Digital
Video TechnologySpace 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 Tans 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 travelers
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 mediums
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 dancers
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 viewers
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 halls location in a suburban
area, established in the opening shots.
The gymnasts teenager street clothes and
the transparent gym halls 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 Tans 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 Tans 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 cameras
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 Sharmas 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.