Installation view of Private Live Public Spaces (October 21, 2019-July 5, 2020), The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Digital Image © 2019 The Museum of Modern Art. Photo by Martin Seck.
There’s something startlingly charming about intimate glimpses into the most humdrum daily lives of strangers – and something troubling about watching them in a gallery context. In MoMA’s Virtual Views: Home Movies, the museum has drawn nine films from its archives for display online until July 1st. Put on your Contemporary Art Hat, and settle into silent movies from the 20th century which fall into two loose categories: earnest, and knowing. Turn to IGTV, and you’ll see the same distinction today.
Generally, home videos are very private artefacts. They’re made within families or between friends, with no presumed audience beyond their primary protagonists. As one of the world’s most prestigious art institutions that film its international platform, how should we view work which would never have been termed ‘work’ by its maker in the first place?
How should we view work which would never have been termed ‘work’ by its maker in the first place?
Well, some of it was made by people very accustomed to the term indeed. The first section of MoMA’s Virtual Views: Home Movies is titled ‘Celebrities’, and it’s probably the most and least interesting of the bunch. Most, because their makers are in full control; least, for much the same reason.
The Chaplin-Fairbanks-Pickford film, for instance, is by far the funniest and most coherent – but of course it is, because it was put together by the era’s hottest Hollywood talent. Not only familiar with playing to a crowd or the rhythms of show-and-tell stories, but making a living from that honed understanding.
Home movies. Jarret family. USA. 1958-67. Digital preservation of Standard 8mm film. Courtesy the Museum of Modern Art.
Home movies. Pierce family. USA. 1958-63. Digital preservation of 16mm film. Courtesy the Museum of Modern Art.
Composer Aaron Copeland’s offering is similarly sophisticated; a voyeur’s perspective follows an everyman, sensitively observed at work and rest with lingering shots of the city bustling around him. Salvador Dali’s film, on the other hand, looks much like you’d expect a ‘home video’ from Salvador Dali to look. What’s he holding? A tiny black kitten is posted into a recess in startlingly white rock before scampering down. A wooden pitchfork follows him in every shot as Dali appears and disappears sporting a skull mask; cut to breath-taking seaside scenery, a bull fight, and to black.
As a visual artist, Dali’s film is by far the closest to the genre of material we’re used to seeing in contexts like MoMA’s. And while their output is par for the course in such settings, auteurs and artists are curious identities. Turning the gaze we normally reserve for them onto anonymous or just unknown people throws the artist’s status into weird flux: suddenly, it needs to account for itself.
What’s the difference between home movies and movie-movies, or between Charlie Chaplin and, say, the Jarrett family?
When do artists stop creating, and when do non-artists start? What’s the difference between home movies and movie-movies, or between Charlie Chaplin and, say, the Jarrett family? After the dizzy heights of ‘Celebrities’ comes ‘The Experience of Place’; much closer to the films we’re used to making ourselves, which is why it feels strange to assess them on terms of artistic merit. After all, they certainly weren’t made with any ambitions to revolutionise contemporary culture – they were made to keep memories fresh, ready and waiting to be revisited.
Sixth Avenue – Subway – Post takes Charles L Turner’s commute as its subject; between his home (near MoMA, as luck would have it) and the US Army Pictorial Service, the footage captures moments of unrehearsed intimacy between coworkers in 1940s New York. New York (c. 1981) takes the same city as its subject, filming inhabitants at a quiet remove and allowing kids and teenagers to flit in and out of shot. Late afternoon pavements give way to city lights; silent, like all MoMA’s films, though nonetheless humming with life.
ArrayBeyond Genre. Edit deAk. USA. 1977-86. Digital preservation of Super 8mm film. Codirected and coedited with Patrick Fox. Courtesy the Museum of Modern Art.
Spanish People at Pickfair. Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford. Cinematography by Henry Sharp. USA. 1929. Digital preservation of 35mm film. Courtesy the Museum of Modern Art.
The online exhibition’s final section is ‘Family’. The trio of films here is at once eminently familiar and uncannily impenetrable. Margaret’s Communion Party (1933), for instance, reminds you with all the force of intimacy that you are not party to it. For me and for you, the girls walking down the path are charming but nameless. For the film’s intended audience, they were beloved grandchildren, siblings and friends. A group of teenagers is caught exchanging glances and sly smiles beneath a tree – to us they’re strangers, but the shot would most likely have brought guffaws when hauled into view of aunties and uncles for the film’s first play-through.
MoMA’s archive-dive presents some deeply compelling lines of enquiry. Most pertinent of all, perhaps – is art simply a question of who’s looking? Of context, not content? Does your gaze transfigure Charles Turner’s commute into another category of looked-at-ness – into ‘art’? How about the framing device of monolithic MoMA itself? Or the present moment: teeming with material born from the very impulse which turned Turner’s camera on himself in the first place?
I can’t see my two-year-old brother, but my dad can send me a clip of him forming sentences; those snippets make my heart feel very full and very empty
As weeks become months, we’re scrambling to make and share marks in a tapestry of time which feels too smooth to get purchase. People are swapping videos online, broadcasting to the world as well as between private individuals; meanwhile, endless zooming and skyping and photomessaging has pushed the significance of ‘home movies’ to new heights. If Dali’s a slick FacebookLive or viral TikTok, then Margaret’s Communion Party is a FaceTime to grandma.
And if your film – captured off-hand or made with great sentimentality as the case may be – were suddenly broadcast for the world to see, would we call it art? Would that depend on who was looking, or on who you wanted to show? I can’t see my two-year-old brother, but my dad can send me a clip of him forming sentences; those snippets make my heart feel very full and very empty. To you, they would mean very little (but I’d probably try to show you anyway).
