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Expanded Photography Bob Cotton 144/146
Sergei Eisenstein: The Method 1948
“In his biggest and last theoretical project The METHOD (1932-1948) Eisenstein was trying to elabo-
rate an analytical model that would enable him to describe and classify all art practices and forms: cave painting and Cubism, 17th Century Japanese graphics and American film, ornament and musi- cal counterpoint, different schools of acting and plot construction in Shakespeare’s dramas, circus and music, Dostoevsky’s novels and Disney’s animated cartoons. But his main point of preoccupa- tion was the genealogy of modernism and film, which was for Eisenstein the quintessentially mo- dernist medium. Eisenstein explored art – literature, theatre, painting, architecture, music, film – in its relation to archaic mentality and conceived artworks as collective dream images. This oneiric su- bject and the method of ecstatic illumination needed for its perception obliged Eisenstein to follow a visual logic instead of a linear one. He constructed his never finished book according to the asso- ciative principles of montage that replaced the traditional scholarly narrative. He searched for new forms of a book that should be closer to associative, spherical, and labyrinthine thought structures, which so far had only found expression in modernist art experiments. His theory emerged as a hy- brid work of an artist who was able to conceptualize a new form – a hypertext – before the appea- rance of a new medium for it.” (Potemkin Press - publisher of Die Methode)https://europe.potemkinpress.- com/ The essential idea underpinning Eisenstein’s unfinished work on Method is inspiring: It is the exploration of formal and informal methods encouraging creativity across all the arts and media arts. It is also an idea that fascinated the FLUXUS artists in the 1960s - the preoccupation with ‘in- termedia’, with Fluxus Boxes, with the idea that art is for everyone, not just artists (see Maciunas: Fluxus Manfesto: Non Art Reality 1963)... These were the ideas that inspired my mediainspiratorium (the database and website underpinning this Expanded Arts series of ebooks). Eisenstein, like Ma- ciunas and many FLUXUS artists, was a generalist - in Eisenstein’s case an engineer and an auto- didact - but how else should you approach the ever expanding knowledge-base of our times? Self- learning is the major survival strategy for the 21st century - and also a strategy that can bring im- mense rewards in spreading our knowledge net, in discovering new perspectives, and more aspects of art- science - technology - and in bringing us great joys of aesthetic revelation. And for the first time ever in human history, In the 21st century we have access to the greatest multimedia informa- tion machine ever invented - the still developing totality of information, art and media accumulating