texts

Chatroulette conversation with Christelle 30/1/2011

2011-01-30T02:59:00.000-08:00

rap from marseille

Ok - what are you listening to - hip hop?

in Nice

ah - hard to get work isnt it - are you in Paris?

i dont working since one year

not me I work in theatre

thanks you

Are you studying?

Christelle - that's very pretty.

nice to meet you

christelle

harun, you?

what s your name

lol

That's all the french I know...

ca va merci

et toi?

bon!

thanks you

Are you studying?

Christelle - that's very pretty.

nice to meet you

christelle

harun, you?

what s your name

lol

That's all the french I know...

ca va merci

et toi?

bon!

ca va

bonjour

bonjour!

not well

London

from france and you

do you speak english?

where you from

hello

Trace of Activity of work on a google document (Fri 28/Jan/2011)

2011-01-29T02:13:00.000-08:00

harun has opened the document.

harun has left.

harun has opened the document.

harun has left

The Falcon and the Theatre

2010-08-07T12:19:00.001-07:00

Pigeons nested on the roof of the old town hall night and day. So much so that a falcon was called into ward them away. Two Thursdays ago a bird handler arrived with a falcon. News of the falcon spread quickly among those in the old town hall, so that one by one staff trickled to catch sight of the bird. It wasn’t long before there were more staff outside the building than inside. As each staff member came out, he or she was updated by those who had been there longer as to what had happened so far… That the falcon had been scared off by two crows… That he was now perched in a corner lulling the pigeons into a false sense of security, conserving his energy for a sudden dash... That his name was Frank.

One staff member, Abigail, suggested that Frank needed to make an example of the pigeons by killing one of them. Another, Mel, who found this suggestion too harsh, wondered if he might pretend to kill a pigeon… So it was this crowd of observers began to generate a character and stories, strategies and histories for the bird, words of encouragement were shouted out. His inactivity was labeled ‘stage fright’. Others suggested he was playing it smart. This gathering of watchers on the ground sparked the curiosity of those in a block of flats above, who wondered what was being watched. An old woman with white hair, who lives in this block, peered out of her window. In turn, her presence brought smiles to faces of those in the crowd she puzzled over. As she looked out the window, the falcon swooped by her window as though on cue. We enjoyed her curiosity because it mirrored our own. We were drawn from the inside of our building by the same motive she looked through the window of hers.

The old town hall from which we emerged currently functions as a theatre. As we stood outside preparations continued for the opening of two large stage shows. Both shows employed end-on seating rakes, the stage at one end of the space, with ordered rows of chairs for the audience. Meanwhile the falcon continued to swoop and circle the building. We, who you might describe as its audience, sought and perhaps had found a theatre that did not occur in the theatre. The falcon in opposition to the building below it has no fixed position, no postcode. Yet that is not to say the two are unconnected. Exploring the invisible and intangible cords that bind them, we can begin to map a set of qualities, overlapping or distinct from the conventions that are too often considered definitions.

The first is ‘liveness’, the swoops and turns of the falcon around the building demanded a responsiveness to its movement in real-time. We tracked the bird, shifted our position, speculated with our neighbour as to its next move. This also brought a compulsive unpredictability. The second is ‘community and locality’, we knew about the falcon because we were told by someone we knew, we cared because it was a concern immediate to us. In this case the warding off pidgeons causing damage to the roof we worked beneath. We gathered in a small spot and witnessed the falcon at work and watched each other watching. The third is ‘to bear responsibility and enjoy constructing a scenario and narrative’, our imaginations seduced into overtime, applying a human psychology to Frank’s movement, finding sporting analogies and choice words with which to motivate him. Not to mention the updating of those who came late to the party. The fourth is ‘ephemerality’, what we saw was fleeting and unrepeatable, even if Frank was to return - his flight paths would not be the same – it was a moment to relish, not meant to last beyond memory. The fifth is ‘symbolic potential’, a quality that governs this entire text. There was an openness to what we saw that allowed a second transformation in our minds eye, a road that takes us beyond where the road physically ends.

Dan Graham Installation / Changing Channels, Vienna

2010-08-07T09:25:00.001-07:00

She entered the white walled structure. She spotted a monitor. It was seemingly a video of the room in which she now stood. Except she wasn’t present on this screen. So perhaps it’s a video of an empty room? She watches the screen a while longer. Eventually it changes. She witnesses herself walking into the room on the monitor. She then waves her hand. The screen shows her simply standing in the space looking towards a camera built into the wall. Moments later hands-in-pockets she watches herself wave her hand. She is alone. She plays with camera and screen: a mirror which delays its mirroring. She hears the footsteps of someone else entering the structure. It is a man. He looks at her. She blushes red. Perhaps he wonders how can such an uncomplicated, offhand glance elicit such a blush? He looks at the screen. On the screen he sees the woman doing an experimental flying-half-karate-half-kind-of-dangerous-dance-acrobatic-maneuver. They look at each other and smile in complicity.

The Loop / Roman Ondak

2010-08-07T03:16:00.000-07:00

A garden of pavilions, a country per a pavilion, a garden housing architectural projections of other states…the presence of these pavilions cannot help but over-emphasize the connections between physical boarders and nationhood, an emphasis at odds with the cross-national development and funding of artwork at this level, the nomadic practice of artists, the country-hopping attendance of audiences, the market that buys and invest in this work not to mention the globalization of finance and language at large. This complexity was addressed (although not a sole motivation of curator Nicolaus Schafhausen) in Germany’s decision to present London / New York based artist Liam Gillick within their pavilion. However Roman Ondak’s work, The Loop directly challenged this division of the Giardini, through the laying of a path from one part of the garden to another via the Slovak Pavilion.Gravel and plant-life was installed to create an ambiguity between outside and in; momentarily disrupting my perception of my environment, like looking at the ground and seeing clouds while the ground’s above you. The constructed nature of this simulacrum was evident against the architecture of the building itself and a sprinkler system installed to sustain the plants. Despite the playful absurdism, it’s particularly appropriate that this work is by a Slovakian artist, from a country that only acquired sovereignty in the late 1980s; historically land-locked, threatened and marched through by militaristically dominant armies. A garden of pavilions, a country per a pavilion, a garden housing architectural projections of other states…

A speaker?

2010-01-10T18:23:00.001-08:00

My brother has made a bird table. It caught my attention because there was no table. Instead he had taken one of the many defunct, unwanted music speakers in his room and converted it. The speaker was an old wooden box-shape. He cut a whole in its side, removed the wiring and filled it with seeds. He then placed the box outside his bedroom window overlooking the garden. This caught my imagination because of the potential of an unlikely but charming situation. A small song bird might fly into this former speaker and begin to sing. In doing so the speaker would function as a speaker again.

Inactive Building Sites

2009-05-25T15:19:00.000-07:00

There are many inactive building sites across London at the moment. They are in a curious state of suspension - at the behest of a cash flow which for now has frozen. There are buildings sanctioned for demolition, waiting inconclusively to be turned to rubble, while buildings not yet erected remain the fantasy of their architects, just muddy bogs waiting for foundation stones.

Bum Bum Train/ Cordy House/ 20.12.08

2009-03-07T12:23:00.000-08:00

Cordy House on Curtain Rd in Hoxton, is a spacious art-warehouse-space with an eclectic programme: it hosts a mixture of cross genre music nights, street art exhibitions inspired by squat culture, installations and for four Saturdays last year (Nov 29th - Dec 20th 2008) the installation-cum-ride known as Bum Bum Train, the brainchild of Kate Bond and Morgan Lloyd.

The queue for the ride snaked through sculptures and installations that evoke props and the leftovers of set from a series of low budget 80s sci-fi horror films, nothing to do with Bum Bum Train, but retrospectively strangely complementary.

Helen and Laura and I, approached the queue for a doorway from which a medley of pop music blared. A knowingly ramshackle sign, which at one point came unstuck from the wall signalled entry to the ride. On as a table beside this door was a bowl of satsumas for the audience to gobble as they pleased.

Entry was regulated by a compere-stroke-door girl dressed in garish face paint and a shiny blue and purple outfit… she came across like a seductively deranged elf. Entry was one at a time and only acceptable by mounting her for a piggyback ride in order to be carried beyond the threshold. This regression to childhood experience and the destabilisation - both physical and mental which comes with handing over your mobility in this way led to gratifyingly knockabout visual and physical comedy.

The first entrant was a middle-aged moustachioed man who had attended with a woman who was most likely his wife, he was very big, the girl petite, he wasn’t the most agile of men and it took three or four attempts for him to get on top of her. I felt like I was observing the unsuccessful mating rituals of two incompatible farm animals; say a pig and a pony. Eventually she staggered with the guy on her back out of sight, through multi-coloured strips of fabric, the sort found in the doorways of tatty sex shops.

I mounted her in a single leap. A microphone is thrust in front of my mouth calling for spluttered and ill-prepared words over the PA system. She asks me my name, I’m announced like debutante at a ball to those in the queue further behind me. I'm asked ‘is there anything I want to say to friends and family?’ Why does she ask this, will I not return in one piece?The entry itself (unbeknown to us at this point) was to be a concise taster of the tone and flavour of what was to come: the cultivation of anarchy, chaos and uncertainty, being thrust unprepared into a situation that could potentially and simultaneously embarrass and amuse, a collapse of physical boundaries and personal space, a comic surreality and ludicrousness - presented with the makeshift aesthetic of Gondry’s Be Kind Rewind’s ‘sweded films’ or the dream sequences of The Science of Sleep or the sets and costumes in the Mighty Boosh TV series), not to mention a playfully libidinal atmosphere caked in and deflected by the cartoonish scenarios.

On the other side of the curtain the source of the pop songs is revealed to be a karaoke machine. A platinum blonde stands with a new romantic quiff wearing a black blazer, a DJ with over sized glasses is selecting various tunes, a woman in a bloated snowman costume and burlesque make-up, shimmies and winks taking up a sizeable part of the room, a man in a 1970s-style-checked-knitwear-tank-top makes cocktails… I’ve entered an eccentric but charming nightclub. Another microphone is pushed in my hand and before I know it I'm singing "Talking about my generation...why don't you all f-f-f-ade away?". This ragtag ensemble encouragingly eggs me on. I try not to think about my vocal efforts being relayed across the ground floor of Cordy House.

Helen who has gone in ahead of me, sits in a wheelchair, by a door which is occasionally opened and swiftly closed by an orangey-red-dyed haired bouncer, who every now and again pops his head in the room, surveys the party scene and disappears. I try to fathom why she is in the wheelchair while trying and failing to keep up to speed with the karaoke monitor. Eventually Helen is asked to rise by the bouncer and goes through the next doorway as Laura is carried in. I knew Laura was next because the piggyback-giving compere woman had told the DJ with with comic-franticness... “we have a special request! Find a song by the Smiths!” (and Laura loves the Smiths). Laura duly enters, i'm now sat in the wheelchair in which Helen sat, I’ve knocked back a couple of tequilas. Laura stands in the middle room, looking slightly shell-shocked before breaking into ‘This Charming Man’. I'm not sure if she has finished her song before the guy puts his head through the door and asks me to rise.

As I descend the stairway I am accosted by people lined either side of the steps, aching to get into the party from which I have just exited. They ask me how it was, they tug on my clothes, ask how I got on the guest list and if I’m coming back. I apologetically brush past them. (Immediately there is a playful reorientation of our sense of space having gone from the rain of outside, to inside a real club to only end up on the outside steps of a fictional club.) These stairs to lead to a bedroom. An old man is in bed in stripy pyjamas. Lit by a beside he lamp, with an absent minded air, he asks if I have some pills to relieve him from pain, he mentions some medication he was expecting, he mentions his wife. I’m uncertain if I have missed something, if something was supposed to be given to me that wasn’t given, I check my pockets, perhaps one of the people on the stairs slipped his medicine in my pocket? I can’t help him and wander on.

A woman in an elegant gown stands in front of an industrial lift. ‘Do you have the password for the VIP lounge?’ she asks, I stutter something about not having the password but could she let me in anyway? I wonder if I was told something at some point that I misheard, if I wasn’t concentrating enough? She tells me if I don’t know the password I should go another path and listen out for it. So I go on.In the next scenario I find myself in a non-descript office and invited to take a seat, I am taken through a questionnaire, health problems? Heart troubles? Asthma? The man asking the questions is dressed in generic office wear: white shirt and tie, smart trousers. No sooner are the questions answered I’m thanked and ushered on.

A police interrogation room: there are two uniformed officers one male, the other female (wearing strong red-lipstick). She pings her rubber gloves, in doing so quoting numerous ‘Carry on’ titles and police comedy films. I’m asked to put both hands on the wall, ‘Do I have anything to declare I’m asked?’ As they frisk me they discover my wallet, which they whip out my inside pocket. It has a 100 quid in it. I can’t afford for it to go missing. I end up wrestling the male officer for my wallet back, the other officer joins in. After much sweat and loss of breath I retrieve it, I offer my toothbrush and notebook instead - the pair reluctantly accept and put both items onto a grey plastic tray as some kind of forensic evidence.

Onward I go, I’m sat down in a dental chair. Given a thimble sized cup of mouthwash, a dentist peers into my mouth. (I squirm at this point, acutely self conscious of the terrible state of my teeth, I wait for several seconds - but what felt like an age for a biting assessment, instead he flips my expectations and announces the wonderful state of my molars). An assistant brings out a warm self-mouldable gumshield - I sink my teeth into it, anxious about their sensitivity, the texture of my mouth against the plastic reminds me of the ritual of preparing for Saturday morning rugby fixtures at school a decade ago.I’m now walking down a catwalk runway, fashionistas pout either side of it. Some are taking pictures. Others encourage me. I’m too engrossed in the spectacle of watching them to perform being on the catwalk myself, and neglect to discover the inner supermodel diva within.

The catwalk segues into a tunnel and I push myself through a trapdoor to find myself in a boxing ring. My opponent is bouncing in his corner, throwing jabs shadow boxing - I’m pulled to my corner by my trainer, he gives me a Mickey/Rocky style psych-pump speech, I nod vigorously. I’m on my feet wondering how much I’m expected to fight, how much my opponent is intending to fight, is he an actor playing a boxer, have they invited a ‘real’ boxer as part of the experience, how seriously is he taking this and how seriously should I? I decide to be defensive, and keep light on my feet - arms up and close together like a Victorian pugilist. I survive the bout. I remove my gloves and chuck the mouth guard at the boxer. My opponent lurches towards me. I escape into the white room of a medical ward.

A small boy lies in a hospital bed, there are beeps and whirs, a matron keeps watch over him, he sits up excitedly: ‘Usher!!!’ he cries, ‘Will you sign my autograph book?’ I smile and ask him his name, it is Nat, I sign “Get well soon, Nat. Usher.” The matron asks me to leave now, explaining the boy’s had enough excitement for the day.

I stumble on in to a living room, I sit down on an armchair in the centre of the room facing a television. Within a second it becomes clear this is no ordinary television but literally live television, the shell of a TV acts as a frame for the performers to stand within, at such a distance that are proportionally the ‘right size’ (the visual gag again revealing a fascination with the manipulation of our sense of space). I catch the end of a weather update, followed by some comedy ident but before I can really engage with the content of the show three men in red lycra bodysuits burst into my living room and whisk me out my seat, they are shouting ‘Move! Move! Get up! Come on!’ Their arms half dragging me from armchair to wheelchair. I’m now in a long white corridor with a slopping floor. Along the right side of the corridor, behind a metal railing are enthusiastic onlookers. I’m part of a sleigh team. They give me an almighty push, I whiz down the slope, high-fiving the crowd as I fly by.

As I slow down, a suited woman wheels me into a conference room. It’s some sort of press briefing, journalists sit inquisitively, cross-legged, bespectacled, pens twirling in air. An African man finishes a speech in a tongue I don’t recognise. The entire room swivels to me. At this point it becomes clear I’m the interpreter of a language I do not speak: I improvise something in English, which has the journalists fooled for a bit, but when it comes to translating the journalists’ questions into (what later becomes clear is) Swahili - staged pandemonium breaks out, the journalists cry: ‘He can’t speak the language!’, the African minister shouts something which to my ear phonetically sounds like ‘juju Swahili’ - I am hurriedly whisked from the room for my own safety.

I am parked in front of a Perspex fairground booth containing the kind of cheap items found in such machines. In place of a mechanical arm is a man’s hand which needs verbal control: Left! Right! Stop! Release! the hand opens. I collect the prize, recognizing the items seized by the police officers now sealed in Clingfilm.

I wander into a familiar room. I am back in the old man’s bedroom, he’s still asking for his pills, I still don’t have them – I apologise profusely with feigned concern. I ascend some stairs, past the same lot who were queuing outside, a couple of girls ask if they can come in on my arm, I more than fine with this we get to the door, but the bouncer won’t have anything of it. I pass through the karaoke party (the snowgirl still bobbing enthusiastically) and out through the doorway from which I came on piggyback.

It is the kind of experience that easily could have been animated fragments of the old man’s delirium. I cannot vouch with certainty that the scenes I have described happened in the order I described them. It was as tumultuous mentally as physically, its unstable actuality lends itself to unstable recollection. This dreamlike intensity was partly born of the sensory overload. Whereas cinema through the darkness of the auditorium might captivate the eyes and ears, here the entire body was literally propelled through space - along the way you were touched, manhandled, speaking and spoken to, you tasted, you were threatened, made alert and ready. It became dreamlike not through lulling and approximating the comforts of a bedtime story or inducing a close to sleep atmosphere, but oppositely by being hyper-real and excessively present.

Tension was racketed up by removing my control and knowledge: no sense of the duration, of the limits of the performers, the number of performers, the size of the space, it was like being flung in the shoes of Alice or Dorothy navigating her way through Wonderland or Oz, slipping from one madcap scene to another, each completely confident in the rationality of its hermetically sealed world, while being the very opposite to the outsider.

