Joshua Powell
The mission statement on the Dilettante Films website
tells us that "Dilettante Films was founded on a bet over a dry martini at the Newport Regatta. Since then, we've produced short films, music videos, industrials & tasteful softcore. We believe that we are entering an age in which quality and love are important once again. We would like to discuss your needs with you, in a gentlemanly fashion." In that spirit, clients like New York-based bands The Bellmer Dolls and Matt Pond have needed Dilettante Films to direct appealingly demented music videos.
Though Dilettante Films formally consists of Caleb Woods and Joshua Powell, in practice Powell explains that, 'Mssr Woods is presently on sabbatical in the Kashmir. Mssr Powell handles all press inquiries.'
In this capacity, Powell is fielding press for "Just Blow," Dilettante Films' contribution to "And, who are you? Artists from Saatchi Online," an exhibition of artists from Saatchi Online, which I have curated at Chelsea's Sara Tecchia Roma New York gallery (until 26 January 2008).
"Just Blow," Powell's slick commercial for organic, free-trade cocaine brilliantly mocks the sophisticate mores and selective ethics of self-styled urbane hedonists. By creating a supremely seductive ad for artisanal cocaine, replete with the tag-line, "Just Blow: When you want to get high, and care how you get there," Powell pushes past a mere snide, self-righteous statement about hedonism versus humility. Instead, he plunges viewers into the same uneasy ethical conundrum that hypocritical hipsters face or choose to evade: to give in and enjoy, or try and moralize pleasure. Indulging in the Blow of the "Just" can be rationalized as indulging a self-conscious need to be, and to be seen as, a "good person" in our "green is the new black" age of chic ethical consumerism.
Powell elucidates over a very decent sushi dinner on Avenue A. You can view Dilettante Films' 'Saving Yossi' here
ANA FINEL HONIGMAN: You don't self-identify as an artist, do you?
JOSHUA POWELL (aka: Dilettante Films): That's a semantic or marketing consideration. I try to do the work. I'd be very happy directing dog food ads. Provided we could use SpaceDogs™
AFH: What's the difference between art and what you do?
DF: I don't know. What?...I think there's a space for shorts that aren't as dull as most video art and are a little more topical, and most sketch stuff just looks so fucking bad. That's the zone I'd like to occupy. As I continue working my pieces are getting shorter and shorter. Sometimes I think I'm working backward toward photography. Where it's viewed isn't so important, so long as it is viewed. I'd like to direct commercials--you get a lot of money for them and it's not brain surgery. I've worked on music videos and, well, ad people can't be worse than musicians.
AFH: Can you articulate for me what qualities interest you in a photograph?
DF: I like a couple of things in a photograph but primarily it's a quality--that being a sense of a whole film being collapsed into a single frame. When you subtract plot, narrative and time from a film you distill it into something mysterious. I like guys like William Eggleston, Stephen Shore and PL DiCorcia, Sternfeld's early stuff. I think, though, that photography as an art form peaked at some point in the 1970s. I'm not ashamed to say that pretty is a quality I seek out in an image. And if you can be funny and pretty, like Lee Friedlander, well, you've got me.
AFH: Anything contemporary?
DF: Maurizio Cattelan is fucking fantastic. Komar & Melamid. Heizer. But the shift to digital photography has made the process of picture making overly democratic and, as such, devalued the meaning of any given image. The photo is like the US dollar these days, a steady, long term decline in value. The digital shift has proven what painters have been saying about photography since the onset; anyone can make a
marvelous image, given enough time and film, err, hard disk space. And when you factor in how most photographs are looked at--on a small, sharply backlit LCD--it's as if you've got your own Jeff Wall collection on the back of your camera, though, probably less boring. A lot of that Dia stuff is just fantastic. I'm a sucker for photos of attractive women acting strangely.
AFH: Everyone likes beautiful women doing stuff. What would you be doing differently with your life if you'd been born a beautiful woman?
DF: I'd own the world. If Margaret Cho is the funniest Asian woman in the world, well, me as a woman...I shudder to think. I'd definitely be fucking Jewish Canadians as often as possible.
AFH: I never said you'd be Asian.
DF: Busted.
AFH: It seems to me that smart Jewish guys already do alright for themselves. Mr. Christina Aguilera is a not lone example. Actually, he seems pretty typical. Do you place yourself as a representative New York Jew?
DF: Christina's a weird name for a guy.
Still from Dilettante Films' KLM airport series
AFH: Is your humor typical New York Jewish humor?
DF: I was born and raised in Canada. So, No. Like everyone else, Philip Roth and Woody Allen are heroes.
AFH: So, essentially you're a quintessential Jewish New Yorker. Is your humor what's known as "New York Jewish" humor?
DF: I have no idea. A lot of that comes from a place of self-loathing and a commitment to losing. I prefer winning and don't identity with nebische types.
AFH: Is greed good?
DF: No, not anymore. At the risk of boring you with my Rachel Carson spiel, we're facing major decisions as a species on this planet, which will be determined in large part by whether we can or can't curb our greed and compulsive consumption.
AFH: What makes a great city?
DF: Reasonable housing, good food, clean drugs and the women, of course. Berlin and Rio, for totally different reasons are my favorite places.
AFH: Typically what are your creative concerns when filming a short?
