Abstract
‘Genre begets Genre’ uncovers Vicki Bennett’s idiosyncratic world of audiovisual collage. With particular reference to her latest live piece, Genre Collage (2009), the artist talks about the importance of popular culture, and her politics of recycling film and appropriating original content. With Genre Collage , Bennett humorously compiles a collection of genre film footage and creates visual puns that dismantle the specificity of iconic genre sequences. The performed piece’s carnivalesque attitude to genre film undercuts the solemnity of about a hundred iconic film genre sequences – thus suggesting a genre in its own right. For Vicki Bennett, the active viewer lives in and informs more generic worlds, which are never either stable or univocal. By also revealing what it is that makes ‘avant-retard’ sound collage also a genre in its own right, Bennett suggests how her genre-bending collage practice lies in the plasticity of ideas and their ‘context’.
Highlights
Her work is reminiscent of some classic avant-garde collage pieces such as Stan VanDerBeek’s Science Friction (1959), Bruce Conner’s A Movie (1958), and Joseph Cornell’s Rose Hobart (1936)
Her film footage is mostly sourced from the Prelinger Archive, but she has used, amongst others, A/V Geeks, the Valente, Donatella, ‘Genre begets Genre: in conversation with Vicki Bennett (People Like Us)’, Dandelion: postgraduate arts journal & research network, 1.1 (Spring 2010), 1–12 [online]
In her latest live audiovisual set Genre Collage (2009), a collage/montage of genre film footage, Bennett speaks through the idiomatic language of ‘folk culture’ by creating discrete, idiosyncratic audiovisual sets and synchronic visual puns; she dismantles the specificity of iconic genre sequences with irreverent iconoclastic gusto, producing comedic effects which hinge on the syncopation of its montage grammar
Summary
Donatella Valente is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History of Art and Screen Media, Birkbeck College, University of London. Her thesis is on the unconscious of popular culture in expanded cinema: archive footage in Italy and the UK (1965–1995). Her research interests include European avant-garde/experimental film and video, world cinema, psychoanalysis and film form, intermedia practices, the moving image and the visual arts, and digital aesthetics/media
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