so what’s the point of Sam Taylor-Wood?
Last week, before the Interval 2, I went to another Deleuze-related event at the Photographers’ Gallery. Part of Catherine Yass’s seminar series The Other Side of Silence: On Silence, Sound and Filmmaking which investigates issues around Deleuze’s notion of the sound-image. Although neither of those that I’ve attended (the other was AL Rees in conversation with Jayne Parker a couple of weeks back) have really touched on Deleuze much at all. Deleuze’s role in these things seems to be little more than to provide the veneer of a spicy bit of theory on the side, a contextualisation at best. This event’s speaker was the redoubtable Professor David Rodowick, presumably chosen as a bit of a Deleuze expert (having published Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine in 1997), but the great man figured hardly at all in the talk. Neither much did the topic of sound. Rodowick’s presence at Interval 2 has already been noted in this blog. He admitted that this series of London talks (he’s based at Harvard) was an opportunity for a public airing of various chapters of his book The Virtual Life of Film, which will be published some time next year. I did rather cynically think that by attending all of the events I would hear enough to not have to buy the book. Alas I can’t make the third talk so I might have to buy the damn thing, which on reflection might be worth it as Rodowick is taking an interesting, complex and useful approach to developing broad theories around (dreaded phrase) ‘moving image art’ practice.
The theme of Rodowick’s talk, following his book’s theme of “film after photography”, was to do with how film as an analogue medium, in particular 16mm and 35mm, is increasingly being used by artists just at the point where it is being replaced by digital media in the film industry; as film disappears from cinema it appears in the gallery in a digital/electronic era. He made some interesting observations about the use of the comparative landscapes of film in b&w, and the saturated colour digital video in Godard’s 2003 film Eloge d’amour, how film deals very well with time and history, but the bulk of his talk was taken up with the work of Sam Taylor-Wood. I wasn’t the only person present to find his choice of artist slightly perplexing, not least because Taylor-Wood, in her role of court photographer to the rich and famous (any friend of Elton John’s is a friend of a friend of a friend...), her use of Hollywood celebrities and the nature of some of her clients (Selfridges to name but one), make her about as establishment as Prince Charles, the very antithesis of where theoretically interesting contemporary art might come from and throw some light upon the state of contemporary moving image artists. Rodowick himself confessed an ambivalence towards her work but found some interesting processes happening which, apparently on being quizzed about, the artist herself was not aware of. There were a number of aspects of her’s and other artists’ works, both still and moving image based that Rodowick drew on, which pointed to interesting ways of thinking about the moving image in the gallery.
Five Revolutionary Seconds XIII is a 1998 work of Taylor-Woods’s that consists of a large panoramic image and a documentary sound recording of its photo-shoot. One of the two main points that Rodowick made was about the nature of the juxtaposition of the fictional/theatrical images, with the documentary, ‘realistic’ sound . But the more revealing observation is the one that might at first sound like the most mundane: that due to the scale of the piece, the size of the photo, it is not possible to take in the whole scene from one vantage point; time is thereby spatialized and the work relies on the movement of the viewer to produce a narrative moving image, and that this was to reintroduce to photography the strategy of time.
Perhaps if we take the long historical view we can see that it is photography that arrested the representation of movement by its mechanic insistence on the momentary, movement reduced to the split second exposure of the shutter, while the cinema took on the responsibility of the time based representation of movement. If, as Rodowick suggests, the analogue is good at representing time through movement with digital image capture better at representing spatial relationships, then perhaps the introduction, or the reintroduction, of the moving image into the gallery, the traditional location for the ‘static’ image, post-photography, is not surprising. But the history of the representation of movement in art is longer than one might expect.
In Philippe-Alain Michaud’s Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion (Zone Books, 2004), we learn that the art historian Warburg had excavated a long history of examples of the representations of movement in the history of art. As a near contemporary of Étienne-Jules Marey he might well have been inclined towards the subject of the representation of movement, and he used associative montage in his ‘mnemosynes’ to construct his time and movement based pictorial theories.
His discovery that many of Botticelli’s paintings showing multiple figures were not so much examples of the same model being used to represent different figures in a group, but a deliberate attempt to depict the figure in motion, is quite revolutionary. See as an example, the 'Three Graces' in the foreground left of the painting here. Warburg's forensics indicate that this reproduces the movement of a single figure dancing. The painting represents a temporal passage through the repetition of a subject in a sequence. It is as though one is looking at successive frames of a film. This suggests that the representation/reproduction of movement existed as a practice at least four centuries before Duchamp’s nude descended. The strategy of time was there centuries before cinema or photography.
Rodowick also talked about the work of Jeroen de Rijke and Willem de Rooij who exhibited here in London in the Time Zones show at Tate. De Rijke and de Rooij have a very particular approach to the film medium, their works are static fixed duration film shots of locations which have significance not always obvious from the bare images, such as images of the outskirts of cities like Jakarta, where the socio-historical-political references are very particular to a knowledge of the local context. The artists have strict conditions for exhibition, usually the film will be projected in the gallery space with specific seating and at pre-determined times of the day, with intervals of precise duration between the screenings. So the context and conditions of exhibition are part of the work, the film will never be seen outside of these circumstances.
