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DJ
"ARTFORUM" April 1980
PROGRESS——-DISCONTINUOUS
Regina Cornwell
Recently I came across a statement that Leo Steinberg made in the late '60s. In effect it's a thought that comments on its own time: "The legitimacy of retrojecting from our immediate experience to remote fields of study touches on the issue of relevance. No one imagines that relevance attaches to particular subject matter. Making things relevant is a mode of seeing." Very simply, for Steinberg, nothing is naturally relevant. We make something to be so; it is a way of seeing, pointing to, underlining, calling attention to. We find issues from the past and what might be considered reconndite and create links between them and our immediate concerns and experiences for all sorts of sundry and special reasons. The past may help us understand the present as well as the future; the present may assist us with the past; or we may even visualize the relevance between the past and present in the shape of a Möbius strip as we come to terms with such relationships. What is relevant is really relative, and what's relevant is also about seeing, actually and metaphorically.
For almost a decade I have been interested in the relation between recent American film avant-garde, by which I mean the period from the 1965 to 1973 or 1974, and primitive film, that is from film's beginnings in 1895 to 1906 or so. But the relevances I began thinking about, and which excited me then, turn out to be somewhat different from what I see as important today, that is the relationship of the two concepts progress and discontinuity to modernism, the primitive film and the recent avant-garde. Progress is a central tenet of a broadly defined cultural modernism——that product of the rise of the middle classes; while discontinuity is a major characteristic of a particular modernism——esthetic or artistic modernism. The machinery of film came out of the push for progress, while the artistic leanings of an avant-garde are in opposition to, and disruptive of, notions of progress in art.
In 1964 Jonas Mekas, poet, filmmaker, and principal publicist of what was then call the New American Cinema, gave Film Culture magazine's Sixth Independent Film Award to Andy Warhol for Sleep, Haircut, Eat, Kiss and Empire. The previous year's award had gone to Jack Smith for Flaming Creatures, and the one before that to Stan Brakhage for The Dead and Prelude.
In the award citation Mekas mused about Warhol's place in the cinema: Andy Warhol is taking cinema back to its origins, to the days of Lumière, for a rejuvenation and a cleansing. In his work, he has abandoned all the "cinematic" form and subject adornments that cinema had gathered around itself until now. He has focused his lens on the plainest images possible in the plainest manner possible. With his artist's intuition as his only guide, he recors, almost obsessively, man's daily activities, the things he sees around him.
A strange thing occurs. The world becomes transposed, intensified, electrified. We see it sharper than before. Not in dramatic, rearranged contexts and meanings, not in the service of something else but as pure as it is in itself: eating as eating, sleeping as sleeping, haircut as haircut.

Mekas went on to say that because of Warhol's work we were going to see films of simple objects and events like trees and sunsets, each shot differently, each by a different artist. "Some of them will be bad," he wrote, "some good, some mediocre, like any other movie--and somebody will make a masterpiece."
Meka's words about the period of the film avant-garde immediately following Warhol--from 1965 to 1973 or 1974-- have proven to be prophetic. Consider Michael Snow's major films from Wavelength, 1966-67, through "Rameau's Nephew" by Diderot (Thanx to Dennis Young) by Wilma Schoen, 1972-74;