The anxiety of ‘not knowing the rules of the game’, proves far more stressful than the game itself, continually trying to psych yourself for being prepared for anything is playfully enforced upon the participant. These perhaps worked best in the meeting with authority figures, the imperious doorman, the office boss/interviewer - the police officers in the interrogation room. Yet the ‘train’ never strives for a single storyline, this allows for the collision of the unexpected, or a logic based on spatial reorientation, or even the collage of experience as one might juxtapose tickets and wallpapers in a 2d artwork. I.e. contrasting the experience of being passive with being active, or of spectacle to being scrutinized yourself, sometimes the links operate across scenes creating irrationality in one instance that becomes perfectly sensible in another. For example the dentist fitting you with the unrequested gumshield- prefigures the boxing match. However the inexplicability of the scenarios and their collision gives the sense of being in a pinball machine - ricocheting through an artificial landscape. Bum Bum Train not only recognizes but conveys experientially the speed and compression of everyday urban experience.

No overt judgement is cast on this expression of experience - but perhaps it is enough to generate this chaos, for it to be played back at you. All the same this rich humour seems to garland a bleakness of sorts: it is hard not to think of having being expelled from the reality game show that is life, being sat on a movable couch and allowed to re-experience your ‘best bits’ that last one time.

Collage and the City

2009-01-03T16:29:00.001-08:00

Yesterday evening, as the escalator ascended me towards the exit of Leicester Square tube station, a busker started a strained rendition of Lennon’s Imagine, accompanied by electric guitar. The fame of the song immediately elicited smiles of recognition and half-smirks between strangers. I was struck by the unintentional layering of this song with the experience of being on the escalator: going up, simultaneously watching (and being watched) by those on the middle escalator - also ascending, while on the escalator furthest from me people descended. In my mind’s eye this tableaux vivant became an unofficial music video for the song or saddened death knell for the city dweller: ‘imagine there’s no heaven its easy if you try / no hell below us above us only sky’ these lines emphasizes a classical theological space, but any Italian Renaissance depiction of Ascension and Fall is substituted by the mechanized steps of the underground... Almost with knowing contrariness, as the busker asks us to imagine no hell below us, people sink to the pit, the belly of the city, while those who 'rise' within this pictorial game - are not heaven bound, but bound for the rain and grot and cheap fairground attractions of Leicester square. And because it is my collage, my projection and my assembly of ideas and images to music, there is an explicable lack of awareness of my characters’ (fellow commuters) roll in this drama, and so their faces - oblivious to the mental contexts I place them, become all the more tragic - like lambs to slaughter or children and elderly on a one way train.

Blindness (2008)

2009-01-01T16:27:00.000-08:00

I recently saw the film Blindness (2008), directed by Fernando Meirelles based on the novel by Jose Saramago. Set in a modern day city, which could as easily be New York as London. An epidemic of blindness appears across the city. It is assumed by state authorities to be a virus, or something transmissible - those who are discovered to be blind are quarantined in a detention centre. The drama follows a woman, (played by Julianne Moore) who is not blind, who can see, who at one stage maybe the only person who can see, but who initially pretends that she too is blind, so that she can accompany her husband to this detention centre. She keeps the fact she can see a secret for as long as possible, eventually confiding to few she feels she can trust. The soldiers entrusted to regulate supplies, care and order are negligent; factions within the detention centre (a former hospital) become increasingly oppositional. As the centre overfills, we see Moore’s character increasingly trying to compensate for the lack of organisation the soldiers should be providing. Initially her impulse is to solely attend to her husband, but the circle of those she feels obliged to aid continues to increase. A close-up on her face as she surveys people in corridors: wandering, lost, pawing their way through a maze of bodies, vomiting, sleeping, pissing, shitting - captures her realisation and guilt at being unable to deal with this sisyphusian task. In Moore’s character I saw a metaphor for a model of a certain type of artist… who you might describe as being ‘blessed with a burden’, the burden is not providing aid to help those who are blind - such aid is presumptuous, unsolicited and not necessarily needed - it is the burden of making a personally satisfying choice as to how that sight is applied. None can see that you can see, the choices to be made are personal and interior, this lack of external judgement becomes the source of the terror.

The Wilhelm Scream

2008-10-14T08:20:00.000-07:00

The ‘Wilhelm Scream’ is a recording of a man screaming in great agony. The Wilhelm Scream was first used in the 1951 film ‘Distant Drums’. However it takes its name from a film made shortly after - ‘The Charge at Feather River’ (1953); in which a character named Wilhelm is given this sound as his death cry in the post-production sound-tracking process. This recording has subsequently been used in over a 130 films right up to the present day. This sound effect has become iconic for the frequency of its use – as opposed to its singularity. The power of a scream lies in it being primal and pre-verbal, herein lays its universality. When one considers iconic screams or wails in visual media (Eve in Masaccio’s The Expulsion, Munch’s The Scream, the screaming nurse from the Odessa steps sequence in Battleship Potemkin, Francis Bacon’s Popes, Janet Leigh in Psycho, Rod Steiger in the Pawnbroker) it is the particularity of the situation that makes them memorable, while we recognize the anguish of that particular instant through the sound made. The Wilhelm Scream is perversely interesting because of it being divorced from its original context and author and repeatedly applied in different situations.

The Wilhelm Scream’s separation from its source, of course happened when it was first recorded on tape in 1953. Fittingly there is no conclusive evidence as to the originator of this sound. The disturbing aspect of the Wilhelm Scream is the dislocation of the individual’s signature: by effectively presenting a multitude of deaths with one anonymous wail, humanity is being constructed in representation as a mechanistic system, made of interchangeable parts, to be reassembled and dismantled as seen fit. This is horrifying enough to earn a scream itself (although not a Wilhelm one).

At the moment of being recorded it moved beyond being a live experience between the maker of the scream and the sound recordist, and became a unit of information in its own right. It might be useful to think of the Wilhelm Scream as a meme. [one website definition of a meme being: ‘an idea that, like a gene, can replicate and evolve. A unit of cultural information that represents a basic idea that can be transferred from one individual to another, and subjected to mutation, crossover and adaptation. A cultural unit (an idea or value or pattern of behaviour) that is passed from one generation to another by nongenetic means (as by imitation); memes are the cultural counterpart of genes’, this term was constructed by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene (1976)].

This meme has been particularly successful and propagated by various ‘carriers’ which in this model are the sound engineers. One film historian described the use of the sound effect ‘in-joke’ between engineers as “a sort of way of communicating between ourselves and saying hello to each other”. This also points to the idea of a film itself being a communicative system in which minority or marginal discussions can occur that might be completely different (or even opposite) to the primary message(s) intended by the film’s central contributors (film studio, director, producer, screenwriter) – aimed at the cinema going public. Here is exciting example and potential model for the marginal operating within any communicative system to establish their own discourses ‘piggybacking’ / or encoded within a dominant message.

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=cdbYsoEasio
(a compilation of film clips which feature the Wilhelm Scream)

Notes on Whitechapel Gallery artist’s talk between Jens Haaning & Nicholas Bourriaud / 11 Sep 08

2008-10-13T09:03:00.000-07:00

Artists and Institutions and the changing nature of Institutional Critique

Bourriaud suggested that the kind of institutional critique that emerged in the 1960s has come to an end. He felt that art galleries were no longer considered as representative of an authoritarian political system as they once were, therefore, making them the subject of work has becomes less relevant for artists. He suggested that the art gallery was seen as ‘one more thing among many things’.

Also, such is the fluidity of galleries now in modes of presentation and engagement (e.g. smaller but no less institutions such as Gasworks, ICA (as seen in their recent Nought to 60 program and Whitechapel itself) means they often think with the contingency and lightness that would classically be the domain of the artist. In the past there has been more of a tension between the dense, heavy (both architectural and ideologically) institution and the nimble, protean artist. However as more and more gallerists, curators and creative producers adopt the mobility of thinking more commonly associated with the artist the innate antagonism between the two has lessened.

Working in/out an institution, working with(out) an institution

Asked how he dealt with the initial invitation to be part of Whitechapel Gallery’s project The Street:
(“Seven artists/artist collectives have been commissioned to take part in The Street, a year-long project by Whitechapel Gallery launched on 30 March 2008. Each were asked to develop seven week-long projects focusing on a disused shop space on Toynbee Street just off Wentworth Street, as well as to develop projects relating to the place on and around Wentworth Street, E1. Projects will usually have some manifestation throughout the rest of the year so that The Street will have an accumulative presence up until March 2009. Writers Lars Bang Larsen and Clare Cumberlidge from General Public Agency have been invited to contextualize The Street throughout the year. A publication will follow in 2009.” Curator, Marijke Steedman)

Haaning confessed to finding it quite difficult. The reason being that it was important to him that the decision to work beyond the walls of an institution is his artistic choice. Whereas with ‘The Street’ the work being external to Whitechapel Gallery itself was part of the structure of the project. From his perspective he felt the gallery had made inroads into the nature of the work, before he had even contributed anything. This stance became clearer in mind of his suspicion of artists who claim to work ‘outside of the institution’ he felt this was naïvely revolutionary, or at worst, a faux-stance of independence, he admitted the importance of, and attraction to, galleries for him, lay in the power of their networks, both in communicating the project to the public, media and others in the professional arts community.

‘Baghdad Time’ (2008) was the produce of Jens Haaning’s commission for The Street…A clock set to Baghdad time has been mounted to the side of a Brick Lane restaurant; “thus acting as a reminder of a situation occurring in another time zone – a situation that society has the power to influence despite its geographic distance… it highlights economic and diplomatic relations between the UK and Iraq - with British participation in the Iraq conflict acting as the main connection” (as described on the Danish Embassy website). This description and commentary complements what Haaning disclosed of his strategies on the evening of the talk.

Other works

Other works which Haaning presented included: “Afghanistan 5012 km” (at Leidsche Rijn, in Utrecht, The Netherlands). A piece commissioned for a new housing estate. The work takes the form of a road sign placed by the motorway, with the lettering ‘Afghanistan 5012km’. This functions as a joke while remaining factually true. Haaning talked about wanting people to consider why this road sign had been sited over any other, as a means of opening up broader considerations. He went on to explain that he saw the work as a response to expansive housing developments occurring in the Netherlands at the time, that were economically related to Holland’s military engagement in Afghanistan.

Another striking work was ‘Arabic Joke’ (2006); this work took the form of numerous posters disturbed throughout New York in October and November 2006: “interspersed among the movie and club posters, the typical joke offers a laugh to those who can read it, and may evoke feelings of dislocation and confusion among those who cannot”. (Who Cares? website). Bourriard talked about other contexts in which he’d seen this work and variations of it, in which the jokes are broadcast, for example. He talked about how ‘Arabic Joke’ created a micro-community for the duration of the joke’s presence in the cityscape – around which those who ‘were in the know’ could enjoy the work. By presenting the ‘insider’s joke’ with the insider being the ethnic minority or marginal community, subversions of the relationship between access to knowledge and authoritarian power were put to work. Finally in Redistribution (London-Karachi), 2003, all the chairs from the ICA, London were shipped to Karachi, Pakistan. They were then left on the street for passers-by to use or take as they wished. Haaning recounted how there had been great excitement at the Karachi end in the lead up to the project, at the prospect of ‘designer chairs from London’, however when the chairs actually arrived there was great disappointment with their aesthetic. He found it humorously revelatory about the expectations of one culture and its produce of another – and the notion of taste and fashion – how in this particular case it definitely did not translate.

One lens through which to view the works mentioned here is through their spatial-temporal-displacement strategies. Baghdad Time, suggest a mini-time zone in the midst of Brick Lane. This asynchronicity could be seen to mirror the culture of population demographic of the Brick Lane area in relation to London’s population at large. Likewise to make the link between the Dutch housing estate and Afghanistan may have had a real-time relevance at the time of its execution – but as Haaning himself said, he is equally interested in a motorist 50 years from now passing the sign and being curious enough to investigate a connection that has become historical, that is not ‘live’. Issues of displacement are explicit in Arabic Joke and Redistribution, in the former the artwork i.e. the poster activates and engages with those communities which have been displaced – alienating those who do not know the language, in the latter it is the objects which have been displaced: two simultaneous situations of the same logic – but not identical events had been created. Here the displacement is not loaded in one community’s favour, or to the exclusion of another. I was made particularly curious about the act of swapping, specifically the moment mid- swap when both parties have nothing and are awaiting the arrival of something.

Notes on a talk at the Science Museum: Perverting Technologies / 6 October / 2008

2008-10-10T19:04:00.000-07:00

On Monday 6th October I attended a talk titled Perverting Technologies: A science. It was organized by the DANA Centre (part of the Science Museum) a cluster of spaces, inviting debate and thought about science in relation to culture. The speakers on the panel were artist, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Blast Theory producer Julianne Pierce and Andrew Shoeben, founder and lead artist in the collective Greyworld. The audience were in the larger space downstairs. The speakers and compeer were on a small stage not much higher off the ground than the audience they were addressing. The space is rectangular with two plasma screens at each end with the bar running across the longer side, opposite the stage. Each speaker was allocated 10mins to introduce their respective practices:

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer:

Lozano-Hemmer spoke articulately about a range of ideas and influences. Notably a forthcoming project in November in Trafalgar square called, Under Scan… “a large-scale video art installation for public space. In the piece, passers-by are detected by a computer tracking system that activates video-portraits projected within their shadow on the ground. The piece is intended as a public takeover of their city, linking high technology with strategies of self-representation, connective engagement and urban entitlement. Over one thousand video portraits were shot in Derby, Leicester, Lincoln, Northampton and Nottingham by a team of local film-makers. Participants were free to represent themselves in the video portraits in whatever way they desired and a wide range of emotions and attitudes were recorded.” (Under Scan website). The projected image is scaled to fit the outline of your shadow. The projectors are extraordinarily powerful among the strongest in the world, 10 000 lumens. He spoke excitedly of one’s own shadow becoming a mobile interface, something we intuitively have learnt how to deal with and manipulate. Every seven minutes, in what he called a 'Brechtian moment', the intricate Orwellian surveillance system reveals itself: luminous green tracking grids are made visible, the scanning systems and spot lights disclose themselves - like red-laser dot gun targets. Observing people’s reaction to his work Lozano-Hammer found himself surprised by ‘what makes people uncomfortable’. In conception he thought this moment of displaying the hidden mechanism would be horrifying - the sudden foregrounding of the technology that increasingly surrounds us - on the contrary, he has discovered the public often like this moment and break into smiles - ’because it looks like a disco’, he says. On the otherhand he finds more were unsettled engaging with the projected portraits. (Filmed in such a way as to stare up at you from the ground.) Such is the number of portraits, and the randomisation of their projection Lozano-Hemmer with an unintentional poetry said: “Participants come back to find themselves, it is very hard to find yourself.”

The artist felt it key that the public activate the work, that the work does not slide into a solely technological spectacle. He sited his work within the Western Classical Painting tradition of portraiture, showing examples of inspirations which included Velasquez’s Las Meninas and work by Van Eyck. The examples portrayed the sitters aware they are being looked at, rather than simply objectified obliviously.

Lorenzo-Hemmer also sited contemporary artists such as Gary Hill (b.1951, “for his earliest video installation, Hole in the Wall (1974), he broke a hole through a wall of the Woodstock Artists' Association, placing on the other side a monitor that replayed his destructive action” (Slought Foundation)). Paul Sermon (b.1966, http://www.paulsermon.org/) and Daniel Conogar (b.1964, Madrid, www.danielcanogar.com). These artists engage with telematic systems, live relay and projection.

He also expressed an interest in exploring the ephemerality of public art. The temporary nature of his installations, the fleeting apparitions of the portraits themselves are means of achieving this. He also referenced ‘the anti-monument’ and in particular the work of Jochen Gerz:

[ “Since the 1960s, forms of monuments were invented that not only explored new types of expression but challenged the very tradition of marking historical events with monuments in order to commemorate the past in the present. Crucial to this development were the works of American and German artists, Edward Kienholz and Jochen Gerz. Kienholz’s ‘anti-monument’, The Portable War Memorial of 1968, comprises a blackboard and chalk with which spectators are invited to record the names and victims of future wars, while Gerz’s much debated ‘counter-monument’ of the 1980s and 1990s is based on the principle that monuments which renounce symbolism draw spectators into an active questioning of their relation to the past and its representations. The inscription on the plaque marking the site of Gerz‘s invisible ‘Monument against Fascism’ in Harburg near Hamburg reads, "For nothing can with duration rise against fascism in our place"

Peter Carrier, Monuments and National Memory Cultures in France and Germany since 1989]

Despite his positive and utopian rhetoric my unease about Under Scan and other works that employ or re-work surveillance technology was not dispelled. In making such technologies ‘fun’ and ‘playful’ it is often argued they have been ‘hijacked’ in the name of progressive socially engaged interactivity, as opposed to being utilized as policing aides. On the other hand I fear such works can unwittingly become PR-exercises for a surveillance state, accustomizing us to their presence, to the point we lose all critically of them or attach undeservedly positive connotations to mention and thought of surveillance systems. John McGrath, the former artistic director of Contact Theatre and now inaugural artistic director of the National Theatre of Wales, author of "Loving Big Brother: Performance, Privacy and Surveillance Space" , talked earlier this year at the LIFT festival in Stratford, during which he called for a more open recognition of an innate human pleasure from watching and surveying, that oft’ forewarned ‘surveillance society’ is already upon us and our emphasis should be engagement, subversion or creative play with these technologies.

Julianne Pierce, spoke about Blast Theory’s recent and ongoing project, Rider Spoke:

“The audience can take part either on their own bike or borrow one supplied by Blast Theory. Following a short introduction and a safety briefing you head out into the streets with a handheld computer (Nokia N800) mounted on the handlebars. You are given a question and invited to look for an appropriate hiding place where you will record your answer. The screen of the device acts primarily as a positioning system, showing where you are and whether there are any hiding places nearby. The interface employs imagery drawn from Mexican votive painting, sailor tattoos and heraldry: swallows flutter across the screen to show available hiding places, prefab houses indicate places where others have hidden. Once you find a hiding place - a spot previously undiscovered by any other player – the device flashes an alert and the question. The question is one of a selection authored by Blast Theory that asks you – alone, in an out of the way spot – to reflect on your life. You then record your answer onto the device. Each hiding place combines two properties: the physical location and the electronic location as reported by the device and, for this reason, position itself is slippery and changeable.”

