Tuesday, September 1, 2009
Video: "Untitled Fall '95" by Alex Bag
The following text is taken from UBUWEB. After viewing the video please leave your thoughts and comments.
In Untitled Fall '95, Bag, at the time an art student, "plays" Bag the art student. In a series of deadpan performances, Bag gathers fragments of pop detritus, fashioning a thoroughly mediated document that is at once a celebration and a record of loss. With the narrative inevitability of a TV serial, the eight diaristic segments trace a woman's struggle to make sense of her experience at art school. As each installment marks the start of a new semester, Bag's character addresses the camera with her latest observations and frustrations.
Interspersed between these confessions are eight set-pieces, in which Bag performs scenes from the background noise of her imagination: a pretentious visiting artist, London shop-girls discussing their punk band, a Ronald MacDonald puppet attempting to pick up a Hello Kitty doll, the singer Bjork explaining how television works. These surreal episodes sketch out what Bag sees as the simultaneous attraction and repulsion of contemporary youth culture, and teeter on the divide between parody and complicity.
What emerges is a picture of anxiety, boredom, and ambivalence. As Bag despairs at one point, her culture is being sold back to her. However, popular culture, enmeshed with fashion, music, and the art world, necessarily depends on the machinations of capitalism. How does one mount a successful critique, when irony, satire and subversion have been enshrined by advertising and the popular imagination?
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Very humorous, but a bit painful to watch. It definitely reflects the pretentious and naive attitudes of art school students, such as myself. The last scene with Morrissy playing was hilarious and disturbing.
ReplyDeleteWhat interested me most about the video was how “Alex Bag” transforms and conforms into the typical art student as she progresses through her college years. Each semester something changes about her: she starts smoking, drinking coffee and even her mannerisms and comments about her work become more “artsy” and contrived while still maintaining an undertone of her ditsy attitude.
ReplyDeleteThe scenes in between her interviews were hard to stand, but I agree with Josh in that the last scene was really funny.
Humorous and crazy scenes aside, I found the video a little sad. "Alex Bag" begins her first semester totally excited-she likes being understood by others, she likes her environment, she even likes just learning about texture, light, and shading- she is ready to work hard because she feels like she found where she belongs. But her initial excitement seems to only bring her farther to fall in her disappointment. She expresses what I think drives a lot of art students- "I just want to do what I want." She did have the chance to do whatever she wanted- and she ended up becoming admitedly like everyone else.
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed the incessant and familiar complaining represented in this video. Bag accurately narrates the progression (regression?) of expectations that a lot of art students have. She talks about just "doing what she wants" and mentions the romantic ideas about just making art. But let's face it, no one starts out doing what they want, and I think that's an important lesson.
ReplyDeleteFrom the all-too familiar and juvenile ranting of an art school freshman to the matured bleakness and despondence of a graduating senior, Alex Bag confesses her innermost feelings through the video log. I could barely tolerate the initial video art clips -almost wanted to shut the computer off- but there was overall improvement by the last one. The most interest for me was the diary-like log of her progression at SVA. In her words she is, "a mask of contradictions, confused all the time, but honest and real": to me, that was the art. The punctum (the thing in a piece of art that grabs your gaze and holds you there) was not in the artsy video performances that she placed in between the monologue, rather it was her self. Maybe that was the intent...
ReplyDeleteok, going to be totally honest here. i watched the first 5 minutes and then turned it off. The hole bit with the bunnies kinda made my whole body twitch in a bad away. But a few days later i sucked it up and watched the rest of the video. it was inventive, creative, and very interesting. i didn't find it humorous but i liked her ideas and concepts especially in the "call me" sketch the one where Ronald McDonald tries to pick up Hello Kitty.
ReplyDeleteA few minutes into this i was annoyed with how she was stereotyping art students with how she spoke etc, it proceeded to her smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee, etc. towards the end I guess I saw the humor but overall this just doesn't do it for me. The amount of times she said like made me want to stop watching it. I understand her inventiveness etc and can appreciate her ideas, but I just didn't really like her characters overall, especially the bunnies voices.
ReplyDeleteI admire her ability to be so animated, however, I can't help but feel I have seen this done a million times before. Nothing about it is super original, and it was a little painful to watch.
ReplyDeleteI watched this video and couldn’t help but get aggravated. The stereotypical ranting of this girl is the reason why I never tell people that I go to art school. I understand that this is supposed to be a parody of an art school student’s journey through SVA, but this girl is exactly what people fathom in their mind when you tell them you know someone who goes to art school (or that you go to art school). I also understand that the video was supposed to be humorous, but it wasn’t for me. I had a friend watch the video with me, she is a high school English teacher, and she said this to me: “Why are art students so weird? It’s like they are trying to be different so they don’t have to deal with the criticism of society.” I’m going to have to agree with her statement. I guess I differ from other art students because I don’t do it as a hobby. I went to school to become a graphic designer because I am choosing this as a CAREER. I am not here to change the world using art; I am here to make a living in the field of graphic design. Kudos to those who want to change other people’s perspective of the world by painting odd pictures, or making videos like Alex Bag, but that’s not the reason why I chose to be in artist. A Lot of people overlook the fact that being an artist takes talent. Nowadays everyone calls themselves artists by painting ridiculous abstract forms on a canvas, but I wonder how many of them can paint like the old masters like Rembrandt. Probably only a handful, the rest waste their time making videos like Alex Bag.
ReplyDeleteMy impression of this video is that Bag exaggerates herself as a character in order to make fun of the attitude of the art student who is naive, both sheltered and edgy. More than that, she uses this character to comment on the place of art in society and whether or not personal expression is even a valid form in a world filled with cold facts. Her eight "set-pieces" explore the interaction between men and women, particulary showing her anger at and disappointment in men (in the Ronald McDonald scene, for example). They also show her contempt for, and confusion about her place in, the consumer society in which we live.
ReplyDeleteI'm sure we have all seen this at our own school, the cigarette, coffee and the way some people express themselves to imitate an air of importance and wisdom in the arts. Sadly, that is how everyone else that is not an art students sees us like. Some parts are quite funny but overall the movie was so prolonged it became a bit boring.
ReplyDelete