GCOP200 - Ever Tried, Ever Failed
Lecture Series: Provocations - GCOP200
In this session, we were shown how most influential artists, films, media can stem from mistakes and accidents.
Man Ray (Emmanuel Radnitsky) was an American Photograher who strongly represented the Dadaist's and Surrealist's. He started off a photographer, and tells his history behind the classic 'Rayograph' as being a mistake. Man Ray was greatly influenced by Marcel Duchamp, a founder of the Dadaist’s group, then moving from that, the Dadaists moulded themselves into the Surrealist group, who gave undivided attention to the importance of the unconscious mind, dreams and understandably, Freudian Theory. André Breton was one of the leaders of the Surrealist group and wrote the first Surrealist Manifesto of 1924 in which he chose to define ‘Surrealism’ as ‘pure psychic automatism’ meaning, the content is created not by rational thought, but by the minds own development of thoughts in it’s own convoluted way when unconscious or when thoughts are left to go wild.
Freudian Theory is based on, or developed from the ideas presented in Sigmund Freud’s book ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’ (1899), in which Freud noted many both interesting and objectionable points of psychology, a few of his main ideas focused on the idea of the human personality being sustained via the Id, Ego and Superego.
The 'Sabattier Effect' or 'Solarisation' effect was initially mentioned by Armand Sabatier (spelled incorrectly), he noted the quality of photographs with this 'direct positive' effect but he could not recreate it. Man Ray perfected the solarisation technique after the light in the darkroom was accidentally turned on while the photographs were being developed. However it is very likely that other people found themselves recreating the effect by accident due to its nature.
Of course, the majority of art is based on experimentation, change and uncertainty, artists, filmmakers, creators universally have to experience the evolution of their ideas and ‘learning to fail’, so to speak. Even from a young age, most children and infants are taught that failing is an option, as many a time the better one, one can only strive to achieve from failure, certain success provides and benefits nothing to oneself.
Many a time, filmmakers have found themselves deep into failure with a project, for example, ‘Lost in La Mancha’ (2002) is a documentary about a film expected to be Terry Gilliham’s version of ‘The Man Who Killed Don Quixote’, however the entire production came across too many failures to counts and so could not be retained, the documentary is a document of the events that occurred during ‘filming’ and the issues they faced.