Julianne played samples of various participants confessions in recording devices, (notably one in which a 40 year old woman, talks of all pervading fear which affects her. “I’m constantly in fear, of what might be fear of what might not, fear of myself”). An interesting idea was put forward that people generally found it easier to interact with machines in a public-performative situation than a person, ‘it’s a lot less intimidating‘, one attendant said, ‘to engage with an answer machine device than to be invited on stage and interact with a human performer‘. I think this is a valuable point to consider and disrupts the binary oppositions that come into discussions around this theme, which will often site technology on one hand and intimacy on the other.

I was more excited by mention of an earlier Blast Theory project with which they achieved their first wave of critical acclaim and mention in the press. It was a project titled Kidnap:

“In 1998 Blast Theory launched a lottery in which the winners had the chance to be kidnapped. Ten finalists around England and Wales were chosen at random and put under surveillance. Two winners were then snatched in broad daylight and taken to a secret location where they were held for 48 hours. The two winners were Debra Burgess, a 27 year old Australian working as a temp and Russell Ward, a 19 year old from Southend working in a 24 hour convenience store. The whole process was broadcast live onto the internet. Online visitors were able to control the video camera inside the safehouse and communicate live with the kidnappers. During the run up to Kidnap, a 45 second video - the Kidnap Blipvert - was shown at cinemas around the UK. The Blipvert carried a freephone number, allowing people to register their interest.” (Blast Theory, website)

I am curious as to how this project would be received now in 2008, when footage of captives held by terrorists is such a mainstay of our tele-visual media. The idea of 'lottery winners' and the project’s initial advertisement in cinemas, switches an extreme, aggressive, torturous, (often politicised) act , into an artwork and perverse leisure activity - both for the hostage and those who become part of the project online through the manipulation of cameras tracking the hostages. How many of the negative aspects of kidnapping remain in the game version of it? Is kidnapping trivialised? and is their anything necessarily wrong with such trivialisation?). Have the primary connotations of ‘kidnapping’ itself shifted in the last decade in this country? In 1998 I suspect kidnapping would have evoked more personal acts of abuse: a lone dysfunctional sadist, a desperate individual trying to raise money, cinematically depicted as ploy in the criminal underworld, an act that takes place within our cities , or at least a domestic place - now one is more likely to think of aid workers, or soldiers in Iraq, frenzied political rants, recitations of religious commentary - we possibly think of kidnapping as an act by ‘a community of the other’ visited upon someone we recognize - a social event and political act. In that respect Blast Theory can be said to have been curiously prescient about the mediarization of anti-social activity and the complicity of the voyeurs.

Andrew Shoeben, the director of Greyworld, talked of his primary audience being the passer-by and how this affected how he presented his work. His challenge becomes getting people’s attention in an instant, this is not an audience who have come to see the work, but who in the act of passing through the space, activate it and on discovery imay then spend time with it. He saw many of his projects as antidotal to the reduction of public space to nothing more than traffic lanes, from which to get to and from work - or shop. A notable work simply titled 'Railings', involved the tuning of the bars which made up a stretch of railing: running a stick along the railings created a melody. Shoeben felt this was especially representative of what he strived to achieve because a cyclist could still chain their bike to the railing a though it was a purely functional object. Equally exciting was a work called World Bench: “Each installation is situated in a school and consists of a bench placed next to a wall onto which is projected the mirror image of the bench. However, whilst one side of the bench may be in the grey playground of a primary school in Newcastle the other is in the sun-baked play - ground of a school in Cape Town. The people sitting on the bench can have an idle conversation, discussing their lunch or perhaps indulging in a little light flirtation, which they would have were they sitting on the same bench and not separated by thousands of miles.”

Other projects included carpeting a bridge: when walking over the bridge sensors are triggered which create various soundscapes such as crunching snow, or dry leaves. Shoeben talked about it being ironic that Greyworld’s most recognised work to date was the least accessible by the general public: The Source, an installation at the London Stock Exchange…

“The Source is formed from a grid of cables arranged in a square, 162 cables in all, reaching eight stories to the glass roof. Nine spheres are mounted on each cable and are free to move independently up and down its length. In essence the spheres act like animated pixels, able to model any shape in three dimensions a fluid, dynamic, three dimensional television. Visitors to the atrium are greeted by this motion: its particles rising and falling, generating an infinite range of figurative and abstract shapes that rise, dissolve and reform at different heights in the atrium. The shape of the sun rising on a new day of trade, the names and positions of currently traded stocks, the DNA helix at the centre of life formed by the work, and floating in the 32m void of the atrium. This complex and sophisticated installation is a microcosm of activity, a living reflection of market forces.”

He went on to joke it exists for the public in the televised world. It can be glimpsed most mornings on news features and seen on the internet. This is interesting territory: a notion of public space within broadcast systems, non-physical public space, what is the potential for public art which only exists in transmitted mediarized, representational space?

I find this work exciting for its treatment of the stock-market as a ‘real-time system’ much the same way the likes of Hans Haacke did so in the late 60s. This spotlight on the stock market is a particularly relevant one in the current economic climate, works which try and depict such data in a visual way is especially illuminating and necessary at this time.

Shoeben’s repeated insistence that the work should communicate itself without extraneous contextualization in the form of a press release or wall panel, definitely alters the dialogue between audience and artwork. He really valued the immediacy of contact between the two. To achieve this it appears the works need a level of directness which operates in a very similar way to a lot of advertising campaigns which continually seek ways of ‘grabbing your attention’, is there a danger of work which uses the same strategies designed to sell you something? Desptie the twist being nothing is bought? That you can be given something, all be it an experience without having to hand over cash, or sign up to something… that isn’t a marketing plug for a personal commodity, unfortunately, is an ever-decreasing occurrence in our public spaces.

After the introductory talks the audience of about 60 were separated into three groups in three separate spaces. Each group included one of the invited talkers. These discussions were designed to encourage a more intimate dialogue about the themes which had emerged. The artist/producer with each group chaired and orchestrated the discussion. Questions judged particularly relevant were noted and shared with everyone in the last ten minutes - when the three groups reassembled. Two points that especially struck me were 1) the politics of access to the technology: the highly technical projects that Blast Theory and Under Scan engage with demand huge financial resources and specialist equipment, how do the artists avoid replicating the dynamic of the privileged few with high access (like military, secret services, big business and police) making subjects of those without this access? do the audience ever become more than glorified end-users? 2) Do artists using such state-of-the-art technologies presume with too much certainty the continuous presence of hi-tech systems in their work? could we not be facing a future where we are reduced to very little, can technology prepare us for its own potential absence?

When the group had re-assembled there was talk about the primacy of the technology, with general consensus among the panel that the application of technology was not an end-point in itself, in various ways they claimed to avoid showcasing in the work itself, this led to the compeer wrapping up with what was for me, perhaps the most revelatory statement of the evening: “Technology is most visible when it fails.”

That Mitchell and Webb Situation/ Episode 4 /BBC 2 Broadcast on 6th October 2008 1.05am

2008-10-07T14:45:00.000-07:00

Episode four of this comedy series featured a short sketch featuring a character called Terry, played by Robert Webb. Terry is seen in close up from the perspective of a TV crew who have taken up residency in his home. The inarticulate character recounts to camera how the crew, i.e. them, just turned up and promised him a mere £75 quid (as an aside he mentions that he still hasn’t received the money yet) and tentatively and passively vents his frustrations. In contrast the measured voice of the director of the crew (heard but not seen) is trying to elicit emotive responses, frequently asking, ‘And how does that make you feel, Terry?’. The voice is reminiscent of Hal’s in 2001, pathologically self-controlled, always seeking to say the right thing to extend the situation at its subject’s expense. To great comic effect, when Terry bemoans the make-up he’s forced to wear, they coolly offer to remove it. In the next cut the consequences of being on TV without make-up are made all too visible, great globules of sweat adorn Terry, his features mercilessly illuminated by the surrounding lights. The viewer is put in the position of scrutinizing him like a show-pig at a country fete; his unease is chilling and cruelly funny. Humour is found in this tension through restraint. While eating food, the controlled voice enquires if he is enjoying his meal, if he’s feeling better now, to which Terry responds saying he’ll be fine, as long the crew don’t block the TV. One can’t help but wander what Terry might be so desperate to see on TV, someone else in an identical scenario to himself?… In fact, Terry goes on to say he doesn’t want to miss an episode of Deep Space Nine (a TV spin off of Star Trek: Next Generation 1993 - 99). As he eats, the boom gently bobs in and out of the frame, a mild irritant putting him off his food. Terry doesn’t know the name for the boom; he is not au fait with the equipment surrounding him and its function. This ongoing interview is in no sense takes place on equal ground (despite ironically being in Terry’s living room). Yet Terry reveals himself to be complicit in its continuance. Terry is clearly uncomfortable and perplexed, put-out but powerless, when he does finally threaten to kick them out, a hand appears within the frame as if from nowhere with a wodge of cash. It Is dangled before Terry’s nose. The money is handed to him, he cautiously ferrets the notes away. His anger abates, but he visibly remains as uncomfortable as before.

Our immediate points of reference might be parodies of the television reality show Big Brother and others of its ilk. It brings to mind the controversy surrounding the contestant Shahbaz Choudhary, who potentially had mental health problems exacerbated by the producers’ strategies, who prioritised spectacular ‘TV moments’ over the participants’ states of mind. Equally, the idea that an uninvited film crew might appear at your doorstep and gradually invade your life has something of the mythic modern horror we see in Pinter’s early work, especially The Birthday Party (in which Stanley Webber, an erstwhile piano player in his 30s, who lives in a rundown boarding house, run by Meg and Petey Boles, in an English seaside town. Is confronted by two sinister strangers, Goldberg and McCann, who arrive purportedly on his birthday and who appear to have come looking for him, turning Stanley's apparently-innocuous birthday party organized by Meg into a nightmare) and Kafka’s The Trial. Both examples like. Mitchell and Webb, draw a bleak, black humour from the confrontation of the weak with the powerful - who gently taunt or confuse as prelude to something more extreme.

The most significant difference between this sketch and the literary antecedents that have been mentioned is how that power is depicted. Both Stanley Webber and Jospeh K. are physically intimidated by men doing the bidding of a system, one the criminal underworld, the other a totalitarian state: power is depicted in the form of latent or potential physical violence. Mitchell and Webb depict power here as the capacity to (mis)represent you, to destroy your ‘media image’. This has become more fearful, and therefore funnier, than death itself.

Banks Violette/ Maureen Paley, London / September 2008

2008-10-07T07:50:00.000-07:00

Entering the gallery one is struck by the overwhelming sound, a thunderous groan; it is not immediately possible to discern its origin. Pulling back a black curtain on the ground floor of Maureen Paley Gallery (London), one is confronted not only by the source of this sound - but by an image of a galloping horse. The image is projected onto water vapour channelled by a number of vents. This is the source of the sound. The ghostly image of the horse, shimmering like a mirage, continually threatens to disappear despite the constancy of the technical apparatus that ensure its presence. The image is about a third of life size, it hovers in the air. To choose water-vapour as ‘the screen’ on which to project, cannot help to undermine the ’notion of screen’: the surface on which the image appears, destabilizing our casual sense of constancy in the things we see. This is reinforced by the looping of the image, edited in such a way, that it is bluntly noticeable when the galloping sequence ends and restarts. This self-conscious ‘skip’, acts like a Brechtian device drawing our attention to the artifice, which otherwise would lie much closer to Victorian magic stage devices, or David Copperfield technological trickery. So while undeniably spectacular, unlike say fireworks, it is a spectacle aware of its impact, and upsets it. Does this make it less of a spectacle?

In the press release we are told the image itself is sourced from TriStar Pictures opening animation “in which a white horse gallops across a black background and then, like Pegasus, grows wings and flies away”. So in Violette’s cropping we are denied the more phantastical stage of the image, it perpetually runs because it has been denied wings.

The artist, Banks Violette, (Born 1973, New York, USA) in his own words says: “I have used the image of the horse repeatedly, it’s an image that falls into that category of images that are void-exhausted and over-determined and drained of life through overuse. This idea of a void image is a constant throughout my work; the idea of an image seemingly unable to exceed the weight of its own overuse, yet somehow, once in a while, capable of reanimation.”

Along these lines of thought the work can be seen in the tradition of Pop Art’s appropriation of the visual culture of populist entertainment. Like Roy Liechtenstein’s ‘Whaam!’ (1963) the image has not been simply enlarged in scale, the composition has been altered not to mention its re-representation in a different media - that of acrylic and oil. The cultural conations of these media make claim for the work within a lineage of Western Classical art history it might otherwise have been denied. By drawing the horse animation from the cinema to the art gallery, again re-presenting the image in a different media - that of projected video on vapour - a new lineage (or path) is found for the animated clip. This transfusion of imagery offers a cultural gravitas that the works did not have previously. They are endowed with an aura of uniqueness and so become prized. However whereas the disposable comic has been transformed into the much more endurable medium of oil. The horse has been removed from the mechanized constancy of celluloid to a digitised image on ephemeral droplets of water… an ephemeral monumentalisation.

Tris Vonna-Michell, 11/08/2008, ICA, Nought to Sixty Programme

2008-10-07T05:16:00.000-07:00

We were taken into the ICA cinema auditorium in groups of three. It is small cinema space, maybe seating about 150. There is another group of three already in the auditorium. The rest of the seats are empty. On the screen are a series of stills. There is no extraneous information explaining what we are looking, at. Nadine - who is German, recognised the streets of Berlin. More specifically there were shots of the performers from Wim Wender’s Wings of Desire. The shots were black and white, there was no obvious narrative or clear guide as to what connected the images. After a while, the group of three already in the space when we entered, were led out by another doorway different from the one we entered. The film continued. Eventually another group of three came into the space and we were led to the same exit as the previous group of three. This exit turned out to be an entrance. We were now in the cinema’s projection room. Perched on a stool, next to the projector sat Tris Vonna-Michell. The three of us stood opposite. A rapid-gunfire patter began, too fast to comprehend in its entirety; it was peppered with negotiation about how long the encounter itself should last, two, three minutes, three and a half? He brandished an egg timer. His speech was intense and compact, his verbal dexterity became spectacle - a style of delivery often wrestling with the facts. But what are the facts? This is what seemed to elude Vonna-Michell's troubled motor-mouth persona. What was communicated to me was the overwhelming anxiety of not being able to communicate. Within this scenario a projectionist delivering an apologia for the cryptic nature of the film he is projecting, using words to bridge gaps of comprehension, but aware of not fulfilling this aim. It was a powerful effect to draw us from the endpoint of a system, the projected image on a screen in the dark… to its source, the machine and man operating it. In doing so rich connections are made between what we perceive and the origins of those perceptions. The spiel served to prevent a reflective distanced relationship to the experience, which was only allowed in hindsight, having left the space, when we were no longer in an intimate spatial relationship to the artist. There is something quietly terrifying about the notion of a ranting projectionist, trapped in a booth, forever trying to explain something inexplicable, failing and trying again.

(Photograph of Nadine and ML by Benedict Johnson)

Histoire(s) du Cinema, screened at Rio Cinema on 28th September 2008

2008-10-06T09:40:00.000-07:00

This is the second time this text was begun, the first time it was lost by some computer malfunction. I have tried to recall it as best I can, but know as I write it is something slightly different. This became the case the moment I began this text with: ‘This is the second time this text was begun, the first time it was lost by some computer malfunction.’ Anyway, the text was (and is) or is (and was) a response to seeing (or even, experiencing or better still, enduring (but not enduring as if to suggest a negative)) Jean Luc Goddard’s Histoire(s) du Cinema. ML and I saw a 315 minute screening with two intervals presented by the Rio Cinema on Kingsland Rd on 28th September. It was on this day the newspapers announced the death of Paul Newman and featured multi-page tributes to him. Tonight, the 29th September, the night I began writing this text, the BBC screened The Color of Money, directed by Martin Scorsese, starring (and in tribute to) Paul Newman, a very young Tom Cruise and Elizabeth Mastrantonio. The film is notable for Paul Newman reprising his role as ‘Fast Eddie’ from the 1961 film The Hustler, based on the book with the same name. This interconnection of the two films released 23 years apart, reveals what movies are, but rarely stress and often hide: a network of relations which extend beyond the duration of the movie itself, encompassing the narratives of their performers’ careers (both previous film roles and those yet to come), the politics of studios and their distributors, the aesthetic not just of the director but her or his production team, the practice of studios buying novels for exclusive rights to their material and the ever shifting role of technology in the aesthetic of the films themselves and so on and so on.

Early on in his ‘Histoire’ Goddard traces the genealogy of American cinema making special mention of one its biggest studio bosses Irving Thalberg, he narrates the various films that Thalberg produced, stressing how different they are from one another (Greed, Ben Hur, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Foolish Wives, The Big Parade, Mutiny on the Bounty) while observing they come from the same source. This is a dispassionate but incisive way of drawing our attention to the connection between films born out of the same stable and financial system, suggesting a tightly orchestrated economic web not superficially apparent in the films themselves. We are left to ask for ourselves what impact this might have on the content of the films - as to what questions they might (not) ask of their society and the context of their manufacture. This strategy becomes a form of institutional critique of cinema itself, the scale of movie production is such that it is intimately involved and complicit with the machinations of big-end business from whose perspective it is a product like any other.

Histoire(s) du Cinema is distributed by Gaumont, a French film production company (and the oldest still running company of its kind in the world). Therefore the distributor and holder of rights to this film is itself a vital part of film history, the market place disseminator of the ‘Histoire(s)’ is also a contributant to that same history and its future, not dissimilar to Goddard himself. These associations serve to emphasize the ‘constructed nature’ of what is casually referred to as ‘history’ and can be identified as one of the film’s ongoing concerns and be read as purposeful.

