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The Imperfect Light: |
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Dedicated to the memory of Jean-Louis Comolli
(1941-2022)
I.
One
of the aims of filmography taken as a science is to arrive at a scientific
understanding of the qualities (sharpness, depth, subtlety) of how a film is
seen. The only way to achieve this is to subordinate the very existence of
these qualities (which are abstract properties) to the conditions of that viewing,
which one imagines to be more tangible.
–
Jean-Louis Comolli, 1966 (1)
This essay investigates the changeover between two
eras, or at any rate two phases, in the modern relationship between cinema and
art. The first phase is difficult, suspicious, fraught with complications; the
second phase holds out some hope for a rapprochement.
“A
proliferation of black boxes in the white cube”. This is how Raymond Bellour
once described, in shorthand, the history of the encounter between cinema and
the institutions of art (gallery or museum). The occasion was an event in
Zagreb in 2007 called Filmske Mutacije,
inspired by the book Movie Mutations.
Bellour, however, was keen to issue a Call to Order, to put a halt to the
ceaseless mutation of image-formats and support-systems. A bold rhetorical
move, since it was he, more than anyone else, who had ushered in (across two
volumes of collected essays) the era of what he termed the entre-image or between-image:
beginning with video art and arriving at the digital age, we saw images
continually migrate from one medium to another, mixing up all conventional
wisdoms about form and content in the audiovisual arts. Still photography
became cinema, cinema was streamed onto digital monitors, video vacillated
between television and film, and all the other arts (music, theatre,
literature) were dragged into this promiscuous fray … (2)
But
no more, declared Bellour. It is time, he proposed in 2007, to return to a
concrete, historical definition of
the cinema apparatus, in its most mythic, ideal and essential form – the form
on which it has worked on us, for over a century, as experience, sensation and
artistic medium. Cinema is all about (according to this account) the
projection, in a darkened room, of a work of fixed duration, which clearly
begins at one moment and ends at another. A piece of space-time, in images and
sounds that are rigorously prepared and presented. Maybe it is no longer always
a matter of celluloid material passing through the gears and gates of
projectors (film prints wear out, after all) but it must be, at the very least,
this: the beam of light, the screen, the captive audience, the screening-time
session.
During
the triumphant days of the between-image (especially the 1980s and ‘90s), as
any visitor to a contemporary gallery anywhere in the world could attest, it
was not always – in fact, rarely – like this ideal cinema experience. Video or
digital pieces on small monitors in over-lit rooms, which the spectator might
stand or sit to regard, or maybe stroll by, casting a distracted glance; always
a problem with soundtracks, either too soft or too loud, in the total
architectural space; always a problem with the placement of multiple works,
supposedly “in dialogue” with each other, but more often just cancelling each
other out in their frantic or too-modest bid for our jaded attention-spans.
In
2006 at the Pompidou Centre of Contemporary Art in Paris, an ambitious show
titled Movements of Images bravely
(or foolishly, and certainly territorially) announced cinema’s death in its
old-fashioned form and its rebirth as a creature of the gallery/museum. It was,
to my eyes and ears, the nadir of this cinema-into-art tendency: dozens of
films, classics old and new, playing on facing walls down a long corridor,
through which thousands of paying customers streamed while hardly breaking
their stride. Tellingly, the only pieces in the show that riveted anyone’s gaze
were the especially constructed black
boxes: little havens of the cinema-apparatus where one could view, for
instance, the famous 43-minute slide-show by Nan Goldin, The Ballad of Sexual
Dependency (1979-2001), and actually hear its delicate song accompaniment –
with the crowd adapting itself to a specific quasi-narrative, chronological,
linear sequence that needed to be seen from start to end in order to be fully
understood and appreciated. Projection times were, indeed, listed on a sign
outside the large booth.
In
Australia, the Queensland Art Gallery took a decisive step in late 2005 with
the construction of what it rightly calls a dedicated Cinémathèque space – two well-appointed cinemas at the heart of its new building.
Now, at last, cinema had a chance to enter the cultural milieu of the art
gallery proudly, on its own terms, bearing its own history, demanding it own
specific mode of attention. But, as became immediately clear, there was a lot
of heavy conceptual baggage to be evaluated and discarded before this union
could truly take place.
