En Plein Air 1: Filthy Currents of the Hour Short Film 

The film “En Plein Air 1: Filthy Currents of the Hour” interrogates the plein air tradition by chronicling an artist’s efforts to paint outdoors, presenting casuistic ways an artist uses nature to legitimize articles of faith about technique, authenticity, form, and spontaneity.  

The film asks us to consider the plein air convention that the site provides the artist’s source of inspiration. But this swole art isn’t just about inspiration. It’s also about physical exertion. Consider the example our dogged artist sets as he seeks out the perfect spot to make his painting.  The task, the film suggests, is far from restorative. The artist labors to haul  and drag the materials of his craft through the forest undergrowth. For its  part, nature is uncooperative—white rope, paint pail and pole with blue  duster get snagged on branches. To add insult to injury, the artist can’t  complete the arduous trek in a single go, but must abandon materials so he can continue moving. 

And for what? 

The eventual placement of the canvas discredits the very idea that the artist is interested in his presumed source  of inspiration. The spot he selects has nothing to recommend it.  

With the journey complete, the painting begins. The act of painting confirms what previous shots in the film have already intimated—nature is irrelevant to the impulse that propels the artist, except perhaps as a provider of tools to accomplish his hankerings. In lieu of paintbrushes, he  wields an array of crude applicators—putty knife, flexible aluminum bar, brushes taped to sticks. For this artist, the point is not to capture the brutal  or gentle astonishments of nature, but to focus on the courageous  accidents of his tools. This conclusion is reinforced by the canvas itself, which is an oversized panel and, worse yet, one that is not blank, but covered in shaggy faux fur. Painting this canvas resembles less the stuff of  cultivated spontaneity and immediacy than the haphazard gutting of an animal, and for reasons less concerned with necessity than with license.Perhaps the final affront is the use of standard house and spray paint, a reminder that the medium seldom engages nature without the risk of toxifying it.