Gaumont’s animated ident crops up intermittently throughout the presentation of the parts of Historie(s) du Cinema, that of a small boy initiating a celestial arrangement of stars in a midnight blue sky. Not with the intention of being part of the film itself but as an end credit to its various sections. Nonetheless such is the structure of the film, that this animated logo can be read as part of the flux of imagery of which the film is composed. It says something of the film’s free range sourcing and harvesting of other films to make its content that even unintended filmic material can slip into its stream without disturbing its flow.

My recollections of the imagery is indicative of the intertextual strategies at play, this is a tiny fraction of what was included:

Jean-Paul Belmondo driving through the night cigarette in mouth, detail of Masaccio’s Adam and Eve in a state of despair being exiled from the garden of Eden, a photograph of a pensive Marilyn Monroe, a contorted figure in white shirt and dark trousers by Francis Bacon, detail of an ominous Vincent Van Gogh cornfield, Cary Grant in North by Northwest, scenes from Rome Open City, clips from the work of Visconti, Pasolini and Rossellini, a still from The Battleship Potemkin, footage from Marnie, a black and white headshot of Sergei Eisenstein, a head shot of Bert Brecht, Jean Harlow, Brigitte Bardot, footage from Greed, works by Howard Hawks, Un Chien Andalou, Rear Window, Broken Blossoms, Abel Gance’s Napoleon, Nanook of the North, detail of a head by Piero della Francesca…

It is not uncommon for the UK broadcasters, Film 4 or BBC to announce a forthcoming series of televised films, with a series of film clips, often with an ending title like ‘The best of cinema this Winter’ or ‘Bringing you the best from the big screen to the small one’… and so on. It is interesting that the parade of images Goddard presents doesn’t create a similarly entrancing reverie. He presents the flurry of images in such a way that they are evocative without being emotive.

The avoidance of trance is achieved by numerous means: the length of the clips is long enough to be recognizable and no more, Goddard disallows us the opportunity to delve into what’s happening in the clip itself, often we are offered a half a physical gesture of a character – the action not allowed to reach completion - before moving on to something else - Goddard is not interested in granting us a readable unit of information, the assembly of clips is the information; we are also continuously wrong footed in unraveling (or searching for) the logic of the sequence of images they are never simple contrasts of content or form, perhaps they are tangential in relationship, nor can we underestimate how much is demanded of us, our personal knowledge of cinema is called upon to find the sense in the editing. There is a moment where a photographic portrait of Thalberg looms large - only to dissolve into the roaring lion of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Thalberg reappears and dissolves again: not only is visual connection made the between the individual as subset of an institution, but it is also an biographical reference of sorts, Thalberg moved from Universal Studios to MGM in 1924. This particular dissolve is formally similar to the many that occur. The heaviness of the dissolve draws attention to its dissolving, it does not happen in a smooth singular direction: the oscillation of the imagery is a manifestation of larger argument: that no image is alone, as no film stands alone, so each image, is constantly invaded by another image, sometimes a fade, other times a contrasting images pulses from behind the image or spreads over it, we have a sense that behind one image is many others, as though all the films ever made were a microscopically thin gauze - each laid over the other, with the potential to elucidate each other, once we allow their simultaneous presence.

The spectre of Brecht hovers over this aesthetic; this can be seen in the refutation of sensory pleasure at the expense of argument, the jarring and varying modes of communication and the typographical games which become an equivalent of the ‘scene titles’ used in Brecht’s self-directed versions of his work. These jarring typographic intrusions, often overlay the image, tattoo it or bump it off the screen altogether. These methods reinforce the flatness of the screen (an equivalent of Brecht forever drawing our attention to our being in the theatre) the use of the titles sees cinema asserting itself as a platform for ideas without being woven into (or disguised by) ‘entertainment’: this is achieved by using the screen like a protester’s placard, the delivery of bold statements in sans serif font and primary school colours. In the jostle of voices and ideas - we are asked to regard the medium like a political rally.

A section of the Histoire(s) du Cinema, sees the date 1944 expand across the screen over the image of a boy, or young man, perhaps Goddard (b.1930, therefore aged 14) himself. At the same bells ring ominously, during which his voiceover begins (translated): “I was alone that night, with my dreams. Fifty years later we celebrate the Liberation. Television, because power has become spectacle, is organizing a huge show. No decoration for Guy Debord. French cinema never shook off the Germans or the Americans…”

[Goddard transposes French political history, its militaristic defeat by Germany and liberation by allied forces, to the narrative of cinema itself, suggesting that although both these parties physically retreated; intellectually French cinema had been colonized.]

He continues: “…Why is it from ‘40 to ‘45 there was no resistance cinema? There were resistance films, left and right, here and there, but the only film, in the true sense, to resist America’s occupation of cinema and uniform way of making films was an Italian film. It is not by chance. Italy fought the least. It suffered greatly but having betrayed twice, it suffered to have lost its identity, it found it again with ‘Rome, Open City’, because the film was made by men without uniform, it was the only time…”

What follows this voiceover is an extended, sumptuous, luxuriant montage sequence of Italian cinema with a stirring musical accomplishment. Here we are enveloped by the devices that had been assiduously avoided to this point. The entire arc of a shot is allowed to run to completion: a hug, the wiping of a tear, a woman stumbling down a street - this is very different from the ‘fragments of fragments’ approach to source material used elsewhere. This change of style is a jolt because by this stage the durational and immersive quality of the film so far had temporarily reversed the normative language of movie editing, the shard and half-clips have become our standard – so that one becomes hyper-aware of the purposely persuasive editing that is so common.

One of the few identifiable categorizations of film Goddard makes is that of nationality… The current dominance of American cinema, the absence of German cinema post war, the emphasis of martyrdom in Russian cinema in the early 50s and his salutation and celebration of Italian film, all point to a discussion of film that follows the modes of 19th and early 20th century thinking about painting and literature: identifying the ‘schools’ and recurring motifs of different countries’ traditions. This categorization complements Goddard’s comment in an interview, when he disagrees with the simplicity of the statement ‘cinema is a 20th century artform’, he corrects saying, ‘no, cinema is a 19th century artform that came to life in the 20th century’.

The instance of this exchange between Goddard and interviewer looks like something done for radio which was also filmed. The insertion of footage portraying Goddard offsets any stylistic depersonalization of other passages in the work. At the core of the film is Goddard himself - even if this presence is not necessarily direct and instantly readable - he takes many guises: we meet him sat at his desk, cigarette extending from mouth, tapping at a typewriter as though in the process of scripting the ‘history’ we watch, it chimes with the image of the detective-writer (so beloved of American film noir) making his notes for the case, casting himself as a private eye of sorts, which suggest he is uncovering something hidden or not immediately on the surface - he is not a police officer - so he becomes the unofficial bringer of truth, it reminds and reinforces that history is a constructed affair, not an organic unrolling of one thing after the other. Another guise of Goddard’s is his voice without image, his voice as signature, it wafts in and out of the film over the hours, alternately, bitter, accusatory, professorial, laconic - another thread on which the footage can hang. However other voices are often heard, passages of Hitchcock theorizing, a recurrent woman’s voice - I can’t identify, questions from others, much of it multi-lingual. This polyphonic assemblage destabilizes the singularity of Goddard’s presence without completely refuting him. The sound of Goddard at the typewriter becomes a soundtrack of sorts, the hammering of keys becomes a kind of percussive music, or military tattoo - in the process underscoring that all the choices of clips are Goddard’s: this is his journey. The diaristic elements of the work complicate any reduction of the film to polemical essay; it is as much poem as call to arms.

The dense interiority of the film is its most consistent feature, we are given no help in unpicking the logic behind the sequence of film clips, if indeed there is one… it is like an old fashion swimming lesson, you’re just chucked in the water and it is hoped that in your thrashing you might swim. As Chris Marker puts it, some filmmakers deliver sermons, but "the greats leave us with our freedom." Strangely the interiority is born not out of self-referentialism but by looking beyond its own borders, so much so it could be described as a film without borders with out a limit, its chains of associations extending multi-directionally. The time the film took to make (part one completed in 1988, the final part in 1998) bespeaks a high seriousness of purpose, a willful desire to communicate on the part of its maker, and yet what we are given is gnomic and cryptic. This is partly the consequence of Goddard’s refusal to relate to us in a popular and recognized mode of the sort we are accustomed to find on adverts and the mainstream cinema. This refusal is one of the foundations of his critique. That is not to suggest we engaged with an unemotional, cerebral exercise; Chris Petit, the filmmaker and critic who introduced the work suggests it has a penitent tone, that Goddard who in his youth was rejective of cinema’s history, now acknowledges that previously undisclosed debt by honoring it. Within the Histoire(s) an interviewer comments that Goddard was fortunately positioned as a chronicler of the art form: coming of age midway through the century, a mid point concurrent with that of cinema itself, uniquely placed like Janus to look forward and back simultaneously. Perhaps Goddard could be considered an incarnation of Benjamin’s Angel of History, through the prism of film’s history… “Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet…The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward.” - I suggest this with the anachronistic presentation of his selected images in mind and his identification, diagnosis and articulation of the destruction of a school of cinema (French) while finding himself unable to act against (in this case socio-political) forces larger than himself.

However that’s not to say Goddard takes up a defeatist stance, I’d like to think of Histoire(s) du Cinema as a trailer. It may seem strange to think of a 5hr magnus opus as trailer, but in its assault on the representation of a linear history it becomes propositional as to how we might represent the past. A representation acknowledged as individualistic. Goddard could be said to be arguing there is no such thing as a communal history. The ‘history’ as taught via many a text book in schools, presents a seemingly ‘communal history’: this was experienced by them as a result of that - but like everything else, although others may be present and integral to what happens and how - we process what happens individually, despite it often being usually communicated otherwise. The presentation of history by the eye-witness, i.e. Goddard, is necessarily different from those who were not there. Therefore he becomes ‘the witness who sways’ - who openly recognizes his agenda and position in his recounting of events.

Having lost my first version of the text I am more anxious than I was previously to ‘save’ what I have written at regular intervals. The fear of loss and the urge to preserve, (it is almost too banal to write) go hand in hand. It is significant that Histoire(s) du Cinema, is a film constructed towards the end of Goddard’s life. It bears the hallmarks of the late works of many artists in disciplines ranging beyond film… The straining for the masterwork - that both contains and delimits all previous work, ths summation and networking of the previous films makes the project comparable to Velasquez’s Las Meninas, or Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, in its scope and ambition. It is a filmic and literary cliché to depict your life flashing before your eyes at the approach of death but none the less a comparable experience to watching Histoire(s) du Cinema. It can be considered a re-enactment of the Louvre scene in Bande à part, the difference being we the audience replace Odile, Arthur and Franz - and rather than hurtling past paintings it is the corridors of Goddard’s mind we are dragged through, a death wail, a cascading fountain of footage.. the last efforts of firing synapses.

On the tip of your Tongue / Abigail Conway / Forest Fringe, Edinburgh Festival 2008

2008-09-24T15:10:00.000-07:00

On Sunday 10th August, it was discovered that Forest Fringe, a performance venue operating during the Edinburgh Fringe Festival had been broken into. Money, laptops and other valuables had been stolen. One untouched item was a sealed empty jar. From one perspective this is hardly surprising. However, if you surveyed the audience who participated in “On the tip of your tongue” they might have voted this jar the most valuable item in the building. The jar contained proclamations of hopes, dreams, desires, fears and fantasies.

On the 9th August the participants entered the large space upstairs in single file. Slight adjustments such as the clearing the space of extraneous furniture - allowing the architecture and original décor to breathe and the replacement of electric lights with candles - brought the building’s original function as a church to life. This immediately transformed our interaction with the space: we intuitively responded by speaking in hushed tones, moving at a slower pace and becoming receptive to a contemplative mode of thought.

On entry we were handed a small plastic bag by the artist, Abigail Conway (it was the sort drugs are traded in). Inside the bag was a finely folded envelope and writing sheet, both made of rice paper (no larger in surface area than a box of matches). Also in the bag were typographically playful instructions as to how to use the bag’s contents.

On a table in front of a screen were ‘edible-ink’ pens . Here you were encouraged to write whatever you felt on your paper and seal it in the envelope. The next step was to ascend a stairway to another platform (it might have formerly been an altar). On this table were two jars. In one you placed your envelope, dropping it into a jar full of other envelopes. From this jar you also removed a stranger’s envelope. After reading the stranger’s note and eating it, you spoke the words aloud into a second jar, then descended the staircase, free to leave or consort with others.

The experience literally asks of us to ‘eat our words’, as a phrase it is negative, ‘to eat one’s words’ is an act of defeat, or revision, but in these circumstances there is a warmth to the act. It is a symbolic means of keeping something treasured by enmeshing it within you. The logic that consumption is a means of achieving greater proximity to an idea or concept is most explicit in the Christian sacrament of the Eucharist, again our attention is returned to the history of the site.

Thus we are partake in a conceptual game exercising our capacity to ‘make-believe‘. We are bound by an essentially ‘intra-audience’ experience – the strength of the work lying in what he have communally experienced. The emphasis lies in what has happened between us, this is valued over what might be extrapolated from the outside by from those who weren’t there. Our capacity to believe is enhanced by the delicacy of the envelopes and other rice-paper made paraphernalia; their aesthetic harks back to literary descriptions of woodland fairytales: objects from other worlds left in ours by chance or good fortune.

Any assumptions of speech as ‘writing made permanent’ are overturned. The act of eating the words is a destruction of this permanence, in doing so a substitution of one permanence for another occurs. The eating is part of a relay that begins in thought and culminates in speech – the act of speaking into the jar is both symbolic and physical; yet we are given the space to imagine that it could be more than this, that there might be, somehow, a means beyond science of containing these voiced thoughts. The achievement of “On the tip of your tongue” lies in its allowance and encouragement of this possibility… that if we were to put the jar to our ear and listen hard enough and long enough we might hear what was whispered.

Dice / Emma Hart (video, 2006)

2008-09-19T10:31:00.000-07:00

"Sea.. six... four...three...Emma wins, Emma's go", so goes the artist's commentary on her game of dice with the sea. We never see her, we hear her voice, we catch sight of her hand, her shadow can sometimes be spotted in the wet sand and in other shots her footprints. Likewise we never the see the sea, when the tide comes we catch the water rolling the dice, we hear it continuously as though it surrounds us entirely, but there is no panning shot across its expanse. The focal point of the work is the contact between artist and water, the encounter, the point of meeting. The dice is emblematic of the dialogue between the two. The interplay of human and sea is playful and delicate. The simple act of engaging with the sea in the mode of a game usually played between people, whimsically anthropormophizes the sea. The tone of this engagement with the natural world is quite opposite to the typical representation of nature and especially the sea, as an unruly threatening force, to be dominated or feared. The representation of chance is similarly toyed with: Hart takes an illustrative and cliched symbol of chance in the form of a dice, and then subjects that object to an unpredictable system. The 1 in 6 probabilities of the cube come face to face with the complex dynamic of turbulent water. Perhaps predictably and even prophetically, natural force wins this little duel, the last frame Sea chucks a double six, you can’t get better than that.

G5 / Gemma Holt / Limoncello /28.08.08 - 27.09.08

2008-09-10T12:42:00.000-07:00

This text was originally written on Microsoft Works Word Processor, then printed on to A4 paper and copied on to the paper you have your in hand. The paper has the casualness of the ‘readymade’ but is not so. The paper is called G5, (H23.3 x W16.6cm) this is ever so slightly larger than A5 (H21 x W14.8). The ‘G’ is most likely for Gemma, as in Gemma Holt, the paper is her artwork. It is photocopy paper - 80grams/m2 - and has been used where possible for Limoncello gallery’s correspondence, loan forms, invoices etc.

As far as I know there are not yet purpose made envelopes to accompany G5, according to an intern at the gallery this can pose a problem, but points to the moment where Holt’s construction rubs against a pre-existent system with regard to its functionality and slippage into the world around it; highlighting the ‘life-support’ necessary for certain constructions to sustain themselves in the world - it would take the backing of a big business manufacturer to strong arm all that was necessary for G5 to become the functional commodity it has the potential to be, not just envelopes, but photocopiers, extra selection choices on printer options and so on. A one-woman self-initiated standardization scheme is bound to be of slight impact in this regard, but that is not to say it feigns dissent or is insincere, more that it will stay in the realm of the symbolic and was always meant to.

I use the word 'dissent', thinking of a quiet tension generated by G5 between the standards we have always known and what is new, thereby calling into question more fundamental units of quantification: be they of time, physical distance or weight. G5 isn’t rhetorically propositional, but it does ask us to look at the act of standardization, to consider who can call for things to be standardized. It invites us to reflect upon assumed fixities that we might follow blindly, either conceived arbitrarily or whose rationale may have once been historically important but no longer so. Significantly neither of these charges can be aimed at the international paper sizes, of which A5 and A4 are part. Quite the opposite, their beauty lies in their width to length ratios, approximately 1:1.4142, if a sheet with this ratio is divided into two equal halves parallel to its shortest side, then this ratio is maintained, hence the ease of scaling up or down A0, A1, A2 etc. G5, could therefore be considered a malfunction of sorts, a disrupter of the elegance of the mathematics possessed by its rational cousin, A5. Through its deviancy (and one might say failure) it asserts its individuality.

As advertisers and marketing strategists in their self-protective cunning have increasingly come to understand (or more likely, always understood but now need to recognise), there is conflict between the message of their pitches: promoting their product as a sign and reinforcement of our ’uniqueness’ and ’individuality’ and what they are pitching: something not unique, something mass produced… Their evolution has been toward the mass produced item which can be ‘personalized’…Online networking sites, mobile phones, digital TV viewing packages pride themselves and make a focal part of their ’package’ the potential for users to customize their products.

Holt makes murky our sense of customization: she hasn’t altered what’s been given, but begun from scratch. She wittily makes something to her own specification that mimics the produce of a production line. It is an act of taking power for oneself, but concurrently affirms her sense of the power of standardization. Perhaps the difference being asked of us is that we recognise alternatives alongside the mainstream choice offered by the nearest stationary store.

