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Digital Video Technology——Space and Time in the Exhibition Environment
Tate Modern, London, UK
October 6, 2004-January 2, 2005
Venue website: http://
www.tate.org.uk

A Time and a Place by Rachel Davies
A solo film and video exhibition
Stanley Picker Gallery, Kingston University, London, UK
December 1-23, 2004
Venue website: http://www.kingston.ac.uk/picker/.

Reviewed by Martha Blassnigg
University of Newport, Wales

lichtgestalten@hotmail.com

The ongoing artistic, experimental deconstruction of the cinematographic experience in new media contexts reinforces revisiting the early cinema experience, which has already become a junction for a dialogue between discourses on art and technology for some theorists. During the first decades of cinema, deconstructive processes are, in particular, expressed in the work of artists, such as George Melies, Robert Paul or avant-garde filmmakers in the 20s, such as Ruttmann, Vertov, Richter, Vigo and their repercussion and resumption during the political independent film productions of the 60s as the French New Wave. But even early mainstream yet artistic filmmakers, such as Abel Gance in his silent masterpiece "Napoleon" from 1927 (recently performed at the Royal Festival Hall in London accompanied by the London Philharmonic Orchestra), have applied many alternative innovations in film form, which find a come-back in contemporary video installation works, such as superimpositions, multiple screens (a split screen with 9 images in the first act of "Napoleon"), fast montage, affective close-ups and a liberated camera movement presenting alternative perspectives and visions. By bringing film back in the exhibition space, in the stretch of more than 100 years of cinema, from popular culture to "high art", the linear perception of the cinema experience is extended into a fragmentary, multiple sensory experience; the film becomes itself a movement within an extended architecture, dismantling the selective recollection within the perceivers mind who walks along fragments of scenes in a slightly more interactive way than the cinema experience normally allows, still a very limited one as this review suggests.

The Tate Modern recently claimed to show its first major exhibition of contemporary film and video works by several international artists: Time Zones from 6 October 2004 to 2 January 2005. By breaking with traditional linear narration, the exhibition intended to reveal passages of time by alternative viewing experiences on multiple and double screens or live web-cam projections, and by juxtaposing temporal registers such as past and present, tradition and modernity in the political, economic context of the country in which the film was shot.

To name three of the six installations, I would like to mention the live web-cam projection of a medieval monastery Comburg 2001 by Wolfgang Staehle, which displays real live updates of a still frame of the monastery in four minute intervals, setting the fast pace of present-day communications technology against a only minimally changing image of a historical monument. Yang Fudong plays subtly and sophisticated with spaces between tradition and modernity, alienation and attraction between two people who ultimately remain separated, in his poetically shot black and white film Liu Lan. Fiona Tan’s video work Saint Sebastian portraits the annual Toshiya ceremony in Kyoto in Japan, showing young female archers at the Sanjusangen-do Temple in this traditional rite-de-passage event exclusively in close-ups of their faces in concentration while shooting on one side of the screen, and the moment of getting in position in extreme close-ups of their necks, hair-dress and profiles on the other side of the screen. The intimate proximity of the camera extends the viewing experience into dimensions of pure affect, emotion, and seeming timelessness, while the sound of voices and murmur constitutes the only connection to the surrounding setting of the ritual. In this way, one of the most crucial film qualities is revealed, the one that makes the viewer keep watching, the affective attachment and identification between subject and viewer in the closeness of the gaze. This gaze, which Tan constitutes, in her explanation, as a reflection on the European traveler’s gaze in a foreign cultural context, is being clearly displayed and reiterated, yet not solved or criticized in the work itself; in contrast to her previous work, it is a rather one-sided approach of repetition lacking deconstruction, which some critical viewers may find unacceptable today in a postcolonial context. The claustrophobic viewing experience of the big double screen in the rather small room in reference to the screen size leaves the experience and reflection completely to the viewer without offering or stimulating any alternative, such as visual distance or space for alternative thought or self-reflexivity.

While the Tate Modern surrounds the exhibition with an interesting program on new European video works and the growing influence of MTV and digital media on experimental video, the exhibition in itself could be called "classical", displaying rather mainstream formats within the video art community. The films themselves break with certain linear narrative structures, yet they are still projected in fixed, programmed sequences. Running in loops, the beginnings and endings are determined by the visitors, depending on when they enter and leave the room, or interrupt and resume the viewing. Hence, in comparison with cinema, the interaction of the visitor is merely extended to the movement in space and the timing of the viewing.

Similar attempts of alternative treatments of time and space were treated by Video artist Rachel Davies in her first solo exhibition A Time and a Place from 1-23 December 2004 at the Stanley Picker Gallery in London. Davies oeuvre, 14 years of film, video and animation productions, embraces the fields of dance, music, performance, poetry, travel-log and documentary. She explores movement and space in creative ways, while simultaneously immersing herself in the medium’s intrinsic relation to the factor time and incorporating personal memory in form of travel-log and documentary footage to question processes of recollection in our lives.

