VL[8] Frenesi, Art and Machine

[Terrance F. Flaherty]

 What is Frenesi? Perhaps she’s “just a cold and lonely lovely work of
art,” and perhaps she is a machine. In Art, the machine is an instrument
with manifold and conflicting possibilities. Frenesi can be viewed as is
an examination of these conflicts and how they contributed to the
failure of the 60s revolution.  The machine may be used as a passive
substitute for experience; it may be used to counterfeit other forms of
art; it may be used in its own right, to concentrate and intensify and
express new forms of experience. When the machine becomes a surrogate
for primary experience, it only serves to debilitate. Just as the
telescope is worthless unless the eye is sharp, so all mechanical
apparatus of the arts depend on the cultivation of the organic,
physiological, and spiritual aptitudes that they are extension of. The
machine can not replace or shortcut the necessity of organic experience.
A camera can no more reveal the truth than know what truth is. For
Frenesi, the life she views or captures on film is real and organic and
the organic she experiences is film. All of her relationships are
mediated by a machine she can not separate from and from which she can
not separate experience.  In business, industry, and government, the
machine replaces humans by reducing them to automation. In art, however,
the machine can only extend and deepen human functions and intuitions.
If the camera eliminates the impulse to see and the radio does away with
the impulse to play instruments, the machine leads to a lapse of
function and ultimately to paralysis. The machine, however, is not
really the problem. Frenesi is not simply a machine, she is also art,
and the failure of the sixties to integrate art and experience. In the
abdication of her spirit and her betrayal of other souls, she cooperates
in the perverse triumph of the machine as both a passive substitute for
life and counterfeit of other arts. “Weed, the cameras only a machine
,”
and so forth, movie sincerity.

Terrance