'In seeing, I am implicated. In being implicated, I am faced.'
Davis, P. 1993. 'The Face and the Caress: Levinas' Ethical Alterations of Sensibility,' in: Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press
Scarcely had we taken our seats when the room was plunged into darkness. A terrifying machine shot out a fearsome beam of light piercing the obscurity, and a series of incomprehensible pictures appeared on the screen, accompanied by the sound of a piano at one end at at the other end a sort of hammering that came from the machine. I yelled in my usual fashion and had to be taken out [...] Gabrielle was sorry we had not stayed. The film was about a big river and she thought that in the corner of the screen she had glimpsed a crocodile.
Renoir, J. 1974. (trans. N. Denny) My Life and My Films. New York: Atheneum. p.18
To write is to become [...]
A sentence-thinker, yes, but one who so very often does not know how a sentence will end, I say. And as there is no need to rush, just leave it open, so that it may later on find, or not find, its closure. Words, fragments and lines that I love for no sound reason; blanks, lapses and silences that settle in like gaps of fresh air as soon as the inked space smells stuffy.
Trinh T. Minh-ha. 1989. 'Commitment from the Mirror-Writing Box,' in: Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism. Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press. pp.18-19
Beginning as a discourse on writing, Trinh T. Minh-ha's text quickly develops along a network of divergencies running from the opening assertion - 'to write is to become' - to the unpredictable ending, which espouses writing and though that is left 'open,' so that 'it may later on find, or not find, its closure'. Trinh's 'words, fragments and lines' evidence a process of becoming, a process that opens itself to alterity. Alterity turns out to be not only the theme of the text, but also the key to its complex textual performance. 'Becoming' is a movement that writes itself towards alterity - and, reading with an open regard, we move with it, as separate but proximate companions on an unpredictable journey.
Wild Geese
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
Mary Oliver, Wild Geese. (Tarset: Bloodaxe Books, 2004)
Margaret Tait. 1952. A Portrait of Ga. Ancona: Orkney and Edinburgh. Sound. Colour. 4 mins 27 sec
Jean-Luc Nancy. 2001. L’évidence du film.
Brussels: Yves Gevaert
Tait cuts from a red scarf to a
thicket of swaying red and pink stocks, conjuring chromatic correspondence, as
if rhyming Ga’s garments and garden, silk and cellulose, the latter being the
material of growing plants, as well as a constituent of celluloid film, and
what Nancy describes as film’s ‘budding and opening of a look’ founded on
careful tending.[1] Tending to
her flowers, Ga’s hands are filmed busily moving in the present (maintenant, French for ‘now’), and with
care (maintain: manu tenere ‘hold in
the hand’). They pick heather, unwrap a sticky boiled sweet, and conduct a
song. Tait’s handheld camera complements her emphasis on hands and touch, and
feels like the stethoscope she used during her time as a medical doctor. It
palpates for rhythmic vivacity, and mobilises our position as viewers,
encouraging what Nancy calls ‘an ethos,
a disposition, and a conduct in regard to the world.’[2]
In a brief scene in which Ga sits
on her house’s threshold with a book in her lap, we read the heading ‘A
Theory,’ and might be lead to think about the film’s ‘theory’ as a whole, with
its deictics of here and now, of holding a look, of touching a
presence –
‘I’m out here now […] Look!’[3]
– With Tait’s camera, we are ‘taken by the hand and led away on a
journey […] that amounts to making the gaze move, stirring it up, or even
shaking it up, in order to make it carry further, closer, more accurately.’[4]
In looking this way, with sensitive eyes, Tait encourages us to revise any
representative visual tendency, and regard anew, with awakened and mobilised
feeling.
Sight turned away from its own looking
[In the jungle of Palenque, Mexico, Robert Smithson positioned twelve mirrors in the ground.]
‘The poised mirrors seemed to buckle slightly over the uncertain
ground. […] Proportion was disconnected and in a condition of suspense. The
double allure of the ground and the mirrors brought forth apparitions […]. So
this is Palenque […] as soon as it was named it ceased to exist.
[...] ‘Other mirrors escaped into visual extinguishment.
