Both William Burrough's article The Cut up Method of Brion Gysin and Bill Morrison's film Decasia pose a serious question about the validity of art. Burrough's pushes the idea that anyone can write poetry and can/should recut and rearrange famed poetry, while Morrison basically stitched together decaying film and digitized it. Both of the initial creative starters were created by other people (the poem/old film), but are recreated into something new. Is this art? Is it only art when the concept changes and a new idea is conveyed.
The following two video's are "trailers" for Stanley Kubrick's The Shining made in 1980. The first video is what many would consider an accurate representation of what you can expect to see if you watch the film. The second video is a "recut," which entails a mash up of different scenes from the movie, set to different music, and the product is completely different than the first "trailer."
Are they both art?
-Yes, defanitely.
Are they both Stanley Kubrick's art?
-Questionable.
From here I wonder if this type of art will only work with certain mediums, and will fail in other mediums. The current and ever-so-popular TV series Glee is known for its mash-ups of songs, in which multiple pop songs are smashed together....which can be considered either a good or bad thing. Decide for youself.
To answer your question, it's a bad thing. Lots of mash-ups are dumb, look at girl talk, they suck.
ReplyDeleteYes, lots of mash-ups are bad, but then again look at the film we just watched, "Decasia". That film had so many mash-ups! i think the technique worked well in all three of these videos by the way. The third video you posted, I was skeptical, but that's only because I like the original song Halo by Beyonce.
ReplyDeleteThese mash-ups and recuts don't truly transform the original material. The "Shining Recut" trailer is hilarious in that it turns a horror movie into a warm and fuzzy family film; however, it seems more an add for the Shining than a work of art. Morrison transformed the decaying footage by taking it out of its original context as Movietone news reels, sequencing it and commissioning a killer soundscape to go with it.
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