This focus so far on functionality, which to me seems secondary to the idea of the artwork as a model of how things could be, risks obscuring another quality of the work: its self-interrogation as to the nature of an artwork. It is not an artwork designed to be mechanically reproduced, but rather by its nature is multiple; if the few sheets of paper before you were the only ones of its kind it would be an aura-possessed work pretending to be otherwise. It makes no cult of itself, it’s not singular and its differences are hardly noticeable without attention being drawn to it. Although emerging from a gallery and an art-world context it operates virally, intravenously dripped into everyday life. Ultimately it is beyond the gallery where G5 can create its ‘little jolts’. Drawing you up sharp when you find it not quite fitting your file, or the discovery of an unusually broad margin when you print or photocopy. By creating this ‘glitch in the matrix’ a portal is opened for further investigation. Although the virtues of standardization are numerous: as regulator of health and safety standards, as a means of regulation of resources (potentially benefiting consumers or those less powerful in society), as a means of optimizing resources and most importantly - easing communication; its flipside is that it is an enforcer of dominant norms and restricts and contains ‘the marginal’. This is particularly apparent with the spell-check facility of Microsoft Works Word Processor; regulating not just types of spelling but words themselves, thereby circumscribing expression of ideas. Disturbingly for me while it recognises curator and curatorial, 'curating' apparently does not exist.

Seizure / Roger Hiorns/ 3.10.08 - 2.11.08

2008-09-09T02:36:00.000-07:00

On Harper Rd off the New Kent Rd, near Elephant and Castle, in an abandoned housing estate, there is an installation. It is not visible from the exterior which is entirely undewhelming . However you walk inside to be enveloped by a shimmering field of blue: different shades compete for your eye as light reflects and refracts. The lower floor of the house has been crystallized. The space, once the living room and a small bathroom are encrusted from floor to ceiling in copper sulphate.

It reminds me of graphic and cinematic depictions of Superman’s refuge from the world, The Fortress of Solitude. This allusion to an epic sci-fi film set is partly neutralized by the domestic context of the project. The allure of the work lies in its transformation of the everyday - proportions, shapes, forms and spatial relationships we are so familiar with made superficially alien.

Beyond its own presence the work does not seem to engage with the politics of its location, like fireworks without sound, it feels mute to me. Nonetheless it demonstrates a fruitful fusion of the knowledge of science with that of contemporary art practice and its traditions; in doing so suggesting that wells of inspiration lie for artists not so much in unrecognised or ignored visual practice from other cultures (or populist culture) - but other intellectual disciplines altogether.

Closing Ceremony of the Olympic Games

2008-09-07T15:12:00.000-07:00

During the BBC commentary of the Closing Ceremony of the Beijing Olympic Games, they quoted Zhang Yimou, its director as having said, “No other country in the world can do mass choreography like China. Except North Korea”. In doing so Zhang Yimou brought to the fore the uneasy links between state oppression, large-scale group organization, spectacle and ‘mass choreography‘. Zhang Yimou, is famed for his direction of Wuxia films, Hero and House of Flying Daggers; which are notable for their epic battle scenes and colour co-ordinated landscapes. The Closing Ceremony saw hundreds of performers moving in clockwork -like unison. There is something simultaneously impressive as well as fearsome about such a large group operating like this. Within the context of a ceremony it is entertaining - when the same techniques and visual bravado are transposed to the armies of an ancient mystical dynasty (as in Yimou’s films) it makes for riveting cinema.

However we need only consider the ‘Mass Games’ (see below) of North Korea to feel a certain unease. These occur as celebratory events on days of national holiday or the birthdays of past and present rulers such as Kim Jong-il. These ‘games’ emphasize themes of political propaganda, military might, discipline, unity and youth; and their roots lie in 19th century nationalist movements.

Dissolution of individuality necessary lies at the root of this kind of choreography, it is the group pattern that is emphasized and prized - though born out of individual action. It is possible to participate without having an awareness of the overarching visual effect. This leads to ethical concerns about participation in systems in which you are blind as to their purpose or consequence.

There is a moment in the ceremony when the performers clamber up a steel frame tower, the scale and distance of the camera shot reminds me of ants scurrying up an ice-cream cone. The synchronized movement of a sea of limbs creates a whirring visual effect that seems impossible without the aid computer manipulation. It is an enviable master class in the co-ordination of performers. The figures on this bare structure call to mind a number of recent paintings by British artist Tim Parr, who recently exhibited works in a show called ‘Man and Space’ at the Keith Talent Gallery (May 15 - June 22, 2008).

In particular a painting titled Construction (2007, oil on linen 40 by 35cm, see above); naked men are building something - it seems like a tower, but not enough of the structure is represented to make any confident guesses. No one is in discernable communication with the other, but each seemingly knows what do; despite the abundance of flesh and their proximity to each other there is little touching. They seem no more liberated than flies on a web. At the same time the press release observes, “figures reach, climb, and contort, building towards the indefinite”. This spotlights an aspirational element to the enterprise, it is troubling because there is no indicator as to what they strive for. The painting is also reminiscent of news documentary footage of Chinese construction workers erecting stadia with frightening speed, reminding the world of the advantages of a cheap and gargantuan labour force. Quoting again from the press release: “Parr’s figures organically fold into one another using their forms to generate architecture and patterning in each painting ever blending artifice and reality.” The figures’ service to the larger schema of the visual structure of the painting is equivalent to the individual in society whose personal needs or desires are subordinate to a more dominant power structure. Parr’s use of computer-graphic-modelling programs as part of the drawing stage of his paintings - perhaps more evident in an untitled work which depicts office workers in various states of tumultuous undress - hurtling in a void - to and from the viewer - compliments our sense of sprawling bureaucratic systems underpinning so much of human activity - taunting notions of ‘free will’ in the process.

These restraints of the individual dovetail into mass choreography as enforcer of discipline. This is especially apparent with one of the most popular Youtube postings of all time: "Thriller" as performed by inmates of the Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center. Here we can witness several hundred inmates, head to toe in regulation orange uniform re-enacting Michael Jackson’s music video - with music blasted from the tannoy into the prison’s central courtyard. A documentary made about this Youtube clip features the governor of the prison boasting the decline of crime since his enforcement of these dance routines. In the re-enactment they are all in orange - there is no one playing Michael Jackson, none of the prisoners are authorized to be the star - ‘the individual‘, yes there is a prisoner at the apex of the triangle but he is not differentiated in the way a front singer normally is from his or her dance troupe. The video has clearly being filmed from a balcony above the courtyard - it is from this angle that the prisoners would usually be surveyed and kept in order. It is from above that choreography becomes coherent, and those occupying this second level are the wardens. It is painfully apt that for all the skill and energy the prisoners’ bring to their roles, their characters are zombies, the lumbering, lifeless undead. It is worth restating the popularity of this posting, it has had nearly 18milliosn hits to date.

These figure in part attests to the popularity of a great dance routine full stop. There has been a boom in the popularity of collective social activity with strangers, be this in the proliferation of flashmobs, or the spread of Line Dancing nights. It is important to point out that there is often a great satisfaction to be found in ‘getting the steps right’ within a group, being part of a massive ensemble. British Military Fitness, is a work-out service with ex-army personnel who model their regimes on how they would engage with troops, their classes take place on Clapham Common with growing attendance. The attraction to such environments is possibly a correlative (and corrective) to the ever increasing physical isolation of the individual and ‘soloness‘ in our cities.

There is a character in the science-fiction series, Star Trek, Deep Space Nine, called Odo, he is a shape-shifter, his natural form is a gelatinous state, he can take any form and is usually humanoid. However for a period of time every day he must slop in a bucket or becomes a puddle, at this moment he collapses without restraint into formlessness; it’s a biological demand like sleep that cannot be bypassed. Odo is a tortured character, who knows nothing of his origins, he was discovered floating through space as a non-descript blob. For much of the series he yearns for knowledge of his origins. Eventually he comes to discover, he is one of an entire race like himself, shape-shifters, who live on a planet on the outskirts of the solar system. He makes his way to this planet, surprised not to find cities, roads, any signs of civilization as he expects it to be. He finally comes across a shimmering silver lake; intuitively he takes liquid form and pours himself in to it. This lake is in fact ‘The Great Link’, Odo’s entire race reside in this lake (see below), indivisible from each other, their bodies are borderless, thoughts are shared as one, for his race this is the most pleasurable and harmonious place to be, it is here that Odo’s anxieties are quelled, that he finds the sense of home long searched for. We can imagine ourselves like Odo, periodically compelled to give up shape…Although we prize our uniqueness and individual mobility, it seems that there are also parallel desires, conflicting even, to dissipate into a crowd, a mob, a gig, a great link; that will soothe the pain, challenges, anxiety and vulnerability of individuation. It is not the desire itself that we should be weary of, but the manipulation of it, here lies our trap.

Ghost (2008)/ Rostan Tavasiev

2008-09-06T18:31:00.000-07:00

On a white plinth lies a multicoloured toy bear; body depressed, sunken and eyeless, from its torn side emerges white stuffing shaped like a released gas or cartoon-genii when first emerging from a lamp. The ‘ghost’ possesses the eyes the stuffed toy no longer has. The eyes are the evidence of sentience and vitality. Given the bombast of a plinth, the toy parodies the state monuments of oppressive regimes - drawing stark comparisons between what is celebrated, what is ignored and what is sanctioned as subject for heartless ridicule.

One cannot extract this work - Ghost (2008) by Rostan Tavasiev, from its context: part of a group show at Paradise Row, London, curated by Maria Baibakova, called Laughterlife, featuring new art from Russia, which in the words of the press release "exemplify the vein of absurdity and black humour that has been an enduring characteristic of Russian culture, from the early 19th century literary works of Gogol, to absurdists writings and theatre of the OBERIU group".

It is through the lens of Russian life and history that the work comes demands reading:

Writer and curator, Andrey Erofeev, in a text about Tavasiev’s practice observes: “Cheap toys were the only things that were never in shortage in the Soviet Union.” He goes on to note “Along with imagery of the communist propaganda industry, toys became the brunt of sarcasm and parody in Russian pop art. But Rostan is far from condemning the lowbrow aesthetics of Chinese consumer goods. His plush heroes do not spoil the world's grace with their ugly shape. On the contrary, it is the world that continually threatens his beloved toys.”

Significantly, Tavasiev depicts the moment of expiration, the ‘spirit’ leaving the body. It is as though this instant had been captured in the moment and frozen in time. A documentary-realist-photographic methodology has been applied to a work that is materially metaphoric. Perhaps this speaks of the quietly political ambitions of the work. It is hard not read the mass produced factory toys as substitutes for the humble, powerless and defenceless in society. These toys are a dominant and recurring motif in his work. From whose point of view are the people presented so? Could it be the oppressors’? People as throwaway consumer products. Or are we viewing how the people, himself included, might tragically have come to see themselves?

Erofeev, writes of ‘the world that continually threatens his beloved toys’ in doing so, he gives the toys an independent existence of their own. Not symbolic of the economically disadvantaged Russian underclass but a parallel existence to our own. As though our world might do damage to his. It suggests Tavasiev has created a mythology of his own, as children do with their toys - a universe away from the one we share with which might echo our own without being a simple 1-to-1 correlative.

Below is an image of a similar, earlier work, Towards Light (2005, fur, sintypon, marble 50 x 20 x 20 cm). The fictive ghost of the toy billows toward the electric light which actually shines, it is not a model of a light bulb (which it could have been), but a functioning real-world one. This speaks of the relationship between the two; Tavasiev’s mythic community of toys and that of ours, of human beings: The bulb, of the real world, illuminates the Tavasiev’s one, and in illuminating this fiction, the light bulb itself is imbued with symbolism, it becomes part of the image as a whole and the artwork, no longer soley a functional object, but truly switched on.

The Face Game & The First Time / Edward Rapley / 8th - 10th August 2008 / (Forest Fringe) Edinburgh Festival 2008

2008-09-06T09:36:00.000-07:00

1) “The Face Game: We will have just one minute together, if you like, you can play the game of trying to see my face. Would you like to play that game?”

My friend had preceded me, she came out of breath, hair ruffled, clothes dishelleved, smiling but unsuccessful.

I enter the room a tall, spindly man stands in the far corner, his back is to me, dark trousers, white shirt, dark waistcoat, he invites me to play a game - to try and see his face. He will avoid being seen - I have one minute. I recall tales of desperate strategies I have heard attempted in this scenario: the Indiana Jones roll beneath his legs, the leapfrog on to his back, the relaxed waiting game followed by a sudden dash, wrestling him to the ground and trying to pry his fingers from his face, and most memorably the person who brought a mirror and caught his face in a reflection. The last strategy seems mythic, like Perseus defeating Medusa with the aid of his shield. His bobbing and weaving makes me feel like a child trying to seize a friendly ghost. I catch a glimpse of his face - in record time - the quickest of the festival so far and one of a handful ever to see the sphinx-like-man . I won’t tell you how…

2) “The First Thing: You will come into the room, there will be a chair for you, I will have my eyes closed. Once you are seated I will open my eyes and say the first thing that comes into my head. Then you can leave.”

I enter a narrow corridor. Edward Rapley is sat on a chair, eyes closed. Hearing me, he gestures for me to take the empty seat, the chair is arranged so as to face him. He opens his eyes, he doesn’t have words, instead he makes a rising gesture with his left arm like a vertical wave moment, exponential graph or swoosh. I say thank you and leave.

I am in a queue so I am asked what was said to me, as I have asked others what was said to him. In this particular presentation of the work the comparison of responses becomes a secondary but vital aspect of the experience.

The artistry of the pieces lie in their elegant simplicity. They are the slightest of works; they threaten themselves with disappearing all together. They have the charm of kindergarten playground games; a sharp reminder of how little is needed to engage an audience - for art to be: no electric lamps, soundtracks, objects, props - just him just you.

The encounter is the artwork. By this I mean the art is not to be found beyond the situation of meeting, its anticipation or memory. In both cases these encounters have been consciously constructed and engineered; human engagement and its mechanisms is the ’material’, the equivalent of the Renaissance sculptor’s marble. As with a marble sculpture hammer the chisel wrongly and the entire work will crack, the slightest alterations, removals, angles make the all difference. The qualities that make such a work a successful are shared with those that make any meeting between people powerful.I don’t think this is ultimately different from any artwork, the material, the concept, the positioning, the structure - all collectively combine to create the artwork which affects us accordingly, it is possible to imagine different works creating the same effect, the same experience of encountering, if a conversation (as an artwork) can create the same effect as a painting how much do they differ? This moves the emphasis away from how the work has come to be or made to the mark it makes on us. Edward Rapley doesn’t dress the encounter or present it as the by-product of an object, the encounter is all.

'The Other', could be identified as the route concern of these pieces, however they explore this theme with very different logics, masked by similar aesthetics. With The First Time, we are invited to see ourselves from the point of view of an outside eye. To most Edward Rapley will be a stranger. We are bombarded with statistics as to how much a first impression can work in our favour (or against us). Many psychological studies reveal how our first encounter with someone dominates how he we are subsequently perceived. This work is a portrait of sorts, and we sit opposite the artist much as we might for someone sketching our face, hoping some kind of insight will be revealed to us that we cannot find looking into the mirror. The work cannily exploits our curiosity as to how we are seen by others and the impression we make on the world. We are excluded from huge swathes of ourselves simply because we are in the way of our self, we cannot extract our self from our self. Perhaps in compensation we have our own interiority, a different kind of proximity to ourselves. The duration of the work is Edward Rapley’s response and mental processing - it is not a communal time system. He opens his eyes and speaks, (or in my case gestures) the time he takes to do this dictates the length of the work, his body functions as the chronological system mirroring the playful absurdity of learning more about ourselves (if only what his first response is) through him. With The Face Game someone sits in the corner with a stop-watch, it is more overtly a game and a challenge - with a clearly articulated objective. You and Edward are on a level playing field. The curiosity is now with The Other, what does he look like, will he be disturbing? How will he appear to me? Why might he want his face hidden? I seek him, I seek knowing him. That the game demands I seek his face divorced of explanation chimes with the desire to know what is alien, beyond all rationality. Imagining ourselves as the Other, as Edward Rapley, what is his experience? In The First Thing, there is the unenviable challenge of genuinely mouthing one’s thoughts, at the risk of saying the ridiculous or the deeply offensive and in doing so revealing yourself; your unedited thought processes and assumptions. In The Face Game perhaps Rapley enjoys the physical and mental challenge of staying unseen, of outwitting an opponent? Or does he enjoy being sought after, being leapt upon, tugged, pulled, prised open? - Only Edward Rapley knows. For a while now I have imagined two impossible situations: in The First Thing, Edward would open his eyes to see himself sat opposite, expectantly waiting words, judgement even, he would remain speechless. In The Face Game Edward would be wrestled to the floor, a man would prise away the cover of Edward’s fingers, in doing so each simultaneously recognising they are identical… there would follow a pause followed by a scream in each others faces.

'Steiner had lifted the weight of the world from his shoulders; if only for a night.'

2008-09-05T12:13:00.000-07:00

There is an abstract, purist, absurdity to competitive athletics, wherein lies a significant portion of its beauty and appeal. Take the 100m dash for example, it can be reduced to getting from point A to point B as fast as one can on foot. The running is not one aspect of a set of skills for a game - like football, where you might sprint past the opponent to get the ball. The act of running is the focus itself. Likewise, the high jump or the long jump, the discus or javelin - they are the simplest of aims taken to an extreme. The blunt simplicity of the objectives, throw an object as far as possible - jump as high as possible, allows the greatest potential for metaphor and symbolism; notably commitment for the sake of commitment, and the yearning to outdo one’s self and fellow competitors, but far more beyond this. It is easy to see how these activities in times gone by were the basis of a community’s survival: to outrun a wild animal, to be able to throw a spear to get food, each of these activities can be overlaid upon a prehistoric survival situation or a militaristic one. A modern sporting event takes these contexts away; the physical activities are now presented in an abstracted, sponsored, televised, aestheticized void. It is an equivalent of presenting the ‘readymade’ as artwork.

