Three Dead Mackerel

Adapted from a talk I gave earlier this week at Goldsmiths, rather than discuss a project after completion, this piece explores my forthcoming film project in a hypothetical, future tense. Or rather, it looks at other models of filmmaking in an attempt to shape my own. With the talk, I screened Zarina Bhimji’s latest film, Yellow Patch, currently on display at the Whitechapel Gallery, and the Maysles brothers’ 1975 film, Grey Gardens. After the talk I took a camera, microphone and tripod, and caught a train to the North Wales coast to film a derelict ship.

One evening I gutted a mackerel to eat. When I slit lengthways down its body and pulled it open, there were two other mackerel lying inside. They were small-scale versions of it, not yet born, barely dead.

Three dead mackerel, in their pristine states, got me thinking about the challenge architectural ruins pose. While a ruin declares its collapse – ruin from ruere, ‘to fall’ – it also testifies to its former life, which barely seems to have left it. Robert Smithson describes this state of ambiguity as ruins in reverse, documenting its emergence along the grubby rim of New Jersey, where construction sites resemble ruins. Likewise Smithson photographed a hotel in Mexico that was simultaneously falling into disrepair and rising, with new extensions being grafted to it. Smithson used his photographs of the hotel in a lecture-performance that was itself a ruin in reverse, at once delivering information and slipping into tangents as if down disused corridors of the hotel. Ruins provide intellectual uncertainty over their state. They are allegories that show, as if through double-exposure, life and death at once. Film captures our imagination in a similar way because while we know it comprises photographic stills taken from time past, it appears to move, lithe, lively, in the present moment that we view it. Films dealing with ruin can reflect their content in different ways, from Ion Grigorescus’s unsteady, pixellated images of rubble-strewn Bucharest to Tarkovsky’s mist and reflections that imitate ruin’s metaphorical capacity for double-exposure.  

Zarina Bhimji, still from Yellow Patch

Zarina Bhimji explores architectural ruin and dereliction. The distinction drawn by Gilda Williams between ruin and dereliction provides an interesting entry into Bhimji’s film, Yellow Patch. The inhabitants of a ruin, argues Williams, have been forced out, whereas the derelict’s inhabitants have left of their own accord – derelict from de- ‘utterly’ -relinquere ‘to leave’. Ruin, therefore, suggests violence, and dereliction, a melancholy relinquishing of space due to dissatisfaction with it. Yellow Patch is filmed in Indian ports that Bhimji’s elder generations left for Uganda. Following Williams’ idea, these ports are derelict. Derelict seems a particularly apposite term for the sites given its original usage for ships abandoned on shore: Yellow Patch creates a psychological space of departure and desolation. Yet in interviews and artist talks – at the Whitechapel Gallery most recently – Bhimji complicates this idea. The port buildings and hulks of ships half-built are not in fact derelict: Bhimji requested the port workers vacate the space during her filming. ‘I go with a shopping-list of shots,’ she explains. The closest the sites come to ruin is on the day of filming, when Bhimji forces their inhabitants out, but otherwise, they are more like stage-sets for enactments of melancholy. Bhimji’s camera pans majestically across the harbour, the 35mm film toned to imitate a dusky light suggestive of endings. A non-diegetic soundtrack of echoing construction noises and human voices is added afterwards, and resonates in the cinematic blackout spaces of the gallery in which it is projected. In his recent essay that accompanies the Whitechapel exhibition, T. J. Demos refers to Bhimji’s withholding of information (we are left to guess at locations, the origins of sounds, and all direct political references) as a post-documentary approach that encourages our emotional response to exile. While this is a valid interpretation of Bhimji’s approach, the extent to which her editing and installation prescribe our reception of dereliction threatens the capacity these spaces have for challenging our understanding of them.

An entirely different approach to filming ruin is found in Grey Gardens, a documentary made by the ethnographic filmmakers Albert and David Maysles. Though threatened with eviction, the two inhabitants of Grey Gardens, a crumbling mansion in East Hampton, continue to live there. Eighty-year-old Edith Beale and her fifty-eight-year-old daughter, also Edith, were once glamorous socialites. Over the extended course of filming at Grey Gardens, the Maysles expose a double portrait of the Beales, as they once were (they recount engagements and hold photographs up to the camera) and as they are today, in ruin. The ruin in Grey Gardens is not only that of the architecture, dilapidated and surrounded by jungle, but that of its inhabitants. Unlike Bhimji’s films, the Maysles’ editorial and auteurist hands do not feel so present. The sound is diegetic, comprising the Beales’ and their cats’ whining. Takes are extended in length, allowing the subjects their own time to speak, complain or reminisce. Grey Gardens wavers between comic and tragic, leaving us unsure of the Beales’ and their home’s status. They are like the dead mackerel, embodying life as it was – shiny with potential – and in an already present state of decay.