Bits of reflected jungle retreated from one’s perception. Each point of focus
spilled into cavities of foliage. Glutinous light submerged vision under a
wilderness of unassimilated seeing. Scraps of sight accumulated until the eyes
were engulfed by scrambled reflections. What was seen reeled off into indecisive
zones. […] Sight turned away from its own looking.’
Smithson, R. 1969. ‘Incidents of Mirror Travel in the
Yucatan,’ in: J. Flam (ed.) 1996. Robert
Smithson: The Collected Writings. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press p.p 125 - 129
Inside Out: Embodied Place in Margaret Tait’s Film and Poetry
 |
| Place of Work [screen shot] |
Through a close reading of Margaret Tait's 1976 short film Place of Work this essay demonstrates how
Tait offers a poetic and embodied interaction with place, and engages
proprioception: our sense of position and movement. I align poetic and
cinematic forms with those of perception by analysing Place of Work through theories of embodiment, and in this way,
suggest that film and poetry are means of reinserting the body into an
increasingly cerebral environment that devalues physicality through association
with labour and femininity.
[...] Sensations recur in the
film like poetic alliteration. Nathaniel Dorsky terms this ‘synaptic editing,’
synapses being cerebral regions where one nerve communicates with another
(MacDonald 2006:87). ‘Synapse’ derives from the Greek, haptein ‘junction, join,’ as does ‘haptic’ (Stevenson 2012), etymologically connecting Dorsky’s idea to Marks’
visual hapticity. In Place of Work, the colour red relies on our chromatic memory to
join one cluster of images – or stanza – to the next. Bridging between
lines, red is a tool of alliteration, or in the sense of creating a flow,
enjambment. Kirkwall’s pebbledash, complemented by the muted colour film stock,
makes red stand out. Every few minutes, a red-coated neighbour, rubbish-lorry,
poppy or nasturtium appears against a green-grey ground. Often in the upper
left of the screen, red objects move left to right (by themselves or due to
camera panning), and a few shots later, a different red object moves right to
left, returning the colour to its former position in our memory, in a flow of chromatic
correspondence. [...]
Extract from Becca Voelcker, 2012, 'Inside Out: Embodied Place in Margaret Tait’s Film and Poetry', an essay for MPhil Screen Media and Cultures, University of Cambridge.
continuous present
'The time of the composition is the time of the composition. It has been at times a present thing it has been at times a past thing it has been at times a future thing it has been at times an endeavour at parts or all of these things. In my beginning it was a continuous present a beginning again and again and again and again... it was a series it was a list it was a similarity and everything different it was a distribution and an equilibration.'
Gertrude Stein 1926 'Composition as Exploration'
‘Things don’t end:
things begin.
Everything is a
beginning,
A racing
On and on and on.'
Margaret Tait 1992 'Soon'
with thanks to Sophie Mayer.
they were seers
The fact is that, in Europe, the post-war period has greatly increased the situations which we no longer know how to react to, in spaces which we no longer know how to describe. These were 'any-spaces-whatever', deserted but inhabited, disused warehouses, waste ground, cities in the course of demolition or reconstruction. And in these any-spaces-whatever a new race of characters was stirring, kind of mutant: they saw rather than acted, they were seers.
Deleuze, G (1989) Cinema 2: The Time-Image (trans. Tomlinson, H and Galeta, R) Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press p.xi
‘Word Song’ (1958)
‘Words are the most
delicate thing.
[…]
Words passing
through the air.
I catch them in
handfuls.
One buzzed by my
ear then.
[…]
And you have to be
careful which voice you catch them
In and put them
down in.
Only by careful earth
of other words beside it, arranged
And watered.
Do you get it to
root.
And of course,
shoot.
[…]
And at last I
really seize and hold it there and stare at it
And hold it to my
ear,
Listen,
Rattle it,
Pull it apart
letter by letter
And finally set it
down.
Use it perhaps.’
Margaret Tait (1958) ‘Word Song’ in Neely, S and Smith, A (eds.) (2012) Margaret Tait: Poems, Stories and Writings Manchester: Carcanet
The flesh is not matter, is not mind, is not substance. To designate it, we should need the old term 'element,' in the sense it was used to speak of water, air, earth, and fire, that is, in the sense of a general thing, midway between the spatio-temporal individual and the idea, a sort of incarnate principle that brings with it a style of being wherever there is a fragment of being. The flesh is in this sense an 'element' of Being.
