[-empyre-] Some further words on my work and Aquarius the Waterman

[Stephen M Wetzel]

Some further words on my work and Aquarius the Waterman:


Though there are no rules, the one rule for art making is that the art object (and for me, in this context, the art object is a time-based work steeped in documentary forms or non-fiction strategies) never terminates inquiry, that it constantly unfolds in new ways, remains a puzzle, or is puzzling, building in its puzzlement over time, something like that. Documentary can be art and not just artful but it must satisfy the badly formed criteria mentioned above otherwise we’re just talking about the delivery of information, problems and solutions, cause and effect, and so on (this is a tired distinction I suppose, but I still find it relevant). My preferred mode is the linear edit, the ultimate in artifice as it is the form most unlike consciousness.



The work I submitted to FLEFF, Aquarius the Waterman, contains an extraordinary legend wherein a water creature offers the folk of central-western Austria—after having just been set free upon granting them their wish of iron ore forevermore—the gift of puzzlement: “You forgot to ask me the best thing of all! The carbuncle and the meaning of the cross in the nut.” My aim is to manifest such a gift in the form of a documentary-like object, documentary because of its power in “bearing witness to the actual” (MacDougall?), a gift because it’s for others. For me the gift is always art; I am only interested in art.





Steve WetzeL
Associate Professor
Director of Graduate Program in Film
 department of Film, Video, Animation & New Genres
Peck School of the Arts
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
www4.uwm.edu/psoa/film/

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