Expanded Cinema and Narrative, Jackie Hatfield

Some Reasons for a Review of the Avant-Garde Debates Around Narrativity

Printed in MFJ No. 39/40 (Winter 2003) Hidden Currents


In the second half of the twentieth century the history and theory of experimental film and video was written with a bias towards modernist material concerns stemming from Clement Greenberg’s modernist position and material specific ideas. Similar to other art forms, a schematized formal history has been predominant, with rules laid down in various texts about which artists followed whom. Although it is not materially film or video, I aim here to discuss how interactive moving image practice and its ancestors, expanded cinema, media and performance, have been excluded from the main theoretical arguments that have shaped the histories of experimental film and video. Of course, I acknowledge the historical writings that are pluralistic and celebrate hybridity, for example Gene Youngblood’s Expanded Cinema and Douglas Davis’ Art and the Future, but they are few and far between. Here I am concentrating on the canonical arguments laid down by historians and film theoreticians and why I think they are problematic to future experimentation. Furthermore, I am arguing that the historical uncertainties around the relationship between narrative and the avant-garde have created a reductive climate for experimentation with narrativity. I am concerned with charting the avant-garde that has been multi-screen, narrative, pro-illusion and pro-representation, since expanded cinema and interactive cinema have often been an exploration of all of these elements. I will outline the supposed lineages that have been used to categorize experimental film and video, and why I believe that these ideological positions must be reviewed in the light of current interactive practice, but also in relation to experimental cinema as a whole. The bottom line is that I am against categorizations and lineages that have become institutional, and which have been taken up by curators or funding bodies where they are used to corral individual artists’ work into groupings, and inevitably serve to write artists in and out of history. My position is an artists reaction - no, a manifesto- against conservative positions in a quest for expanded cinema to be given its rightful status, a central position within experimental film and video history. Artists have often struggled against the institutional or the state funded and yes, theoretical and historical texts around practice do affect artists, who need validation and acknowledgement of their work.
Importantly, what needs to be recognized is that in practice experimental film and video, rather than drawing purely from the anti-narrative driven avant-garde, have also derived from the narrative traditions of intermedia and mechanistic invention in primitive film. Though not included in the canonical histories, narrative has been a central aspect of cinematic experimentation often in relation to interactive, expanded, performative and importantly, technological experimentation. For example the highly regarded and seminal volume of P. Adams Sitney’s Visionary Film was written with a bias towards single-screen work, and while I accept that there are narrative dimensions to Anger, Deren, Brakhage, Warhol and Markopoulos who are part of the American canon, it is largely the definition of narrative that I take issue with and the uncertainties about the real intricacies of narrativity. The general tone within avant-garde debates has been that artists were against narrative continuity and conventional cause and effect structures, and the focus has been on work that that can be interpreted as anti-narrative or "liberated" 1 from the "demands of narrative continuity" 2 . This position can be seen more clearly within the British texts, stemming from the structural materialists and epitomized by Peter Gidal’s influential book Structural Materialist Film (1989). On the other hand while the theories have been preoccupied with the anti-narrative stance, artists have often been both pro- and anti-narrative. For example, omitted from the canonical histories were the experiments with expanded cinema, narrative and performance that took place within the movements of Futurism, Dada, Bauhaus, at the Black Mountain College, with the Fluxus group and crucially the art and technology experiments in the 60s and 70s, epitomized by the pioneering activity of the engineer Billy Klüver and E.A.T. at "Nine Evenings: Theatre and Engineering" in New York in 1966.
It was through discussion with my students and with film and video artists that I realized that the seminal single screen based histories laid down by only a few people were in fact acting to define the whole sector for future generations. There are notable exceptions, for example Warhol’s Chelsea Girls, which has been widely acknowledged, but there is a difference between this kind of double screen formation and expanded work where the screens are part of a space, i.e. where the proscenium arch is removed. There are few contexts where artists can experiment with and be innovators of technology and cinema, I believe it needs a concerted effort by institutions and funding bodies to be aware of the history of artists’ endeavors in this area, but more importantly, to support them. I suggest that these two questions be addressed:
What is cinema if it is not film? And what is the history and status of interactive expanded cinema, technological invention, and narrative experimentation within the history and theory of the experimental avant-garde?
Although cinema‚ in itself, is synonymous with spectacle, vaudeville, theatre, circus, performance, narrative, and audience; structuralist filmmakers and conceptual artists of the 1960s and 1970s took a position that was anti-illusion, and the critique and theory around film and video created a modernist-oriented climate for the practice. Artists’ use of video in the early 1960s also initiated debate to determine how film was different from video, and vice versa. Artists and theorists alike were establishing characteristics that were specific to the mediums, much in the same way that Greenberg had defined the "flatness" of a painting as being "the only condition painting shared with no other art." 3 There were a number of key texts by artists that categorized experimental film around its material specificity; these have included, for example, Peter Gidal’s Structural Materialist Film (1989), The Structural Film Anthology (1976), Hans Richter’s The Struggle for Film(1986), and Malcolm LeGrice’s Abstract Film and Beyond(1977). Similarly, in the 1970s there were concerns with video’s intrinsic qualities. For instance, one of video’s distinct characteristics was seen to be its relationship to television. Frank Gillette wrote, "What I’m consciously involved in is devising a way that is structurally intrinsic to television. For example, what makes it not film?" 4 A review of articles such as David Antin’s "Video: the Distinctive Features of the Medium," David Hall’s "British Video Art: Towards an Autonomous Practice" and the catalogue of "The Video Show" at the Serpentine Gallery in 1975 suggest an atmosphere late modernist in tone. Hall has argued that artists were "constructing alternative frameworks and procedures out of the prevailing climate," 5 and that in retrospect the early work was more conceptual than formal. Nevertheless in the UK there were two distinct material specific histories forming around film and video practice of the 1970s that were institutionalized around the London Filmmakers Coop and London Video Arts. Although in the last few years there has been a convergence of these technologies, the material status of film in relation to video and other forms continues to be debated by those who are in love with film as film. The historical lines of demarcation between film and video are problematic, as any preoccupation with filmic-ness located in the material is missing the point. For example, I would prefer to use the term cinematic to describe what I do as an artist. I do not use film, but I do make cinema -- it moves, it is composed of moving images. Bill Viola makes cinematic work, although working electronically; Chris Hales, Malcolm LeGrice and Grahame Weinbren make cinematic work although working electronically and digitally. The formal distinctions with their intrinsic qualities became edifices in the UK for practice and distribution but they were a myth.
As well as the material distinctions insisted on through the 60s, 70s and 80s, there were some influential texts that sought to define experimental film and video further, and it is these conceptual bases that have since become dogma that need to be re-addressed alongside the resulting political outcome. To consider this relative to its historical context, it is important to say that in London David Curtis, Malcolm Le Grice and Peter Wollen were seeking to give film status within fine art practice at the time, and clearly it was their endeavors that were extremely influential on the setting up of the agencies to fund experimental filmmaking. The position developed by these men and their colleagues have had enormous influence on the funding practices of the public agencies of the British Film Institute and the Arts Council of Great Britain (now the Arts Council of England), neither of which function anymore as providers of funding specifically for artists moving image. In "The Two-Avant Gardesâ" published in Studio International 1975, Peter Wollen argued for specific distinctions in avant-garde practices. He established a lineage from abstract painting for what he called the first avant-garde, which he defined by the absence of verbal language and narrative. The second avant-garde remained within the bounds of narrative cinema. He claimed that divisions could be made along the lines of "aesthetic assumptions, institutional framework, type of financial support, type of critical backing, historical and cultural origin," 6 and the institutional and, furthermore, regional frameworks that Wollen referred to were the New York and London Filmmakers Co-ops. Wollen argued that to be included within the first avant-garde the work had to be non-narrative and anti-illusionist, and there were no anomalies to his clear line of demarcation extending through history. Furthermore the work he argued must also have been made, distributed, critiqued or funded within or around the London or New York Filmmakers Coops, and stated that "New York is clearly thecapital of the Co-op movement." 7 So to give an example of how this might have worked, an artist in Scotland or Ireland would have had to distribute their non-narrative work from the London or New York Filmmakers Coop to be considered part of Wollen’s first avant-garde, and be funded by one of the public agencies. Consequently the formal arguments and ideological politics affected practice, either through access to the technology or the distribution network, or through validation by the peer group through funding channels. Wollen’s reviews of experimental film would not have been so problematic for the continuation of avant-garde film and video practice if they had not been used as indicators for what was avant-garde and what was not.
