This piece presents a plan for a static film; the text instructs the reader to select a tree or another object in nature and place a film camera in front of this object to record it and all surrounding occurrences for “any number of hours.”14 The author of the work is thereby removed from the generative process that “produces” the film; the film’s content is likewise void of mediation, opening instead onto the organic movements of a landscape over an indeterminate duration. In direct opposition to the Gathas, Tree* Movie does not seek to abolish subjectivity but rather to overcome the ego through a removal of personal intervention in the work. It’s as if we were watching the world perform itself within the frame of the film, uncontaminated by any human element.15 After his initial engagement with chance operations, Mac Low recognized the idealistic and theoretically flawed nature of his Buddhist investment in nonegoic procedures. In 2001, he wrote: “By the time I realized that the artmaking methods that I’d mistakenly thought were ‘nonegoic’ are not, I had come to value them for their own sake.”16 He writes in turn that, contrary to his original belief that the self could be transcended by means of nonintentional works, the self must first be studied and understood if it is to be surpassed: “An understanding of the self—even though the term is ultimately meaningless—is only attained by working through what each of us thinks of as ‘my self,’ not by attempting to evade or abolish it.”17 Indeed, as Anne Tardos writes of Mac Low in her preface to Thing of Beauty: “We often talked about the fact that even when he used a nonegoic system, he was still consciously choosing the verbal materials.[….]” Yet he continued to
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Jackson Mac Low, Representative Works: 1938–1985 (New York: Roof Books, 1986), 132. Ibid., 132–3. Tree* Movie was realized on three occasions: on November 14, 1971, in a garden on the roof of the Chelsea Hotel; on March 26, 1972, on a farm in Binghamton, New York; and on August 12, 1972, on the northeast side of Central Park. During each screening of Tree* Movie, Mac Low repeated the word “tree” continuously throughout. In 2009, Anne Tardos combined the four-hour video of the Binghamton realization of Tree* Movie with her audio recording of Mac Low’s live performance during a screening of Tree* Movie at Bard College in 1985. Thing of Beauty, xviii. Quoted from Jackson Mac Low, “A Talk about My Writingways” (lecture presented at University of Arizona, Tucson, January 24, 2001). Written from early December 2000 to January 24, 2001 in New York. Ibid.