Contemporary gallery based artists are using ‘moving image’ medium in a way that returns to the pre-history of cinema, before the age of mechanical reproduction, before mainstream cinema, before television, before video even. The very specificity of the location of reception (as with De Rijke and de Rooij), the static image animated by the movement of the viewer (such as Rodowick suggests is the case with Five Revolutionary Seconds XIII) takes us back to the picture house, the Victorian painted panorama, the magic latern show; it certainly has more in common with these earlier manifestations of the image in motion than with any subsequent developments in experimental film and video. In incorporating film media they return to a point where the visual arts were engaged in movement, a process historically arrested by the two poles of cinema and photography.
As irksome as it might be to those of us who have been engaged in ‘the moving image’ as ‘artists’ before or parallel with the recent incorporation of those media into mainstream art practice, as the ‘other’ to the mainstream cinema our practice has inevitably been umbilically linked to it. Now, when cinema as digital media is fragmenting across multiple media spaces, gallery artists use of moving image media can be understood, not simply as cinema (or anti-cinema), but as a return to a pre-cinema when, as Aby Warburg's discoveries suggest, the image in movement was an intrinsic, but subsequently lost, part of visual art practice.
A re-invention of the wheel, or perhaps a return to the horse-drawn carriage it perambulates? This might be the point of Sam Taylor-Wood that David Rodowick has inadvertently uncovered. And doesn’t this provide some succour to an experimental practice? A radical practice may go unacknowledged by the mainstream, but why would a progressive, experimental artform want to be acknowledged as an agent by a conservative orthodoxy anyway?
The theme of Rodowick’s talk, following his book’s theme of “film after photography”, was to do with how film as an analogue medium, in particular 16mm and 35mm, is increasingly being used by artists just at the point where it is being replaced by digital media in the film industry; as film disappears from cinema it appears in the gallery in a digital/electronic era. He made some interesting observations about the use of the comparative landscapes of film in b&w, and the saturated colour digital video in Godard’s 2003 film Eloge d’amour, how film deals very well with time and history, but the bulk of his talk was taken up with the work of Sam Taylor-Wood. I wasn’t the only person present to find his choice of artist slightly perplexing, not least because Taylor-Wood, in her role of court photographer to the rich and famous (any friend of Elton John’s is a friend of a friend of a friend...), her use of Hollywood celebrities and the nature of some of her clients (Selfridges to name but one), make her about as establishment as Prince Charles, the very antithesis of where theoretically interesting contemporary art might come from and throw some light upon the state of contemporary moving image artists. Rodowick himself confessed an ambivalence towards her work but found some interesting processes happening which, apparently on being quizzed about, the artist herself was not aware of. There were a number of aspects of her’s and other artists’ works, both still and moving image based that Rodowick drew on, which pointed to interesting ways of thinking about the moving image in the gallery.
Five Revolutionary Seconds XIII is a 1998 work of Taylor-Woods’s that consists of a large panoramic image and a documentary sound recording of its photo-shoot. One of the two main points that Rodowick made was about the nature of the juxtaposition of the fictional/theatrical images, with the documentary, ‘realistic’ sound . But the more revealing observation is the one that might at first sound like the most mundane: that due to the scale of the piece, the size of the photo, it is not possible to take in the whole scene from one vantage point; time is thereby spatialized and the work relies on the movement of the viewer to produce a narrative moving image, and that this was to reintroduce to photography the strategy of time.Perhaps if we take the long historical view we can see that it is photography that arrested the representation of movement by its mechanic insistence on the momentary, movement reduced to the split second exposure of the shutter, while the cinema took on the responsibility of the time based representation of movement. If, as Rodowick suggests, the analogue is good at representing time through movement with digital image capture better at representing spatial relationships, then perhaps the introduction, or the reintroduction, of the moving image into the gallery, the traditional location for the ‘static’ image, post-photography, is not surprising. But the history of the representation of movement in art is longer than one might expect.
In Philippe-Alain Michaud’s Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion (Zone Books, 2004), we learn that the art historian Warburg had excavated a long history of examples of the representations of movement in the history of art. As a near contemporary of Étienne-Jules Marey he might well have been inclined towards the subject of the representation of movement, and he used associative montage in his ‘mnemosynes’ to construct his time and movement based pictorial theories.
His discovery that many of Botticelli’s paintings showing multiple figures were not so much examples of the same model being used to represent different figures in a group, but a deliberate attempt to depict the figure in motion, is quite revolutionary. See as an example, the 'Three Graces' in the foreground left of the painting here. Warburg's forensics indicate that this reproduces the movement of a single figure dancing. The painting represents a temporal passage through the repetition of a subject in a sequence. It is as though one is looking at successive frames of a film. This suggests that the representation/reproduction of movement existed as a practice at least four centuries before Duchamp’s nude descended. The strategy of time was there centuries before cinema or photography.