Historically,
the relation between art institutions and film has been fraught with every
imaginable problem and inequality. Art patrons are familiar with the many
out-of-the-way little theatrettes, often showing (sometimes on celluloid but
usually on video) film programs that are conceived largely as pedagogical or
human-interest footnotes to a central gallery exhibition: TV documentaries
about the lives of artists, films on which some grand dude fleetingly worked
(like Salvador Dalí’s dream sequence for Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound, [1945]), films that include
some striking architectural monument (the Casa Malaparte in Jean-Luc Godard’s Le mépris [1963]). Cinema, at that stage, seemed doomed to remain art’s poor cousin, and
it would be foolish to imagine that this situation has entirely disappeared in
many parts of the world.
Even
at a more evolved level of curatorial culture, this détente didn’t necessarily improve much. Cultural snobbishness has
always ruled, and severely constrained, the artworld’s adoption of cinema.
Throughout the 1970s and ‘80s, group shows would provide rigged surveys of
“film as art” – laying out a tidy avant-garde history that, just like the
Pompidou show, refused to consider the vast majority of commercial, narrative,
feature-length production as art (or even as interesting cultural production).
The mind truly boggles: a history of film art without John Ford’s Westerns,
without Italian comedies, without Egyptian musicals, without even the French
Nouvelle Vague or the New German Cinema, without stars and sensation and
spectacle? (3)
This
was the sorry trend that Alexander Horwath’s admirable film program for the
2007 Documenta aimed to overturn once
and for all, forging the link between the most severe formal experiments of (for
instance) the Austrian experimental scene with the grandest thrills of a
passionate and intelligent Hollywood movie. Yet even this visionary program
probably tested the limits and patience of art-goers suddenly confronted (some
surely for the first time in their life) with the likes of George Romero’s
Marxist zombie flick Land of the Dead (2005). And, as Shep Steiner has noted in reference to this
farming-out of the medium of film by the Documenta head to a specialist
curator, the potential “result of this hierarchisation of forms is to tighten
the definition of the art field in the wake of various pressures to expand it”.
(4)
The
last hangover of this snobbishness is to be found in a phase we are still,
alas, living through: the art world’s promotion and spotlighting (even funding)
of “artists’ films”, as if films by artists are somehow going to be naturally
superior to, purer than, run-of-the-mill cinematic productions. This
indefensible philosophy has bolstered the careers of overrated “stalwart”
artists who now work the international art circuit, such as Peter Greenaway and
Bill Viola, and thoroughly mediocre filmmakers such as Matthew Barney and
Rebecca Horn, not to mention a host of other pale pretenders to the “cinema
effect”.
The
story of Barney’s success is sad but instructive: his supposedly Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk known as the Cremaster cycle (1994-2003) is a cross between a catwalk fashion parade, a sculpture
show, a celebrity photo shoot, and a bunch of lame, slow-burning gags. In this
attenuated and exploded/expanded performance art, the only things that people
tend to immediately understand are the jokes – while the interpretive key to
the piece is, in this case, a cryptic system of supposedly universal bodily
references that do their best to evade any particular history, politics or
ideology.
From
the birth of video art in the ‘60s to the so-called Artist’s Film of today, we
see (as Australian artist-critic Philip Brophy eloquently argued in a lecture
on the Pompidou’s touring video program) a form of stunted thinking, and hence
stunted art-making: this is cinema without cinema, a deluded “virgin cinema”
free of any incisive knowledge of cinema history, its forms and experiments.
The
lesson and the task here are clear: any Cinémathèque worthy of the name, that
forges its identity and destiny within the umbrella of an art institution, must
take on the onerous but ultimately noble burden of instructing the art world,
artists and art audiences of the cinema-realm they know far too little about at
the outset! Otherwise, cultural prejudice and ignorance will rule, and cinema
will always lose out.
At
the limit, some of the hierarchies must be confronted and overturned. In
conventional, old-fashioned galleries – especially the major, national
galleries representing a sanctioned view of what is and has always been deemed
art – painting and sculpture take up most of the space, money and attention.
