Rob Nilsson

Wild Surmise: a Dissident View Rob Nilsson

This "collection of thoughts, feelings, surmises, rants and rhapsodies" explores the world of art and cinema Nilsson has watched and experienced over the last 40 years. To him "post modern" developments in the gallery and museum Arts are largely fatuous and have resulted in market oriented novelties which pretend to significance but depend on profit. Following the lead of the original Duchampian art jokes, (FOUNTAIN or BICYCLE WHEEL) funny only once (in 1917), modern day cultural Sophists continue to promote Warhol's sly suggestions that someday, "everything will be art" by allowing it to happen. Catharsis, transcendence, or anything involving depth of emotion, complex human behavior or intellectual challenge is embarrassingly sincere to these "fixers" who correct the pretensions of Art in order to create the breathless "freedoms" of fashion. His view of the so- called American "Independent" film movement (1959 to the present) is that it never was what it intended (and pretended) to be. From an indigenous cinema created by early American pioneers (inspired by Italian Neo-Realism and the French New Wave (1950s & 60s) John Cassavetes, SHADOWS, FACES, Lionel Rogosin, (ON THE BOWERY), Morris Engel, (THE LITTLE FUGITIVE), Shirley Clarke, (THE COOL WORLD) and later Robert Young and Michael Roemer, (NOTHING BUT A MAN), and Cine Manifest filmmakers Nilsson and John Hanson, (NORTHERN LIGHTS) an "Indiewood" variant ended up backing the film careers of directors such as Spike Lee, John Waters and Quentin Tarantino who were really on the road to Hollywood all along.