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The snowball of “digital transition” is now rolling downhill like some cartoon snowball. Today, connected virtually to everything from everywhere, we no longer take the time to recognize let alone consider the medium or differentiate it from the message. What is book, newspaper, RSS, blog, film, video, text, email, tweet, mp3 or html no longer matters to us. Desktop, laptop, tablet, phone, iWatch… it is all just impressions on a screen.

I thought this would be a good time to stop and take a breath. as the world whirs around you like a skater in a spin sometimes you have to pick a spot, mark it, and focus on it so as to not get dizzy. That is what Art often does best.

In 1973 Marcel Broodthaers made a short film that asks us to meditate on the nature of content in the context of medium in a simple openended way. 

As you rush to try and figure out what is next for publishing, curation, librarianship, journalism or any industry based on content dissemination, take 5 minutes, click on the link below, and watch Un Voyage en Mer du Nord then go to lunch and quietly think about what you really do for a living. 

~eP

Un Voyage en Mer du Nord (A Voyage on the North Sea) by Marcel Broodthaers

From UBUWEB:

A recent exhibition at pioneering curator and collector Thomas Solomon’s new gallery, Solo Projects, paired a 16-mm silent film, Un Voyage en Mer du Nord (A Voyage on the North Sea), 1973-74, with a thirty-eight-page, French-bound book that shares its title and ostensible subject matter: the pairing of a late-nineteenth-century amateur painting of an archetypal European ship and a twentieth-century photograph of a pleasure boat against a modern urban backdrop. The roughly four-minute film is projected on a retractable home-movie screen—a Broodthaers motif—and the book displayed on a simple wooden shelf, lit by a single spotlight. 

Un Voyage’s almost obsolete format and pedagogical presentation gave the show the feeling of a historical document. In each work, Broodthaers “cuts” into the painting and the photograph by focusing on small details. The artist is said to have dated the painting to around 1900, and initially it seems that Un Voyage is delivering a rigorous structural analysis based on formal and historical oppositions marking the divide between the nineteenth century and the twentieth: novel versus cinema; painting versus photography; shipping as commerce versus sailing as leisure. But the work does more than this. By using splicing, binding, and repetition to join these apparent opposites, it performs a complex overlapping of materiality and history. Punctuated by intertitles that demarcate fifteen “pages,” the film insinuates a relationship to contemporaneous structuralist cinema—think of the wall-mounted seascape photograph that is central to (and literally at the center of) Michael Snow’s forty-five-minute zoom in Wavelength, 1967. But again the comparison unravels as the film in Un Voyage undermines its own apparent logic, repeating “page” five twice, for example, or inserting a brief closeup of cotton weave where one would expect a shot of the painted canvas. 

The film and book represent Broodthaers’s interest in reproducible media, though the relatively small edition—just one hundred examples of the pair were produced—also suggests that the artist was not aiming for a mass audience. The evidence indicates that Broodthaers was interested in complicating the status of these objects by subverting any notion of an “original” or definitive version. It should be noted that Un Voyage follows directly from several 1973 works not included in the exhibition, among them two 16-mm films—Analyse d’une peinture and Une peinture d’amateur decouverte dans une boutiquede curiosities—and a slide projection, Bateau Tableau. Un Voyage itself in many ways resembles a slide show: Testing the limits of the cinematic, Broodthaers injects a dose of humor by assembling a deliberately inert motion picture from still images. 

Written, designed, and produced by Julie Chen and Clifton Meador at Flying Fish Press in Berkeley, California and the Center for Book and Paper, Columbia College Chicago, Fall 2010. larger files here