Thus, for instance, it was striking to observe the use of a single painting (Gran Via, 1974-1981) by Spanish painter
Antonio López García within the entire dispositif of the international touring exhibition Collaborations by Víctor Erice and Abbas Kiarostami. The intention of Erice, who chose and
included this artwork, was doubtless not polemical: he was simply probing and
laying-out the genesis or underwriting of his masterpiece El Sol del membrillo (1992), including a series of eye-level
monitors (which begin screening only as you approach them) featuring video Apuntes (Notes). These sketches or
drafts – watching the painter at work, comparing the locations in Madrid as he
renders them to how Erice finds them years later – lay the groundwork (in
image, sound and word) of the eventual feature film. They are placed in
relation to the physical presence of the López painting, itself dramatised with
cinematic lighting and a soundtrack mix.
Yet
the effect for many gallery visitors was startling: rarely has the sight of a conventional
figurative – if hyperrealist – artwork in a gallery space seemed so strange, or
so completely displaced from its usual sovereign spot! By contrast, Kiarostami’s
series of black-and-white snowy landscape photographs, however remarkable,
functioned in a far more normal, conciliatory way for such spectators.
Let
me return to the example of the Queensland Art Gallery – representative of a
growing movement towards a better relationship between art and cinema. It is in
this ongoing experiment (somewhat watered down since its inception, alas) that
we see the first steps of a new effort to bring these forms and media into a
reciprocal, mutually respectful arrangement. There have been, and will continue
to be, teething problems – some quite banal and logistical, since no gallery in
this country is used to running itself like a picture theatre, with evening
sessions, ticket sales, queuing crowds … And it is, of course, never enough to
simply put film screenings (however well selected and presented) and art
exhibits (including audiovisual performances and installations) into close
proximity within the gallery space – or across the courtyard, which is the longed-for-but-not-quite-firing
model of “synergistic interactivity” used within the open space of Federation
Square model in Melbourne, housing in its hive the ambitious Australian Centre
for the Moving Image, now formally known only as ACMI.
So,
how to truly bring cinema and art into dialogue, to create real
interpenetrations and hybrid forms that move well beyond the ephemeral
fireworks of yesteryear’s between-images?
First,
there needs to be a real effort of pedagogy – and I do not say this lightly. The cultural conditions vary from country to
country, but I have noticed across several decades that, whenever film enters
the gallery, a certain entertainment
factor takes over, and the felt need to explicate, teach, explore and
critique the work is extremely lessened – precisely at the time and place where
it needs to be strengthened.
The
exhibition of Correspondences over
four months at ACMI in Melbourne was a prime example: instead of a major
international conference or weekly lectures from prominent members of all the
pertinent arts and intellectual disciplines, there were only a few weak
sessions on Spanish and Iranian cinema background contexts. This is truly
selling the work short for what should have been a major cultural occasion and
event. Indeed, not even the complete catalogue edited by Alain Bergala and Jordi Balló was made available
to the Australian public – only a very reduced selection from it, as if too
much film analysis would scare off the average artgoing patron. Bergala himself
was in and out of the country, for the exhibition opening, before anyone
significant even knew about it!
But,
even more profoundly and far-reachingly, the gallery needs to take its filmic
pedagogy outside its lecture rooms and onto the gallery floor: in works that
themselves inform the viewer, in dazzling and instructive ways, about cinema’s
history and its forms. This is what the deliberately messy but wildly ambitious
Pompidou project by Godard, Voyage(s) en
utopie in 2006 did; or, on a more modest scale, similar projects by Philip
Brophy (Ads, 1982; Club Video, 1986) and Harun Farocki (Section/Interface, 1995).
By
the same token, film works need to be fully valued in themselves – by curators, audiences and the entire, increasingly
dominant promotional machine attached to our major galleries – for their
history, their value, their power, and (yes!) their art. It is only when the
average gallery goer has it in her or his head that they can catch a rare film
by Raúl Ruiz, James Clayden or Howard Hawks at a particular Cinémathèque
session stationed somewhere inside the institutional white cube – allowing due
time to take in the related audiovisual installation by Chantal Akerman, Agnès
Varda or Dirk de Bruyn – that this particular revolution in the arts will be
well and truly underway.
II.
