Bad Knees was recorded at the Experimental Television Center over a couple of sessions in July 1985, soon after recording Lumpy Banger. Also in June and July I worked with Dan Doherty on a couple of real time animation experiments called Luna Negra and Transformaciones. There seems to be another sequence of recordings in the middle of the Bad Knees work that, though I never showed, could stand on it’s own as another finished piece. Bad Knees seems to be the last series I recorded at the ETC while living on Lake Street in Owego, working for, and living, down the street from the Center.
Again this is another super short sampling of a couple of hours of material recorded over a couple of sessions.
In part, I made my edits short in opposition to those long minimalist pieces I was brought up on, and though I loved them, I admit that I had to fight off sleep at times. Work was often shown in theatrical settings. Narrative movies and television were still the context to view non-narrative work. At a certain point I made a directed decision to be brief, partially to differentiate the work, partly to be easy on the viewer, but more importantly it was an attempt to reduce each series to the essential and best elements. I focused on shorter gestures that made their point and moved on. Ultimately it would marginalize the work as well, as longwindedness can be equated with depth and value. And also, in part, the work was so short because I had very limited access to editing and, when I did manage to be with a pair of decks, I was working on a grant proposal. It was well known that grant panels did not look at more than a couple of minutes of tape, so to some extent the economics determined the form.
see:
blog.lumpybanger.com
lumpybanger.com
