Media rodeo 32: Checks and stripes
Speak Now: Joan Jonas @ Lenfest Center, 6 February 2025
https://www.lenfest.arts.columbia.edu/spring-2025-events/speak-now-joan-jonas
Kind of curious… I loved her 2024 retrospective at MoMA. Devoting an entire floor and a number of winding galleries to her virtuosic range of work allows the visitor to wander through years of Jonas’ whimsy at their own pace. Personally, I spent more time with her found objects and seminal mirror performances; I was content to breeze through rooms like some of her recent marine work.
Seeing Jonas speak was interesting! Most of the talk involved her showing video works and speaking briefly about how they were produced. Seeing so many works, one after the other, made me think about desire over time, the signification of desire, the source of the image’s power. Jonas mentioned that she was motivated early in her career by attempting to locate a female imagery; there’s something to be said about her use of material in conversation with artists like Judy Chicago.
Most off-putting, however, was the way Jonas describes her relationship to her objects of study. I can only describe it as a sort of deferred nostalgia for the ‘primitive’. Like MoMA’s 1984 show Primitivism, Jonas’s appreciation of non-western, folk objects relies on the idea that they anticipate the conceits of modern art. The masks that Picasso saw at the Trocadero—in this normative art history—are not valuable in their own right but because they will someday have inspired another artist. The nostalgic fantasy of a virtuosic primitivism suspends the found object in an entropic matrix; the contemporary artist is transformed into simultaneous historian and critic with a perversely parasitic relationship to aesthetic decay. Jonas doesn’t always do this! But especially the mirrors… I am reminded of Robert Smithson’s Yucatan mirrors, a similar expropriation of value from a landscape fantasized to be Other.
Maybe that doesn’t make any sense. But regardless, I enjoy Jonas’s art much more than how she talked about it here.
Millennium Mambo, 2001, dir. Hou Hsiao-hsien
https://letterboxd.com/film/millennium-mambo/
I’ve written about this before. I love Millennium Mambo. I saw it in a theater for the first time recently. It’s easy to remember the phenomenal soundtrack, the depiction of relation over time, and the beauty of the film. I was reminded of how dark much of it is. Saw it on Valentine’s Day…
My new thought is that the climax of Millennium Mambo is when Vicky and the Takeuchi brothers make face prints in the snow. After so much time has passed, the return to this relationship is relieving. Vicky visits the brothers’ hometown in Japan for its annual winter film festival. That one song plays and they embody nothing but joy. Millennium Mambo’s narrative progression does not end with the snow face prints, but it returns to that narrower, violent path that the movie largely explores. Perhaps the final moment—Vicky in the apartment that Jack left for her—rivals the melancholy of a joyous moment in the snow. Again, the sadness comes from the sacrifice involved in the satisfaction of desire. Curious… something to do with desire containing its own frustration… inverted!
Very beautiful. Great music. Seeing this in the theater is a completely different relationship to the film.
Dune, 1984, dir. David Lynch
https://letterboxd.com/benerdmann/film/dune/
Awesome! Very pretty. Dune is at its best when it does the monumental aesthetic that the books encourage; moments like the prescience visions, Alia’s appearance in the finale, or the baroque entrance to an otherwise supermassive, flat, grey guild freighter (my favorite shot!) are amazing. Lynch is exceptionally inventive here, working between now archaic CGI and painstakingly detailed practical effects. There are so many unique artifacts for the nostalgic viewer hidden away in Lynch’s Dune, from Sting as Feyd-Rautha to the soundtrack that is undeniably by Toto to the theme composed by Brian Eno.
That said, this movie loses a lot of the complexity of Herbert’s novels. Lynch attempts to adapt the entire first book—Dune—into two hours and change. He includes inner dialogue as quiet voiceovers, but the clunkiness removes the viewer from the narrative setting of the film. Characters like Chani and Stilgar are nothing but tools that propel Paul’s story forward; where Lynch tells the story of Paul, I appreciate that the Villeneuve tells the story of Dune. A friend argued that this version of the movie avoids the hyperdramatization that undercuts many films today, which I agree with—it’s part of the charm of these 70s, 80s, and 90s science fiction films, and a refreshing narrative style in comparison to contemporary film. Yet, the intensely character-driven nature of Dune is tied up in the drama of the story, and allowing too much of that to fall by the wayside undermines Lynch’s Dune.
Nonetheless, this is a science fiction must-watch. Irulan’s voiceover is done rather artfully and is reminiscent of films like the original 1982 test cut of Blade Runner. The scope of the film explodes past even what Star Wars did in 1977. Lynch’s refusal to explain—Ix, guild navigators, the Atreides/Harkonnen dualism—is mostly helpful here, drawing the viewer in with the promise of a universe that will never be fully revealed. Really good! It drags at times, but worth a watch for Dune fans, Lynch fans, and science fiction fans.