Albert and David Maysles, still from Grey Gardens

What, then, are different ways in which ruin and dereliction can be filmed? If it is ambiguity between coming into being and falling into decay that makes ruin interesting, is ambiguity in filmmaking the best way to approach it? While replacing information with suggestive soundtracks might increase possible interpretations of a place, it can also dictate an emotional response too generic to allow appreciation of specific contexts. Tomorrow I will film a derelict ship. Deciding the amount of information to disclose in the film is difficult. But maybe, remembering how I opened that mackerel, the necessary information is there on site, and by taking a camera and filming it, little more need be done.

Phil Collins

The word repeated most often in questions following artist filmmaker Phil Collins' talk at Goldsmiths' College this week was exploitation. Collins explained that he aims to put issues of exploitation at the forefront of his work, building on the historical association between film and the gaze. As a Briton, filming in locations such as Kosovo and Palestine, the political weight of observation, participation and spectatorship becomes even more apparent. Early on in the talk, Collins showed an extract of a film he made in Kosovo shadowing a group of British photojournalists. The footage is shocking because it reveals the extent of the photographers' ignorance and manipulation of events. A fifteen-year-old boy sits hunched on a couch, avoiding as best he can the gaze of the cameras. We hear the photojournalist and his assistant discuss the object of their gaze, and request the removal of the boy's shirt – so that a scar on his chest be revealed for the shot. They ask his name, and repeatedly mispronounce it, 'how do you spell that?' Collins' camera follows, complicit yet ashamed, zooming in to study the boy in an uncomfortably close close-up. This proximity draws the audience into the film: the footage is fascinating, but makes us shuffle and blush – as viewers, we are part of the exploitation. 
Photojournalism is one of the many cultures Collins follows, others include Karaoke, disco dancing, soap opera and tele-shopping. Visiting places we usually only associate with BBC news reportage of humanitarian crises and political conflict, Collins questions our assumptions and images of places, asking why we know nothing of Palestine's disco culture or Aspen's Mexican immigrant workers' love of telenovelas. Not only does this approach dismantle our stereotypes of a place, it also uncovers the radical potential of popular culture. What can a soap opera or Karaoke event do? Though extremely invested in political and ethical considerations, Collins' work is also very funny. The auditorium is smiling for the majority of his talk, and the films are by and large positive, giving enjoyment to the participants (with the exception of the Kosovan boy). 

Collins projects his films in real time, avoiding editing and condensing footage, instead preferring to let the audience approach the piece at any point and experience the situation at the same pace as the filmed subjects. In this sense, the films encourage the audience's empathy with the subject. They Shoot Horses is an 8-hour projection that records a disco dancing marathon organised by Collins in Palestine. Paying competitors an hourly rate, Collins set up his camera to film a planar shot comprising a candy coloured wall and strip of floor on which a group of five young Palestinians danced for as long as they could. For the purposes of this week's talk, Collins showed excerpts of the piece, and so we saw the group dance to Joy Division, Donna Summer and Olivia Newton John, and deteriorate into a depleted and exhausted pair of dancers, 8 hours later, slumped against each other on the floor, occasionally tapping a foot or finger. In the final minutes of the day and song, however, a sense of euphoric camaraderie takes over and the pair rises again to dance – and enrich the typical set of images of check-points and battered dwellings that we associate with The West Bank. 

Likewise, although Karaoke is not British, it has come to be associated with British pub culture, and so Collins' project working with Karaoke, The Smiths' album The World Won't Listen, and young people in Indonesia is a similarly unexpected cultural mix. The album was released in 1987, its music and lyrics capturing the era's political and social unrest. Today, at a time of Neo-Liberalism, increasing privatisation, class division and recession, the album resonates loudly. Collins suggests that Karaoke singers sing towards something beyond the audience and camera, the political or associative in the song converting into an emotional response. Such a vernacular, misty-eyed delivery of songs (any song, though particularly The Smiths' brooding ones) cannot be but confessional on camera. Collins worked with local musicians to record the album and convert it into a Karaoke machine, which he then installed at a venue to which young people were invited to sing and be filmed. Again, the close-up shot emphasises the personal engagement the singers have with each song; a lone teenage boy sings 'sixteen, clumsy and shy, that's the story of my life'. 

Class division and feelings of disparity also prompted Collins' project in which he filmed a pilot episode of a Mexican soap opera, using professional actors and a conventional studio set-up and running time. Visiting Aspen, Colorado, one of the richest places he has been, Collins realised that its cleaners and labourers were all Mexican immigrants who lived more than two hours outside the city, and would travel home everyday, exhausted, and escape into the fantasy world of the soap opera (or telenovela). Thinking about the division between Aspen millionaire and Aspen worker, Collins went to Mexico to recruit actors and film a soap based upon Jean Genet's play The Maids, which dramatises this upstairs/ downstairs power divide. The pilot episode features the expected mise-en-scène of the telenovela: a glamorous mistress and mansion, a gun, blood, a betrayal, and several kisses and tears. As with the way the Kosovan film captured the audience in the complex of relations between viewer and viewed, it is difficult to watch the soap opera without getting caught-up in its melodrama and aesthetic. Escapism vital for Aspen's workers becomes escapism for us.