With Hong Kong to Hull (1999) Davies experiments with the genre of the travel-log, recollecting her footage from 1992 during her train travel Hong Kong to Hull. In a double projection, a cyclical split-screen, panoramic views in fast movement from the train window depicting passing landscapes diverge and converge with shots from street life in Hong Kong and personal encounters with travelers during the train journey. Davies experiments with unusual camera points of views and angles of a rather liberated camera; the reiterated landscape pans, bird-views of travelers in the train compartment and street scenes, form a triangular relationship, an osmosis between the captured environment and the imaginative connotations of memorized experiences in the conscious engagement of recollection.

We Got Old (2002), a collaboration with the choreographer Annie Lok, starts with a face in darkness as an interface for a projected film on the forehead and eye, a possible suggestion of a cinema of thought. Passing fast rotating arms, the movements find in the following scene only apparent stillness in the image of a woman standing on a railing with the rocking sea in the background and a view on the city. In the following walking scenes of a dancer, the camera moves like an a-synchronized double of the dancer, like a sensuous body capable to feel and nearly breath. The two movements converge and diverge, they both establish their own pace through the ambiguity in references to stillness and gravity, through anticipation of direction and through an ambiguous play with distance and proximity accompanied by a shifting focus between tangible sharpness and the blur of indeterminacy. Anticipated by the blurred perspective of the lens filling with raindrops, the dancer’s slowly walking movement leads the camera eye and body into the street life of Hong Kong. The camera rotates slowly in 360 degree circles, disorienting the viewer’s reference of gravitational stability, as Davies similarly has deployed in her Video So We Went Dancing, also shown at the exhibition. The following long still shot of the dancer again looking over the vast horizon at sea brings the film to a circular ending and only momentarily balances the recollection of rotation in the mind; quite soon the soft rocking of the waves virtually joins the apparent still foreground image of the railing and again destabilizes the sense of balance.

Davies’ most recent film project Gold (2004), a collaboration with the choreographers Hanna Gillgren and Heidi Rustgaard, is a flamboyant whirl of two young gymnasts in their suburban gym hall, contrasting fluid camera movements closely capturing rapid movement of the gymnasts in combined back- and foreground action with still frames and silent moments of concentration with close focus on the individual girls. The film is set in the context of a political coloring of the gym hall’s location in a suburban area, established in the opening shots. The gymnasts teenager street clothes and the transparent gym hall’s walls momentarily showing the environment of the rather poor neighborhood, segue the competitive character of the girls training sessions as an outlet and exercising room for survival and subversion against the restrictions of the suggested environment. The close-ups of the individual girls, the concentrating face and breathing lead towards the imaginary space in her mind, projecting the acrobatic jump in preparation, merging with the actual performance cut up into fragments. Slow motion, stop-trick and flashbacks and forwards, the change from color into black-and-white capture the affective intensity of the events rather than their movement in sequence.

Similar to Fiona Tan’s Video installation San Sebastian, Davies reveals an affective quality in her film, a seamless flux of emotions through time and space. While Tan remains with the extreme close-up of faces, Davies inter-cuts them with distant movement in still frames and creates spaces for virtual intervention and reflection. Both works stand out by their visual attractiveness and aesthetics, while Tan’s exclusive display of proximity facilitate the empathy with the filmed subject, but complicate processes of self-awareness and reflexivity. A certain exoticism, which can be found in many early films shot in foreign cultural contexts, is here veiled by a suggested close relationship between filmmaker and filmed subject through the camera’s proximity, yet this impression remains ambiguous, as it could simply be an effect of the close-up shot. The double screen would have constituted an interesting approach for the creation of an alternative viewing space of reflection within this work, a treatment that Tan has shown in very sophisticated ways in her previous work as for example in a very personal project during the Artes Mundi exhibition at the National Museum & Gallery in Cardiff from February 7 until April 18, 2004 (For more information, see http://
www.artesmundi.org).

Rachel Davis films and also the previous examples of video works are constructed in a way that suggests a projection in an exhibition space. In the case of Davies, accompanied by an enacted opening performance, her treatment of movement of both the camera and the filmed subjects and environment, the circular movements in time, the extension of spaces, can be experienced more fully in an exhibition space where the viewers are liberated from stability and fixation. For more information on the exhibition and performance of the opening evening, please see Aparna Sharma’s review in Leonardo Reviews, January 2005.

Contemporary artists and avant-garde filmmakers seem to reinvigorate some of the earlier artistic cinema experiments, and international conferences and festivals, especially on the electronic arts, display such tendencies. It is, in particular, the aspect of performance and alternative approaches to time and space that evokes awareness, self-reflection, and interactivity, merging contemporary arts with classical performance and representations. Film has more than once proven to constitute a continuous junction between art and technology and contemporary video works by artists, apart from their value in isolated experience, also encourage to incorporate a broader context in theoretical discourses around cinematographic technology in a contemporary media environment. It is to hope that the established exhibition spaces continue to establish close collaboration with experimental platforms and forums where such innovations are being created and tested against an audience in order to keep up to speed with the most recent developments.

 

 




Updated 1st December 2004


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