What modern
cinema needs is lighted theatres which, unlike the darkness, neither absorb nor
annihilate the clarity which comes from the screen, but on the contrary diffuse
it, which bring both the film character and the spectator out of the shadows
and set them face to face on an equal footing. (5)
In March 2010 at the Adelaide International Festival
of Art, in a section titled Alone, We are
Together curated by Victoria Lynn, I began to notice something unusual
happening in the gallery spaces: a lot of digital video screens, many film
references – nothing out of the ordinary there – but the first strong signs of
a new, more reciprocal, productive exchange between cinema and art.
An elaborately produced video by Korea’s Donghee Koo
called Static Electricity of Cat’s Cradle (2007) (6) marked a change between yesterday and today. It was, at first
glance, the mere document of a performance piece, a man and woman attached to
wires and ropes, getting pulled in and out of a potential embrace. Behind the
mid-air gyrations of this absurdist couple was another old-fashioned trope:
back-projection of an endlessly rolling, one-take view from a moving vehicle.
Suddenly, at the end, there was a twist. A strange Dr Mabuse figure – in a
cowboy hat – was revealed, pulling the strings and also working the remote
controls of the video machinery. Special effects of fireworks emerged to frame
and extinguish the action. We had just passed over from happenings and ambient
video art to something like cinema.
In another room, a two-screen projection, Spelling Dystopia (2009) by the German
duo Nina Fischer and Maroan el Sani (7), shot – like their haunting 2006
“remake” of Alain Resnais’ Toute la
mémoire du monde (1956) – on glorious 35mm film stock, explores the
deserted Japanese island-city used as the backdrop for the fiction of the Battle Royale movies. A superb, kinetic
montage of image and sound ping-ponged between the screens, as the reality of
cinematic location morphs with the digital artifice of video game settings.
The work of the Italian artist (resident in the
Netherlands) Rossella Biscotti offers us a still more thoroughgoing glimpse of
a cinema in transit. One of her most arresting pieces – which, as is par for
the course for the contemporary multimedia artist, exists in several collapsible
or expandable formats and versions – is The
Undercover Man (2008), a weird re-take of the Hollywood true-life crime
film Donnie
Brasco (1997), except for the fact that it uses (with the creepy
co-operation of the police authorities) the actual guy upon whom the movie is
based. (8) Like some works by Pierre Huyghe or Johan Grimonprez, The Undercover Man takes cinema – its
texts, its mythologies, its social circulation – as its very subject, and ends
up (in the words of Bill Krohn) reflecting cinema, this medium of the past with
an “extinguished brilliance”, back to itself at “quirky angles, and with a
lunar pallor”. (9)
Another of Biscotti’s works takes us even further into
movie mutation. In the Adelaide event, her stark installation The Sun Shines in Kiev spanned several
possible versions of a grim reality: the fate of the official Russian cameramen
sent in to film Chernobyl after the toxic meltdown. As an installation, it was
the usual mixture of screens, media and relational-aesthetic elements laid out
in a quite large, unwelcoming, almost underground-cave space: a wall of text,
projected video, a bank of slides. The narrative – or slice of history – is not
spelt out in a linear way. As almost always in art galleries, we enter and exit
at our own whim, coming in at the middle, looping the ending (if we stay this
long) back to the beginning.
The entire work rests upon a grim epiphany: if we look
and listen closely enough, if we figure out how to read and cohere the pieces, then,
at a certain, chilling moment, we realise that the white spots on the surviving
celluloid traces left by these unfortunate cinematographers sync up with bursts
of static noise on the sound recording – marking the exact moment of
radioactive contamination. It is something between a Chris Marker essay-film
and a true-life horror movie.
But what was most striking about The Sun Shines in Kiev was its quality of light. Neither fully dark
nor wholly illuminated, the room that housed the piece was a deliberately messy
compromise between a theatrical cinema space and a well-appointed art gallery.
In the terminology of curators – or, indeed, projectionists – light was leaking
and bleeding all over the place: the large door could not be shut, the text
could not be entirely deciphered in the semi-darkness, the moving and still
photographic images swam in and out of clarity or obscurity, depending on the
shadows of mobile spectators’ bodies falling upon them.
It was a disconcerting but also intriguing experience
for a cinephile like me. I wanted to fix this imperfect light, but I also
learnt, eventually, to surrender to it. The artist, surely, was using this
light, shaping it, playing with it – and also leaving it open to chance.
