Workshop #8

Our eighth meeting began with Philip finally caving in to provide an elegant boxed invitation that I had wanted him to show as an example of a potent, intentional, communicative object. It was very nice, and thank you Philip. We took up the question of the Culture Industry in a time of multi-source user-produced culture. I repeated my pessimism about this new condition and claimed that we are now the producers of our own isolation — workers in the culture “cottage industry.” The group was invited to offer some reasons for optimism, counter examples to this pessimistic assessment.

Marcus pointed out that digital production has put him in touch with large groups of like-minded users — for example, 100 or so others who share his obsession with a very specific era of psychedelic album covers — and thus remedied an isolation he, and every other obscure hobbyist, would have felt throughout the pre-Internet era. Playing Devil’s advocate, I said this was a very narrow group, essentially a projection of Marcus’s own subjectivity. To immediately find everyone who shares your most peculiar, narrow desires is not a remedy to isolation; it is a machine for turning the otherwise heterogeneous world into a mirror of your own subjectivity. Chris countered that he found a similarly large and engaging community on Dennis Cooper’s blog and that, contrary to my assessment, they were a heterogeneous and surprising lot. Dennis’s attentiveness and modesty in the forum — his ability to be a good online host to many divergent guests — was credited with enabling this mix. Rob pointed out that these shared activities of production give us pleasure and stimulate the creative engines of our brains.

Others were going to chime in, but (perhaps fearing the onset of an incurable optimism) I shut down the conversation by noting that the role of a medium in any artistic work is, at least in part, to resist the will of the artist. The medium translates our subjective desires into objective art by contravening us, by frustrating our desires. The example of marble or steel is an obvious one, where the artist must deal with the capacities of the medium in order to go from intentions to completion of the work. Equally, language resists us. In this light, the ideal of the virtual world — to make an intervening medium that answers completely and immediately to the desires of the user — would be the death of art. I acknowledged that no medium achieves this ideal, and perhaps my impression of the virtual world being such an arena of unfettered desire might come from my ignorance of the difficulties of really working in that medium.

Then our guest for the evening, Gus Van Sant, arrived with his friend Bobby, a screenwriter from Los Angeles visiting to see if he wants to move to Portland. Gus was so interesting and so generous with his time that we took advantage of it and talked with him for the next two-and-a-half hours. There was much to talk about and we only scratched the surface, but the scratching began with Gus’s early recognition that as a painter (studying painting at the Rhode Island School of Design) his prospects for employment were bleak. Like many of his classmates, including ¾ of the Talking Heads, he decided to do his work, essentially the same work, in a different medium. At first (partly under the influence of a then thriving film arts scene, typified by the work of Stan Brakhage), he literally painted with film. He painted on the film; he projected light through film to make painterly surfaces; and he created “abstract visual” work with film.

Then he moved to LA in, I believe, 1976. (This truncated bio is partly Gus’s summary and partly my own poor listening skills. I’m sure there are some online sources for this same story…) He wanted to work in Hollywood and understand that way of making movies so he took a job with Ken Shapiro, the maverick creator of The Groove Tube, a mainstream/counter-culture movie whose success earned Shapiro studio support for a follow-up hit. Gus would be his assistant. “I rolled the joints,” he told us, explaining his place in the stoned circle of very talented comedy writers that Shapiro had gathered around his new project. Shapiro worked inside the studio system, but he did so from a seeming “outsider” position, pursuing quixotic artistic goals. In that way, Gus’s time with him was a savvy choice, exposing him to the dynamics of some Hollywood business relationships that he would also (later) push to unusual ends.

That summer he and his friend Eric got jobs on a film crew in Portland, for Penny Allen’s film Property. The crew was paid by CETA, a now-defunct public subsidy for employment training that Gus described as “welfare for people who don’t qualify for welfare.” Allen’s crew and project were very “community based,” casting local characters such as Walt Curtis to, essentially, play themselves in a drama about gentrification and exclusion from the housing market. This low-budget feature film-making experience was also a seminal one for Gus, and it is possible to see his later choices about film-making as combining the lessons of Shapiro/Hollywood and Allen/Portland. In the rich intersection of these two approaches, he has made an idiosyncratic and deeply subjective body of films that nevertheless has reached a vast, divergent audience around the globe.