Escapism and fantasy also play large parts in Collins' recent project of creating a tele-shopping programme for broadcast on German television. Like continuous advertisements, tele-shopping programmes manufacture desire. Rather than selling products, however, Collins' programme offered its viewers experiences: the chance to be interrogated by a professional interrogator; to be in a Victorian-inspired sex show; to pretend to be in hospital on your death-bed (€9.99). At a time when bands have to make their profits by offering fans increasingly theatrical performances and 'experiences' because material CDs no longer sell, and people buy their avatars virtual homes and holidays, notions of manufacture, selling and purchasing are shifting. Collins' experiment in selling experience not product is an interesting extrapolation of this. 


Shopping, soap operas, Karaokes and discos concern performance, desire and fantasy. Collins takes them outside their expected context, and there they perform and expand our consideration of identity and spectatorship. Perhaps we were too quick to suggest exploitation: these films require a more complex form of looking and thinking. 

A Visit to the Warburg Institute

Before his death in 1929, German art historian Aby Warburg amassed thousands of books and photographs relating to his field of research – namely, how ancient pathos, revealed in expressions and gestures, manifests in post-medieval visual culture. Warburg ceded his primogeniture rights to his younger brother, preferring to follow a career in art history than banking. He did this on the condition that his younger brother funded his academic acquisitions. His brother agreed, and eventually, not only had Warburg accrued a vast collection, but also a library in Hamburg was built especially for it. In 1933, Warburg's collection was moved to London, and eventually to the purpose built institute in Woburn Square in which it lives today. 

Warburg significantly influenced the theory and practice of art historical research, his work characterised by a cross-temporal and cultural viewpoint, drawing resources from high and low (Warburg's photographic collection files images of Greek statues alongside photographs from newspaper clippings). According to Gombrich's biography of him, published in 1970, Warburg worked in this way so that he could survey types (archetypes, though Warburg did not use Jung's terminology) and primitive models that occur across eras and places. In the context of the turn of the century in which Warburg was working, theories of racial and social memory were prominent and inevitably influenced him. Indeed, Warburg liked using the term saftesteigen (rising of the sap) to describe memory, and wrote that art was an organ of social memory. Gombrich quotes Rilke describing things 'long forgotten' rising like 'blood that courses and [...] gesture that arises from the depths of time.' The photographic collection's arrangement in sections such as Gestures is also reminiscent of Darwin's The Expression of Emotions in Animals and Men, an influence Warburg acknowledged. 

For a visitor untrained in what is often quite arcane art historical knowledge, understanding Warburg's associations (and thus why images of Rome's Four Rivers carved fountain is in the Animals section, sub-divided Crocodiles, for example) is no easy task. Warburg's scholars and archivists are practiced in his method of tangential association and tracing of origins. (The crocodile represents the Nile, one of the Four Rivers of mythology. Statues of the gods and personifications of these rivers often feature emblems of them. The Nile is represented by a male, holding a cornucopia to symbolise plenty, children to symbolise fertility, and a crocodile, native of the river.) Warburg encouraged peripheral reading, speaking of the exciting potential in picking up the book to the left or the right of the one searched for on the library shelf. Serendipity is crucial in the research of many artists such as Tacita Dean, and it is not surprising that the Warburg Institute receives much interest from visual artists. 

The arrangement of the collection is also attractive in a poetic sense, its contents reading like a list-poem of associations. From one section to another, Warburg's thinking process can be traced: Science and Magic – Alchemy – Medicine – The Humours – Charts and Calendars – Seasons – Time – Months – Days – Hours – Elements – Weather – Climate – Places – Cities... and so forth. 

Aby Warburg's Mnemosyne Atlas

Artists are also drawn to Warburg because of his visual – entirely visual – project The Mnemosyne Atlas, described by Gombrich as 'a vast pictorial symphony'. Arranged and shuffled with pins on 40 black upholstered exhibition panels, the Atlas comprised around 1000 photographs of depictions of gesture throughout history. Warburg did not complete the project, and the only evidence of the panels are some photographs of them propped in Warburg's Hamburg library sometime before 1933. In his essay Atlas: The Anomic Archive, Benjamin Buchloh likens the Atlas to Benjamin's Arcades Project because both attempt to gather a collection without providing captions (in Warburg's case) or additional commentary (Benjamin). 

Buchloh also discusses Gerhard Richter's photographic Atlas that comprises hundreds of images of everyday German life, and far fewer (and as a result, extremely shocking) ones of the Holocaust. Rather like the way atrocious images appear  in W. G. Sebald's books, each Holocaust image provides an overtly political 'punctum', to borrow Barthes' term, which startles us into a new understanding of the collective history and memory of a nation. Many historians, including Buchloh, however, are keen to point out the difference between Warburg's enterprise and that of Richter, Sebald, or collagists such as Hannah Hoch and Kurt Schwitters. While the latter group of artists and writers might share Warburg's aim and enthusiasm to forge unexpected associations between cultures and times in order to enrich understanding, their objective was more political and tied to particular contexts (such as a post-war German questioning of identity in the cases of Richter and Sebald).  