DF: I'm working with such small margins that I don't have the luxury of thinking about "ART" during a shoot. Mostly, I'm concerned with making my actors trust that I have enough confidence in them for them to relax and forget everything they were taught for the stage. Funny arises only when people are committed to not being funny. Ideally it's situations or concepts or pairings that lead to the good laughs and not some kind of monkey routine, though, monkeys can be brilliant if given the right material. I also think about lunch a lot. You tend to eat too much when shooting.
AFH: Who cares? Isn't "fat" the new "normal?"
DF: That sounds suspiciously like someone giving up.
AFH: Speaking of - do you think satire actually serves a political purpose or does it just deflect attention from "real" issues and undermine their gravity?
DF: I can't tell if satire actually helps or hurts. People pat themselves on the back for watching the Daily Show but has it supplanted or abetted "the cause?" People may feel like they've "done" something by watching the show but it hasn't seemed to translate into anything tangible. This country is on the brink of surrendering the legal notion of Habeas Corpus--a tradition that dates back some 400 years in Anglo jurisprudence--and yet no one really seems to know or care. I'm just as bad as anyone. I mean, I'm not burning Cheney in effigy in Times Square.
AFH: Humor doesn't have to mean levity.
DF: It's basically impossible to satirize this era anyway. We turned a corner; I think the exact moment was when Dick Cheney shot his friend in the face--and after that moment news and satire were, effectively, the same thing. You notice that too when you watch the Daily Show--Jon Stewart's basically just reading the news and giving this look to the audience like, "Can you believe this, people?!" It isn't actually well-written. Colbert, on the other hand, is sort of a genius.
Still from Dilettante Films' 'Tuesdays with dad'
AFH: Do you judge artists by whether their art is 'pure' or corrupted by "commercial" concerns?
DF: No, only 14-year-olds and Pavement fans think about such things. A good artist finds and connects with an audience. It's a dialogue. This idea that you stay in your room revising the poetry you wrote about
your parents' divorce and it's someday discovered and you're revealed without ever having to engage the marketplace of ideas...well, Van Gogh aside, it just never happens like that. Usually when artists fail it's because they suck. Or so my mother insists whenever I show her a script. Though greed isn't good, paradoxically, money can be. And making money, or getting laid, for being funny, well, there's simply nothing better.
AFH: Do you think political art can be effective or is art too isolated to make a difference on any large level?
DF: When you read the sort of manifestos artists were writing at the beginning of the 20th century and the centrality with which they put art in the conversation--whoa, times have changed. Art operates within a very safely delineated zone. It is intrinsically elite and irrelevant--this was probably always the case but we know it now. That's ok though, as long as it's beautiful or funny and even better, if I get paid.
AFH: Who are your ideal collectors?
DF: The Saudis. They're unfuckingbelievably rich and they have absolutely no taste. It would be easy to get one by them for a ton. I'd bet they'll end up owning Damien Hirst's shitty skull thing.
AFH: What art would you buy if you could buy anything?
DF: A Goya, an Eggleston, a Richter and an hour on court with Roger Federer. I tried installing one of James Turrell's sky rooms in my apartment but my upstairs neighbors were furious, and very litigious.
AFH: Is art too expensive?
DF: Not mine. Reasonably priced and delivered with a handwritten 'thank you' from my mother.
AFH: What is your problem with merry Jack-Ass-like antics of the Warhol's Children set?
DF: First of all, I've got to get on the record my objection to the association with Warhol. Warhol was a really funny, cutting, sneaky and often brilliant artist whose work plays on a lot of levels. Warhol's Kids was some term a journalist coined to create or rather, desperately create, a scene. Everyone wanted to be there when the Velvets formed, when the Stones recorded Exile, when Dylan plugged in. But it's the work, not the scene, that must pass muster and though I applaud their herculean self-destruction I cannot abide the work which is almost always shit and so meaningless that to buy into it is to take a dump on the whole idea of art as being anything special. It's as if all the stupid people at the Factory are now getting their due. The more smart people have to delude themselves into discovering "meaning" and then rationalize it to me, the more I smell a rat, or some hipster's DNA spatter. I think "Kostabi's Kids" might be a better moniker.
AFH: Are these the guys whose hipster hypocrisy you're mocking in your art?
DF: I'm always really just attacking myself. As it says in the Bible, only the man dusted with his own sewage can point at the others and yell, "You're all covered in shit!"
AFH: What would you say are the most salient defining characteristics of our generation?
DF: Jeez, isn't this really a question for Radiohead?
AFH: I thought they were Gen X. We're something else, aren't we? Math isn't my thing, but I'm pretty sure that they're older than we are.
DF: I lie about my age. I'm 64. That's why I'm such a crotchety fuck.
Still from Dilettante Films' 'I am a fucking transformer pal'
'And Who Are You? Work from Saatchi Online' is on until 26 January 2008 at
SARA TECCHIA ROMA NEW YORK, 529 West 20th Street, between Tenth Avenue and Eleventh Avenue. Opening hours: Monday through Friday, 11am to 6pm or by appointment. T: +1 212-741-2900; www.saratecchia.com.
ANA FINEL HONIGMAN is a critic, PhD candidate in art history at Oxford University and Senior London Correspondent for the Saatchi Gallery's online magazine. She also contributes to Style.com, Grazia, Tank, Sleek and Harper's Bazaar.
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