media. Except lately, every time I pick up a mainstream side editing gig, I keep getting instructions like, “make it look weird – and amateurish. Make it look like a regular person made it for You Tube.” That is to say, make it look categorically non-corporate.
The measure of success for any activist endeavor is the obsolescence of the cause. So often when the parameters and details of the environment change we slap on the word “post” so that any discussion on the subject seems quaint, and anyone still steadfast in the cause seems hopelessly antiquated [*see post-feminism & post-racism]. If there is any doubt about success of independent media, look no further than Sunday’s inaugural concert event during which an audience member taped the opening prayer delivered by the first openly gay bishop, Gene Robinson and posted it online. If there is any doubt that the paradigm has not sufficiently shifted, consider that HBO chose not to air that portion of the program.
Four years ago, we kept saying that the potential of the home-video camera as a civic tool had been stunted by its relegation to exclusively the domestic sphere. Four years ago we were also saying that America would never elect a black man or a woman. I guess we were just sort of wrong on both counts. Make no mistake about it, in the words of our nation’s first black President, “There is much work to be done.” Organizers, artists and purveyors of independent media should not become too content, lest the movement become over-run with LOL cats. Although during this pivotal time in a nation’s history, I find it appropriate to acknowledge that the fruits of a piñata are always more easily accessible and sweeter once the piñata has been cracked open by the drunken fists of the downwardly mobile digital generation.
Party on Wayne.
Posted in: Writing and Interviews.