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The General Returns from One Place to Another

Michael Robinson

2006 00:10:45 United StatesEnglishColorStereo4:316mm film
Tags:
Landscape, Literature

Description

Through a concurrently indulgent and skeptical experience of the beautiful, the video draws an uneasy balance between the romantic and the horrid. A nihilistic monologue (from Frank O’Hara’s play of the same title) attempts to undercut the sincerity of the landscape, but there are stronger forces surfacing.

— Michael Robinson

“More than any other work of Robinson’s, The General Returns achieves something heady, ethereal, altogether mysterious and nearly impossible to define. This was my introduction to Robinson, and the immediate reaction was a mixture of seduction and befuddlement, the sense that an audio-visual world for which I had no available vocabulary or affective framework had just opened up before my eyes.“

— Michael Sicinski, Cinemascope, Winter 2008

This title is also available on Michael Robinson Videoworks: Volume 1

About Michael Robinson

Michael Robinson (b.1981) is a film and video artist whose work explores the joys and dangers of mediated experience. Borrowing the formal skins of structural film, the emotional cues of pop songs and employing a woozy toggling of public and personal memory, his work strives to cultivate new resonances between seemingly disparate elements, harnessing the surface connotations of specific landscapes, television shows, texts, songs and sounds as psychological triggers, ripe for reconfiguration.

Robinson’s films and videos have screened internationally in both solo and group shows at a variety of festivals, cinematheques, museuems and galleries. His work has been discussed in publications such as Cinema Scope, Artforum, and Art Papers, and he was listed as one of the top ten avant-garde filmmakers of the 2000's by Film Comment magazine. He holds a BFA from Ithaca College, an MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and has been awarded artist residencies from the Headlands Center for the Arts and the Wexner Center for the Arts.