A further influential essay of its time was Peter Gidal’s 1976 "Theory and Definition of Structural/Materialist Film."’ Here Gidal stated that "an avant-garde film defined by its development towards increased materialism and materialist function does not represent, or document, anything." 8 At the time he was almost puritanical in his arguments for a continual attempt to destroy illusionism in his drive to validate film as film. Again, GidalÕs position was representative of ideas that characterized avant-garde film debates in the late 1960s and 1970s. As well as artists’ various approaches to narrative, the history of multiple projection environments, including performance, challenged theorist’s assumptions about the anti-illusionism and anti-narrativity of the avant-garde. After all, what is narrative? There are contradictions as it can be argued that narrative exists as soon as there is a representational image or as soon as there is a subject present. So for example when we see a performance as part of a screening, or when we experience expanded cinema, the bodies of the performer or audience are physically present as living embodiments of their narrative histories, we come from a narrative place. My point is that the definition of opposition to narrative has never been resolved; the lines of demarcation never quite clear.
As I have suggested, the categorizations of Wollen and the general tone epitomized by Gidal around narrativity were not reflected so literally in the actual work of artists either in the UK or US. Artists who gravitated towards film from performance, theatre and dance aimed to expand the theatre stage from the proscenium arch out towards the audience to create happenings or situations that included them as part of the event. For example, in 1958 the ONCE group from Ann Arbor Michigan used environmental projection with performance to "free film from its flat frontal orientation." 9 In 1965, Robert Whitman made Prune Flat, a synchronized projection and performance, and Aldo Tambellini used multiple projections to create electromedia environments. In 1967 Carolee Schneeman staged active performance-oriented cinematic spectacles such as Night Crawlers and Snows, and in 1969 John Cage and Ronald Nameth presented HPSCHD, a multi-media extravaganza that included one hundred films. In the late 1960s the group set up by Robert Rauschenberg and the engineer Billy KlŸver, Experiments in Art and Technology (EAT), staged interactive installations extending the potentiality of art towards an inclusive experience for the viewer, incorporating technological experimentation as part of the event. As one of the works in Nine Evenings of ‘66, Oyvind Fahlstrom’s Kisses Sweeter Than Wine was an extraordinary artwork incorporating technological, synaesthetic, narrative, and performative experimentation. 10
In the UK expanded work was becoming publicly quite visible and some of the uncertainties around narrativity were being aired. In the 1970s, artists like Anabel Nicolson described her work in progress "the wooden camera and projector will also be used as elements in a situation where viewers and performers/film stars will be the sameâ" 11 and Malcolm LeGrice, were incorporating performance with film and also questioning the boundaries between audience and artwork. In Reel Time (1973) Nicolson famously performed with a sewing machine and projector and projected film of a sewing machine in operation, which was simultaneously sewn into a real sewing machine. 12 At the important show "Perspectives on British Avant-Garde Film" in 1977 at the Hayward Gallery there was a great variety of filmmaking reflected in the films from the period 1967-77. Although much of the work played with narrative, performance, and audience expectation and was placed in various other categories, the sections "The Avant-Garde and Narrative" and "Deconstructed Narrative" acknowledged some of the ambiguities around narrativity. In addition, the commentary in the catalogue, the many discussions, as well as the work itself, reflected the real diversity in the artists’ approaches to performance, narrative, and the screen space. The exhibition included expanded cinema, and performance-oriented (i.e., audience or artist), and narrative work (in the widest sense). There was performance based work by Stuart Brisley (Arbeit Macht Frei 77), and Jeff Keen’s (White Dust), which was collage, imagistic, narrative, and performative, and which Tony Rayns described in the catalogue as "an homage to vintage movie serials, a form with very specific, very idiosyncratic narrative conventions [that] can only be described as collage narrative." 13 In relation to the theoretical debates of the time Keen’s multi-layered, multi-screened, projections on projections could be described as pro narrative and representational, and not at all anti-narrative. Sensorial and expanded, Ray Day Film, absorbed the viewer into Keen’s interpretation of kitsch horror and Americanized comic book narratives. Also there was Marilyn Halford’s work, frequently performative, including New Sketchesand Ten Green Bottleswhich was by Deke Dusinberre’s account from the show catalogue an interactive film where the audience "assume that participatory role by playing a child’s game," 14 and described her films as "simple, subversive and wryly humorous; in addition they explore those aesthetic issues which inform all of British avant-garde film-making." 15 Work by Halford included Hands Knees and Boomsa-Daisy (1973) which Halford described as "gaming with a screen image of myself," 16 Footsteps (1974) described as a "game in the making," 17 between the camera and actor, about which Halford said "I am interested in the relationship of theatrical devices in film working at tangents with its abstract visual qualities" 18 and for Rehearsals (1976) "my interests are in the theatrical devices and repeated movement between actors through rehearsalsâ and to present them theatrically." 19 In video terms, expanded work of the late 70s, tended to be modernist in tone, with a focus on time, space and television, but shows like "The Video Showâ" at the Serpentine Gallery in 1975 showcased all kinds of video, including expanded, interactive, representational and cinematic, e.g. Valie Export’s Space Hearing and Space Seeingâ Tamara Krikorian’s Breeze, and Hermine Freed’s Art Herstory.
What I’m trying to demonstrate by listing just some of these works is that despite the modernist thrust of the writing with an emphasis on the lineage of purist and non-imagistic anti-narrative practice, what actually went on was totally different. Rather than this history being weighted towards anti-narrative, the reality has been that, beginning with the Futurists and the Surrealists, through to Fluxus, and to date, artists have played around with narrative rather than being predominantly against it. In actual fact the history of artists’ experimentation with narrativity, representation, interactivity and technology as part of the experimental avant-garde, is un-accounted for and unwritten. Therefore, looking at the work retrospectively the extraordinary and imagistic, textural and sensuous works of LeGrice and Nicolson, seem to bear no relationship to the dry formalist climate around them. Nicolson’s Slides (1970) was lyrical and physical, layered and colorful, teasing the viewer into looking for representation within the filmic-ness. She shows us the process, we see the slippage of the film through the gate, the sprocket holes and the material flicker. We get glimpses of a figure. We are waiting for these fragments to re-appear and are conscious of film’s capacity to record a representation relative to the artist’s action in manipulating the film as a painterly event. Threshold(1972) by LeGrice is a three-screen work including performance, where the artist changes the configuration of the screens by moving the projectors around. This piece is vibrant in color, and imagistic, sumptuous and beautiful. The sound is fragmented, and edited like the image and color into tonal rhythms and cadences. There is representation, and reference to the external world, and it is processed and layered, drawing us in. This work is not about the absence of representation, but the richness of it when it finally appears. Rainbow colors, layers and movement, are pieced together, a rich tapestry of image and sound, figures become shapes and multiply into crowds. It is a work that speaks of the artist and of the process but also the representational and narrative world, and performed live, this work is a physical meeting of artwork, artist and audience. And also with Footsteps (1974), Marilyn Halford toys with the viewer’s expectation of cinema and their place in relation to the screen and the camera. The opening shots are in negative, the figure, a woman, turns to look at the camera, and we seem to be creeping up on her. We ask, who is behind the camera? The figure turns away, then we get nearer, and we realize that we are implicated in a game of statues with the woman. There isn’t any montage, just a cut and a second section, which is the same as the first, but positive this time, with music added. We are reminded of the silent films, ‘primitive’ cinema, games and early American movies. The film is processed to look ‘old’, dragged through dust and grained to appear ancient and crackly. So while these works are structural and formal they are also narrative, they reference cinema, film, and representation, and ask us to question them relative to that.