The Internet adds a new lens through which we can view Warburg's collection. Now that we can Google an image using an image, the electronic search engine presents us with a seemingly infinite number of possible visual associations and tangents. The Warburg Institute plans to put its photographic collection online. Interestingly, this plan runs alongside its continuing acquisitions – many of which reach the Institute by post or are cut out of Sotheby's auction catalogues, and pasted onto A4 sheets, then tucked into files. These files are stored in boxes and metal filing cabinets that smell of a particular vintage of brown paper and dust. The language we use to describe virtual collections is extremely spatial and archival: we create files, click drop-down boxes and send folders to the trash. As Susan Stewart says in her book On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection, 'the collection relies upon the box, the cabinet, the cupboard, the seriality of shelves'. Perhaps it is partly for its tangible and imaginative organisation that Warburg's collection continues to appeal to artists and scholars alike. 

   

  

    

Observational Cinema

To observe, as [Roger] Sandall made clear, involved attending to the world – actively, passionately, concretely – while at the same time, relinquishing the desire to control, circumscribe or appropriate it. 

[Quoting Frederick Wiseman:] When the observational technique works, it puts you in the middle of the events and asks you to think through your own relationship to what you're seeing and hearing, which I think is more interesting for the viewer. The real film takes place where the mind or the eye of the viewer meets the screen and interprets, in a sense, participates in, what they're seeing and hearing.

from Grimshaw, A and Ravetz, A (2009) Observational Cinema: Anthropology, Film, and the Exploration of Social Life Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press

Patience (After Sebald)

from Patience (After Sebald) dir. Grant Gee

Known for his documentary on Joy Division, director Grant Gee's film Patience (After Sebald) was screened last week at the ICA. A q&a in which Gee explained the shift from music documentary to one about the late writer W. G. Sebald followed the Friday night screening. Gee had originally wanted to film grotty European hotel rooms, as if 'on tour' with his camera, but minus a band to feature. Indeed, the emptiness Gee hoped to depict in the hotel rooms is one of the elements that slid the project into Sebaldian territory. Gee proposed a voice-over accompaniment to the hotel room scenes: a voice reading excerpts of Sebald's books that discuss loneliness, wandering and European history embedded in its architecture.

What was eventually produced is essentially an expanded version of this proposal, with many voices reading Sebald in both senses – through his own words and their own. Gee decided not to film in Europe, however, but to undertake Sebald's walk around the Suffolk coast that features in his book The Rings of Saturn (the German original is subtitled An English Pilgrimage). Visually, we see many shots of anonymous lampshades, single-beds and radiators, paraphernalia of the everyday. There are also clocks, stations and barren streets, all filmed in an appropriately archaic format: a Bolex camera loaded with discontinued Kodak black and white film. The footage looks like Sebald's photographs, which he photocopied over and over until they became the dark and grainy artefacts he put in his books.

The German original of Sebald's The Rings of Saturn, showing the subtitle An English Pilgrimage

We hear writer/ walkers Robert MacFarlane and Iain Sinclair; translator, poet and friend of Sebald, Michael Hamburger; and artist Jeremy Millar, amongst others. These speakers appear on screen in somewhat cliched semi-transparent superimposition, suggesting Gee's simultaneous insistence and embarrassment in resorting to the talking-heads documentary format. Far more powerful are the times in which voice features without corporal accompaniment, particularly so when the voice is Sebald's own, speaking in interviews before his untimely death in 2001. His voice is very low and soft, running like an old but well-oiled cog, around and over the Sebaldian misty and monochrome shots. Given Sebald's use of unnamed narrators (in Austerlitz, for example) and very few images of himself or other people in comparison with images of buildings and plans, the film's use of 'disembodied' voice seems more appropriate to the subject matter than talking-heads. Music in the film is provided by The Caretaker (electronic musician James Kirby), whose soundtrack is characterised by white noise (the sonic equivalent to Sebaldian or Dickensian mist) and samplings of old opera, radio and piano music. Along with Sebald's faint German accent, the soundtrack implies a kind of translation – between here and there, past and present, this voice and that voice – translation being integral to Sebald's work. Iain Sinclair makes an interesting point in Patience regarding translation, saying that it adds a gloss to the original and thus transforms it into something else. He refers to Midsummer Murders, which is apparently popular in France. The dubbed French version has 'an existential gloss' lacking in the original. Sinclair suggests that part of Sebald's appeal is the gloss of distance – distance being associated with loss, fetishisation and longing according to Freud – that results not only in his work being translated from the German, but in its quotations from French, Dutch, Latin, Welsh and other languages. 

