Decline?

I have been thinking lately about the work I produced when I began school here a year ago and what I've made lately. I started thinking about it with my viewing of other Acconci works on YouTube (the one with him "masturbating" under the table in particular) and have been revisiting the idea with each artist that we look at now that I have returned to this classroom while working on actual film only. Revisting the idea in part because there were a lot of things I like about my first pieces that I find pushed away by working through all of the conceptual ideas (just as a matter of tape and idea space, not as any kind of discard on conceptual grounds) that I miss.

I think about Jonas Mekas's website and how 365 movies is a tall order for anyone to really feel like they've done well everytime, and about the idea that "you make a film every time" so it's a lot like practice many times. I think about it most right now because as far as quality of work goes, this challenge project is not likely to produce anything that marries aesthetic to concept well. On the other hand, working every day gives me a body of collected images to go back to and search for images or ideas that do work and remix them for the future.

Jonathan Rosen visited my 115 class last semester and presented Gotik Aztéques. Along with his presentation of his film, he talked a lot about he combines his personal works with his extensive professional work, often arranging to shoot certain scenes or tests or animations for commercial work so that he can later use them in his personal projects. It's this revisiting of work as an artist, real remixing, that I think about these days. Camera movements, compositions, concepts that have fallen by the wayside in the rush of all this work, as well as all of this new work that I am thinking about right now.

Since the end of last semester, I decided that there is nothing that I will produce that is just for class. All work is public work. Every blog, every 5 day challenge. Because every work is a practice, whether it be daily, like it is now, or my usual stream of whatever you want to call it whenever I get around to making it. After all, someday I may make something worth seeing, and once I do, like any artist, it will either legitimize all of my previous work (something that I can't stop believing leads to what we see in class on some days) or create an example of just how much happy accidents can count for.

Either way, there is no harm in putting work out there, but there is in holding it back. It would seem that that is also well documented by what we see in class on some days.