“Social factory” is a term to describe this film production by theorists. According to Helmut Draxler, social factory is a political agenda against “work as a whole under the dominant capitalist conditions (5)”. Within social factory, the distinction of “productive and non-productive work” is not applicable. He goes on to state that, “goods-producing labor and distribution oriented to consumption by means of logos, labels and marketing are no more opposites than a disciplinary work ethic and hedonistic lifestyles (5).” This is born after the third industrial revolution, a revolution of technology, information, and communication, for which non-material labor like service lab are becoming more and more vital to modern society. In light of social factory, the distinction of content and form in contemporary art practice is diminished. And, the notion of “work in progress” used by some practicing artists is replaced by the notion of “mechanism in work.”

Lars von Triers, an experimental filmmaker, emerged from Denmark in the 1990s to create seminal films that constantly challenged the notion of form and content. In his 2004 film, “Five Obstructions,” it weaved narrative lines through the difficult tests of making a film. In the film, Lars von Triers’s mentor, Jorgen Leth, was challenged to remake Leth’s 1967 short film “The Perfect Human.” Leth had to follow an increasingly difficult set of constructed “obstructions” made by von Triers. The painstaking tasks humanized the process of making a film to an extreme level that the viewers sympathized with the filmmakers reality. The film is bizarrely on the verge of being a documentary and narrative-based film when five versions of the film are remade and the moments of making the films are being shown.

Early in 1995, Lars von Triers and Thomas Vinterberg founded Dogme 95, a manifesto and a collective directors movement to challenge the superficiality of the modern film industry (6). It embraces a technologically deterministic view that modern media democratizes cinema because of making it accessible to more people. Dogme 95 claims that movie making is not an illusion, the task of film-makers is not to fool the audience. To encounter the film of illusion, Dogme 95 created a set of rules known as “The Vow of Chastity” for film making including restricted principles like: Shooting must be done on location, props and sets must not be brought in, the sound must never be produced apart from the images or vice versa, music must not be used unless it occurs where the scene is being shot, and the camera must be hand-held (6). These rules subtract all extra film-based techniques that distinguish the film profession from home or amateur film making. These tenets are against all techniques that attempt to create illusionary perfection. What it leaves are the core physical elements: actors (a lot of times von Triers uses non-professional actors) and the situation of making the movie. At the end of The Vow of Chastity von Triers writes, “My supreme goal is to force the truth out of my characters and settings. I swear to do so by all the means available and at the cost of any good taste and any aesthetic consideration…(6)”

Constructing Social Frame Work

A social frame work is a structure that serves both as form and generator of content. In Bourriaud’s essay “Relational Form,” art practice is defined as social interstitial. Bourriaud raised the idea of “relational art” as a possibility for art to take on in its theoretical horizon, the realm of interaction and its social context. He states that this “system of intensive encounters has ended up producing linked artistic practices: an art form where the substrate is formed by inter-subjectivity…the ‘encounter’ between beholder and picture, and the collective elaboration of meaning (7).”

Art institutions and art events are containers for these social encounters. The act of art viewing is not a private activity. It involves a complex community, defined as an inter-relationship of artists, art objects, art objects installed in spaces, and art viewers. When one walks into a gallery (or any space), one is naturally in the same space as the art objects and other gallery attendees. This relationship is similar to the social relationship within a film crew, mentioned above. The difference is that the film crew is focused on production while the art attendees are focused on consumption. In film making, the actors are on the stage while the crew is behind of the stage. In common art production, the artists create backstage and then premier their works on stage, the gallery, for the viewers, art viewers, to perceive.

Relationship to My Projects

The possibility of this social interaction has been a major concern in my latest art project. Over the past few years I have continuously worked as a performance video artist. I have progressed from seeing myself as a singular-individual to a collective-individual. Now, the social aspects of my art is just as important as the prior focus on personalized performative video with myself as performer. My projects integrate the making of video with the creation of social situations.

Production of video is practical and formal in my work. It does not override the content. I approach this format as if it condenses time and opens up the creative space for collaborative activities. Components of such activities is usually comprised of multiple roles: idea/script initiator(s), director(s), camera-person(s), and performer(s). These different roles in the production process are combinable, exchangeable and somewhat unpredictable according to what different individuals bring to their roles. This loose structure does not build upon certain crew members. Rather, it is project-based and is situated in the context of a particular production. In order to create this dynamic, the production of the video often coincides with other events and gatherings. The purpose of the approach is not seeking a democratic ideal. It is more of a formalist concern in service to the pre-defined concept of the project and the infrastructure it begets. Video is a format as well as the productive induction of making a video.