Yet we resist these removals. No sooner one context is removed another emerges in its place. It is not by chance that so much of the Olympic sports coverage and commentary seeks to find the ‘story’ for each athletic achievement - conscious of our watching organized, bloodless, regulated conflict and the unnaturalness of this (as opposed to the conflict of war, or hunting, or even the original Olympic games involvement of sacrifice to Zeus) the athlete’s story is constantly searched for, a replacement for the campfire report of ‘x’ who hunted the boar across the landscape until it collapsed in exhaustion.

Sports commentator, Simon Barnes, writes of the Beijing Olympic Weightlifting champion: “Steiner had lifted the weight of the world from his shoulders if only for a night”. Barnes’ allusion to Atlas here, the Titan condemned to support the cosmos on his shoulders, is an apt one. Steiner expressed a frenetic joy immediately after his victory. (Which has caught the imagination of Youtube montagists) However, on the medal podium he received his gold holding a picture of his recently dead wife, who died in a car accident last year. It was she to whom the medal was dedicated. It was the sorrow of her memory that Barnes intuits had been momentarily lifted. Above we have a photograph of a man holding a photograph. It creates a ‘twisty-turny-pully effect’: He is himself, the woman is represented through a 2-d image - she, we know, is dead, he is alive. Photography and death appear in constant tango. Of course since they are both in the photo - they are reduced to the same dimensions. He holds the photo the way many athletes hold their medals for photo opportunities - he holds it at a similar height, in the same front facing way a medal is usually held, so that it is parallel to the eventual photograph and readable. The actual medal shares a hand with the obligatory bunch of flowers, it is not given the ‘platform’ of the her photo. So her image becomes a symbolic substitute, or displacement, for the medal. Something as light as a photography in the place of a metal medal is fixating. One imagines the photo bearing as much emotional ‘weight’ as the dumbbells bore physical weight. It is seductive to imagine her gently aiding him in the lift, bracing his trembling knees, like a caryatid, sharing the weight with him for the obligatory two seconds before he let it fall. In sound-tracking otherwise standard sports footage of this lift with romantic ballads the Youtube video makers seem to have been seduced likewise.

Scene Unseen: Undressing without triggering a security light / Kianoosh Motallebi (2008)

2008-09-02T18:20:00.000-07:00

Undressing without triggering a security light, is a work by MA Slade graduate Kianoosh Motallebi (b.1982) it is presented as a 56 minute video projection.

The artist, Kianoosh Motallebi, has set up a game between himself and a security light. The word ‘game’ could be substituted for ‘challenge’: The artist, Motallebi, has set up a challenge between himself and a security light. But perhaps that doesn’t read as well as: The artist, Motallebi, has initiated a challenge between himself and the security light. Or, starting again: The artist, Motallebi, has set himself the challenge of undressing without triggering a security light. For the duration of the 56 minute video we see Motallebi, trying to undress without triggering this light. If the light goes on during an attempt he goes back to the beginning: puts back on what had been removed and tries again, much in the same way as not finding a satisfactory opening sentence I re-write it. Over the course of the video and his many attempts success eludes him. The framing of his figure in this wide shot: it being night-time, the anonymous grey car and black gate in the background, him standing there oddly vulnerable but at the same time defiant, upright but looked down upon by the tilting security light - as though awaiting interrogation, calls to mind Buster Keaton in Steamboat Bill Jr, particularly the scene later re-enacted by Steve McQueen in Deadpan. Perhaps out of shot, hovering over the scene is the spectre of Samuel Beckett, he who wrote: “Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.”

Challenge, test, game, duel: these words are not totally interchangeable in describing the relationship between the security light and the man; but all float around its articulation. There is the sense of a man challenging an automated system, human cunning pitted against the machine. There is also the self-challenge of the activity: “My dexterity and endurance are put to the test against a security lamp. By moving very slowly I attempt to undress, without being caught by the motion sensor. My endeavour is hindered by the cold, passers by and the relentless attention of the security lamp.” The opposition of the two: the light with its aim to illuminate potential intruders and the artist to move beyond its detection, stresses the dualistic/duelistic nature of the situation. The word ‘game‘, for me, contains the others as a subset: it does not ignore the playfulness of the set up, the low stakes, physical, psychological and legal (that’s not to say there are not games with high stakes), but keeps in mind this oppositional quality (which is also spatial) and the self-challenge, finding the discipline not to rush, the upholding of his concentration and so on.

So we are witness to a game of sorts, a constructed-situation designed to elicit results within parameters but not completely foreseeable. There is a curious logic to it: the light is not one of his own making, it is as on ‘off-the shelf’ security light. A pre-designed system, used for his own purposes, beyond those it was intended - serving him by functioning as it was designed. The man aims to undress without triggering the light, if he is successful he will be naked but unseen, if he fails he will be clothed but illuminated, clearly visible. Two types of revelation (one of flesh via clothing the other of environment via light) are proposed - but within the structure of the game they cannot be simultaneously present. So we might conclude revelation is always accompanied by concealment. ‘Conclusion’ itself is being toyed with here; the ending of a situation is classically a climax of sorts… a revelatory summing up or cathartic release. The ‘ending’ often comes with fanfare, a platform in which its finitude is spot-lit. Here, for the protagonist to fulfil his quest there can be no recognition of it having occurred, beyond our extrapolation that it has occurred through a prolonged darkness – but even then we cannot know. It maybe he has stopped midway undressing, if it is dark – we cannot know. Knowing becomes entwined with seeing, but to interchange the two is a trap.

There are four watchers: there is the artist, monitoring his own movements as he gingerly undresses, there is the sensor of the security light, there is the camera recording the scene and there is us. This web of watchers all perceive differently, three also share a time-zone. We are in our own time-zone, we were not present when these activates were recorded. The camera like us, witnesses, but is not part of the activity. However it was there at the time the event took place. The events are documented through its lens, what we can see is curtailed by the sensitivity of what it had the capacity and sensitivity to record. Motallebi, has the same human eyes as we do, he processes light, brightness, colour with the biological system that we do. Lastly there is the security light, which processes movement with a motion sensor. The security lights posses a mechanized constancy in contrast to Motallebi’s organic irregularity. But his human brain is able to exploit its limitations: for it to recognize movement - an object, person, fox - movement across its field must occur at a particular speed – anything less and there is no recognition of presence.

When Motallebi has slipped beneath the sensor’s threshold of perception. It goes dark. But just as ‘presence’ is revealed to be relative, dependent on the machine’s perception. When it goes dark and Motallebi ‘disappears’ the darkness takes us to the threshold of our visual perception. Yet we know there are creatures that would be able to see Motallebi, if they were passing him on the night he was making this video. The Snowy Owl for example, has eyes that are tubular rather than round, giving a relatively large cornea in proportion to the overall size of the eye and enabling more light to enter the eye. The pupil can be opened so wide that no iris is visible, this is large and convex, causing the image to be focused nearer to the lens hence retaining maximum brightness, the light gathering properties are enhanced by a reflective layer behind the retina, which reflects back onto the rods any light that may have passed through the retina without hitting it the first time. Specialists say the eyes of the Snowy Owl is are least 100 times more sensitive than ours in low light levels. Significantly though the sensor cannot recognise Motallebi when he moves slowly enough, Motallebi if he had the mind to could creep right up to the wire powering the light and cut it, kill it, with the light never having recognised his presence at all. That ‘something’ or ‘someone’ is beyond the threshold of our perception offers no safeguard against being affected by its presence.

Work 850 / Martin Creed/ Tate Britain 2008

2008-08-27T13:30:00.000-07:00

The Duveen space in Tate Britain is empty. A heavy stone, neo-classical atrium. The word 'empty' is used in the sloppiest sense, no space is empty. This space is full of connotations, histories, political and social associations, memories of what has happened there before and what might happen in the future. But it is empty of artworks, no sculptures, no paintings, no installations… or so I think.

There is a family of five. Perhaps tourists. They walk casually as though through a piazza, maps in hand. Sound spills into the space from adjacent rooms. I am sat near a pillar towards the south end of the space. I read the information panel about Martin Creed’s new piece Work 850. The work is partly sponsored by Puma, the sportswear manufacturer.

A runner appears round the corner. Explosively cutting through the space. He enters my line of vision of life-size then gets smaller and smaller but never invisible. His shrinking image is accompanied by the rhythm of his feet, starting loud and becoming ever more quiet until inaudible. The runner turns a corner at the end of the space and disappears out of sight. The effect is incredibly cinematic. Statically observing this rapidly moving body is like a quick but steady ‘zoom-out’ shot.

Another runner. The same carving through the space. A palpable expulsion of physical energy. Then another. Eventually I recognize the runner I first saw. They are on a loop. So the notion of an empty space is transformed. The gaps between the runners in the space become a ‘charged negative’. The waiting punctuated by moments of concentrated and directed action. The in-between times do not feel like a nothingness, the inactivity has been filled with expectation, as tightly choreographed as the runners’ action… An equivalent to the drawing exercise in which you sketch the space surrounding space an object, everything but the object, and in doing so reveal it by the shape of its absence.

The sparseness of the scene encourages a greater focused scrutiny of other details. Great attention is paid to the runners: their running style, who has the biggest thighs, the tightest Lycra, their varying combinations of sportswear, who’s running out of breath. The runners can be seen anticipating the erratic movements of the public – there are no cordons demarcating ‘no walk or no run zones’. Some are oblivious, allowing the work to ‘run through them’, or be overtaken, unaware they themselves were any sort of obstruction. Others watch leaning against a wall. Occasionally you hear a runner make a sharp intake of breath. The compact minimalism lies not only in the visual sparseness; but the activity itself, running: the most elemental of physical expression. This is reinforced by the linearity of the work, the runners taking the same programmed course, parallel to the walls, following the schema laid out by the architecture as much as the dictates of the artist.

To lock your gaze on a runner is to simultaneously become hyper-aware of the construction of the space, how it orchestrates your eye through its symmetry and calculatedly draws attention to certain decorative features by aligning itself with the effects of perspective. The rows of squares that pattern the floor (seven per row) are noticed for the first time. I note the lighting and the colours. Aside from the runners and the architecture, the most consistent visual motif is the invigilators; dark-berry-red shirts, black trousers, white ID cards, either on hip or round nick, either still or pacing within a particular zone. They are spot-lit not just by their uniformity but by the contrasting (but equally consistent) tempo of their movement. All has become like music.

Observing the runs, a game of ‘spot the differences’ emerges in me; little similarities are tracked, deviations are counted, all the while metaphors are searched for. While watching I recall a buried memory: I had taken my youngest brother, four years old at the time, to the park, to ride his scooter. We stopped at a path, midway up a hill. He excitedly ran further up the slope to gain momentum, while I sat on a bench and watched. He got on the scooter, full of excitement and glee, then whizzed down, past me, past other pedestrians and couples and dog walkers, I could hear him wailing with excitement, until he was reduced to a dot, and eventually out of sight. It was a happy moment. As he ran up the hill becoming present again – smiling so much, I was moved to tears. Perhaps a delayed reaction to his temporary disappearance. I thought of his childhood rushing by, of the incredible difficulty if not impossibility of retaining moments of time, how (for me) his disappearance did not just prefigure aging, but loss and ultimately death.

Music is Food / Oliver Payne and Nick Relph

2008-08-23T13:07:00.000-07:00

I saw this 3 minute video at Herald St Gallery – (who represent the duo Oliver Payne and Nick Relph) on the 18th July 2008. This video’s opening title reads 'Frieze Film' .

One wonders what the marketing executives of the respective sponsors thought upon seeing this work. Those who are charged with assessing the use of the corporation’s logo: that they are formatted as was agreed in the contract, at the right size, no smaller than those of other sponsors who have donated the same amount, that the text in relation to logo is correctly proportioned - and most importantly that the brand is not undermined. I imagine there might have been some hesitancy among these executives: as when one suspects being the victim of a very sophisticated and subtle slight, so subtle one hesitates to take offence for fear that there was no slight at all – and yet the doubt remains.

Usually the sponsor’s credits are sandwiched either side of a film, or just at the end; if it is a press release, or an information board, they are to one side, in a corner, marginal. Usually artworks present themselves and operate oblivious to the logos and funding creditations that accompany them.

It is commonplace for works not to recognize the financial contributors to their production. It is a very specific blind spot: there is no end of works that comment, or are in themselves, the trace or documentation of their physical process or material manufacture; or make a point of communicating the contributions of the personnel who made them - especially collaborative works exploring authorship.

This is an opposite scenario to the institution hosting the work; the visibility of an institution’s dependence on a corporate sponsor is exactly the motivation for the company to sponsor in the first place.

One can see why artists suffering this blind-spot are so widespread: the individuality, ethics and autonomy of a practice can immediately be called into question when juxtaposed with a particular sponsor. It leads to an explosion of questions around who we should work for, accept money from, to what end – what is the danger and potential of compromise – is one immediately co-opted? and to whose gain? Will the benefits fall to a company whose policies you are happy with - or will their policies conflict with arguments made by your work? Far better to feign ignorance, or declare such considerations beyond the concerns of one's practice. Nonetheless the financial chain of production, visually symbolized by the corporate logo, is as worthy a subject matter of a work of art as its material or conceptual process - Either there is an interest in the circumstances of production - or there is not. Just as a site-specific work recognizes its physical circumstances, could it not also engage with its financial environment. I.e. be economically-sensitive?

Oliver Payne and Nick Relph are clearly not afflicted by this blind-spot… Their 3 minute digital animation: Music is Food begins with a circle against a monotone grey background, in the corner of the frames are right angled ‘L‘ shapes – similar to a videogame gun-sight - the circle, slowly rises like a sun. There is no turning of blind eyes. Payne and Relph turn the opposite way. They look the sponsors in the eyes – unblinkingly - as directly as we are asked to look at the diagrammatic disc, or circle, or sun – and risk a metaphoric burning of our eyes. This disc, glides with the certainty of direction possessed by an astronomical body. The proceeding smoothness calls to mind the alignment of stars and moons creating eclipses. One thinks of cartoon representations of Mayan temples activated by sundials: the interlocking shifting bricks of archeological adventure films, depicted as graphic little blocks and lines, sliding into position with uniform speed - as though ordained. These simple geometric shapes evolve into a diagrammatic landscape - in which the London Eye (or the outline of a tyre-tread) becomes recognizable. The picturesque scene is completed with a silhouetted template of Big Ben – descending from the top right hand corner of the screen with the easy efficiency of an electronic automated windscreen wiper or sunroof. Going from black, grey and white to colour, the apotheosis of the film emerges as the BMW roundel in the centre: (the famous circle divided into blue and white quarters). It seamlessly rotates anti-clockwise as text rotates from the bottom of the screen clockwise - gliding from outside the frame entering in an arc and eventually halting above the logo: 'Frieze Film is sponsored by BMW and supported by Channel 4 and Art & Business'.

Looming over the aforementioned references is the spectre of the Channel 4 test card and its ident, called ‘round and back’ (used from 1982 – 91) in which animated blocks slide from the edge of the TV frame to form the Channel 4 logo itself the number 4. With TV idents in mind (and a channel switch) the Big Ben also calls to mind the Thames Television ident of London’s skyline – appropriate when we consider Frieze is a London fair.

This cool, distant, shrugging of shoulders, or prostration at the feet of corporate power and influence takes product placement to such an extreme that it is reduced to absurdity, to the extent the work acquires the whiff of Dadaist prank: the Power Point lecture reprogrammed to go out of control and overstate its statistics, or a demo of a Tetris game, that can’t escape ‘demo mode’… All the while an honesty is being mined in this yielding to (and recognition of) corporate presence. Simultaneously a very classical tradition of the representation of an artist’s patron is being toyed with, revived and reworked. It is commonplace for Renaissance paintings to include a portrait of a patron in group depicting a Biblical event. The funder’s portrait often inserted among a watching crowd – as though an ordinary bystander (to emphasize humility), other times the patron’s face would be given to a much more central character in the depicted scene. The difference is that the veneer of self-less generosity has been stripped – the patron’s face is all, anything else is marginal, if represented at all.

Behind the inorganic, icily unemotional, overtly constructed façade of the animation one can sense Payne and Relph’s delight and despair (a delight shared by many of the first generation of Pop artists) in their appropriation of the populist visual environment. And behind Payne and Relph’s delight and despair, even nostalgic warmth (born 1977 and 1979 respectively). After all this is not the appropriation of the immediate visual noise (of 2007), or Channel 4’s current visual identity – but that of near two decades ago. The animation’s score, by Alexis Taylor (of Hot Chip) makes music of a blend of test card monotone washes, simplistic homemade Casio keyboard tunes, and early 8-bit videogame jingles. The sonic simplicity compliments the visual aesthetic: that of material made on rudimentary graphic design packages or programmed on a Commodore 64+ - the early home computer that took videogaming into a domestic space and out of arcades. Here we are in the land of games on cassette tapes, Sega’s Master System, Thundercats and Transformers. To see the work through the lens of a diaristic picture book, is to recognize and shudder at the thought that, the autobiography of every Western Europe born 80s kid is intertwined with the growth spurt and boom of corporate globalization and its branding.

My first step would tear its first step

2008-08-23T08:58:00.000-07:00

I trudge through the concrete building, up unyielding steps, I turn the corner and I am confronted by another staircase. It is unlike any other I have seen before. One that will never creak, but might tear.

It is in the centre of a large white room. Light, from windows on the left, passes through it. It is red. Its first step – if you are ascending, or the last if you are descending - hovers at least half a metre from the ground. From afar you might think it is made of cloud. Closer it seems to be a red gauze. The light switch, the steps, the banister, the wall fittings – all made of this gauze, Perhaps it was spun by celestial spiders. Closer still you can see it swaying gently in the draught. The white ceiling is obscured by the red floor at the top of this stairway, which stretches across the expanse of the room. It occupies the room with such serenity that I could easily believe that the concrete building has been constructed solely to encase, protect and keep sacrosanct what is before me, all the other rooms mere preparation for this one.