Merleau-Ponty, M (Lefort, C ed. and Lingis, A trans.) (1968) The Visible and the Invisible Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press p.139
nowhere less now
However, for those familiar with Seers’ practice, not all is
as it seems. Little do we know, as we sit in the Wardroom waiting to be ushered
inside/ onboard, that some of the photographs around us are her additions and
relate to the content of the film we are about to see. Moreover, we have a
sense of being capsized when we enter the nave because although the floor might
represent a deck, rising up around us are the insides of an upturned boat.
Somehow we are at once on and under a great weight of grey-blue metal, and
ready to be set adrift in Seers’ peculiarly reticulated story.
She weaves the narrative of a relative in the merchant navy,
a pair of twins, a great aunt and member of the Masons, and the medical
condition of heterochromia in which one’s eyes are two different colours. The
story itself however, is less striking than the installation, and suffers from
a glut of voice-over declarations that tell us how to respond: “this
coincidence is uncanny”. Whereas W. G. Sebald and latterly, Tacita Dean, have
given us narratives leaden with coincident and the uncanny, Seers forces us to
make connections and recognise significance.
To return to the installation, Seers’ success lies in her
imaginative construction of narrative elements in the material fabric around
us. Not only are the naval and travel aspects of her film made manifest by the
Tabernacle’s hull and décor, the recurring theme of heterochromia and twins – a
pair different yet the same – is translated into the twin projection method
employed. Two projectors placed above the stepped audience area beam across to
two spherical screens, one raised above the other. One sphere is convex, the
other concave, and both appear to float in the surrounding gloom. Throughout
the film the screens show different images, sometimes coinciding or providing
variations of the other, other times following their own tangents.
Once the film is over and we remove the headphones and
duvets given us for its duration, the lights come up and we see the legs of the
spherical screens, realising that now they resemble less a pair of eyes than a
pair of satellite dishes. Indeed, one strand of the narrative concerns an
extra-terrestrial character who speaks to us from the future, and these dishes
cup the idea that we have seen something that has come from a place further away than a
boat will take us. Be it heterotopic or heterochronic, Seers’ film and The
Tabernacle are awash with a feeling of alterity.
Cinematography: The Creative Use of Reality
'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 underlayer of an implicit double exposure.'
Deren, Maya (1960) 'Cinematography: The Creative Use of Reality' in Braudy and Cohen (eds.) (2004) Film Theory and Criticism (6th ed.) Oxford: Oxford University Press p.191
Deren, Maya (1960) 'Cinematography: The Creative Use of Reality' in Braudy and Cohen (eds.) (2004) Film Theory and Criticism (6th ed.) Oxford: Oxford University Press p.191
The cinema and cemetery
'...are sites without a [...] fixed, univocal, geometric notion of geography. They inhabit multiple points in time and collapse multiple spaces into a single place.
'As "other spaces", they are permeable systems of opening and closing, a type of space that refers to all other spaces and, ultimately, to every space imaginable. Cinema and the cemetery, like the garden, are such heterotopias, for they are capable of juxtaposing in a single real place segments of diverse geographic worlds and temporal histories.'
Bruno, Giuliana (2002) Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture and Film New York: Verso p.147
Fly me to the Moon
JULIE BORN SCHWARTZ / ANDREAS CHWATAL / THOMAS VON POSCHINGER /JOHANNES VOGL / ELISABETH WIESER
Kunstarkaden Munich Sparkassenstr. 3, 80331 Munich, Germany
Curated by Susanne M. I. Kaufmann
 |
| Julie Born Schwartz |
 |
| Johannes Vogl |
 |
| Thomas von Poschinger |
In Other Words
Fly me to the moon,
and let me play among the stars, let me see – I want to see – what spring is
like on Jupiter and Mars, in other words…
The phrase in other
words suggests the presence of two lexical layers that share a meaning but
appear different: Let me play among the
stars means in other words, darling,
I love you. In this way, one set of words or images can serve for another,
acting as a mask over the original, enhancing its emotional or aesthetic impact
while revealing something of its integral nature. Writing the lyrics for Fly Me to the Moon in 1954, Bart Howard
used a celestial metaphor or mask to reveal love. Julie Born Schwartz’s film
installations use constellations of images adjacent to the subject; images that
function as masks through which the actual subjects – love, death, and memory –
emerge.
 |
Film still from Born Schwartz (2011) Fly Me to the Moon film 9 mins 05 sec looped, colour, stereo
sound, 4:3
|
excerpt from In Other Words, a forthcoming essay on artist filmmaker Julie Born Schwartz due to be published in Munich in September 2012.