from Patience (After Sebald) dir. Grant Gee

Artist filmmaker Tacita Dean, who has written about Sebald and made a film about Michael Hamburger, features in Patience. Her practice shares with Sebald's a collaboration with chance. 'You go along and then something happens and you go somewhere else,' she explains. The virtue of patience is fundamental to this: an ability to wait and let things unroll in their own time before the camera or the writer. Gee explains that the film's title derives from Sebald's eponymous character Austerlitz, who plays with an assortment of photographs on a table as if with the card game Patience. Like Aby Warburg shuffling images on his Mnemosyne Atlas exhibition panels, Austerlitz orders and reorganises his collection of photographs, making new connections and associations that arise unexpectedly and take him and the reader on tangents into the past. Gee's collection of images for the film also takes us to unexpected places, for instance the virtual terrain of Google maps employed by Sebald scholar Barbara Hui to trace all the geographical references in Sebald's books. While visiting Somerleyton Hall in Suffolk, for instance, Sebald discusses Kentucky: on the 'Litmap', therefore, a line shoots out across England westwards to the States. The juxtaposition of a colour screen-capture from Google with the black and white Bolex footage is pleasing because it offers a new reading of Sebald that does not try to impersonate his archaic aesthetic but instead uses new technology as an interpretive tool.

Michael Hamburger dir. Tacita Dean

Unexpected associations are the protagonists for The Rings of Saturn, for instance in its photographs of dead herring piled up in Lowestoft that, by way of visual association, refract the discussion to one of the Holocaust and victims awaiting burial in piles. A few pages on from the herring photograph (a few seconds on, in Gee's film), we see a photograph of piles of human bodies. In this sense, Sebald's method is close to Gerhard Richter's, placing the mundane or natural alongside the atrocious (Richter's vast collection of photographs, Atlas, contains tens of images of everyday German life, punctured by one or two of the Holocaust). Though sharing a visual commonality with Warburg's Mnemosyne Atlas, Sebald's technique is closer to Richter's because of its political shock. Warburg's aim of forging new and oblique links between images, times and places to enrich our understanding of history is certainly shared by Sebald, but as Benjamin Buchloh writes in his essay Atlas: The Anomic Archive, the particularity of Sebald and Richter's post-war German identities, dealing with trauma and communicating a political message, albeit obliquely, distinguishes them from Warburg.

Barbara Hui's Litmap

Dealing with trauma in Sebald's case is inextricably bound with the act of walking. As MacFarlane points out in Patience, the English and European tradition associates walking with recovery, as opposed to an American notion of walking as discovery. Yet recovery is not achieved on Sebald's English Pilgrimage – on the contrary – the pilgrim ends up in hospital, overwhelmed by history, associations and memories prompted by the walk. Saturn is a planet associated in alchemy with bile and thus melancholy: one who senses an inexplicable sense of loss and sadness is 'saturnine'. 

Gee says Sebald's walk through Suffolk is a MacGuffin, in that he might walk anywhere (or even conduct a purely psychic walk) for the associations and thoughts would remain the same. Gee's detection of arbitrariness in the walk's location reflects in the film's form, which runs with little variation in pace or discussion. This is not necessarily a negative criticism, and one could easily argue that viewers simply need patience to meander with the narrative, and not expect to be pulled through it. As a result, it is easy to feel lost in Patience, unsure how the sequence of scenes or speakers' readings have reached the current point of discussion or will progress from it. This feeling of being lost occurs in The Rings of Saturn itself, when Sebald becomes disorientated at Dunwich Heath and finds himself returning to the same spot again and again – an experience described by Freud as uncanny. This collocation of mental and spatial experiences is underlined by Sebald's statement that a labyrinth of which he dreams resembles a cross-section of his brain. The entire walk is a walk through the mind, and in this sense, Gee's film is an attempted representation of it. 

A panel from Aby Warburg's Mnemosyne Atlas

Gerhard Richter's Atlas

Considering Sebald's footsteps, Sinclair discusses the current state of literature derived from walking. Now that Suffolk's coastal walks (or London's M25 walk, in Sinclair's case) have been 'written', and that much of the countryside has been homogenised into generic industrial and commercial parks (this being one of the main discussions in Patrick Keiller's Robinson film trilogy), Sinclair wonders whether one might have to walk 'the six orbital motorways of Beijing' in order to stand out from the crowd. But this sentiment of dissatisfaction and restlessness is typical of Sinclair, Keiller and Sebald's genre, and is what makes their voices so enjoyably melancholy. In their slow pacing they – and Gee in Patience – allow us some time and space to think. 

From 'Change and Criticism: Consistency and Small Minds'

The recompense of art criticism resides in the act of looking at a work of art and allowing oneself the time to experiment and re-experiment, to think, consider, articulate, vacillate and rearticulate. The critique of contemporary art is not an appropriate ambit for somebody who expects to be right all the time or on the majority of occasions. Rapid and not always significant change begs an illogical criticism that creates a dialogue between historic fact, the visual and opinion in an “open manner”, instead of trying to establish a pedantic system that permits no variations and that is only perfect with regard to its own limitations. The idea of self-correction is precisely what is most interesting about art criticism. Oscar Wilde said that criticism is the highest form of autobiography. I would like it not to be autobiography or self-expression, but auto-didactic, a printed record of the process of learning and, ideally, a demonstration that the art discussed is stimulating.

