I’m painfully aware that many of my posts are responses and reactions to The Medium blog at the New York Times Magazine. I should probably cut them a check if this blog made any money (or had any readers…HIYOOOO). But until that happens, I’ll keep linking to it.
At any rate, Virginia Heffernan has posted a piece on YouTube and the avant-garde, where she contends that YouTube has not only created a new genre of video but also has forced us to reconsider what avant-garde means. At the heart of her position is the way that YouTube has “facilitated” (not sure what the right word is here) a formal shift over time.
Hit videos by amateurs in the site’s early days tried to produce the recognizable short-form genres that existed on TV: music videos (“Numa Numa”) and sketch comedy (“MySpace: The Movie”). But uploaders since have drifted from known forms, contributing entries now known only as “YouTube videos,” because it’s not clear what they would have been called before the advent of the site.
This is a great point. Short-form video that was neither “a short” as many film-makers call short films (which can be as long as 30 minutes) nor a television commercial, was basically an anomaly(with the obvious exception of video art). YouTube has not only found a home for this kind of thing, but more importantly, as Heffernan seems to be arguing, birthed it.
But what’s surprising is how little the homemade videos resemble the pro goods. Sure, there are parodies of mainstream clips here and there, but mostly the amateurs are off on their own, hatching new genres. Consider “haul” videos, in which people show off the stuff they recently bought, or the popular “fail” videos, which show all manner of efforts gone wrong. Individual haul and fail videos often attract 100,000 views or more — and no one had even imagined such genres until recently. At the same time, no one at any production company seems to be struggling to serve the haul-fail audiences (or combine them?).
Additionally, what’s so great about the genre of “YouTube videos” is that it decouples the avant-garde from class, allowing for access to the avant-garde for those without cultural and technological capital.
In serving these niche audiences with their microgenres, YouTube has solidified its slot as a home for the vernacular avant-garde. For years, I have believed this, and for years people have warned (or promised) me that any day now the heterogeneous site would be steamrolled by commercial forces that would wipe out the indigenous flora and fauna. But not only has the weird, small stuff hung around — out of sight of the home page, in many cases — but it also continues to be found by its audience. YouTube may not be making money as efficiently as Google once hoped it would, but it’s still incubating novel forms of creative expression and cultivating new audiences.
However, the question that remains is whether the “vernacularization” of the avant-garde leaves us…well…without an avant-garde. Inevitably, a critic like Frederic Jameson would argue that once there is a “massification” of formal techniques once associated with an auteur such as Godard or Sheeler and Strand, the “social mission” (aka its politics of resistance) of the avant-garde is stripped away. For instance, when pastiche, the technique utilized by many avant-garde movements across a variety of arts, is incorporated into a shampoo commercial, according to someone like Jameson, the antagonistic relation is gone. It is, in effect, a “blank parody,” as he once called it.
Now, I strongly disagree with Jameson’s assessment. It is at once utterly austere and reactionary. Further, it is also a position that is complicit, at worse, and indifferent, at best, regarding the relationship of art and class. Indeed, as Jameson has noted himself, the avant-garde had to come out of the upper classes, as it was their own bourgeois lifestyle that they were critiquing. (A great example of this would be Luis Bunuel’s comical film “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” (1972), which is highly recommended.) So, are the working class and the poor relegated to politically unmotivated folk art, and emancipatory aesthetics left to the elite? It seems that Heffernan’s thesis raises a clear division in the debates surrounding aesthetics and politics, of which the Jacques Ranciere is a critical voice.(See a great interview on this very issue.[pdf])
Does one side with the “resistance” as an abstraction or does one side with “democratization” of technique?
Bonus: The trailer for “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie”
4 responses so far ↓
Michael // September 14, 2009 at 3:44 pm |
Im not sure which category this falls under, but really I just wanted to show you this (even though I’m sure you’re all up on it), it is at least on YT.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLPqg-l3Tkc
I hate ppl.
SH // September 14, 2009 at 3:55 pm |
I second that.
I hadn’t seen this video but I’ve seen links to some pretty nasty comment sections. Wretched.
Bran // September 21, 2009 at 10:48 am |
Dope post. I think Heffernan’s argument is really interesting and on point.
One thing I’m not understanding from your post, though, is your invocation of Jameson in relation to what Heffernan refers to as the vernacularization of the Avant Garde. You use Jamesons’ concept of the massification of formal techniques (which results in things like shampoo companies utilizing pastiche) to argue that Heffernans concept of the vernacularization of the avant garde, from Jamesons’ perspective, would result in the destruction of the avant garde itself. In that way you pit Jameson against Heffernan and then align yourself with Heffernan. But it seems to me that there is a disconnect because Heffernan is not speaking about corporate takeover of formal techniques associated with the avant garde. In fact, she is saying that youtube has specifically resisted this. So, Jameson becomes a bit of a straw man and might be being used unfairly as a foil because, and I don’t know her position on this, but Heffernan might even agree with his views on the social mission of the avant garde being stripped away when it’s incorporated into things like shampoo commercials. It seems like some slippage results when trying to conflate Heffernan’s idea of vernaculrization and Jamesons’ idea of massification.
I’d be curious to find out what Heffernan would say about Jamesons’ idea (not that I disagree at all with your assessment of it being austere and indifferent if not complicit regarding the art/class relationship).
SH // September 21, 2009 at 11:04 am |
Jameson is most definitely my favorite straw man.
But seriously, I bring him up because I thought that Heffernan’s point did not get to the politics of the avant-garde, which Jameson does quite well. And what I’m getting at is rather, would Jameson read Heffernan’s post and then conclude what he usually does–vernacularization=weakening of political edge? As you say, I side with Heffernan because sometimes when discussions about what is already imbricated with corporate interest, well, we are left with nothing, zilch since the evaluation of “political” art will be boiled down to whether you can trace back funding for it to some big bad entity or not, which to me is silly and reductive. And worst of all, it is guilty of deifying the “good old days” of surrealism and “real” resistive art, which becomes trapped in a kind of authenticity game that I find to be rather ridiculous especially when contemporary capitalism has not left anything outside of it. Hardt and Negri call this “real subsumption” (as opposed to “formal”). As an aside, this is also where many theorists are reading Foucault, especially as they argued that capitalism today is biopolitical, subsuming “life-itself. At any rate, I strongly disagree with Jameson’s retrospective valorization on the grounds of elitism(not on his part so much, but on the part of the avant-garde of the past.) Hence, I saw Heffernan’s post as opening up of these issues, and was trying to bring out what I thought remained implicit.