Comments on: Hi

By: Conall

Conall — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 22:58:31 +0000

There is something so blatantly (and perhaps deliberately) perverse about the comparison you draw in your last comment, Sam, that I think it would make sense to begin there. I don’t know anything about the project of Harrell Fletcher’s you mention above beyond what is given on his website, but I know a little about Neill, enough to get a sense that this project of Harrell’s (including the process of documentation which is, as you say, “part of the work”) has a certain political intent, in terms of getting children and adults alike to radically rethink the way in which they understand education and the experience of childhood. Getting the children involved in this work, it seems, is about providing them with an opportunity to express their creativity in a way the educational system typically denies them.

The David Archuleta video and the process of ‘making friends’ that it performs and/or documents, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to me to offer any such avenue for participation or creativity. The construction of narrative through these photographs is interesting, yes, but there is such a rigid distinction between the ‘photo-world’ (the past, when ‘David’ was happy, prior to this emotional break-up – all of which is ‘documented’ through these photographs) and the ‘filmic world’ (the present, with ‘David’ alone and in mourning, addressing the viewer in standard music video mode – all of which is presented on film) that it seems very much to be denying the opportunity of harnessing the process of documentation for any creative end. The documents and the act of documentation are ascribed to the past, this inevitable, unchangeable past that can only be relived through the ultimately unsatisfactory (“Delete all pictures?”) act of re-viewing.

I think this gets us to a very important difference between the act of “rereading Summerhill” called for by Harrell, and the act of re-viewing performed here (I could here quote the infamous passage on rereading from Barthes’ S/Z in support of this, but I will restrain myself). Just as ‘David’s’ act of re-viewing these photographs only serves as a reminder of the distance between (‘mediated’) past and (‘real’) present, I think the video relates to its viewer in much the same way – all we can do is (re)watch it, maybe perform the ventriloquistic act of ‘singing along’ that gives us the fantasy of creative participation without actually allowing us either to create or to participate. This seems to me quite antithetical to the attempt Harrell’s project appears to be making: to radically refigure the relationship between the user and his tools, or the child and his toys, if you like (again Barthes comes to mind, the essay on ‘Toys’), so that these children may be creatively involved in their own ‘work’ and their own ‘play,’ an important part of which is the documentation itself. Here there seems a possibility that documentation may be creative, may be ‘present’ – a possibility I don’t see in the Archuleta video.

I had some other thoughts, but this is long enough for now at least.

By: Sam Kaplan

Sam Kaplan — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 22:14:15 +0000

For additional thought: how does this picture, from the video

img183.imageshack.us/img183/2027/picture1pi6.jpg

differ from this picture, from Harrell’s website?

harrellfletcher.com/images/sweden_summerhill/1.jpg

Both are self-conscious acts of documentation. In both, the documentation is part of the work. In Harrell’s case, the photograph is from a 2003 project called “In Sweden, As In The Rest Of The World, It Is Time To Reread Summerhill” in which he and a group of kids “created posters … , shot videos, wrote life stories etc.” relating to the book “Summerhill” by A.S. Neill. (See harrellfletcher.com/2003/signal_summerhill/set.html for more information.)

By: Sam Kaplan

Sam Kaplan — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 22:24:50 +0000

I also have those questions, Frank. I think people assume that relationships formed under “artificial” circumstances—pretending to be friends/lovers in a music video or film, for example—can’t possibly be meaningful. However, it seems to me that such situations only highlight the “artificiality” of all relationships; that is not to say that relationships are not meaningful, only that there is always a certain pretense in “becoming friends” in which people act a certain way. I think artists like Jen and Harrell seek to harness that pretense: if this is how people make friends, why not use it to create new relationships between people who otherwise might not interact?

By: Frank

Frank — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 22:10:19 +0000

I just assumed that all of these people were actors, mainly because, as in the “Crush” video, they are clearly all way too attractive to coincidentally be David’s friends. Although I suppose it’s possible. One thing that really got me curious though was the kind of relationship especially that formed between David and these girls who are supposed to be his “romantic interests” in the video. Are the connections that you are supposed to believe that they make in the videos real or fictional? Is the flirtation in the “Crush” video only scripted on paper, and in reality becomes an actual connection that is that much more believable because you are watching it truthfully form in real time? I often wonder how often this happens in movies also, where clearly there must be real sexual tension between two actors who play lovers and have to create a certain believability about the nature of their relationship.