Week One: Art

The elasticity and fluidity of the appearance of objects in the world of Waking Life stand counter to my actual dreams, especially those that seem extra realistic and firm. Of course, they aren’t. They’re as ephemeral as mist. However, at the time I experience them, their reality is often more entertaining than any other state of awareness. The craft Linklater employed in Waking Life, the rotoscoping, helps him to convey for me as a viewer a variety of joys, sensations, pains, and tortures that people mask during their waking lives. In the film I detect, because of my age, traces of older films Linklater doesn’t reference directly. I’ll use those references to allow me to slip willingly into the experience of the film without regarding the film as 1) either a work of art or not, 2) either high or low art or not, 3) either worthy of serious consideration or not. Of course, this isn’t the first film of its type to establish a single main character moving through a series of unusual and edgy episodes to a point where he wonders how to free himself from the dimension of his entrapment. It’s also not the first use of rotoscoping in film, although Linklater used it here for the entire film. But, all previous film history aside, I’m called upon to wonder if the film is about its look, its rhythmic—visual and musical—effrontery, the day-long chronology of its characters, its verbal content. Possibly it’s about all and none of these, which for me exposes the film as being about itself. Beaudrillard writes contemporary art’s “only reality is that of its operation in real time and its confusion with that reality.” In other words, contemporary art doesn’t squint toward either past or future.
http://insomnia.ac/essays/contemporary_art/