Lucy Lippard (1970) Change and Criticism: Consistency and Small Minds

on the ground of this day so beautiful

Germaine Krull Metal 1927-1928

The photographer is a witness, the witness of his time. The true photographer is the witness of the everyday; he reports. That his eye does not always focus on what he sees three feet above ground is natural. But that he focuses consistently on the ground, on today's ground, on this morning's ground, on this Thursday morning's ground, or on the ground of this day so beautiful that he forgets what day it is. The world. The world of his time. 

Germaine Krull 1897 – 1985

speaking, hesitating

Lucy Clout 22 minutes [film still]

A static shot across a lawn. A suburban house. Shaded by trees, the house sits stocky, clapboarded and vanilla coloured. A car is parked to its left. Lucy Clout coughs from behind the camera, and begins talking. 

The cough is a device to bring us back to the person behind the camera, speaking, hesitating.

This is the house in Evansville, Indiana, used as a location for American sitcom Roseanne. Clout's flat voice-over describes its use, Roseanne's audience ratings, and the roles of various producers and actors, as if reciting from a fan base article (though in fact it is she who has written the text). Suddenly she breaks into direct voice, presumably addressing the house as if it is a character: 'You are threatening, you are uninteresting, you are casual', then the flat reeling of information continues. 

Repetition figures frequently in the text, minor sentences lacking verbs reminiscent of poetry, and therefore out of place: 'A blinding flash of Matt Williams' anxiety that the house is not external enough.' 

At one point, the voice-over stops when a young woman exits the house with a dog on a lead and pulls it around the lawn. She re-enters the house and shuts the door. Clout coughs, and continues her monologue. 'You are a local, a regular, very discreet... [is she now addressing the house's occupant?] The house is symmetrical, but not too symmetrical... A blinding flash of Matt Williams' anxiety that the house is not external enough'. A car drives past as a butterfly flickers towards the camera. Nothing happens. This is the type of architecture we know from sitcoms and movies; here it is again, before us on the auditorium screen, running for the sitcom standard length of 22 minutes – yet nothing happens. The house is a screen itself, onto which we project our memories of film, and onto which Clout projects her speech. The combination of impersonal declaratives and slips into direct voice reflect Clout's interest in social conventions of intimacy, conversation and language. 

Describing the making of 22 minutes, Clout says she stood behind the camera, pretending to read a book, and looked away when the woman with the dog looked; she seems to enjoy awkwardness. In an untitled film made on her web cam, she sits cross legged in a dressing gown. The carpet is beige, and a wall socket and Internet cables are visible behind her. 'Hello,' she greets the camera, and goes on to address the recipient of what we discover is an email video greeting. 'I'm going to show you some tricks,' she says. This is a visualisation of the mundane: on the floor, not-dressed yet, Clout tries to entertain someone elsewhere with banal tricks and chatting. The framing severs anything above her neck from the shot, causing us to feel stuck, lowdown inside the computer's web cam, like an interloper intercepting a skype call. The idea of a third person who is not necessarily supposed to be there intrigues Clout, suggesting voyeurism and an element of comedy. As viewers, we often feel like this third person encountering awkward exchanges. During a recent screening at the Whitechapel Gallery, Clout offered the audience a woolly tassel she had made, and held up a pair of plastic trousers printed with a pattern of snails. 'Treat it right,' she said, giving the tassel to an audience member at the back. It is unclear what the relationship between the tassel, the trousers and the films is, but it is exactly this ambiguity and clunkiness that makes Clout's work speak, unhesitatingly, about social conventions.

 

Robert Smithson's Hotel Palenque (1969-72)

Robert Smithson's Hotel Palenque (1969-72) 

Photographic slides and spoken word/ photographs and text

In his photographic and written essay, A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, Robert Smithson visited industrial construction sites on the New Jersey shore, noting that they were 'ruins in reverse' that, in their nascent states, resembled moribund monuments. Visiting Mexico in 1969, Smithson photographed a hotel that performed a similar entropy, simultaneously decaying in parts and undergoing renovation in others. He delivered the slides in a lecture to students at the University of Utah in 1972, and the piece now exists as a slide installation with audio accompaniment.

Ruins stand as reminders. Memory is always incomplete, always imperfect, always falling into ruin; but the ruins themselves, like other traces, are treasures: our links to what came before, our guide to situating ourselves in a landscape of time. To erase the ruins is to erase the visible public triggers of memory; a city without ruins and traces of age is like a mind without memories. 

Solnit, R (2007) The Ruins of Memory

extracts from Jean Rouch

For me, then, the only way to film is to walk about with the camera, taking it to wherever it is the most effective, and improvising a ballet in which the camera itself becomes just as much alive as the people it is filming. This would be the first synthesis between the theories of Vertov about the 'cine-eye' and those of Flaherty about the 'participant camera'. I often compare this dynamic improvisation with that of the bullfighter before the bull. In both cases nothing is given in advance, and the smoothness of a faena (strategy of play) in bullfighting is analogous to the harmony of a travelling shot which is in perfect balance with the movements of the subjects. 