There are others in this room. Watching, daring to touch, walking round, contemplating, playing, flirting, crying, laughing, chatting – all of them, like me: lumpen, fleshy, gravity bound, inevitably and unbearably weightier than the architecture at the centre of the illuminated space.

These thoughts tumble by as I turn the corner and absorb its impact. On first encounter I feel a glove has been thrown to my feet, a provocative mocking of my mass. A dare to climb the staircase. A dare laced with the full knowledge that I cannot. That my first step would tear its first step. And so I must remain bound to the white floor. I can look, I can imagine, but I shan’t enter.

What lightness would I need to ascend this stairway? What weight might I shed to achieve it? An extreme diet? Burdensome memories? Could it be a quality of character I am lacking, one of ethics, one of knowledge, of self-discipline, of self-awareness, of grace? Is there a state of being to be reached that would allow this ascension to the red floor? If only for a beat, for a nanosecond?

All this is evoked and as quickly crumbles, when I must recognise the staircase is an artwork. ‘Staircase – V’, in fact. It is made of polyester and stainless steel tubes. It is the work of Do Ho Suh, born 1962, and a team of old craftswomen, with rare skills not likely to be passed on to another generation. It is part of a group show – Psycho Buildings, Hayward Gallery. It is not a mythic doorway but an evocation of an apartment he once lived in. It is these bare facts that I temporarily escape or avoid, and in the duration of escape and avoidance become like a free-runner re-mapping the routes of thought prescribed of me, creating and projecting my own paths and structures.

a new word for a new world

2008-07-28T15:28:00.000-07:00

The deadline for submission of this text is today - Monday 28th July 2008. This is a day after the final screening of Susan Hiller’s recent film "The Last Silent Movie" at Matt’s Gallery, in East London. Your opportunity to see this film, in this context, has been lost.

The film is composed of audio-archive fragments of 25 extinct, dead or endangered languages from across the planet. The screen is black aside for white subtitles translating the spoken words.

The Klallam language (nəxʷsƛ̕ay̕əmúcən), spoken until 1975, is one language in a large family of Native American languages called Salishan or Salish languages that have been spoken in what is now Washington, British Columbia, Oregon, Idaho, and Montana and is present in "The Last Silent Movie".

Moved to temporary speechlessness after experiencing this work, I offer a new word:

squarch’eath / n. the destruction or erasure of a culture as a result of the dominance (esp. economically, militarily, religiously, linguistically) of another culture(s) (esp. in relation to globalization) [ 21 c. constructed word, Klallam, skʷáči anglicized as squarchee , world, universe + English death]

Anarchy is Ordinary / Kate Hawkins at Bischoff/Weiss 9.05.08 - 21.06.08

2008-07-09T07:03:00.000-07:00

In the basement space of Bishcoff/Weiss gallery on Rivington St, a video is projected on the far wall. In the video Kate Hawkins, in Liberty-style floral dress is fronting a musical outfit, in a deadpan, disaffected, ‘home counties’ / slumming-it-aristocrat drawl she repeats the refrain: ‘Anarchy is Ordinary’. Either side of her, men head-to-toe in black, including balaclavas - sway plaintively, feebly knocking wooden blocks, keeping time. The musical tone is reminiscent of the certain post-punk groups such as Alison Statton’s of Young Marble Giants, singing flatly with untrained vocals. The resulting effect is a comic conflation of a banal-drugged-stupor-delivery with a bizarre visual of a ‘young Lady’ flanked by two ‘cartoon’-styled terrorists. They are silent. Hawkins sings - but she is not their mouthpiece, the film is an opposite scenario to that of Stockholm Syndrome - it is not the unarmed, now captive, that have become docile but those in the balaclavas.

They have been assimilated into a band, for popular consumption: the video is a film of an event that took place in an East London pub called the Betsey Trotwood. This reversal of a normative power-relationship between the potential hostage and anarcho-terrorist, proposes the assimilation of genuine dissent. The power of rebellion neutered. [Opposition] “leached of meaning has become alarmingly habitual, failing to confront or shock” reads the Bischoff/Weiss press release. However it is necessary to distinguish and identify the source and nature of opposition. Particular symbolic rebellions such as hairstyle, clothing, use of slang, choices of music and drugs, have certainly being assimilated: the torn and destroyed clothing associated with the punk aesthetic in its early incarnation is now an off-the shelf feature of many designer clothes, ‘jeans with rip included‘. The online dissemination of music - no matter the genre -means hearing it is no longer dependent on a tribal gathering in an exclusive location; geographic knowledge of which would distinguish you from those not-in-the-know or with a reactionary political outlook. Marketing and advertising campaigns are hyper-quick and adept at assimilating emergent symbolic rebellion in order to align themselves with it…assimilation itself is slightly ’old hat’ these same campaigns are engineering the signs and cultural statements themselves - for the consumer to follow. No longer assimilation - just dissemination from the marketing boardroom.
Looking at two of the many forms of ‘opposition’ one might consider the anarcho-terrorist destruction of landmarks and people: the creation of disorder in public space is paramount here; systems like public transport, media stations… bedrocks of the city system are disabled, our use of them is subsequently permeated with fear. London has recently been the focus of such attacks. It would be inaccurate to sweepingly argue that ‘opposition’ no longer exists’. This form of dissent continues to be a regular part of our news content. Clearly this has not been assimilated or ‘leached of meaning’. If we were to follow this admittedly singular reading for the work (led by the press release); the terrorists as backing singers becomes a visual fallacy. An alternative to the presence balaclava-wearing men might be two of the many people seen wearing ‘Che Guevara’ t-shirts bought from a store on Oxford Street. For the argument to hold Hawkins must point her gun at a more ’internal’ form of opposition: that which happens within the system it critiques. Perhaps one who is in the system - and wants to remain, but also change it (whereas those in the video are more likely to be read in line with Hollywood-movie-stereotypes as symbolic of an opposition that has not been assimilated, of the sort the US military claims to pursue).

A recent successful example of this ‘internal opposition’ could be Plane Stupid; the environmental activist network, who earlier this year (27th Feb 2008) gained access to the roof of the Houses of Parliament to protest Heathrow’s expansion and the construction of a third runway. This kind of disruption ignites discussion. If the dominant media and politicians will not push Plane’s Stupid concerns to their front of their agenda, they devise actions to engineer it to be so. Significantly, Plane Stupid’s disruption remains symbolic: they crossed territorial borders (in this case entry and occupation of the Parliament’s roofs), but they were not destructive. They unfurled a pre-made banner, but did not deface the building let alone explode it. They were removed and no physical trace of their being there remains. Yet they made the front page of the Evening Standard the day after and 3 months later they are being interviewed and their opinions canvassed in the Guardian newspaper (31.05.08) Nonetheless it should be recognised, via the documentation - the materially destructive acts by the anarcho-terrorists’ their activities - too become symbolic as images (not that it wasn‘t symbolic as an act in the first place), and the symbols can easily become assimilated. Sadly, for 15 dollars it is possible to order a t-shirt design with a montage of the American flag back-dropping a smaller image of the Twin Towers mid explosion - headed in bold red print “God WeTrust”. It is advertised as being “a unique special patriotic gift”.

The space upstairs consists of paintings and another video work on a TV monitor. Here we can engage with the more structural-material games at play in Kate Hawkins’ work. The paintings or ‘paint-things’ or more accurately ‘performed-objects-which-hang-on-the-wall’ - are canvasses originally folded as though napkins into a variety of formations. A certain side was then sprayed. The canvasses were then unfolded: the creases reveal the folds, and sharp-sided regions of grey reveal the upward facing sides in their folded form. This series of works explicitly bears the marks of the physical process that led to its being. However, the process of their making is not their sole concern. The folding of the canvasses as napkins derives from Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management. Isabella Beeton (1836 -1865) wrote this compendium of articles as an aspirational guide for those wishing to manage a certain kind of Victorian household. The formal appearance of the works is reminiscent of abstract geometric modernist paintings by the likes of Ben Nicholson (1894 -1982). The associations of the end-result coupled with the logic behind their making hurls two independent (by politics, time and function) cultural practices (the modernist and Victorian) together.

I name Nicholson in particular because it seems one of the subterranean themes connecting all the works is Englishness and class mobility. The scrutiny of this aspect of Englishness is brought into sharp focus by the press release’s allusion to ‘Taarof‘: a Persian form of civility emphasizing both self-deference and social rank - in reference to the video work on this floor. A work which structurally contains something of the stiffness and rigidity of its content. Here, a TV monitor, features a single static shot of an autocue. There is a scrolling text on the autocue. The still and the moving are brought together within a single frame. We are presented with text as image, but the text is large enough for us to read, so of course we do….The text was the basis of a performance piece You’re Too Kind by Kate Hawkins and Eloise Fornieles. It took place on the opening night of the exhibition .The two read a series of complements to each other from an autocue which gradually becomes more and more barbed and bitchy. The autocue serves to emphasize levels of insincerity. These Pinteresque language duels are the ghost voices of the veiled and coded speech-attacks so frequent in the 19th century English literature by authors such as Austen and Eliott, as well as the contemporary and associate of Ben Nicholson, Virginia Woolf. Thus the series of canvasses, the video work Anarchy is Ordinary and You’re Too Kind can be read as a bleak triptych exploring a seemingly inescapable tension (across the lives of several generations of Englishmen and women) between the irrational desire for social acceptance by a society (or individual) you feel ill at ease with (or even subjugated by)…a situation where even rebellion can lead to the deeper entrenchment, sustenance and affirmation of that against which you rebel.

"Insects of the former Soviet Union"

2008-05-25T07:11:00.000-07:00

I laughed at the thought of successive generations of insects pledging allegiance to Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Gorbachev – antennae raised to attention. Of course, these associations were not intended in the phrase, nonetheless, it does unlock the tragic irony of battle and bloodshed over land that cannot fundamentally be said to belong to anyone. What if non-human life made claim to the land, especially insects, who have occupied its surfaces longer than any human society? The trees, the moon, the birds, constant in their activity, among the flux of human ideological positions and conflicts.

I stumbled across this phrase on the Royal Entomological Society website. It was the title for an advert… "Here is the latest catalogue of insects which I can offer you from ex - USSR territories (Russia, Siberia, Far East, Altay Mts., Sayan Mts., Kirghizstan, Tadzhikistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan etc.)." Posted by Dmitry Sobanim in March 2008. Perhaps significantly all prices are in U.S. dollars.... Many of the specimens are butterflies, flying creatures - which now dead and preserved, must be traded via mail, courtesy of a network of airlines.

One might consider the insects as a metaphor for the essentially apolitical, those who cannot, even symbolically, (rather than those who chose not to) participate in the machinations of politburos or local elections. The essentially apolitical might include new-born children or the senior citizen in the throes of Alzheimer’s. And yet, as we come to terms with the ecological impact of political/corporate ideologies it becomes clear that the indifferent are no less affected than anyone (or anything) else.

Stopper / Eitan Buchalter / 26.04.08

2008-05-18T07:59:00.000-07:00

We entered the door one after the other. She pushed open the door ahead of me, only to find that the door could not open completely. There was a soft thud. We squeezed through the available space, turning our bodies sideways to slip into the building. Once inside we noticed a man standing on the other side of the door. He was still, standing upright, in non-descript dress, eyes open and a Buster-Keaton, deadpan expression. He had carefully positioned himself so as to be hit by the door as others tried to enter. Not so close to the door as to immediately block the arc of its movement, but enough for the person pushing the door to build some momentum in their action, but still unable able to complete that movement. We didn’t notice him immediately, his presence was slight. But once we did, we understood the soft thud was his body against the moving door. Our surprise converted to smiles of comprehension. We waited by the door to watch someone else try and enter the building. Eventually the door swung open and he was hit again, face not reacting. It was like watching a re-enactment of your own action by strangers, or your own activity from outside your body. Here damage was done to the man unintentionally; only after the act could you become aware of what you had done…what was on the other-side of the door. A forewarning was needed. A larger body of knowledge was needed to save his body. Allegorically the work communicates the danger of action without a sense of the whole picture, while recognising we can never have the whole picture. The work points to the daily damage done to the quiet, the passive, the weak, the silent, the invisible. At the time I was reminded of the anxiety I feel approaching my house after it has been raining heavily. After heavy rain, the snails come out, I walk on tiptoes, it is dark and wet, trying to avoid them - I scrutinize the ground, seemingly inevitably,I make one last step and I hear a crack. Once again I have stepped on a snail. I am temporarily crushed.

The building we had entered was called Vivid. A warehouse turned gallery in Birmingham. The man was called Eitan Buchalter, an artist contributing to a three day programme of work under the title Endurance (24 – 26th April 2008). Eitan had been behind the door all day. The endurance was his. Our encounter with the work is very fleeting. The experience of audience and artist are extremely different here. We only experience a sense of endurance through imagining what it would be like to be in his shoes all day as opposed to having endure ourselves.

Endure sounds so similar to enjoy. I point this out because of the conflicts which emerge when works which represent endurance are enjoyable to watch. The pain of the activity does not (nor necessarily has being designed to) translate. And so, all too often, consideration of the aesthetics of an activity takes primacy over the suffering engendered by that activity. Once in the building we needed to buy tickets for entry into the gallery space. At this point we were asked to remove our shoes, we were told they would be returned when we were ready to leave. We complied. We caught a glimpse of the shoes being whisked away into cupboard full of more shoes…presumably those of other gallery-goers.

Inside this exhibition space people walked without shoes. The floor was rough concrete, some of it smoothed over, it was uneven, its bumps and ridges easily felt through your socks. We saw films of Valie Export electrocuting herself, Ron Athey tearing his skin apart through sheets of glass, a man repeatedly spat upon, another man eating the leftovers of meals. A few hours later - on leaving the exhibition - we ask for our shoes back…inside we find slips of paper. They read: Endurance, Eitan Buchalter, 2008. This time it had been our turn to physically endure and the communication of the theme was all the better for it.

Bookdeath: Live and Let Die / Elizabeth Humphrey

2008-03-01T17:25:00.000-08:00

Among the ‘special collections’ section of Chelsea College of Art and Design Library are a number of ‘art-books‘. In this collection I discovered a book titled Live and Let Die. I was attracted by its shape; its cover was made of card, this card also worked as a lid to the rest of the book, which externally was a bottle-green plastic trough. The card cover was attached to this trough by a black duct tape which acted as a hinge. Opening the card cover was a surprise in itself, the other side of the card had the following instructions: “Peel back cellophane, water the surface pattern, leave for a week and eat your edible cress book – enjoy!” Opening the cover I expected more pages, but in fact there was a single page. Under the cellophane was a sheet of card with the letters cut out like a stencil, it read…

L I V E

A N D

L E T D I E

Through the letter-shaped-spaces I could see the watercress seeds. The idea being that watering the ‘book’ would allow the seeds to sprout – growing through the letter shaped gaps.

The artist describes this process leading to an ‘edible cress book’. I ask myself is it a book? Yes, it has a cover – but it could as easily be described as a ‘lid’…a lid to a miniature garden bed perhaps…and because the ‘bed’ and the ‘trough’ are one and the same, it wouldn’t even be fitting to think of it as a single page book…it might be more accurate to describe it as a cover with writing on the inside sleeves - without any pages. There is also the absence of physical journey one associates with a book; the turning of the pages, physically going through the book is a kinetic experience.

Live and Let Die operates by describing itself as a book, while deviating from the normative look, construction and content of a book, the question of ‘what is a book?’ is therefore brought to the foreground. What is the quality (or set of qualities) that makes an object a book?

Self-labelling/definition is used as a strategy to encourage the reader to revisit, re-asses or rethink the(ir) dominant/normative meaning/use of the words present in the label/definition.

Engaging with this strategy, contrary to my initial doubts Live and Let Die possesses a number of qualities analogous to a ‘normal’ book.

The cress seeds when watered will grow upwards from the seed-bed into three-dimensionality, this can be seen as a kinetic experience, to be enjoyed and relished, equivalent to the reader moving through the book…The text moves towards the reader. It is the text encroaching upon us. The recognition of movement is given primacy over its direction – and who or what is moving, but there is the same sense of discovery that a regular thriller possesses, with its twists and turns, present in the unpredictable unfurling of the shoots over time - as we invest time in it…even the stalks of cress are cousins to the narrative threads of a novel. Both Live and Let Die and a normal book are ‘time-dependent-systems’ ; they need time’s passing to function; drawing power from their respective potentials and its interplay with our imaginations.

The dormant seeds are explicit symbols of potential and future growth. Growth kept at bay beneath the cellophane seal. They wait to be peeled back and watered. To fulfil their function: to germinate. And they continue to wait, even now as you read this text, in the library. And so these seeds and the work it comprises (Live and Let Die) remain unfulfilled - like an unread text in need of a consciousness to unlock it, to be moved by it - in a state of suspension…in this state the work can only fulfil itself in the reader’s imagination.

I must confess a desire to ferret away this ‘art-book’; find a watering can, peel off the plastic and water it. The work’s potential is realized through physical action. The symbiotic relationship between reader and book is explicit. The book needs the reader. The notion of reading has been transposed to a physical act. One reads Live and Let Die’s instructions, which lead to an action that unlocks the content. The word is made vegetation (by flesh). By activating the reader in this fashion we return to Barthes’ notion of the ‘death of the author’. I imagine the book in my possession, the cress has grown, it is bright green, I have liberated the work, allowed it to reach its potential – but of course, in doing so I have set off a chain of events that will inevitably lead to this book’s death.

A text on a page can be read again and again, meanings might shift, but rarely irretrievably lost or destroyed. If the cress grows it must die.

