💥✍ Every year I share a 𝘔𝘢𝘥𝘮𝘦𝘯 clip with students to set the bar for pitching a film. I'm half-serious about the Don Draper pitching-bar, because even though the scene is not to be read as a daydream in the 𝘔𝘢𝘥𝘮𝘦𝘯 narrative, it comes off as a daydream, innocent and idealised. Don, pitching an advertisement for the Kodak Slide Carousel, uses memories sealed in his family album to represent "nostalgia" ("a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone") learnt from his "Greek" colleague Teddy (from the past). Freud had a term for such idealisation of memory… what is it….. "screen memories"... "when an early memory is used as a screen for a later event". 𝘞𝘦 𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘮𝘢𝘬𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘮𝘦𝘮𝘰𝘳𝘪𝘦𝘴 they say. It's a strange thing to "make memories". Saying it aloud is to confirm or validate the present as if the present will never be enough; the present lacks something that the future values. Yesterday I met with students online to discuss how we could use NOW in a productive way - "keeping busy" (another phrase suggesting we are trying to survive the present). I told them that all the images that we confront today are NEW - and that art is made in times of crisis. At a panel discussion at IMMA, when we were coming out of recession, I said something that alarmed the audience, and me, when I let it slip out - "We need another crisis." I said it in the context of a deep nostalgia felt for the art that was made during the crisis. Art made during crisis is always wearing the veil of crisis. Amidst a crisis artists needn't make up a theme, explore some hidden history, or marvelous & nebulous subject. The crisis is so present, so unavoidable, so virulent that it covers everything, like grief. Two weeks into homeschooling my kids I've noticed my son Noah, aged 7, rubbing out his drawings when they "go wrong". I advise him to wait, turn it over, and look at it again in a few days. "You can't see it now. You will see it later." This of course is impossible for a 7-year old, so he ends up rubbing it out anyway. Today he found a drawing that had evaded his rubber. "It's good Dad," he said, qualifying his surprised look with, "I knew that already though."🖤

MARCH 27, 2020 (ORIGINALLY POSTED ON INSTAGRAM @a_flash_in_the_small_night