Although an important and much welcome history of single screen film and video, the tone of the anti-narrative stance has been reiterated more recently in A History of Experimental Film and Video (1999) by Al Rees. I don’t want to be too critical of Rees, since he is the only person lately who has attempted to write an historical overview of the sector, and he is dealing with a minefield trying not to leave anyone out. However, I have one point of contention with his historical lines of demarcation around narrativity, since his views are widespread and influential. Although it is a small point within an otherwise evenhanded historical review of the theories, Rees referred to the "artists’ avant-garde," 20 and discusses the issue of experimental narrative, and its distinctiveness as an "art form," 21 from the "avant-garde." 22 He included within the "art cinema"â as opposed to the "artists’ avant-garde," 23 Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Delluc, Dulac, and Gance. Rees described Richard Abel’s distinctions between the artistsâ avant-garde and the art cinema or narrative avant-garde, and made his own distinctions, "the rise of narrative, psychological realism in the maturing Art Cinema led to its gradual split from the anti-narrative artists’ avant-garde." 24 In Rees’s definition the artists’ avant-garde has again been aligned with anti-narrativization and non-drama. His arguments have been based on the supposed lines of demarcation between dramatic narrative and experimental film. He argued that "the continuous flow of images that editing permits, and which is the basis of dramatic illusionism in film, is in contrast to the equal power of film editing to enforce breaks and interruptions in that flow," 25 and that "the role of experimental film was to push the distinction to its limits." 26 My reading of Rees’s distinction was that while drama based film had narrative expectation built into it, the artists’ avant-garde used illusionism and narrative against themselves‚ i.e. drama was narrative, experimental film was anti-narrative. The problem is, it was along similar lines of definition that the majority of women’s practice of the 1970s and 80s was marginalized as being narrative and therefore not art (i.e. not coming from the abstract or formal film) and not part of the purism debate. This reductive positioning of narrative was challenged by feminist groups in the 70s and 80s who consequently set about distributing work through their own organizations, for example, Circles and Cinenova (UK), Women Make Movies (US), Video Femmes (Canada). Much of women’s practice of the 70s & 80s was narrative-driven, certainly political, and often oppositional, and there is space for an extensive historical review to write this work into the avant-garde. Although some of the work was supported institutionally and debated in the UK as the new pluralism, many of these important works have subsequently been written out of the history, for example, the experimental narrative and performative work of artists like Gill Eatherley and Marilyn Halford and later Rita Keegan, Pratibha Parma, Zoe Redman and Marion Urch to name but a few.
In relation to the formal and material arguments and the narrative distinctions, I believe that in the UK little seems to have changed in forty years and there is currently a sense of déjà vu. Consider the position of women involved with the avant-garde in the 60s, 70s and 80s. In 1979 Anabel Nicolson, Lis Rhodes, Felicity Sparrow and others were so angry at the dominance of the masculinised modernist canon patronised by the Arts Council, that they with held their work en mass from the "Film as Film: Formal Experiment in Film" exhibition at the Hayward Gallery accusing the committee of "denying the space within it to answer back, to add or disagree." 27 They argued that they were not "being left free to characterize our own contributions" 28 and that their "perspectives were tolerated rather than considered seriously." 29 They objected with their feet, on the grounds that diverse practices were being squeezed into the anti-narrative formal abstract debates, and furthermore that they were being used to define retrospectively the narrative work of women such as Maya Deren and Germaine Dulac. There was emphasis on the abstract formal qualities above all else, which were used to contextualize this seminal narrative practice within the male dominated canon, and to re-define and re-imagine it as either formal or anti-narrative or ‘art cinema’ and narrative. The predominance of this position and the totally institutional patronage of non-narrative effectively silenced the variety of practices that women happened to be involved with and which in reality collectively formed the history of the avant-garde. Inherent in the formalist rhetoric was the rejection of the alternative languages of cinema that didn’t fit the prescribed norm, and loosely speaking individual artists were ‘in’ the avant-garde, if their work could be matched to the theoretical categorization. This isn’t exactly surprising given that film discourse was a late starter in the modernist tendency to substantiate traditions and specific artistic trends, but it meant that artists had to be totally oppositional to narrative in the widest sense. The point was that women’s work was included, and was written about, but within the frame of reference of the abstract/formal debates, which left almost no place for the naming of, for example, an experimental narrative language, nor what Laura Mulvey has described as a "feminist formalism." 30 In his contribution to the "Film as Film" exhibition catalogue in his essay entitled The History We Need, Malcolm LeGrice acknowledged that the discourse around narrativity was riddled with ambiguity and unease, and perhaps he felt the potential consequences of restriction more keenly, since he has always fostered an inclusive approach to experimentation. Though as I have said, women challenged this by setting up their own distribution and means of production, in particular Felicity Sparrow and others set up "Circles" which became "Cinenova", and was a central space for the support of experimental narrative work by women, and against dominant forms of representation. To fast forward to date, Cinenova has now closed down, funding withdrawn, and the important historical archive of LUX (London Electronic Arts, and London Film-makers Coop) has also re-located after a critical few months of crisis management by the artists. The sector at present has limited means of distribution, the current LUX organization distributes the back catalogue and a few selected artists works. No freedom here, no equal opportunity, no open access, and certainly no context for exhibition. It is probable that works by many women artists of the 80s and 90s from these archive collections will never be seen again if no-one objects, since they don’t fit into the current zeitgeist, which is, materiality (film not video or electronic) and anti-narrative. The old arguments are being played out again. In 1983, Lis Rhodes and Felicity Sparrow asked, "Do we have to delve into history and re -appropriate it?" well I argue, yes, we (all of us) do. In the current climate there is no place for radical and dangerous work that challenges the status quo. There are many reasons for this, but because of funding streams that encourage all that is anodyne, contexts for disruption and intervention are few. Within the art sector, points of resistance are rare and funding, expertise, and exhibition infrastructures have the potential to be (and are) influenced by reductive standpoints. The small chinks where artists have squeezed their productions have been getting narrower. The point is there is a danger that more selective histories will be written, as to date within the various histories of the experimental avant-garde there has been a gradual writing-out of an enormous body of narrative, expanded, technological and interactive moving image work that does not fit easily into categories. Perhaps it is the fault of the artists, who should have written their own histories, and for future consideration we should start to challenge the way that the writing up of practice takes place. One thing is certain, anti-narrative as definition for what is avant-garde practice or not, is and has been historically, a flawed form of classification.
My review of the avant-gardist positions and ideologies would draw a different picture of the avant-garde to include the histories of expanded cinema and experiments with narrative as a central rather than marginal element of artists’ experimentation. Although drawing a similar lineage to the historical avant-garde debates it would have a different emphasis. For one thing, there would be no material delineation between film and video post digital (I will be extremely unpopular for this position) and there would be wider debate around what has constituted narrative and anti-narrative experimentation. There is no doubt about the historical relationship between anti narrative and narrative in artists’ practice - each drives the other. Though as I have said, within the critique and definition the emphasis on this relationship has been perceived as artists’ work versus mainstream, and the issue of narrative in experimental film and video needs more research to determine a historical trajectory within which to include much overlooked narrative work.
To conclude, within the relatively short academic history of experimental film and video there has been emphasis on the material conditions of the mediums revolving around narrative categorisation. This schematization of film and video artworks has been oriented around what were initially Greenbergian formal concerns and there has been pre-occupation through the writing that the avant-garde has been totally opposed to mainstream narrative conventions. I have tried to point out here that the historical and theoretical premise of avant-garde artists being anti-narrative can be proved unfounded by simply reviewing the practice throughout history. This is not widely available, so similar to a review of the women’s avant-garde in relation to narrative, there is a need to determine a history for experimental interactive expanded cinema that is not guided by anti-illusion, material concerns, or single screen as categories to define it. After all categorization and definition are forms of censorship that have often found their way into institutional funding and exhibition curatorship. There is no doubt that ideologies take their toll on the continuation of certain artists practice. We need to understand how this has happened in the past to optimistically look forward to a climate for radical experimentation with moving-image in the future. At the moment in the UK, artist’s communities are dispersed and fragmented, and there is no place where artists can show their work without a limiting selection process oriented around non-narrative single screen film. In 1972 and before prematurely bringing her expanded filmmaking to a standstill Gill Eatherley said "There have been many struggles with projection ideas, which are impossible to realize, due to lack of situations outside the conventional cinema in London..." 31 and sadly in the UK this statement is true for artists working with expanded cinema and performance in 2002. Artists do need exhibition spaces, but also unfettered funding and collective and empathetic dialogue within which to review their work. I believe that for cinematic experimentation to continue in fertile ground or indeed, at all, it is imperative that the histories are reviewed, in a pluralistic and inclusive way, but that any ideologies around moving-image funding, distribution and exhibition facilitate expanded moving-image and experiments with narrativity, and don’t marginalize them any more than they have been to date.