One of the reasons we treasure ideas is their material indestructibility; their detachment from the compromises of realisation. Books derive much of their cultural status, power and danger as vessels of ideas. The burning or confiscation of books is never as effective as the destruction of those who create the ideas that the books contain. Usually it is the book as object most under threat when the book is destroyed. But not here. Physical construct and concept are interwoven. Had I acted on my fantasy not only would the potentiality of the piece be exhausted, therefore the work irrevocably altered as would its relation to others in the future: distorted. Its being part of a library makes it a communal object…protected from the unregulated desire of the individual. And so its life remains in stasis, so that our collective enjoyment of it can be extended, shared and propagated indefinitely.

Videogame Testing / Critical Practice

2008-02-19T15:01:00.000-08:00

background and context:

For three months in the summer of 2003 I worked as a tester for Electronic Arts (EA) developer, marketer and publisher of videogames. I was based at their studios in Chertsey, Surrey. It was a vast complex; part of the site was shared with Zanussi, manufactures of various home appliances. The main EA building is reminiscent of a corporate tower from Blade Runner or Gattaca. The interior décor enjoyed a sense of its own late 20th sci-fi inspired futurism, see-through elevators, entire sides of the building constructed from inclining panes of glass, large open interior spaces, perfectly sculpted landscapes, a neat lawn: grass meticulously and regularly cut, artificial lakes and real swans, a hi-tech gym, while in the canteen multiple screens played multiple channels. Near the main entrance was a videogame library… staff could borrow any game published by EA. Anything natural was controlled or pre-fabricated so that the entire complex felt like a simulation, or in Star-Trek parlance as though roaming through a ‘holodeck’ (an immersive hologram computer program used a holiday destination in substitution of the real thing by the spaceship’s crew). There were standing games posts where you could play EA’s latest products in the lobby area (with endless free lives, so no need for coins), the space felt clean to the point of sterilization. All staff had electronic swipe cards allowing different access to different parts of the building depending on your position. On Fridays refrigerated drink cabinets were unlocked and there was an unlimited supply of drinks. Throughout the week there was a ‘take-away’ allowance if you had an evening shift (EA had accounts with for fast-food pizza, Chinese, Indian and. fried chicken). At one level the company saw itself as a Disneyish pleasure village.

While I was there I tested a number of games on a number of platforms (the platform being the console, e.g. Playstation 2, X-box etc). These included a Harry Potter Quiditch game, a rugby game capitalizing on the Rugby World cup that year, a Japanese adapted import of the ‘beat-em up’ Soul Caliber 2, but the majority of my time there was spent testing Freedom Fighters:

testing

The EA motto is ‘Challenge Everything’. When an EA game loads up - before the game’s title screen - this phrase is whispered with the appearance of the EA logo, the gender and tone of the voice is ambiguous it is enticing, challenging, malevolent and provocative. This corporate motto was the defining mode of operation as a tester.

When playing a videogame you might pull the controller out the socket in frustration. You might press a particular button really fast. You might put the game on pause and make some food or have a conversation. These actions might lead the game to ‘crash’: that is to freeze, start from its beginning, or that level, jam not allowing you to play further. Equally, while playing a game your ‘avatar’ (the character/ object/ craft/ protagonist - you the player are controlling on screen) or the world in which your avatar moves may not behave within the logic of the system, or not follow its own rules. This is often a ‘cartoon-logic’, e.g. if you eat a yellow star you can fly for 10 seconds, for the game to be satisfactory you shouldn’t be able to fly if you haven’t eaten a yellow star.
There is also the physics of the game to be testes, is the length of time you hold a button proportional to how high you jump? Can you shoot yourself? Can you run beyond the borders of the game, can you stand outside the play space? Do the buildings have the integrity they should? Can you run through a wall that operates as the boundaries of the game, or does your avatar half-merge with something that should be solid? Do bullets pass through an enemy that is supposed to be susceptible? When the game is set on its most difficult setting is it too easy to complete, is the beginner setting to difficult for an average player. Do the multi-language formats work? Does the sniper rifle make a sound programmed for the machine gun? These are ‘bugs’, it is the aim of the testers to find them, be able to recreate them and communicate to a third party where and how the bug occurred.

We would work in teams of five or six with a group leader guiding our testing. The structure of the process was to comb through the game identifying bugs in the programming, let the programmers (unseen on the floor above) know where the bugs are, and how they reveal themselves, the programmer would then fix the bug, when he or she felt this had been done, we would be sent an updated version of the game, we would try re-locate the bug or re-create the circumstances which led to its appearance. If we couldn’t do this it was taken to be solved. If we succeeded the programming team was alerted, they would try another fix and send a new version for us to test again and so on. Sometimes we’d be given the cartridge/ disc and allowed to roam through the game as we pleased like a ‘vandal-flaneur’: disrupting the world as much as we could muster. Other times there would be much more specific testing. We’d be given an A4 sheet with instructions to test a given situation on given level. If it was an early stage of the game there would be a ‘test menu’ inserted into an options page on the game; this allowed you to go directly to a particular level, this saved the time of having to play all the way through a game to get to a particular point. As later versions of the game were provided, you got closer to its final form, the test menu would be removed.

Clearly there are different bugs, those of the mechanical sort concerning the interface of the control pad with game itself, a basic test would be to press a single button as fast as you could for a three minutes. Then there are errors of logic, the game breaking its own rules, mentioned earlier. There are errors of content or miscommunication a soldier who should be wearing red, incorrectly wearing blue, titling miscredits etc. Then there are omissions of special effects like explosions when hitting an oil tanker. Then there is checking for audience play settings, that menus lead to the right submenus and so on. The aim was to ‘eradicate’ them all.

the culture of videogame testing

I was being paid to test videogames: to find bugs, to find holes, to find failures of programming, to break the game, to the crash the game. To crash a game – to have the screen jitter, petrify, re-boot was the pinnacle of videogame testing and the act that generated the most attention and respect among your co-workers and seniors. Within this sphere of work there was culture of destruction, the more destructive you were (and able to recreate and communicate) your destructive act the better you did your job. This culture was intensified by the separation of the testers (the destroyers, the Dionysian force, from the programmers (the Apollonians) kept apart architecturally and socially. In the Logic of Scientific Discovery (1935) Popper argues science proceeds by the deductive demonstration of the falsity of scientific theory…that scientific rationality consists of the falsification of theories. For this process to be effective the creators of the theories, the scientists, need to be whole-heartedly engaged with proving themselves wrong, and this is largely alien to our natures. If the programmers, who create the games, were also the testers, how motivated would they be to find holes in their own work? By separating the creative process from the act of its testing its - the product (in this case the videogame) is most thouroughly examined for the mutual benefit of the customer and Electronic Arts, who are better able (or more confident) to guarantee a flawless product and raise the status of their brand. An internal conflict in the process of manufacture is removed by creating ‘work-cells’ without conflict for the eventual benefit of that product and its distributor. Is there potential for this model to be applied to non-profit based systems of manufacture?

the testing is executed by the same means the game would normally be played

Importantly the testing is executed by the same means the game would normally be played. We use the same control pads often the same button combinations. In fact the game could only be usefully tested this way if it is to successfully recreate situations in ‘real-life game play’. The process of playing the game and testing it are the same. However playing and testing are not the same. There is a difference in intention on the part of the operator which alters the definition and labeling of the activity from the point of view of the operator but not universally. An outside eye looking over the shoulder of the operator would not necessarily be able to define the activity. The outside eye might label what the operator considers to be testing as irrational or bad playing.

If one thinks of a videogame as a system designed for an expected function, in this case playing, the misuse/ misapplication/ deconstruction/ destruction/ critique of the system is an activity that deviates from the expected function (defined by the designer). Perversely, testing is an activity that we communally recognize as operating by (the inclusion of) deviation from expected function and normative use/application. Testing is an activity in of itself – it does not become another activity.

Many activites, like videogame playing, allow the same process to mask different intentions operating within the same system. The variation of intention may result in an unusual application or deviation from the expected function, but the definition of the activity does not and sometimes cannot be the same for both operator and outside observer.

Art, like videogame testing, is recognized by some as an activity that fulfills its function by deviating from its expected function and normative application (and this being the case means its expected function and normative application is forever shifting). The greater the awareness and collective agreement of a system’s function in relation to the activities that happen within it, the more likely there will be agreement between operator and outside observer of the definition of the activity within that system.

afterword

The mindset I developed in this culture of destruction and testing remains with me. After leaving EA it was difficult not to see oneself as the avatar within a game. I was often surprised and disappointed by the continuous and unyielding solidarity of objects I wanted to (and see others) occasionally fall through floors and pass through walls; and I remain mistrustful of the world’s materiality…I am often seized by the compulsion to run into barricades, jump repeatedly on pavements, jump off things, to catch the videogame off guard so to speak, to see if it would jam, hoping it would jam, that I might disappear through a previously invisible fissure, that I might wreck time and its passing, that I might hover suspended, frozen in the air, that the world might crash and be re-booted.

some related texts

The Logic of Scientific Discovery/ Popper
The Birth of Tragedy/ Nietzsche
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions/ Kuhn

Harun Morrison

Stilted/ Catherine Walpole/ BAC/ Spring 2007

2008-02-04T17:23:00.000-08:00

Catherine dances for 13 hours on stilts. The building - BAC - is open for 13 hours. So that while the building is open Catherine is dancing. In fact Catherine started dancing before the building was open and continued to dance after the building closed, so that all those who came and went over the course of the day (no matter how long they were there)had a sense of Catherine dancing forever. A laptop connected to a video projector was counting the seconds, minutes and hours and blowing up the figures on the on the walls of the cafe – made this explicit. It was important the hours were projected in the cafe - a social space, separate and away from where Catherine was. In the cafe was a collection of CDs, some belonging to her, some belonging to her friends, some donated by members of staff - hundreds of them. There was a CD player in the café - it was connected to speakers in the foyer space where Catherine danced. You were invited to select a song for Catherine to dance to. When you had chosen a song you received a sticker. All those who had chosen songs over the course of the day wore a sticker - this generated conversation along the lines of "What song did you choose?", "Who’s that song by?"... Word of the mouth about the piece spread, conversation about the work was initiated. The music from the speakers in the foyer spilled over into the cafe so that although Catherine was separate, away from the social space that - we all became part of the same aural landscape. Her friend manned the CD player, you couldn’t state which song you wanted and then go. You couldn’t write down the song you wanted, or leave a note and come back later - you had to make the request in person - the song being requested had to be the next song played. Songs could be repeated.

Catherine wore a beautiful pale pink vintage dress. She herself is very slight and delicate, petit. Catherine tried to dance in the style of the music being played. She would waltz to waltzes, twist to 50s jive songs, stomp to 70s rock and roll and so on. She tries to disappear stylistically into the song. Being on stilts made her much taller than everyone (and the attempt to disappear doomed to fail). Even if you wanted to dance with Catherine it would have been awkward - although we tried. She had made herself difficult to interact with - or made explicit the difficulty she personally confessed to having in social situations. She was literally stilted. You could talk to Catherine. There wasn’t a rope around her, she didn’t want there to be, you could ask her what kind of music she felt like dancing to - a slow song? a fast song? She would converse with you, if you stretched your hand toward her, she would reciprocate. She would smile back, joke, laugh - share her thoughts. She danced on a mosaic of bees in a corner of the foyer beneath an arch next to the central staircase that greets you on entering the building. To be eye level with Catherine you needed to walk halfway up the steps. Behind her was a shelf - it had all that she might need for that day, bottles of water, snacks, glucose energy sweets, sandwiches, fruit, chocolate, painkillers, Tampons, cans of coke - as things were consumed the packaging was left on the shelf - the rubbish grew as these things were used or eaten.

Also changing is Catherine's body, the muscles getting increasingly tired, the wear and tear that the physical effort demands… And Catherine's mood: depending on the song, the time of day, who's come by to watch her to cheer her and who hasn’t. Also changing are the stilts themselves, at one point the rubber on the stilts wears away completely, so she needs to sit on the shelf - the same she has lined her fruit upon, so Greg (BAC's production manager) can replace the rubber, so she has less chance of slipping. It seems like a gentle act, like a vet with a sickly animal, being treated, stitched, plastered or patched up.The longer you watch Catherine the more likely you are to experience that drift away from the spectacle of the act to the symbolism behind it and at this point that you might begin to cry as so many others did. Recalling being too shy to dance with someone, too awkward, too different, too strange to commune with the crowd. To balance on the stilts is to be in constant motion, and therefore unsettled - the stilts become a physical device to demonstrate a psychological and emotional state... [You can easily topple on stilts can be read 'I can easily be toppled' 'I am vulnerable'.]

To watch a woman dancing in a public space to a tune you might have chosen alludes to a lapdance. You are the punter. By choosing the song to which she dances like a bear in a cage, do you become her keeper, her tormentor? All the while your role shifts, now what is happening to make you feel protective of her?Towards the end of the 13hrs those still left in the building gathered round Catherine to cheer her on, to egg her on to give support. Someone selected ‘Lady Marmalade’(!), a chorus of women danced with her and for her, her name was shouted someone gave her flowers. You could tell she was in pain, great pain. Slowly becoming incoherent, dropping words, getting tearful, the stress of the situation catching up with her. Eventually her boyfriend turned up – you could see her relief- he became a fixed point to which she could return her gaze and anchor herself. Eventually it was time to close the building – first everyone had to be cleared out except staff, when the doors were finally closed Catherine came down from her stilts – she couldn’t do this on her own. She staggered towards a sofa in the café, three of us lay her down. Her legs, feet and back were sore and tender. She was weary of anyone touching her as she ached all over. Time had made itself present on her body. Catherine was disorientated, incoherent, not speaking in sentences, when we unstrapped her from her stilts she half stood to walk but couldn’t. She was half-speaking, half crying. When she was eventually whisked away in a cab, and I returned to the archway where she has spent the last 13 hours - there remained the things she had hurriedly left behind: the crumpled cartons of the things she had drunk, a half-eaten bar of chocolate, some unopened packs of glucose energy sweets and the bananas - yellow at the start of the day now turned browny-black.

The Amazing Talking Skull/ BAC/ Winter 2007

2008-02-04T17:18:00.000-08:00

The Amazing Talking Skull/ BAC/ Winter 2007

You and three others enter a room, dressed to appear like a Victorian library or 19th century gentleman’s study. Books are shelved from floor to ceiling. There are four seats. You sit down. Above you there is a single domestic bulb, in front of you a human skull attached to a metal pole standing on a wooden box. The light bulb flickers, stammers, then goes off. You are in the dark. A book slips from the shelf and falls to the ground behind you. It causes you to jump, scream or laugh nervously. And then there is a strange mechanical whirring. The skull now looks up so that it is seemingly eyeballing you. Red lights in the socket replacing eyes flicker to life… reminding you of the Terminator after his synthetic flesh has been burnt away. The jaw begins to move, the skull begins to speak in a rich, sonorous voice. ‘The Amazing Talking Skull’ speaks of the fleeting nature of life, how quickly it passes, the dangers of us being distracted from this fact. It concludes, stating with authority, ‘One day you will die.’, the head pivots so that it looks at someone else and repeats, ‘One day you will die.’, it pivots again to a third person, ‘One day you will die.’, and finally to the fourth, ‘One day you will die.’ As though a battery has died, the head lowers, the eyes dim, the bulb goes on, the door is opened. And you and three others leave the room, laughing uneasily or delighted, spooked but charmed.

‘The Amazing Talking Skull’ is the work of Paul Granjon. The work itself was commissioned to occupy a room within a larger building-wide and site-sensitive project called ‘Masque of the Red Death’ by a company called ‘Punchdrunk’. The commission is therefore parasitical in its relationship to another piece of work: not authored by Punchdrunk but contributive to their work - both parasite and host drawing inspiration from the writing of Edgar Allan Poe. The space ‘The Amazing Talking Skull’ occupies was not purpose built or dressed for it and has been the site of a number of other commissions mainly solo (human!) performers. In this immersive fiction a plague is rife; the library acts as a temporary haven of sorts. There is bleak comedy to being addressed by an automaton… we are reminded it is the non-biological which will survive. Granjon states on his website “I am interested in the co-evolution of humans and machines.” But in the context of the story, there is no ‘co-evolution‘, and the singularity is not in our favour.

Within the world of Punchdrunk, The Amazing Talking Skull avoids being jarringly anachronistic because its aesthetic fuses with our own sense of the fantasies of the Victorian imagination… because you can imagine the skull fittings so snugly in the works of the 19th century founders of modern science fiction, Jules Verne, H.G. Welles and Poe himself, it doesn’t break the illusion of the world in the way that a television would, although it is more advanced and contemporary in it’s use of technology. (We know there is a gleaming white Mac running Mac OS X whirring beneath the box). For the comic specialist, perhaps such suspensions of disbelief, or fusions of knowledge, are unnecessary because The Amazing Talking Skull compliments the subgenre of fantasy and sci-fi known as Steampunk (fantasy works set in an era of steam power, usually Victorian era England, often incorporating contemporary devices technologically achieved with 19th century means). I.e. we accept this because if Victorians had invented robots this satisfies how we imagine how they would look and talk. Any robot aping organic life instils a sense of the uncanny (although this is perhaps decreasing with our continuous and ever increasing exposure to robots both in toy shops, daily life and film).

Nonetheless this sense of the uncanny is magnified by various conflicts at play in this situation. The Webster dictionary defines a robot as ‘An automatic device that performs functions normally ascribed to humans or a machine in the form of a human ‘.The robot’s function hovers between that of storytelling and reminder of death, the content of the speech and the robot’s form compliment each other by different means. There is nothing new in the image of skull as ‘memento mori’. The robot as object can be seen as a descendant of the skull held by the monk in Zurbaran’s ‘Saint Francis in Meditation’ in the National Gallery, a 3D cousin, that has evolved into a piece of sound emitting kinetic sculpture. We also have robot as imitator of life, the inanimate programmed to appear alive, but it is a skull - classically representative of death, death is alive, talking about the nature of life, the robot is also a substitute for a human performer, specifically commissioned for the Christmas period when people are most likely to be with their families less willing to work! Perhaps it is this ricochet of conflicts accounting for captivating nature of this piece and the uneasy laughter it induces.