I discovered this morning that, as a masters student, I can technically go to any lecture I want, which is certainly an amusing prospect. Over breakfast, jen invited me to one of their lessons. They were holding a ‘happening’ in ps1. those of my readers who took writers contexts last year will recall that happenings are related to fluxus – sort of events which are pieces of art in and of themselves. This ‘happening’ was a piece of nostalgia based on the sixties hippy movement. Everyone dressed up as a hippy and did stuff hippies did: burn joss sticks, read tarot card, listen to frank zappa etc. it was really cool. I got a bandanna put on my head.

Such happenings interest me: most other art forms can only be witnessed from one point. With film, we all ‘see’ the same picture; with literature we all read the same words. Yet this form of theatre is different. It is participated in rather than observed. Everyone has a different experience. There are no ‘units’ like shots or words, and therefore it cannot be created. In film, literature or photography, there is always a certain type of relationship between text/image and viewer. In such happenings, there is no viewer – they just happen. Thus this bypasses the Lacanian symbolic and renders itself ‘real’. I noticed the thing was being filmed, yet any such film is doomed to fall short, for it can only render the real in symbolic form, as a photograph can only be a symbol rather than it’s referent.

I thus find these things quite fascinating in relation to my own work. To what extent can films be considered real. What is the nature of the image in relation to reality? Why indeed do they draw us so?