1. P Adams Sitney Visionary Film The American Avant-Garde 1943-1978 p.4. Sitney is referring to Un Chien Andalou.
2. Ibid , p. 4
3. Clement Greenberg "Modernist Painting," from Art in Theory 1900-1990 Charles Harrison and Paul Wood p.755
4. From an essay written in for the exhibition Video Art ICA Philadelphia Catalogue. Also quoted by David Antin in Video Art an Anthology, Ed Ira Schneider Beryl Korot, p.174
5. David Hall, "Before the Concrete Sets" in AND Journal of Art No.26 1991 p4
6. Peter Wollen, "The Two Avant-Gardes," Studio International November 1975 p.171
7. Ibid p.171
8. The British Avant-Garde Film 1926-1995: An Anthology of Writings Edited by Michael O'Pray (University of Luton Press, Arts Council of England, 1996), p.145
9. Milton Cohen of the ONCE group from Gene Youngblood Expanded Cinema (Studio Vista, 1970), p. 371
10. Kisses Sweeter than Wine, and Open Score by Robert Whitman have been documented by Billy Klüver and were recently presented by him at Evolution 2002, part of the Leeds International Film Festival.
11. Nicholson's description of her work in Perspectives on British Avant-Garde Film Hayward Gallery Catalogue, 1977.
12. See Michael O'Pray The British Avant-Garde Film 1926-1995, p213
13-19. From the catalogue for Perspectives on British Avant-Garde Film, Hayward Gallery 2nd March-24th April 1977.
20. AL Rees A History of Experimental Film and Video, British Film Institute, 1999, p 30.
21. Ibid p.33
22. Ibid. p.30
23. Ibid pp. 30-33
24. Ibid p.33
25. Ibid p.34
26. Ibid p.34
27-29. Women and the Formal Film, Annabel Nicolson, Felicity Sparrow, Jane Clarke, Jeanette Iljon, Lis Rhodes, Mary Pat Leece, Pat Murphy, Susan Stein, statement from Film as Film, Formal Experiment in Film 1910-75 , ed. Phil Drummond, Arts Council of Great Britain, 1979, p.118
30. "Film, Feminism and the Avant-garde," Laura Mulvey, written as a lecture for 'Women and Literature,' Oxford Studies Committee 1978, published in The British Avant-Garde Film 1926 to 1995, p199
31. Gill Eatherley "Filmmaker's statement" "The Avant Garde" exhibition, Gallery House, London 1972, taken from Peter Gidal's Structural Materialist Film (Routledge, 1989), p118