I started with an intuitive personal performance language four years ago. I see performative moments in other individuals. This performative aspect is revealed collectively in temporary circumstances or narrative subtexts in my work. The recognition of individuals corresponds with the videos I produce. The allocation of individual tasks is what constructs the concept of my productions. My role in the work is to initiate, gather individuals’ endeavors, and coordinate this temporary collective moment.

Examples of this working method include Cannibal Cafe, a live video production during the standard gallery opening as part of Diego Tuesdays at the San Francisco Art Institute. “Cannibal Cafe” appropriates news articles about the Internet-murderer Meiwes, known in the media as the Rotenburg Cannibal. He provoked one of the most controversial court cases in Germany because Meiwes found his willing victim through an Internet advertisement, killed him and ate his body over a few months. This project appropriates the information that Meiwes often posted on-line while looking for victims and the two-hour video documentation he made of the killing incident. In following with parts of this story, I posted an on-line open casting call on many different websites for the role of Meiwes. All applicants to the ad are given opportunities to perform the cannibal role of Meiwes while the victim is played by the same actor during the two-hour Diego Rivera Gallery opening.

The result of the Cannibal Cafe project generated several unplanned and unexpected conversations from the improvisational performance. Based on the general story and some simple scenarios I provided at the show, participants approached the role as an open-ended character. They discuss cannibal themes in alteration with their personal interest and knowledge.

Another project which espouses the theme of social situation construction is Bump’n Grind (www.bumpngrind.org). This project evolved from my earlier dancing projects conducted among the internal San Francisco Art Institute student community in which I recorded video of people dancing along with music. I took this dancing material and compiled a video of all performers in order to initiate other parties and video making events. The Bump’n Grind project builds upon the dancing aspects of this previous work and focuses specifically on a dancing style that is evident after visiting 1015 Folsom on a busy night: sexually explicit dancing between youth. As such, “Bump’n Grind” focuses on learning about this aspect of young post-melting pot American culture. It is interesting because the youth of this club represent the cultural complexities and merging in California. Most of the people at this club are the offspring of immigrant families where the parents are very hard working and sacrificial for their families. The youth are primarily Asian American, white, Hispanic, Indian, and African American. In particular, the youth have a dynamic cultural background composed of a deep heritages and contemporary popular American media culture. They are being influenced by and influencing larger popular culture. They present a hybridized identity of a future generation, particularly in urban centers. Bump’n Grind is constructed in order to frame this cultural hybridity for future discussion.

This project created the social situation of a heavy sexual-style dance in order to expand and highlight this sexual dynamic this youth culture openly displays. The results were predictably explicit. The unpredictable element was decided by the 150+ people who participated to create this live narrative recorded live on video and also re-processed by VJ’s Nate Boyce and Ronaldo Barbachano. Framed initially as a dance competition, this event created a live social remix that merged its form and content.

Conclusion

Perhaps discussing the notion of content and form is already a gesture of separation that conflicts with the effort of embodying one into the other. Other than solving a problem, the initiated dialogue and the proposal of “media reflexivity” is a call for a continuous critique on shifting content with default form, or default content with shifting form in art practice. Media reflexivity seeks another understanding after Greenberg’s autonomous art concept which continuously elevates some artwork into an exclusive high art mode. However, this is not to deny this Greenburgian concept, but rather media reflexivity conflates the autonomous focus on form along with pluralism’s critical dialogue of content, the main influence in art practice today.

Written by Deer Fang
Edited by Jon Phillips

References

1. Clement Greenberg, Autonomies of Art, Moral Philosophy and Art Symposium, Mountain Lake, Virginia, October, 1980, http://www.sharecom.ca/greenberg/autonomies.html

2. Clement Greengerg, Avant-Garde and Kitsch

3. Allen Kaprow, The Education of the Un-Artist, Part I,

4. Howard Singerman, Toward a Theory of the MFA

5. Helmut Draxler, Against Dogma, Time Code as an Allegory of the Social Factory, http://www.bbooks.de/jve/eyck-againstdogma.html

6. http://www.dogme95.dk

7. Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Forms.