[... quoting Vertov from 1923] 'I EDIT when I choose my subject [from among thousands of possible subjects]. I EDIT when I observe [film] my subject [to find the best choice from among a thousand possible observations...]' 

I see [with my camera] I write [record on film] I organize [edit]

[...] Music envelops one, can put one asleep, lets bad cuts pass unnoticed, or gives artificial rhythm to images which have no rhythm and will never have any. In brief, it is the opium of cinema and, unfortunately, television has exploited the mediocrity of this process. [...T]he musical sauce with which they are served. [...] On the other hand, we must value music which really supports an action, whether it be profane or ritual music, the rhythm of work or of dance.

Rouch, J 'The Camera and Man' in Hockings, P (ed.) (2003) Principles of Visual Anthropology (3rd ed.) Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter p.89-94

offstage

Ilya Kabakov

The word obscene has an obscure etymology: it can be related to the Latin ob (on account of) and caenum (pollution, dirt, filth, vulgarity); but it can alo be related to ob (tension) plus scena (scene, space of communal ritual, enactment, sacred space). In this sense, obscene doesn't suggest anything vulgar, sexually explicit or dirty, but simply something eccentric, offstage, unfashionable or antisocial. It is similar to profane (outside but in proximity of the temple).


[... quoting Barthes' A Lover's Discourse] 'Whatever is anachronistic is obscene. As a (modern) divinity, History is repressive, History forbids us to be out of time. Of the past we tolerate only the ruin, the monument, kitsch, what is amusing; we reduce this past to no more than its signature'. 


[...] Kabakov's nostalgic obscenity does not simply refer back in time, but rather sideways. In his artistic quest, Kabakov moves away from the much explored verticality of high and low towards the horizontal of the banal and its many invisible dimensions. Kabakov is an archaeologist and collector of banal memorabilia.  

Boym, S (2001) 'Obscene Homes' in The Future of Nostalgia 

Ilya Kabakov

archive

There is no document of civilisation which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a document is not free of barbarism, barbarism taints also the manner in which it was transmitted from one owner to the other. 


Benjamin, W (1940) Theses on the Philosophy of History 






To have a souvenir of the exotic is to possess both a specimen and a trophy; on the one hand the object must be marked as the exterior and foreign, on the other it must be marked as arising directly out of an immediate experience of its possessor. 
[...]
The actual locale of the souvenir is often commensurate with its material worthlessness: the attic and the cellar, contexts away from the business and engagement with everyday life. Other rooms of the house are tied to function (kitchen, bath) and presentation (parlour, hall) in such a way that they exist within the temporality of everyday life, but the attic and the cellar are tied to the temporality of the past, and they scramble the past into a simultaneous order which memory is invited to rearrange: heaven and hell, tool and ornament, ancestor and heir, decayed and preservation. The souvenir is destined to be forgotten; its tragedy lies in the death of memory, the tragedy of all autobiography and the simultaneous erasure of the autograph. 


Stewart, S (1996) 'Separation and Restoration' section of Objects of Desire in On Longing  

www.beccavoelcker.co.uk

You fasten your seatbelt. The plane is landing. To fly is the opposite of travelling: you cross the gap in space, you vanish into the void, you accept not being in any place for a duration that is itself a kind of void in time: then you reappear, in a place in and in a moment with no relation to the where and when in which you vanished. Meanwhile, what do you do? How do you occupy this absence of yourself from the world and the world from you?



– Italo Calvino If on a Mid Winter’s Night a Traveller

‘As we watch a film, the continuous act of recognition in which we are involved is like a strip of memory unrolling beneath the images of the film itself, to form the invisible under-layer of an implicit double exposure.’


Deren, M (1960) ‘Cinematography: The Creative Use of Reality’ 
in Campany, D (ed.) (2007) The Cinematic Cambridge, MA: MIT and London: Whitechapel p.172

I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the kimono washing her hair. Some day, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed


Christopher Isherwood (1939) Goodbye to Berlin

in the anonymous biographies

Hashem el Madani/ Akram Zaatari

How can we but see in our taste for everyday life in the past a resort to the only remaining means for restoring the flavour of things, the slow rhythms of past times – and in the anonymous biographies of ordinary people the understanding that the masses do not allow themselves to be measured as a mass?