above copied from: http://mfj-online.org/journalPages/MFJ39/hatfieldpage.html

The Future of Science...Is Art?, Jonah Lehrer

In the early 1920s, Niels Bohr was struggling to reimagine the structure of matter. Previous generations of physicists had thought the inner space of an atom looked like a miniature solar system with the atomic nucleus as the sun and the whirring electrons as planets in orbit. This was the classical model.

But Bohr had spent time analyzing the radiation emitted by electrons, and he realized that science needed a new metaphor. The behavior of electrons seemed to defy every conventional explanation. As Bohr said, "When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry." Ordinary words couldn't capture the data.

Bohr had long been fascinated by cubist paintings. As the intellectual historian Arthur Miller notes, he later filled his study with abstract still lifes and enjoyed explaining his interpretation of the art to visitors. For Bohr, the allure of cubism was that it shattered the certainty of the object. The art revealed the fissures in everything, turning the solidity of matter into a surreal blur.

Bohr's discerning conviction was that the invisible world of the electron was essentially a cubist world. By 1923, de Broglie had already determined that electrons could exist as either particles or waves. What Bohr maintained was that the form they took depended on how you looked at them. Their very nature was a consequence of our observation. This meant that electrons weren't like little planets at all. Instead, they were like one of Picasso's deconstructed guitars, a blur of brushstrokes that only made sense once you stared at it. The art that looked so strange was actually telling the truth.

It's hard to believe that a work of abstract art might have actually affected the history of science. Cubism seems to have nothing in common with modern physics. When we think about the scientific process, a specific vocabulary comes to mind: objectivity, experiments, facts. In the passive tense of the scientific paper, we imagine a perfect reflection of the real world. Paintings can be profound, but they are always pretend.

This view of science as the sole mediator of everything depends upon one unstated assumption: While art cycles with the fashions, scientific knowledge is a linear ascent. The history of science is supposed to obey a simple equation: Time plus data equals understanding. One day, we believe, science will solve everything.

But the trajectory of science has proven to be a little more complicated. The more we know about reality—about its quantum mechanics and neural origins—the more palpable its paradoxes become. As Vladimir Nabokov, the novelist and lepidopterist, once put it, "The greater one's science, the deeper the sense of mystery."

