Spotlight on...Daniel Houghton

Author: Alexxa Gotthardt

Daniel Houghton '06 is a studio art major from Brunswick, Maine. At Middlebury, Houghton is the first studio art major to use video art as his senior project. Entitled "Everything Glowed" (look out for the beautiful, enigmatic ads that are speckling campus), Houghton's video is self-described as "all the things that you would have to photograph if you didn't take at least one snapshot of someone before they left." Complete with original footage, music and narration, "Everything Glowed" debuts May 15 at 6:30 p.m. in Dana Auditorium.

The Middlebury Campus: Why video art?
DH: For me, video because it's the coolest. It moves me the most and it has an emotional quality to it. There's a quiet beauty to the plastic arts like painting and sculpture that's very grown up and wonderful and precious, but I like things that make my heart race a little bit - video does that. And people are still mesmerized by it - its like a hot medium I guess. Its also oversaturated, every young boy and girl wants to be a video artist, so its kinda lame I want to be one too - its kinda like jumping on the bandwagon. You get to use computers and it's an okay reason to use computers. You don't have to be that kid who uses computers and nobody likes anymore because they're antisocial. And its way easier than painting - your hands can be crass and coarse and ill-refined. It moves, it's quick, it's very narrative. I like stories and trying to understand them better. It's also everywhere. People know how to look at it. A lot of people engage with video all the time in a way that they don't engage with painting. Painting takes a little more action on the viewer's part. There's a TV everywhere. For me, it makes it exciting that so many people are experts at watching it. They're usually pretty limited experts, but a lot of people know what they like. As soon as people start to see a video, they're drawn to it. Say you walk into a gallery - if there's a screen on, even if its scrolling text, people go and watch that. It's like a fire, you just get mesmerized.

TC: What do you consider your main inspirations?
DH: Hollywood. Mournful, sad, self-indulgent rock and roll music. Some of my friends who are active in the arts. I think my peers are the most inspirational and the most threatening because they're the ones who are the most like me. It's easy to look at great work and to distance yourself from it, you don't have to live up to the expectations of great work, but as soon as your friends start doing good work it sets a precedent.

MC: Do you have a specific motivation behind your art?
DH: Oh yes. I want to be famous, so I'd like to convey that sad desire of mine because it won't happen. So I'm trying to capture the tragedy of my own life. I like going outside with the video camera because then it's a simple way to bring some of it back with me. It's not the only way by any means. I like that it makes me watch things closer. Motivation...like to save the world? Or to show that beauty still exists? Or to prove that love happens all the time? I don't know, I'm so cynical sometimes.
Motivation…one of them definitely is to prove that video can be pretty and imperfect. I've had debates with people about film - people love film like they love God or Mackintosh computers. As we were watching it ["Everything Glowed"] and I was trying to figure out why people love film so much. I was thinking maybe it's that we're hung up in…oh boy…this is me deciding what society is up to…well, maybe a love of film has something to do with this fascination with technology. Film is the most beautiful representation of technology we have, but video isn't as beautiful, so it doesn't affirm this need of ours to be technologically superior. You can get at the same ideas through video that you can through film, it just doesn't have the prestige of the machine age and the early plastic age when it was still okay to use plastic materials and cellulite and to use up silver nitrate by the gallon. I feel like that stuff is way uncool, but people still love film.
So I want to prove that video doesn't have to be ugly and that it doesn't have to excuse itself. Hopefully there's nothing in here that has to excuse itself by saying I'm sorry that I'm not better. I'm sorry that it wasn't shot on film. I'm sorry that there wasn't more money behind this and that the actors weren't better and that this wasn't shot on Middlebury's campus. I hope that there's no apologizing. That it can be perfect in its own terms. So my motivation was to achieve perfection and to show it to the world I have achieved that perfection. [laughs]
It's an opportunity. You have an amount of time - I have 42 minutes. in a screening (I don't want to do it as an installation where you can just walk by it), it's a chance to try as hard as you can to take care of all the people who are watching. You can take care of them in any number of ways. You can take care of people by showing them tough love and awful imagery and gruesome events and abusive parents, because maybe that's something that will help the audience. It's kinda lame to think you're helping people but…its just a chance to get people from when they sit in their seats to the point when they leave. That scares the heck out of me to be responsible for that amount of time for that many people. Even if only 10 people come that's suddenly 10 hours of human time that I'm consuming jealously for myself. That forces you to grow up a little bit, or at least try to, because you don't want to waste that time.

MC: What has this movie meant to you? How has it made you grow?
DH: It's made me grow a little bit. I'd like to say it's made me grow a lot because that would make me feel good about the process I had just undergone - my senior year launch pad into the real world beyond this false world that we are living in every day. How has it made me grow? The only reason I would dare say that I've grown some is that it was more frightening than anything else I've done here. It's not the most frightening thing I've done, but aspects of it were terrifying. Creative work is supposed to be personal. If you spend a whole year working on your project and it's done and it hasn't amounted to anything, it's a daunting threat to the ego. If what you can amass is nothing, then it paints a bleak portrait of what you're made of.
Oh, and I learned a couple of important things, I learned how to take critique and that I wasn't able to do that for half of the year. I would get very defensive and very protective of what I had made as if it were something untouchable. If somebody was going to say something bad I didn't want to hear it. It was really rough and very emotional. So I learned to get a little distance from my work. I know what I like in the video and its okay if other people don't like that or don't see it or don't pay attention. I used to be desperate that certain things would come across, and I'm not so desperate anymore - but if they do that's great.

MC: What do you see as your ideal future?
DH: I want to work under somebody. I've never done that in creative work. I feel like it would be very frustrating because I've gotten used to thinking that I know what I'm doing and that I'm making important decisions and changes. I think the best thing I can do is find someone who inspires me and work near them. Even doing simple things - work doesn't have to be deciding important things about a film that someone else is working on, it could just be feeding them oreos slowing and delicately or sweeping out their Jacuzzi or cleaning out their refrigerator. I also really want to dive into the commercial world for sure because there's so much work going on there and it seems so…well I feel kinda naughty doing it. Like that's not where the art is, that's where they steal from artists. I just need to be patient and not be in a hurry and to try to let things happen.

MC: What is your definition of art?
DH: My definition will c
ome short of art. [laughs] It's very private. It usually takes place in a very small place, in a very small area. A river is artful because it goes around bends in a very pretty way. So you set up a few boundaries, you make a few initial choices about what you're trying to achieve, and then you're given one opportunity, or maybe a couple, to succeed within those boundaries. It's like when you grow up a little bit, like when you set yourself up to fail and then you succeed. That's when an artful accomplishment has been made. This is very warm…these are all very warm thoughts about art. You explore the dark side…no, I'm not going to say that. Art's usually not your own doing. You don't make your own art. It happens to you and you try to notice.