Pierre Nora

‘Diversity is the most important factor in resisting misrepresentation,’ says Lebanese artist Akram Zaatari, whose photographic archive features in Tate Modern’s current exhibition New Documentary Forms. Zaatari has collected photographs taken between the 1940s and 1970s in Saida by studio photographer Hashem el Madani. While one might expect el Madani’s studio portraits to be uptight pretensions, posed and conforming to conventions of a conservative society, they are anything but. His studio in fact offered an escape from external mores and customs; and his subjects sought refuge and fun there. Children play and scowl before the camera; best friends embrace; men wear dresses and pose as bride and groom. El Madani’s portraits are arranged according to subject – groups of children, couples, individuals. While this organization, along with the pristine wood and glass framing, dresses the photographs in an archival ‘uniform’, their contents resist homogenising.  A girl in a floral dress standing behind a patterned tabletop stares out of one photograph, towards somebody or thing behind us and to our right. The fact that her gaze misses us by this small but unmistakable margin, focusing intently on what we will never see, adds to the mysteriousness of the subject. She has the face of a much older woman, her lips slightly pursed and her brow ridged in concentration, yet her shoulders and arms are those of a ten year old. El Madani’s portrait allows the girl to be both a child and a complex and developed person. He does not force her into a cliched infantile pose, instead letting her keep her thoughts and secrets somewhere behind that tabletop and brow.  El Madani’s subjects are not celebrities, and it is safe to assume the costumes they wear for him are not worn on the street. Indeed, these portraits might be the only photographic record of some of the anonymous individuals archived and celebrated here.

Hashem el Madani/ Akram Zaatari

Also at Tate Modern is A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters, a solo show by American photographer Taryn Simon, whose photographs of hidden aspects of American culture featured in Denmark’s contribution to this year’s Venice Biennale. Tate’s show comprises eighteen research projects undertaken by Simon between 2008 and 2011. Simon investigated eighteen families’ bloodlines, uncovering their stories and contexts. Each bloodline forms one of her ‘chapters’, here presented in a highly systematic manner reminiscent of an archive. As with Zaatari’s collection of portraits, Simon’s meticulous framing and order (portraits fill frames on the left, textual information and captions are in the central frame, and additional photographic documentation relating to the family’s history fills the right hand frame) propose an order against which the subjects resist. The bloodlines all belong to families who have been involved in historical turmoil of some form or other, be it involvement with the Nazi regime, Brazilian feuds or Thalidomide births. As with Simon’s work at the Biennale, unacknowledged or obscure narratives are researched and brought to light, and as with Zaatari, diversity is presented in order to resist history’s standardising and amassing force. Having said this, the archival presentation of such diversity seems contradictory. One views each chapter as one might a catalogue of amusing and slightly freakish crockery sets, all packaged identically but cracked or fired in their own way. While raising awareness of history, peoples and identities is surely positive, the extent to which Simon frames and compartmentalises her subjects ultimately endangers their individuality and turns them into commodities of curiosity.

Taryn Simon

Taryn Simon

The obscure and overlooked also guide filmmaker Emily Richardson’s practice. Richardson’s film Memo Mori is currently on display at The Wapping Project, in the power station’s cavernous basement that was flooded with water for a Yohji Yamamoto dress installation earlier this year. Richardson has collaborated with Iain Sinclair for this film, a 23-minute documentary on the wastelands of east of London currently being developed for the Olympics. Sinclair provides the film’s malcontent and melancholy voice over, commentating on a kingfisher flying over a canal in the ‘blasted landscape’, before slipping into excerpts from his psychogeographical book Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire. The camera pans slowly in a circle, revealing the Thames’ tributes as they ooze past brick bridges and skeletal cars, or surveys allotment sheds using low-down and static shots. The sheds are portrayed as individual characters, each built in its own idiosyncratic style, from driftwood and car bonnets. We linger on a shot of a shed door numbered 33 and wonder at its extraction and former, tragically distant, neighbours. Indeed, though the shed shares some formal likeness with Heidegger’s homely hut, in Richardson and Sinclair’s rendering, it is far more forlorn. The allotments are abandoned and will soon be cleared, like the travellers’ sites and warehouses that stand in the way of Stratford’s Olympic development. The context of the film installation in Wapping Power Station, now largely taken over by its restaurant and bar, is important: Wapping, like much of east London, has a history of gentrification and redevelopment. Its warehouses are now bistros and apartments for city traders, and Stratford’s unique improvised homes and habitats will soon be paved over by computer-designed parks, stadiums and plazas. Sinclair’s monologue evokes Robert Smithson’s brooding over ruins in reverse on the New Jersey shore, and Richardson's shots of diggers and cranes echo Passaic's. Sinclair's voiceover is interrupted by a second voice, which expresses an opposite attitude towards development. The voice is that of a tour guide who accompanies bus visitors to the Olympic site. The tour guide boasts that Olympic catering companies will provide sixteen thousand litres of milk and 3.4 million eggs during the games, this information ironic considering the visuals of deserted fields and muddy riverbanks. Suddenly we jump to what appears to be a disconnected subject, though this is part of the Sinclairian genre of wandering narratives. A drone of insects – cockroach-like leather-clad Hells Angels – appears on screen. Sinclair explains that during filming in the east end, Richardson encounters a Hells Angel biker's funeral whose size rivals a Kray Twin’s. The Hells Angels’ head quarters is just off the Hackney Road, we are told, and the funeral procession will move north east, past the Olympic sites and up, further and further, towards Chingford. The bikers’ swarm therefore – peculiar, idiosyncratic and ugly though it is – is another example of individuality existing on the margins of society and capitalist redevelopment.

Emily Richardson