Lunar Follies

TSIOLKOVSKY

“Three (or so) segments of a work in complex progress …”

“… but the myth of the frontier has consistently engaged the disarmingly irreverent sophistication of the modern multi-lens camera, of course. Earlier works, like the focus of the interplay as seen in the presentation of the scrims usually associated with the pinhole camera, the nonchalant stance, the thematic array, and the variously colored fluorescents, confront the secondary myth of the iconic cross-cultural artist, as prefigured in the many seminal and provocative essays by a group of distinguished contributing editors, published in the Contemporary Camera Obscura. ‘The nearest star,’ to adduce a well-known remark of the anonymous Gnostic followers of Blake, ‘is much too near,’ profoundly encapsulates the varied philosophies of shared visual interests and loosely Hegelian theoretical vistas, many of them here on display as a group for the first time, allowing students and scholars to spend hours, rather than the usual hurried moments, with objects commonly associated with the tenaciously unyielding subjects herein deployed in ‘ur’-constructions that take as their unifying and irreversible (although subject, always, to aporia) theme the images that are, paradoxically, vital yet moribund. Whereas mechanical tools, e.g., the hammer, the adze, the wood plane, the nathan, the ripsaw, and the blotter, project and valorize the images in the early films of Wynton Marsalis, inescapable filtering of new and little-known earlier works by now-lost ‘outsider’ cinematographers, as presented in varied locations within North American public spaces throughout the fifties and sixties, contradict a haze of pioneering techniques which can transform such mundane instruments into dazzling media installations that relentlessly transgress the cherished Germanic motifs which inoculate, or, conversely, are inoculated by, surprising Baudelairean correspondances; for example, via the imagery of Callahan, Atget, and Adams, cultural topoi, so to speak, that have delighted and outraged the ‘mouse in the dynamo,’ as Bartley Scott put it some years ago, as well, too, as influencing those cinéastes and plasticists who pioneered the fevered pyrotechnics and mysterious and ineradicable film captions that have come to be viewed, with much justification, as harbingers of pure process, emblematic clips heavy with metaphor, and short but multi-layered arguments, not to mention a vertiginous, motile linear perspective and the labile interfaces contemporaneously labeled as ‘technovideo interventions,’ despite their static modes within …”

— Kelli Dawn Tsiolkovsky

Kelli Dawn Tsiolkovsky writes the “Arts, Dining, and Cinema” column for the West Village Edge, and is also the author of Brooklyn! Economy for Epicures, and the forthcoming novel, Andy Warhol Was a Virgin (Whitlow / St. Martin’s).