Juxtapoz Magazine - William E. Jones "It Only Looks As If It Hurts" @ The Modern Institute, Glasgow

"I spent those years writing fiction, which had the advantages of being free and private - a field of pure invention. I eventually published three novels between 2019 and 2023. Over the course of the trilogy, the narrator becomes a painter. I followed the path of my fictional character and started painting seriously in 2022, almost immediately after the writing was finished."

"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. 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."

Filmmaking ceased during the first Trump administration and the Covid lockdown, prompting a turn to fiction writing and publication of three novels between 2019 and 2023. The trilogy's narrator becomes a painter, and the artist adopted painting seriously in 2022 after finishing the books. The No Product series (2010) involved hand-scratching and painting 16mm advertising films from the 1960s, obliterating the commodities portrayed. Multiple pre-digital prints of commercials survive in deteriorated states, once widely seen but now obsolete and transformable. The No Product films draw inspiration from Isidore Isou's 1951 Traité de bave et d'éternité and its concept of cinéma discrepant.

Read at Juxtapoz