Consider, for example, the history of physics. Once upon a time, and more than once, physicists thought they had the universe solved. Some obscure details remained, but the basic structure of the cosmos was understood. Out of this naïveté, relativity theory emerged, fundamentally altering classical notions about the relationship of time and space. Then came Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and the surreal revelations of quantum physics. String theorists, in their attempts to reconcile ever widening theoretical gaps, started talking about eleven dimensions. Dark matter still makes no sense. Modern physics knows so much more about the universe, but there is still so much it doesn't understand. For the first time, some scientists are openly wondering if we, in fact, are incapable of figuring out the cosmos.

A particular region in the prefrontal cortex of the human brain, Brodmann Area 47, is engaged in trying to figure out what's going to happen next in a sequence of events manifested over time, in spoken language, signed language, music, etc. When expectations are met, these neural circuits are rewarded and reinforced. When expectations are violated, a different part of our brain, the anterior cingulated, becomes activated, focusing our attention on the unexpected sequence. The end of Dvořák's 7th Symphony is a wonderful artistic exploration of the delicate orchestration of neural responses that allows us to feel both surprised and rewarded by clever permutations of what we're accustomed to. We retrieve these perceptions from episodic memory traces the next time we hear a similar piece of music.

Or look at neuroscience. Only a few decades ago, scientists were putting forth confident conjectures about "the bridging principle," the neural event that would explain how the activity of our brain cells creates the subjective experience of consciousness. All sorts of bridges were proposed, from 40 Hz oscillations in the cerebral cortex to quantum coherence in microtubules. These were the biological processes that supposedly turned the water of the brain into the wine of the mind.

But scientists don't talk about these kinds of bridging principles these days. While neuroscience continues to make astonishing progress in learning about the details of the brain—we are a strange loop of kinase enzymes and synaptic chemistry—these details only highlight our enduring enigma, which is that we don't experience these cellular details. It is ironic, but true: The one reality science cannot reduce is the only reality we will ever know.

The fundamental point is that modern science has made little progress toward any unified understanding of everything. Our unknowns have not dramatically receded. In many instances, the opposite has happened, so that our most fundamental sciences are bracketed by utter mystery. It's not that we don't have all the answers. It's that we don't even know the question.

This is particularly true for our most fundamental sciences, like physics and neuroscience. Physicists study the fabric of reality, the invisible laws and particles that define the material world. Neuroscientists study our perceptions of this world; they dissect the brain in order to understand the human animal. Together, these two sciences seek to solve the most ancient and epic of unknowns: What is everything? And who are we?

But before we can unravel these mysteries, our sciences must get past their present limitations. How can we make this happen? My answer is simple: Science needs the arts. We need to find a place for the artist within the experimental process, to rediscover what Bohr observed when he looked at those cubist paintings. The current constraints of science make it clear that the breach between our two cultures is not merely an academic problem that stifles conversation at cocktail parties. Rather, it is a practical problem, and it holds back science's theories. If we want answers to our most essential questions, then we will need to bridge our cultural divide. By heeding the wisdom of the arts, science can gain the kinds of new insights and perspectives that are the seeds of scientific progress.

Since its inception in the early 20th century, neuroscience has succeeded in becoming intimate with the brain. Scientists have reduced our sensations to a set of discrete circuits. They have imaged our cortex as it thinks about itself, and calculated the shape of ion channels, which are machined to subatomic specifications.

And yet, despite this vast material knowledge, we remain strangely ignorant of what our matter creates. We know the synapse, but don't know ourselves. In fact, the logic of reductionism implies that our self-consciousness is really an elaborate illusion, an epiphenomenon generated by some electrical shudder in the frontal cortex. There is no ghost in the machine; there is only the vibration of the machinery. Your head contains 100 billion electrical cells, but not one of them is you, or knows or cares about you. In fact, you don't even exist. The brain is nothing but an infinite regress of matter, reducible to the callous laws of physics.

The problem with this method is that it denies the very mystery it needs to solve. Neuroscience excels at unraveling the mind from the bottom up. But our self-consciousness seems to require a top-down approach. As the novelist Richard Powers wrote, "If we knew the world only through synapses, how could we know the synapse?" The paradox of neuroscience is that its astonishing progress has exposed the limitations of its paradigm, as reductionism has failed to solve our emergent mind. Much of our experiences remain outside its range.

This world of human experience is the world of the arts. The novelist and the painter and the poet embrace those ephemeral aspects of the mind that cannot be reduced, or dissected, or translated into the activity of an acronym. They strive to capture life as it's lived. As Virginia Woolf put it, the task of the novelist is to "examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day...[tracing] the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness." She tried to describe the mind from the inside.

Neuroscience has yet to capture this first-person perspective. Its reductionist approach has no place for the "I" at the center of everything. It struggles with the question of qualia. Artists like Woolf, however, have been studying such emergent phenomena for centuries, and have amassed a large body of knowledge about such mysterious aspects of the mind. They have constructed elegant models of human consciousness that manage to express the texture of our experience, distilling the details of real life into prose and plot. That's why their novels have endured: because they feel true. And they feel true because they capture a layer of reality that reductionism cannot.

By taking these artistic explorations seriously, neuroscientists can better understand the holistic properties they are trying to parse. Before you break something apart, it helps to know how it hangs together. In this sense, the arts are an incredibly rich data set, providing science with a glimpse into its blind spots. If neuroscience is ever going to discover the neural correlates of consciousness, or find the source of the self, or locate the cells of subjectivity—if it's ever going to get beyond a glossary of our cortical parts—then it has to develop an intimate understanding of these higher-order mental events. This is where the current methods of science reach their limit.

What neuroscience needs is a new method, one that's able to construct complex representations of the mind that aren't built from the bottom up. Sometimes, the whole is best understood in terms of the whole. William James, as usual, realized this first. The eight chapters that begin his epic 1890 textbook, The Principles of Psychology, describe the mind in the conventional third-person terms of the experimental psychologist. Everything changes, however, with chapter nine. James starts this section, "The Stream of Thought," with a warning: "We now begin our study of the mind from within."

