The following is a brief preview - the full content of this page is available to premium users only.
Click here to subscribe...
This life, as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in. it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh ... must return to you -all in. the same succession and sequence. - Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 1974.1
You have to hand it to Hollywood. This global centre for cinematic entertainment keeps on pumping out product formulas that help constitute a state of 'eternal recurrence'. This new poll uti on possesses the comforting appeal of repetition and encourages the thought that nothing will change and that we can all go back to sleep after we have watched the movie. However, amidst this glut of recurring cliche Brisbane video artist Grant Stevens is excavating things of value, for he uses video technology to manipulate Hollywood conventions and transform them into his own idiosyncratic and vernacular modes.
In Stevens' creative reworking of familiar movies such as Top Gun and A Few Good Men, we gain an insight into the mind of an adolescent male who is attracted to the hard glamour and the spectacular action of big budget Hollywood films. Stevens' output, however, is not that of the passive viewer or victim of the Hollywood image factory's relentless spectacle. Instead, from his obsessive watching and re-watching of these films emerge thoughtful pieces that explore, question and investigate Hollywood's codes and conventions. After consumption comes digestion, and in Stevens' case, it is the overt, as well as the less obvious aspects of the 'dream machine' that come under the microscope.
Like video artists Ichiro Sueoka ('Requiem for the Avant-Garde') and... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline