A journey in technology

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(Inventory of a performance).

Consultations with 6 technical demonstrators.

6 camera tests (including the discovery that some new DSLRs with video capacity have an in-built mechanism which means they switch off after a certain amount of time. Even with a mains adapter.  “Allegedly” this means they are classed as a stills camera, rather than a video camera which would require a different amount of tax on purchase of the camera).

3 projector tests.

3 – 4 trial installations (I can’t remember).

I was about to write down the resulting set list, but then I thought I had better not itemise exactly what is in my set, just before the performances!

Suffice to say there are over 50 separate items.

Phew.

“Pressed against the inside of the celluloid.”

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(Thank you Ryan M. McKelvey).

With one week to go until my first performance of Portrait, there is still much to do. I am working on honing the content/ movement material for the second part of the performance.

A preview of the work yesterday at a feedback session brought up some exciting and rich references, including Yvonne Rainer’s Hand Movie of 1966, and Kate Chopin’s novel, The Awakening.

One of the ideas that has created the form for the second part of the performance is the reflection that in our current lives we are constantly trying to get into screens – to become the image inside the device. I find it interesting that early on in its history – before its role as a PR tool was really discovered – the photograph was considered an objective document and was used ‘scientifically’ for categorisation and cataloguing. Now, whilst we talk about ‘documenting’ our lives and our work, it is almost as if we are in a state of constant becoming inside of our devices, rather than living outside them. Perhaps, in this second part of Portrait, I am inside the device, trying to find out its limits, as Ryan suggested “pressed against the inside of the celluloid.”

Which brought up Jenny Saville’s wonderful work…

Closed Contact #8 1995-1996

Closed Contact #14

And the idea of the camera as a lifeline, as in the film 127 Hours.

Krapp’s Last Tape

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I’ve just listened to Samuel Beckett’s play Krapp’s Last Tape, a version broadcast on April 9th 2006 by Radio 3.  Krapp is performed by Corin Redgrave.

Every year on his birthday, Krapp, who is a writer, records a tape.  Krapp is making his sixty-nineth tape.  In the play we listen to the sixty-nine year old Krapp, and listen with him as he listens back to recordings from earlier birthdays.

I love how the structure of the play alludes to how we visit, and re-visit memories, how we change them, how our feelings about them change over time, or don’t, how they can become distant or instantly refreshed, holding a power and weight of meaning that surprises us.

I love how the mechanical noise of the tape spooling in the recorder marks the passing of time, like a clock.  And marks the passing of Krapp’s time.

In his introduction, the Radio 3 presenter Robbie Meredith says that Beckett had been inspired by listening to a tape recording of one of his own plays:

“Beckett became fascinated by the quality of recorded sound, the way it creates present history, and yet plays with time”

“In short, landscape is the link between our outer and inner selves”.

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Images of Bill Viola, The Dreamers, 2013

Title quote from Bill Viola, Reasons for Knocking at an Empty House, Writings, p.253

Bill Viola’s words have crystallised something for me.  They connect many of the strands that seem to crop up in my work…  the experience of the body, of time, of the landscape as a physical thing.  The body as conduit of the experience (simultaneously) of time and landscape, the body as a landscape in the frame.

Or rather, I don’t know if these things are apparent in my work, however, they are things which inform the choices I make.

As well as the sight of landscape, the sound of landscape enters the works.  The sound of the rain and the wind in Snöplog.  And Figure(s) became a sound piece – a “sculpting of time” (Viola again) through sound, object and body – falling beans alluding to waves, pebbles and the time of landscape, of the body, not of the mind.

“If you look at landscape in historical terms, you realize that most of the time we have been on Earth as a species, what has fallen on our retina is landscape, not images of buildings and cars and street lights.”  Bill Viola

Cited here: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/b/bill_viola.html#DzmPS0ioD0Puf5Fw.99

Sculpting time – Bill Viola

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“Sculpting time”: is how Bill Viola defines his art. “Time is the basic material of film and video. The mechanics of it may be cameras, film stock, and tape, but what you are working with is time. You are creating events that are going to unfold, on some kind of rigid channel that is embodied in a strip of tape or celluloid, and that thing is coiled up as a potential experience to be unrolled. In a certain way it is like a scroll, which is one of the most ancient forms of visual communication.” ¹

This time is something Bill Viola likes to extend, repeat and decelerate — as if to show us all its contours, all its forms.

It is an aesthetic not unrelated to the practice of meditation, which focuses on the present moment, zeroing in on hte subject on order to perceive it more precisely. What can I see? For the artist, the camera is that second eye that “re-teaches us how to see” and addresses the world beyond, or beneath, appearances.

(my italics)

Jérôme Neutres in Bill Viola – Album Bilangue de L’Exposition au Grand Palais, Paris 2014

¹ “The Universe continues to be in the present tense,” in Viola, Reasons for Knocking at an Empty House, writings 1973–1994, Cambridge, MIT Press, 1995, p. 253.

Clocks for seeing – Roland Barthes

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… the only thing that I tolerate, that I like, that is familiar to me, when I am photographed, is the sound of the camera. For me, the Photographer’s organ is not his eye (which terrifies me) but his finger: what is linked to the trigger of the lens, to the metallic shifting of the plates (when the camera still has such things). … For me the noise of Time is not sad: I love bells, clocks, watches—and I recall that at first photographic implements were related to techniques of cabinetmaking and the machinery of precision: cameras, in short, were clocks for seeing and perhaps in me someone very old still hears in the photographic mechanism the living sound of the wood.

Barthes on the stills camera

The camera as a means to mark, or measure the course of time.  Or duration?

And what of the symbolic association with a living thing, a tree?  Duration again?

Old notes about Figure (s) 2

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Points of departure

At once energetic, totemic, classical, abstracted (some more than others) and celebratory.

  • Stuttgart, Neue Staatsgalerie, Henry Moore: Di...

    This is a description I wrote of some of Henry Moore’s Reclining Figures that were exhibited in the gardens at Hatfield House during the summer of 2012.  The figures, mostly female, are reclining, however they emanate both a sense of groundedness, their totemic limbs firmly planted into the floor (or the plinth), and a feeling that they are just on the brink of movement.  Looking at other classical representations  – in the Western art tradition – of the female form, Titian’s Venus of Urbino, Gotzius’ The Sleeping Danae Being Prepared to Receive Jupiter, I notice a softness and fluidity of form that contrasts the energy and strength in the Moores.  Taking this contrast as a starting point, I wanted to investigate how these two physicalities both feel – to embody them – and look.

  • How might sound score the sculptural body, and the sculpting body score sound?  The relationship with a soundscape/or score, or the idea of scoring the sound on/with the body has something to do with the materiality of Moore’s forms and their weight, of the potential energy and movement in them, contradicted by their weighted still nature as bronze, or stone.  In an early conversation with artists Vv and Jennie Howell, we talked about finding a way to express the “resonance of mass”, its “sonic weight”.