With that single sentence, as radical in sentiment as the modernist novel, James tried to shift the subject of psychology. He disavowed any scientific method that tried to dissect the mind into a set of elemental units, be it sensations or synapses. Such a reductionist view is the opposite of science, James argued, since it ignores our actual reality.

Modern science didn't follow James' lead. In the years after his textbook was published, a "New Psychology" was born, and this rigorous science had no need for Jamesian vagueness. It wanted to purge itself of anything that couldn't be measured. The study of experience was banished from the laboratory.

But artists continued creating their complex simulations of consciousness. They never gave up on the ineffable, or detoured around experience because it was too difficult. They plunged straight into the pandemonium. No one demonstrates this better than James Joyce. In Ulysses, Joyce attempted to capture the mind's present tense. Everything in the novel is seen not from the omniscient perspective of the author, but through the concave lenses of his imaginary characters. We eavesdrop on their internal soliloquies, as Bloom, Stephen, and Molly think about beauty, and death, and eggs in bed, and the number eight. This, Joyce says, is the broth of thought, the mind before punctuation, the stream of consciousness rendered on the page. Ulysses begins where William James left off.

Similarly, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, enchanted with opium, was writing poetry about the "the mind's self-experience in the act of thinking" long before there was even a science of the mind. Or look at the world of visual art. As the neuroscientist Semir Zeki notes, "Artists [painters] are in some sense neurologists, studying the brain with techniques that are unique to them." Monet's haystacks appeal to us, in part, because he had a practical understanding of color perception. The drip paintings of Jackson Pollock resonate precisely because they excite some peculiar circuit of cells in the visual cortex. These painters reverse-engineered the brain, discovering the laws of seeing in order to captivate the eye.

Of course, the standard response of science is that such art is too incoherent and imprecise for the scientific process. Beauty isn't truth; Monet got lucky. The novel is just a work of fiction, which is the opposite of experimental fact. If it can't be plotted on a line graph or condensed into variables, then it's not worth taking into account. But isn't such incoherence an essential aspect of the human mind? Isn't our inner experience full of gaps and non-sequiturs and inexplicable feelings? In this sense, the messiness of the novel and the abstraction of the painting is actually a mirror. As the poetry critic Randall Jarrell put it, "It is the contradictions in works of art which make them able to represent us—as logical and methodical generalizations cannot—our world and our selves, which are also full of contradictions."

No scientific model of the mind will be wholly complete unless it includes what can't be reduced. Science rightfully adheres to a strict methodology, relying on experimental data and testability, but this method could benefit from an additional set of inputs. The cultural hypotheses of artists can inspire the questions that stimulate important new scientific answers. Until science sees the brain from a more holistic perspective—and such a perspective might require the artistic imagination—our scientific theories will be detached from the way we see ourselves.

Neuroscience, of course, believes that it has no inherent limitations. One day, a team of scientists may explain human consciousness. The bridging principle will be solved. The mystery of experience will turn out to be another trick of matter. Such scientific optimism might be right. Only time will tell. (It's worth noting that not every scientist is quite so optimistic. Noam Chomsky, for example, has declared that, "It is quite possible—overwhelmingly probable, one might guess—that we will always learn more about human life and personality from novels than from scientific psychology.") Regardless, it's clear that solving the deepest mysteries of the brain—what the philosopher David Chalmers calls "the hard questions of consciousness"—will require a new scientific approach, one that is able to incorporate the wisdom of the arts. We are such stuff as dreams are made on, but we are also just stuff. Neither truth, when seen alone, is our solution, for our reality exists in plural.

At first glance, physics seems particularly remote from the subjective sphere of the arts. Its theories are extracted from arcane equations and the subatomic debris of supercolliders. This science continually insists that our most basic intuitions about reality are actually illusions, a sad myth of the senses. Artists rely on the imagination, but modern physics exceeds the imagination. To paraphrase Hamlet, there are more things in heaven and earth—dark matter, quarks, black holes—than could ever be dreamt up. A universe this strange could only be discovered.

But the surreal nature of physics is precisely why it needs the help of artists. The science has progressed beyond our ability to understand it, at least in any literal sense. As Richard Feynman put it, "Our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things which are there." It's a brute fact of psychology that the human mind cannot comprehend the double-digit dimensions of string theory, or the possibility of parallel universes. Our mind evolved in a simplified world, where matter is certain, time flows forward and there are only three dimensions. When we venture beyond these innate intuitions, we are forced to resort to metaphor. This is the irony of modern physics: It seeks reality in its most fundamental form, and yet we are utterly incapable of comprehending these fundaments beyond the math we use to represent them. The only way to know the universe is through analogy.

As a result, the history of physics is littered with metaphorical leaps. Einstein grasped relativity while thinking about moving trains. Arthur Eddington compared the expansion of the universe to an inflated balloon. James Clerk Maxwell thought of magnetic fields as little whirlpools in space, which he called vortices. The Big Bang was just a cosmic firecracker. Schrödinger's cat, trapped in a cosmic purgatory, helped illustrate the paradoxes of quantum mechanics. It's hard to imagine string theory without its garden hose.

These scientific similes might seem like quaint oversimplifications, but they actually perform a much more profound function. As the physicist and novelist Alan Lightman writes, "Metaphor in science serves not just as a pedagogical device, but also as an aid to scientific discovery. In doing science, even though words and equations are used with the intention of having precise meaning, it is almost impossible not to reason by physical analogy, not to form mental pictures, not to imagine balls bouncing and pendulums swinging." The power of a metaphor is that it allows scientists imagine the abstract concept in concrete terms, so that they can grasp the implications of their mathematical equations. The world of our ideas is framed by the only world we know.

But relying on metaphor can also be dangerous, since every metaphor is necessarily imperfect. (As Thomas Pynchon put it, "The act of metaphor is a thrust at truth and a lie, depending on where you are.") The strings of the universe might be like a garden hose, but they are not a garden hose. The cosmos isn't a plastic balloon. When we chain our theories to ordinary language, we are trespassing on the purity of the equation. To think in terms of analogies is to walk a tightrope of accuracy.