Rodowick also talked about the work of Jeroen de Rijke and Willem de Rooij who exhibited here in London in the Time Zones show at Tate. De Rijke and de Rooij have a very particular approach to the film medium, their works are static fixed duration film shots of locations which have significance not always obvious from the bare images, such as images of the outskirts of cities like Jakarta, where the socio-historical-political references are very particular to a knowledge of the local context. The artists have strict conditions for exhibition, usually the film will be projected in the gallery space with specific seating and at pre-determined times of the day, with intervals of precise duration between the screenings. So the context and conditions of exhibition are part of the work, the film will never be seen outside of these circumstances.
Contemporary gallery based artists are using ‘moving image’ medium in a way that returns to the pre-history of cinema, before the age of mechanical reproduction, before mainstream cinema, before television, before video even. The very specificity of the location of reception (as with De Rijke and de Rooij), the static image animated by the movement of the viewer (such as Rodowick suggests is the case with Five Revolutionary Seconds XIII) takes us back to the picture house, the Victorian painted panorama, the magic latern show; it certainly has more in common with these earlier manifestations of the image in motion than with any subsequent developments in experimental film and video. In incorporating film media they return to a point where the visual arts were engaged in movement, a process historically arrested by the two poles of cinema and photography.
As irksome as it might be to those of us who have been engaged in ‘the moving image’ as ‘artists’ before or parallel with the recent incorporation of those media into mainstream art practice, as the ‘other’ to the mainstream cinema our practice has inevitably been umbilically linked to it. Now, when cinema as digital media is fragmenting across multiple media spaces, gallery artists use of moving image media can be understood, not simply as cinema (or anti-cinema), but as a return to a pre-cinema when, as Aby Warburg's discoveries suggest, the image in movement was an intrinsic, but subsequently lost, part of visual art practice.
A re-invention of the wheel, or perhaps a return to the horse-drawn carriage it perambulates? This might be the point of Sam Taylor-Wood that David Rodowick has inadvertently uncovered. And doesn’t this provide some succour to an experimental practice? A radical practice may go unacknowledged by the mainstream, but why would a progressive, experimental artform want to be acknowledged as an agent by a conservative orthodoxy anyway?
posted by Steven Ball at 12:29 am
2 Comments:
Goodness another lengthy entry hot on the heels of the last one, (do we suspect time off?) I’m sure it is probably only my own highly subjective reading, but a lot of what you say correlates with ideas that I tried to (rather unsuccessfully in terms of their reception) promote through installation practice in the 90’s.
Such as…. The location of the screen within the gallery space (one consequence of artist working with the moving image) inevitably leads to a questioning of the relationship between screen and space and audience. Space in this context is in much greater crisis than the problems often associated (in both mainstream and experimental work) with its depiction in and on screen (see…Somewhere over England, On Some Faraway Beach, Home Video etc)
That such a crisis tends in the direction of a dismantling of cinematic apparatus back to the days of early cinema (the side show) and beyond. This dismantling of apparatus can result in the complete collapse of the screen in favour of a direct enunciation of light and sound. The space and the objects within it becomes the screen (see..Overheard Overhaed, Hot Seat etc )
In this context illusion and the audience’s complicity in its creation is also heightened; the ‘trick’ of motion pictures is routinely exposed and becomes part of the work. We see and, see through simultaneously (see..The improbability Calaculator, Phantom Power etc).
I think the work you were doing moves in another direction though. It changes the nature of the interaction of the 'viewer' with the time-based work by removing the screen and 'three-dimensionalising' the subject of the work, making it sculptural, so both temporal and spatial, and as per your contextualisation genuinely investigative in relation to the 'cinematic'.
I don't think it's in the interests of Taylor-Wood et al to 'deconstruct', if anything quite the contrary, they rely heavily upon maintaining the familiarity of the cinematic experience and I don't think the observation that their work bears remarkable similarities to familiar pre-cinematic forms implies that this a strategy, on the whole it betrays more a disinterest in historical context. I don't really think that de Rijke and de Rooij are particularly interested in 'the cinema', more in some kind of conceptual framing of their work as 'not cinema' or certainly not just 'film', a reproducible medium with all the familiar connotations of multiplicity and non-uniqueness taking us right back to Benjamin. They are more interested in the way their staging separates the pieces as unique events, not just about what's on the screen but also when it's shown, the intervals between the screenings and the viewer's physical position in relation to it, ironically, intentionally or not, recreating a classic cinematic relationship between the work and the viewer in the process.
In think that the only thing that these artists and their ilk have in common with an experimental time-based media practice is the use of the media, which is hardly a surprise given how ubiquitous film/video is and are no more likely to be expected to question the nature of the medium than a painter would the chemical composition of paint or the weave of the canvas. The observations the Rodowick made were interesting in themselves, they were also slightly ambivalent, inconclusive, and actually served more to highlight how distinct these works are from a truly investigative critical practice.
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