A Stutter Form and Time: Trisha Donnelly and Ceal Floyer at Documenta (13)
A pulsating diagram, a
truly metronomed space […] One’s mind hops from connection to reference to
memory to imagined memory […] [1]
When the everyday object is taken apart it becomes defamiliarised and we
listen to or look at it anew.
In different ways, both Trisha Donnelly and Ceal Floyer
deconstruct and defamiliarise the ordinary, transforming images and sounds into
enigmatic and elliptical presences, here presented to us at Documenta (13) in
the form of a silent film and audio installation respectively.
Trisha Donnelly (b. 1974), who works across sculpture,
sound, photography and film, is occupying Kassel’s Gloria Kino, an elegant
cinema opened in 1955, the year of the first Documenta. On its silent loop of
around ten minutes, Donnelly’s film denies us any narrative or referential
certainty, its images – six or so in total – are all ‘a bit like’ recognisable
objects, but the framing is so tight and the camera so resolutely static, that
we come to understand Donnelly’s desire to present objects obliquely and with
mystery.
We feel our way into Gloria’s seats. The auditorium is
silent. On screen, delicate white rigging flutters from what might be a mast
standing over to the left of the blackness. The shot cuts to a highly
reflective surface resembling chrome, which seems to be reflecting the ripples
of liquid running against it. Later, an opaque and stony block is filmed and
suddenly the auditorium around us appears. Bathed in white light from the block
on screen, the space is beautiful.
It is rounded, upholstered in a plush, pistachio green, and entirely
empty on this bright morning. Further into the film, a round-edged and
luminescent rectangle is reminiscent of a 35mm slide, and this association is
only reinforced by the image’s stuttering motion, flashing on and off,
illuminating and plunging us into darkness by turn.
 |
| Trisha Donnelly |
The loop starts again, and slowly, softly, we feel for the
aisle, the door, the street outside. Not sure what we have seen, it looked a
bit like a lot of things, and a lot like beauty.
Meanwhile, sheltered in an ante-room to Ryan Gander’s cold
breeze that blows through the Fridericianum, Ceal Floyer (b. 1968) has
installed and audio piece made in 2005 called ‘Til I get it right’. The room is
empty and stark white, with a hard resonant floor space of about 8 by 4 foot.
Floyer has dissected and looped Tammy Wynette’s love song, removing the
‘falling in love’ section from ‘I’ll just keep on/ ‘til I get it right’, and
thus leaving us with a more elusive and ultimately tragic declarative that
plays on a continuous loop. This looped repetition does something similar to
Donnelly’s silence and ambiguity: it amplifies the formal properties of what we
hear – after three or four loops the words detach from their romantic referents
and sounds at first foreign and then purely acoustic. We notice the insistence
of the rhythm and the femininity of the tone. Like much of Floyer’s work, we
experience the mundane readymade – in this case, Wynette’s song – anew. In his
book 101 Experiments in the Philosophy of
Everyday Life, Roger-Pol Droit describes the power of repeating a word
until it empties itself of its meaning and demands a new, raw reality. [2]
In her 2009 installation Things, shown
at the Lisson Gallery, Floyer sampled the word ‘things’ from several pop songs
and played them from over thirty white plinths. While at first the ironic
contrast between the many aural ‘things’ and the absence of actual ‘things’
from the empty plinths was explicit, the second experience of this installation
was more profound. Hearing so many ‘things’, we suddenly wondered what the
vague and all encompassing noun means. Repeated across the space, the sibilant
endings seemed to wash out the word’s meaning, and it floated in the air like a
question. Perhaps this question concerned our expectation of art pieces, and perhaps
it is floating with Wynette’s loop in the Fridericianum too, as the breeze outside
continues to blow.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)