WILLIAM E. JONES

To make the No Product series (2010), I scratched and painted 16mm advertising films from the 1960s by hand, frame by frame. This defacement obliterated the objects being sold. Before the digital era, multiple film prints of commercials used to be shipped to television stations for broadcast. Consequently, a large number of copies of these films are still in existence, often in a state of considerable deterioration. At the time of their production these advertisements were seen by millions of spectators. Now they are obsolete, without commercial value, and shadows of their former selves, virtual garbage that is available to be transformed into something else.

The original inspiration for the No Product series was Traité de bave et d’éternité (Treatise of Slobber and Eternity), the only film made by Romanian/French writer Isidore Isou, completed in 1951. The film’s narration includes a manifesto of what Isou called cinéma discrepant, or discrepant cinema. The images of discrepant cinema (usually appropriated from historical sources) are ‘chiselled,’ to use Isou’s word – scratched, distressed, dirtied, splattered with ink, and altered beyond recognition. Isou argued that he did violence to images in order to renew the film medium. In a sense, the No Product films, and by extension Treatise of Slobber and Eternity, are the precursors of my current painting practice. I make use of appropriated material and distress it through blurring.

–William E. Jones