The International Journal of Screendance Volume 4 is now online, including my essay
“Cutting across the century: an investigation of the close up and the long-shot in “cine-choreography” since the invention of the camera.”
Really looking forward to some fascinating reading material!
Do have a look and let me know your thoughts.
(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…
And the idea of the camera as a lifeline, as in the film 127 Hours.
“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.
… 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?
Group session at the University of Brighton 15.10.13
I brought various framing devices to the session – two cameras, two empty photo frames, several chairs. I asked the artists within the group to adopt my processes – to arrange the body within a framing device, paying attention to how gravity affects the body. I then asked them to frame a landscape of the body.
Ryan working with Claudia.
KATY PENDLEBURY 
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