It's been a little while since our the last post on here, between now and then Maia and I have packed our weeks with work a video installation, another viewing of videos, Andy Warhol's Screen Tests at the SAM, and Fiona Tan's video installations at the VAG. The video installation we worked on for the old Innate space, a dual streaming projection onto the floor and ceiling, created vortex-like images designed to invite people to interact with their space as it related to the images they see of it. Viewers would be in the images only if they got close to them, creating a cylinder of space from floor to ceiling for people to play in. We didn't have any Allan Sekula-like manifesto to pair with it, the installation was more a piece that we hoped would encourage people to experience their surrounding space in a different way.
A few days later, Maia and I went down to the Seattle Art Museum to see Andy Warhol's Screen Tests. Thirteen of them, each a four and a half minute portrait-like shot of a person, generally a celebrity. The four and a half minute time comes from Warhol shooting each Screen Test on a 3 minute reel at 24 frames a second, and playing them back at 16, creating a dream-like speed between real time and slow motion. In many of them, Warhol would turn the camera on and leave as the subject would be sitting in front of the camera for three minutes. Most were celebrities, used to being filmed and having their picture taken, but both of those are very different interactions with the camera than Warhol's Screen Tests. Pictures are quick, instant flashes that a person can pose for and be done with, in films a person puts on a similar but extended act to a role they are supposed to be playing. With Warhol's Screen Tests though, there is no real role or pose for the people behind the camera to be acting to, they simply sit as the camera sits across, staring at them.
The films remind me of Marina Abramovic's The Artist is Present and Dziga Vertov's Man With a Movie Camera. They are like Abramovic's piece in that a sitter sits silently across from a looker for a period of time, but in these pieces they are simultaneously sitting across from both no one and everyone. No one in that it's just a camera and the subject; everyone, because the actors knew Warhol's films would probably be shown to anyone who wanted to see them in galleries like the SAM. This no one/everyone effect caused the actors to behave like the people Vertov filmed in Man With a Movie Camera. In front of Warhol's camera, some like Lou Reed feign apathy, some squirm, some return the camera's stare, most are a variation of these.
Maia brought up the fact that these weren't necessarily video installations because Warhol made these pieces on 16mm film. The images may have been on film, but the camera-gaze effect on the actors would have been the same regardless of if the medium was film, tape, or DV. This brought up questions about medium specificity that Maia and I answered with a concrete "I can't really explain it, there's just something different about them." Obviously, there is a lot of difference between tape, DV, and film, but we were stumped as to whether or not Warhol's films would have had a different effect if they were in video.
A couple days after we got back, Maia and I had another video viewing where we watched some of Warhol's commercial work (eating a hamburger and a Japanese TV commercial) and all of John Baldessari's videos on Ubu Web. In an interview, Baldessari lamented his involvement with early video art because in his opinion early video art tended to be boring, which spurred him to make his video "I will not make any more boring art" where he monotonously writes the title over and over again for thirteen minutes. His next video "Six colorful inside jobs" is a time lapse of his painting a room a different color each day of the week, stretching the line between art and work. As a video and because of intention, it's art, but at the same time Baldessari has to spend a long time everyday in a house painter's uniform to paint these rooms, taking a smoke break or two in the middle of each color. Instead of showing us a room in 6 different colors, he takes us through the work required of it.
In true to his conceptual art perspective, Baldesarri's next video Title breaks down a film into its component parts--objects, characters, narrative, etc. Most of Baldessari's work deals with removing information to make us focus on what he wants us to think about and Title is no different-- he removes characters, sound, and narrative to show us a shot of the objects; objects, characters, and narrative to show us landscape; etc. These different units are used to create and manipulate meaning in something of a Kuleshov effect (longing look + sandwich = hunger). Baldessari works with this theme of creating meaning again in his video The Meaning of Various News Photographs According to Ed Henderson. In it, Baldessari hands Ed Henderson various news photographs stripped from the context of their story and asks Henderson to guess what's happening in them. Baldessari hands the photos to Henderson in a calculated order to see how he can manipulate what Henderson thinks the images mean. These meanings, though, are doubly skewed in that Baldessari is taping Henderson which again puts the Man With the Movie Camera effect on them, causing him to create more lavish stories than he otherwise would have if he weren't consciously being turned into an art piece.