This is why modern physics needs the arts. Once we accept the importance of metaphor to the scientific process, we can start thinking about how we can make those metaphors better. Poets, of course, are masters of metaphor: The power of their art depends on the compression of meaning into meter; vague feelings are translated into visceral images. It's not a coincidence that many of the greatest physicists of the 20th century—eminent figures like Einstein, Feynman, and Bohr—were known for their distinctly romantic method of thinking. These eminent scientists depended on their ability to use metaphor to see what no one else had ever seen, so that the railroad became a metaphor for relativity, and a drop of liquid helped symbolize the atomic nucleus. Poets can speed this scientific process along, helping physicists to invent new metaphors and improve their old ones. Perhaps we can do better than a garden hose. Maybe a simile will help unlock the secret of dark matter. As the string theorist Brian Greene recently wrote, the arts have the ability to "give a vigorous shake to our sense of what's real," jarring the scientific imagination into imagining new things.

But there's another way that artists can bring something to the cosmic conversation: they can help make the scientific metaphors tangible. When the metaphysical equation is turned into a physical object, physicists can explore the meaning of the mathematics from a different perspective. Look, for example, at a Richard Serra sculpture. His labyrinths of bent metal let us participate in the theoretical, so that we might imagine the strange curves of space-time in an entirely new way. The fragmented shapes of cubism, which engaged in such a fruitful dialogue with the avant-garde physics of its time, served a similar purpose. Picasso never understood the equations—he picked up non-Euclidian geometry via the zeitgeist—but he was determined to represent this new way of thinking about space in his paintings. A century later, physicists are still using his shattered still lifes as a potent symbol of their science. Abstract art lets us comprehend, at least a little bit, the incomprehensible.

It's time for the dialogue between our two cultures to become a standard part of the scientific method. (Our universities could begin by offering a "Poetry for Physicists" class.) But it's also crucial to take our scientific metaphors beyond the realm of the metaphorical, so we can better understand the consequences of our theories. Art galleries should be filled with disorienting evocations of string theory and the EPR paradox. Every theoretical physics department should support an artist-in-residence. Too often, modern physics seems remote and irrelevant, its suppositions so strange they're meaningless. The arts can help us reattach physics to the world we experience.

Neuroscience can also benefit from the reactions of artists. Novelists can simulate the latest theory of consciousness in their fiction. If a theory can't inspire characters that feel true, then it probably isn't true itself. (Woolf, for example, was an early critic of Freudian theory, dismissing the way it turned all of her "characters into cases.") Painters can explore new theories about the visual cortex. Dancers can help untangle the mysterious connection between the body and emotion. By heeding the wisdom of the arts, science extends to art the invitation to participate in its conversation and the opportunity to add science to its repertoire. And by, in turn, interpreting scientific ideas and theories, the arts offers science a new lens through which to see itself.

C.P. Snow, the essayist who coined the "two culture" cliché, proposed a simple solution to the problem of divided cultures. He argued that we needed a "third culture," which would close the "communications gap" between scientists and artists. Each side, Snow said, would benefit from an understanding of the other, as writers learned about the second law of thermodynamics and scientists read Shakespeare.

There is currently a nascent third culture, but it strays from Snow's conception. While his third culture was based upon dialogue, our current third culture consists, almost entirely, of scientists talking directly to the general public. As John Brockman, the founder of this new third culture, wrote: "What traditionally has been called 'science' has today become 'public culture'...Science is the only news." There is, of course, much to be said for scientists cutting out "the middleman" and translating their data for the masses. Many of the scientists that make up this third culture have greatly increased the public's understanding of the scientific avant-garde. From Richard Dawkins to Brian Greene, from Steven Pinker to E.O. Wilson, these figures not only do important scientific research, they write in elegant prose. In doing so, they are teaching us much.

But what of the collaboration between science and the arts? Are we really prepared to live with a permanent cultural schism? If we are serious about unifying human knowledge, then we'll need to create a new movement that coexists with the third culture but that deliberately trespasses on our cultural boundaries and seeks to create relationships between the arts and the sciences. The premise of this movement—perhaps a fourth culture—is that neither culture can exist by itself. Its goal will be to cultivate a positive feedback loop, in which works of art lead to new scientific experiments, which lead to new works of art and so on. Instead of ignoring each other, or competing, or co-opting each other in naïve or superficial ways, science and the arts will truly impact each other. The old intellectual boundaries will disappear. Neuroscience will gain new tools with which to confront the mystery of consciousness and modern physics will improve its metaphors. Art will become a crucial source of scientific ideas.

This will ultimately lead us to take a broader view of truth. Right now, science is widely considered our sole source of Truth, with a capital "T." Everything that can't be stated in the language of acronyms and equations risks being disregarded as a pretty fiction, which is the opposite of scientific fact.

But the epic questions that modern science must answer cannot be solved by science alone. Bringing our two cultures together will allow us to judge our knowledge not by its origins, but in terms of its usefulness. What does this novel or experiment or poem teach us about ourselves? How does it help us understand who we are, or what the universe is made of? What long-standing problem has it engaged, perhaps even solved? If we are open-minded in our answers to these questions, we will discover that poems and paintings can help advance our experiments and theories. Art can make science better.

But before any of this can happen, our two existing cultures must modify their habits. First of all, the humanities must sincerely engage with the sciences. Henry James defined the writer as someone on whom nothing is lost; artists must heed his call, and not ignore science's inspiring descriptions of reality.

At the same time, the sciences must recognize that their truths are not the only truths. No single area of knowledge has a monopoly on knowledge. As Karl Popper, an eminent defender of science wrote, "It is imperative that we give up the idea of ultimate sources of knowledge, and admit that all knowledge is human; that it is mixed with our errors, our prejudices, our dreams, and our hopes; that all we can do is to grope for truth even though it is beyond our reach." The struggle for scientific truth is long and hard and never ending. If we want to get an answer to our deepest questions—the questions of who we are and what everything is—we will need to draw from both science and art, so that each completes the other.

above copied from: http://seedmagazine.com/news/2008/01/the_future_of_scienceis_art.php