Page 15 - Studio International - July August 1973

gives rise to a web, but a different web, of (The empiricism of de Antonio's camera and achieves a characterological symbolism, through
perceptions and meanings shared by film-makers sound is in the service of this dialectical the emphasis on comparison from respondent
bound by similar relationships to an art form reflection. The aspiration of documentary to respondent on given points coupled with a
whose primary function is commercial neutrality and supra-historical validity, and the correlative de-emphasis on long takes,
exploitation through the widest possible correlative shibboleth of irrepressible individual respondent continuity within an
exhibition of multiple prints. subjectivism, which characterize the cinema interview, and psychological speculation. (He
Rare is the artist who is fully cognizant of Write documentarian and their films, are uses perhaps one twentieth of his interview
these abstract interpretive tools. Emile de dilemmas of positivism which de Antonio, as a footage.) All respondents represent themselves
Antonio, a social critic of received dogmas, marxist, has coolly rejected as falsely premised.) concretely in their relationship to the art world,
mores, and political ideologies, is such an The collage technique which he employs is a but simultaneously they epitomize, even
artist and thereby earns the right to call his film materialist artistic strategy for binding together inadvertently, the components of that gerund,
a personal recollection of the art world of the empirical observations, manifest 'object `painting'. This effect of abstraction through
194os, 5os, and 6os. Personal, not because it matter,' in order that the relationships among epitomization is heightened when the
is subjective, selective, or tendentious, but them, latent 'subject matter', emerge clearly characters are comic in their actions and their
personal because it is an explication of one and concretely as facts of historical life. (In speech. The clapboard, 'Leo Castelli, Take
gerund by the cognition arising within another. this way he avoids the Platonic error pervading One', is a minor example. But Philip Johnson
That is, it is a recollection of unique art by `social' or realistic cinema which proceeds from emerges through his puffery as the unwitting
reproducible, ineluctably commercial, art. a reliance on the object-image ontological ideologist of the ruling class stating tendentious
His presence in the film is more than a simple identity to what Georg Lukacs calls 'a theory assertions as Platonic truths, like the business
iconic reference to the adjective, 'personal'. It of the artistic imitation of "ideas","Art and about the universality of the 'itch to emulate' in
is bound up with the idea that the film-maker Objective Truth,' Writer and Critic, p 41.) our society. Robert Scull is the Balzacian
gains his understanding within the activity of De Antonio does not, cannot, photograph a bourgeois who exploits his stable of young
film-making itself. `social relation', a 'social law', or even a simple artists in their studios and then construes his
But in Painters Painting the opposition gerund, such as 'painting'. He simply pieces patronage romantically as the story of the
between painting and film-making is not so together a concrete human content to achieve a patron of the arts who helps the struggling
crude as all that, nor the personal nature of the truthful structural scale. artist by ameliorating his poverty — rather than
recollection so mechanistically marxist. In fact His real subject matter, what perhaps is fair exploiting it. Poons in his rebuttal to Scull:
the opposite is the case, because de Antonio to call the dynamics of whole social systems, what ? The ingrate ? The independent artiste?
has been able to see in the problems of painting only emerges through the operation of the Another ideology ?' de Antonio does not even
and the pronouncements of painters analogs of collage technique on his empirical 'object spare himself in this regard and makes the
issues in his own work as a film-maker. matter'. It is the relationships among the parts, nature of his personal involvement in Painters
He begins to deal with these analogs very the shots, which his movie is about. Hence the Painting more ambiguous by cut — from the
early in the film. Subject matter is a case in feeling of kinship between his art and New York Scull-Poons debate to himself playing Scull to
point. De Antonio's films are too easy to see, painting. Hence the placement near the film's Andy Warhol's Poons:
and have too often been seen — and Painters beginning of Barnett Newman's discussion of Warhol : de, you made me a painter.'
Painting will be no exception — as essentially the problematic nature of 'object matter' for de Antonio : Now cut . . . The real things.'
formally neutral vessels for the documentation painting and his assertion that scale is achieved Perhaps what de Antonio told Warhol, the
of historical subject matter. Viewers separate through content. (The assertion is repeated as a commercial artist of the fifties, was that painting
the content from its mode of presentation, voice-over — Newman being now deceased — as in its fullest sense was commercial art too, being
which is untenable. (Sartre points out that facts the film's final image. The picture shows enmeshed in commercial relations, and much
have no truth or falsity but as they are spectators among the paintings in the better paid at that.
interrelated through some structured Metropolitan. Quite literally they serve as Besides the construing of painting as a
perception, and we have already noted that human measures of the paintings' scale.) complex of activities and relations, the
perception arises through alienative practice, In the same way Larry Poons appears near materialist practice of collage, and the Brechtian
the gerunds.) When de Antonio's films are not the film's conclusion in the only art-making characterological treatment of real persons,
perceived as formally neutral, viewers and participle in the film. Another analog for there is yet a fourth dimension to Painters
reviewers report the obverse perception, that film-making, Poons is 'editing' a painting and he Painting. That is an internal excellence which is
they are propagandistic. Of course neither places his hands before his eyes in the familiar based of course in part on de Antonio's
perception is correct. gestural metaphor of the motion picture control of the epistemological and aesthetic
That this film in particular, concerning an director at work, framing his subject. elements in his work. But also it is based on his
avant garde which casually ignored by the In another sequence Jules Olitski discusses established practice of serendipitous discovery
overwhelming majority of the population of cropping paintings while Mary Lampson's and skilful exploitation of fortuities within the
the United States, might be a mere presentation microphone, recording what Olitski is saying, vast quantity of material his cameraman, Ed
of content not only flies in the face of the intrudes from the right edge of the screen. It too Emschwiller, exposes. (De Antonio neither
economics of motion pictures but also ignores could have been cropped. shoots film nor records sound himself.)
the battle of this very avant garde to gain The loss of control of paintings to museums In Painters Painting's synthetic collage we
recognition for an art in which new, more and through dealers, all discussed in the film, have the best use of a camera pan we are likely
complex relations of content and structure mirrors the film-makers' traditional loss of print to see in 1973. It begins on a wall and, travelling
exist. Furthermore a selection of New York control to distributors. right, crosses Robert Rauschenberg's Rebus,
art-world gossip and criticism, besides being There is yet another dimension to this continues onto the white wall to the right of the
relatively unsaleable, would be a stupid picture. personal recollection, the Brechtian painting. On the sound-track de Antonio has
Rather in Painters Painting, and in all his half dimension, for de Antonio, though a cut together Henry Geldzahler calling Rebus
dozen political films, de Antonio has been documentary film-maker, is nonetheless a (1955) a puzzle, an anthology of possibilities
interested in making reflections of aspects of leading exponent of Brechtian caricature,ras which was proto-Pop, and Rauschenberg
American society, the structural revelatory of the dynamics of society as himself explaining that he used the coloured
interrelatedness, the strategies, tactics, and Lukacsian structural analysis. Again this is comic section of the newspaper in Rebus as an
techniques, which can be perceived rationally. involved with de Antonio's cutting, by which he `on-going surface' on which to paint, and his