In discussing the way those films got made we touched briefly on his early short, The Discipline of DE, which came about when he contacted William Burroughs by cold-calling him and then visiting to talk and ask for film rights. Gus got the rights for free because, as Burroughs told him, “there’s no money in short films.” He made the 9 minute movie on 16 mm, doing nearly everything himself. Gus’s second feature (and his first to be released), Mala Noche, was made in the mid-80s through similar means, but with a crew. (Gus says that getting film rights from the story’s author, Walt Curtis, was much harder than getting film rights from Burroughs.) As with the short, Gus cobbled together funding from friends, family, and savings. He made the film in Portland with a crew that borrowed heavily from the Penny Allen shoot.

Mala Noche was meant to reach audiences through film festivals and, via that exposure, through distributors who would place it in “art house” cinemas (a typical feature of most big cities and college towns back then, where two or three different movies would play each day, usually foreign films and independently made features; Cinema 21 is the evolved version of this once-common part of the distribution landscape). It did so, most notably through inclusion in a Los Angeles-based gay and lesbian film festival that Gus tried hard to get out of. He had heard they were unreliable and would “lose prints;” but his efforts failed and the film showed, winning a key award and the support of critics and distributors who helped make it a success. It did well enough that Gus was able to get backing for his next feature, Drugstore Cowboy.

The financial success of Drugstore Cowboy set Gus up to be able to get funding for his idiosyncratic films, so long as he played the studio game of securing the right “bigger name” actors. Funding came, he said, because he could get the right actors to sign on and the studios could then bank on the actors. Gus described the roller coaster ride of the next decade or so — where his reputation (and power) within Hollywood soared and plummeted as each film (all of them idiosyncratically his) succeeded or failed — as a process of sticking with his ideas, even if it meant waiting out a drought of studio doubts until he next proved his worth again. Thus he was able to make his bizarre re-shoot of Psycho by bringing it up again and again, until he got the go-ahead right after Good Will Hunting had its great success.

Throughout this time, he has continued making small films and videos, sometimes commercially (music videos and ads) and also non-commercially (increasingly, now, using the movie function on his small digital camera). He’s also continued making movies in Portland (though not exclusively), enacting his own version of the approach he encountered with Penny Allen, using non-actors and a crew that’s at least partly based here.

Some interesting things that came out, in regard to our workshop’s subject, were Gus’s belief that movies will be an obsolete form soon — not just film (though that’s heading out soon) but the convention of making feature-length story movies that one sits and watches. Gus sees the vitality of online gaming, its aesthetics, and the sociability of gaming environments, as potent models for future visual entertainments. He recalled playing Doom and being astonished when, moments into the game, he was “blown away by some 14-year old girl in Minnesota.”

He believes that most people who succeed and become visible within the movie-making economy are savvy about the logic of that economy and work hard to manipulate it to their advantage. Certainly this is true of himself, though he didn’t say so; from the very first he has made canny choices and shown great insight into the question of sustaining a career. Considering the range of films he’s made and the reach those films have had, I would even say he is a genius at using that system.

He reminded us that its important to stick to one’s own impulses and not let ourselves become divided or confused by guessing what a hypothetical audience (or anyone else) might want. The work can only succeed if it is clearly yours. The audience has to come to it, not the other way around; and they can only see it and come to it, if it’s clear about its interests. I added that these interests, the real center of anyone’s work — unsullied by attempts to please others — are inevitably very embarrassing to the artist. Since some wag said that was just my problem, I realize that I expressed my point poorly — I meant that the real core focus of one’s own work is always indefensible. When we find what our desire or obsession or curiosity is, that focus will never be explainable to others; we are unable to defend its importance against any accusation it is trivial or wrong. (That’s the discomfort, the embarrassment.) Contrarily, whenever we find a focus for our work that we feel we can defend or argue for, we’re probably straying away from our real interests. Real interests are indefensible. Try to work in a way that you can’t defend or argue for.

I invite the rest of you to add any of the many other insights Gus offered us, here, as comments/addenda to my incomplete account.

Next week we meet on Thursday December 7. Our guest will be Mikey Merrill of Urban Honking. Please bring a laptop if you have one, preferably with wireless capability. And start thinking about the features of a class website that you’d like to take advantage of during the eternity that lies ahead in which our primary contact and aid to one another will be via the website. What do we need for our work for the future?