Intimate Bureaucracies and Kitsch

       While reading about some of the amazing mail art and Boggs’ bills in Networked Art, I was reminded of the National Park Passport book I own. The park system sells a small passport book for people to buy and have stamped at each National Park, Historic Place, or Monument they visit, exactly as one would stamp a passport when visiting a country. Each park or monument has their own unique stamp that mirrors the type of stamp one would get while going through customs (looking exactly like the canceling stamp of Guy Bleus on page 15). I have collected hundreds of these passport stamps over the years during my travels. In fact, the National Park passport program seems like it derives from (or at least is parallel to) the mail art movement.

       However, I would argue that these stamps are not mail art, but pure kitsch, precisely because they do not fit Craig Saper’s theory of intimate bureaucratic art. While these passport stamps are directly based on the bureaucratic passport system of international customs offices and are a part of a collective endeavor by travelers, they are not conspiratorial, do not share a new language, do not destroy the origin of the international passport system, and do not depend on an individual artist’s craft. In other words, these stamps are merely kitsch: mass produced imitations designed to appeal to the largest number of tourists.

       I find it interesting that a bureaucratic entity has turned a mail art element into a kitsch product that advertises its own governmental program. To me, this idea of an “intimate bureaucracy” is what separates mail art from kitsch. It seems like a very fine line—many of the mail art examples in the book seemed “kitschy.” However, the ultimately subversive qualities of this art that resists the label of kitsch can be found in the idea of the intimate bureaucracy, which the National Park Passport program fails to have. (But I will still collect those stamps!)

Hitchcock's Rope as Quasi-Oulipo

       This is a difficult blog entry for me to write, since I had trouble thinking of a text that uses Oulipo constraints, beyond the ones we have discussed in class. The only text that comes to mind is Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope, which attempts to show the on-screen action in real-time without a single cut. The technical difficulties of achieving this in cinema (as opposed to one long, 80-minute stage production) included trying to have consistent sound (and microphone placement) throughout extended takes that often moved from room-to-room, organizing props in a way that would allow the camera to move freely, silent stage-hands who would move set pieces off-camera to allow camera and microphone movement during filming, and actors who wouldn’t consistently ruin takes deep into filming. In fact, even after Hitchcock solved each of these problems, he still was forced to shoot the film in ten segments due to the limitation of film in each camera. Even if he had the capability to have more film in a canister, he would have had to deal with camera over-heating. Therefore, each long-take had to be timed so as not to run out of film before completing the scene. Each edit was masked so as to seem as if the film were shot in real time for one long, continuous take. Often, the cuts were masked in black (for example, an actor would step in front of the camera, momentarily causing a black screen, where Hitchcock would make the unnoticeable cut). The last limitation had to do with projecting the film in theaters, which required a projectionist to change reels (about three times for an 80-minute film). Since these moments would actually seem like they were interrupting the action, Hitchcock purposely made three unmasked cuts at the moments of reel changes, which would actually seem much more seamless to audiences watching the film in theaters.

       The result is a film that feels real-time and incorporates the best possible traits of cinema and theater. Unlike a staged drama, mistakes could be fixed with new takes and pauses were not needed between acts. Set pieces could be moved silently in one room behind the camera as action was being filmed in an adjoining room. Unlike the manufactured feel of cinematic multi-camera set-ups with over-the-shoulder shots and quick edits, this film felt more personal, with less technical distraction.

       This also brings up an interesting theoretical point: in placing these limits on himself, Hitchcock designed the entire film as a way to mask his self-imposed constraints. In the other works we’ve read or seen, the artists have been practically flaunting the constraints as obstructions that must be over-come. Perhaps the reason I like Rope (it is my favorite Hitchcock film) is that the constraints don’t actually feel like they are obstructing anything at all, just because they are disguised so well. It feels like a different text than the ones we’ve discussed in class because those works announced their constraints instead of trying to conceal them.

Episodic Obstructions

            There are a few similarities in If on a Winter’s Night, The Five Obstructions, and A Void, including direct reference to audience (in Vowel’s diary, in Lars Von Trier’s written monologue at end of the film, and throughout Calvino’s work) and  ekphrastic descriptions of works of art within each work (including Leth’s cinematic quotation of his own film). The one that struck me as being essential, as I mentioned last class, was the episodic nature of each.

            However, “episodic” is not quite the correct word, since episodes in the truest since can be arranged in any order without impacting the overall narrative structure of the work. The “episodes” in all three works do have a specific order that must be maintained as the story builds. For example, in The Five Obstructions we couldn’t have the Brussels segment occurring before the India segment (the punishment must necessarily follow the crime), while in If on a Winter's Night… we must have the chapter before the “anti-chapter,” with each chapter building toward a conclusion at the end of the novel. Perec’s novel is the least episodic, with each chapter feeling more like scenes from a play sprinkled with diary entries.

            We might conclude that the obstruction in each work is not leading to destruction of all order, but generating new systems within an older, necessary order. In that sense, understanding each work as episodic reveals how the function of each obstruction slightly changes the function of each episode while always fostering a structure that builds toward narrative closure of some sort. Of course, one wonders how these texts might be different if these episodes were re-arranged out of chronological order.