The other videos we watched of Baldessari's (The Way We Do Art Now and John Baldessari Sings Sol Lewitt) were both ironic jabs at what people were considering art in the early 70's-- the former by making his own tiresome "exploration" as to what constitutes art, the later by making fun of his own medium in singing Sol Lewitt's Sentances On Conceptual Art. While Fiona Tann isn't a conceptual artist in Baldessari's tongue and cheek manner, the work we saw by her in the VAG today was more contemplative than formal. The major pieces we saw were Rise and Fall, Provenance, Island, and A Lapse of Memory.
Provenance is the first piece in her exhibit.The piece consists of 10 filmed portraits on individual screens. Like Warhol's Screen Tests, we sit across from a subject, studying them. However the feeling in these pieces is more of an intimate observation than Warhol's scrutinizing camera. These films move slowly, panning up a child's body, watching a man peel an orange, sitting with an elderly woman. The people in these are Tan's friends and relatives, filmed in their natural environment; this pre-established relationship between Tan and the subjects gets extended to the viewer as well, allows a strong feeling of intimacy between you and this stranger.
The next work in the show Rise and Fall is a dual screen projection about time, memory, isolation, and our world's ephemerality. Two women make up the story— one young, one old—and are suggested to be the same, distanced by time. With two women, two realities (reality and our constructed memory of it), and two time periods, the dual screens form another layer of these dualities as well as creating a conversation between the two screens. The screens tend to show the same scene, but they always differ slightly from one another, and because we never know which one is “real” and which is “constructed”, we are left with the experience of negotiating between the two.
Rise and Fall’s narrative, if you could call it that, is about the life of a woman who has lost someone, presumably her lover, and is working through what it means to have lost as well as the looming end of her own life. Tan illustrates the ebb and flow of human life with her interspersed shots of Niagra Falls. The enormous screens slowly pan from water to water fall, overwhelming us with its monumental size, sound, and metaphorical value. Tan’s work feels extremely patient, giving the space to think as well as feel her topics.
Isolation and memory are also at the core of her next work in the show, Island. Tan filmed the piece on the same Swedish island that Tarkovsky filmed The Sacrifice, and is composed of various austere images with a Chris Marker-like narrator who tells about a woman on an island as well as various musings about life such as “we do not remember dreams, but construct them” and “gaining distance is sometimes the only way to get closer to what matters.” Those two quotes embody so much of Tan’s work—both intensely solitary and contemplative. This monastic feeling is again embodied in her last work in the show A Lapse of Memory, about an amnesiac man living alone in a palliative home.
The home is actually the Royal Pavilion in Brighton; filled with Asian tapestries, the narrator tells us about the man’s youth as a worldly traveler named Henry but going by Ang-Lee. Henry’s character is almost Jean Pierre Jeunet-like in his eccentricisms—stringing construction lights along the floor, pounding his body for morning yoga, studying the globe with a flashlight, etc. His amnesia serves to further Tan’s conversation about memory, but in A Lapse of Memory it works to blur the borders of East and West because Henry/ Ang Lee doesn’t know his past and is surrounded by its stand-in objects. I don’t think Tan is trying to make a “we are the world” kind of piece here, but instead tries to ask us how to construct our identity in relation to, or in Henry’s case without, memory and origin. This relation is further complicated self-referential narration that reads us the shooting script as well as narrating Henry’s life. This contrasts with her other work that pulls you into her questions, while A Lapse of Memory’s self-referentiality pushes you back to view Henry more than sit with him as you would in Tan’s Provenance portraits. This doesn’t make the piece any less beautiful, especially because the palace drowns us in rich color, A Lapse of Memory is simply more of a character study than her other pieces—using this character as a device for examining questions about memory and identity.
Warhol videos:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUQlpOhnxlE - Richard Rheem
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=In1c5O3bNeg&feature=related - Edie Sedgwick
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhYfCWd5XQ0&feature=related - Ann Buchanan
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jaf6zF-FJBk - Warhol eating a burger
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x82gWQFEpQA&NR=1 - TDK commercial
John Baldessari
http://www.ubu.com/film/baldessari.html
http://fora.tv/2009/07/09/John_Baldessari_A_Print_Retrospective
http://www.altx.com/vizarts/conceptual.html - Sol Lewitt's sentances
Fiona Tan
http://fionatan.nl/works/4 - Excerpts of all her works
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