In the first part of this dream I'm becoming acquainted with a guy who might be Mick from the first floor apartment.
Now I'm watching a movie that Mick made. Sometimes it's real and I'm part of it. The movie is very similar, and maybe derivative, of Chi-wang's production which I saw last night. (Chi-wang lives next door.) This movie is more coherent, with a less interesting corps of actors and storyline- 20somethings sitting around talking kind of thing. The story is ruptured by gaudy landscape stills with text, like in D. Byrne's "Your Action World" book. The characters are talking and suddenly the camera pulls away and stops abruptly at pixelated postcard shot of a tropical beach, and then text pours on like frosting. The effect is to mock the supposed narrative.
In one scene, the artist (Mick) is leading a friend or protege past his installation in a gallery. I'm tagging along. This is the real, I'm participating part of the movie. His installation is a string of tables- white-painted boards on legs- overlapping each other and forming a crooked line along one wall of the gallery. On the tables are a bunch of little objects he made. A canyon cliff here, a car there... poor craftsmanship throughout. As we walk along and they're talking, he's casually and roughly picking objects out and giving them to her. They're supposed to be helpful to her somehow for her own project.
It's upsetting and confusing to see him so carelessly violating his own work, and I protest. I argue that she can take information from this show if it's useful to her work, without taking the actual stuff with her.
They ignore me. It bothers me that she doesn't attempt to stop him from trashing his work supposedly for her benefit. It bothers me that he has the arrogance to use his special privileges as the artist to meddle with his work, in public.