Imperfect light: let us recall that, long ago in 1966,
the critic-filmmaker Jean-Louis Comolli, in his radical youth, wrote a
manifesto in Cahiers du cinéma titled
“Notes on the New Spectator” (from which the prefatory quotes throughout this
essay are derived). It was, in part, an ode to television, this relatively new
medium that – very precisely – did not depend on cinema’s darkness, but
unfolded within the variable light of the domestic, suburban home-space. For
Comolli – and his faith in a new medium today seems charmingly optimistic – this
meant that TV could free the new spectator from his sinister enthrallment, her
ideological seduction, from the “phenomena
of fascination, transference, ecstasy”, and thereby allow more open, critical reflection. (10) And, if not
exactly welcoming of everything streaming through this box, Comolli was willing
to welcome new developments in TV documentary (a form in which he would himself
extensively work in his future filmmaking career), and embrace the
possibilities of watching films re-screened and remediated in this way.
Comolli’s argument proceeds by attempting to turn a commonplace
assumption on its head: the dark theatre is not (contra Bellour’s 2007 assertion) a natural condition of cinema, but
rather a form of ideological conditioning. “There is a long-standing and
constantly renewed agreement between the darkened film theatre and the
commercial cinema; each represents the other’s means of survival”. (11) Furthermore: “Conditioning to darkness activates to full effect a
kind of reflex in the spectator entering a cinema – expectation, desire even,
for familiar forms, recognised patterns, the whole homogenised apparatus”. (12)
Comolli’s ‘60s call to
question the cinematic became, in other cultural sectors, a trigger to flight
and denial. By 2010, we have surely come a long way from a video art based, for
at least four decades, on exclusions of the cinematic (and thus a last-gasp
High Modernist attempt to ground the “medium specificity” of video). This
mindset is best captured in a rather ludicrous manifesto written in 1982 by the
Australian duo Robert Randall and Frank Bendinelli for their exhibition Screens.
Video upfront. Recording time equals viewing time. No editing. Real
time. A beginning and an end. No
progression or development. Purely aesthetic information. Beyond informing or
documenting. No messages. Combining, superimposing and transforming found
images. No narrative. Video montage. Fixed camera. No zooming, panning or
tracking. (13)
Today, by contrast, the
relation between cinema and art is clearly becoming less neurotic, less
defensive. The Hollywood mainstream itself seems to be moving closer to the
conditions of the gallery, and not only because of the ongoing renovations in home
cinema viewing: Martin Scorsese’s Shutter
Island (2010) is, in fleeting ways, uncannily like Spelling Dystopia. The “projection intervention” once staged by
Biscotti between sessions at a film festival says it all: “Cinema is the
strongest weapon”. But it is cinema configured otherwise and put to work
differently.
III.
If you
review films in a half-light that helps concentration, you see them differently
and better than in the cinema. You watch them from a level of confidence and
equality. The formulae no longer create an illusion. The aesthetic pleasures
are charged with more meaning. (14)
To conclude this essay, I would like to reflect upon
an exhibition of particular importance and ambition that was presented by ACMI
in Melbourne in 2009: Len Lye, An Artist
in Perpetual Motion. There was a homecoming fervour attached to this show:
although the name of Len Lye (1901-1980) is generally known, less well recognised
is the fact that, in
France, Portugal and many other places, he is considered the greatest artist
from the New Zealand-Australia axis to emerge during the 20th century. The
exhibition offered up an extraordinary work of documentation, much of it
collected by the subject himself. There were rarities on display, such as his
paintings and drawings of sea life.
Nonetheless,
I wondered: for the spectator new to Lye, did this show provide the best
introduction, the best (as the marketing departments love to say these days) immersion?
Comolli
may be right in arguing that mainstream cinema has conditioned us to darkness;
but Len’s art, in all media, certainly was not dependent on it. What you see is
what you get in Lye: his art is all on the surface, traced in lines and
colours, cuts and sounds. It moves, it twinkles, it shines. It is, we might
say, radically infantile. There is
nothing Gothic about it, nothing that craves shadowy corners or secret spaces.
It can play, variably, in the light or the dark, or in any imperfect
half-light.
In
the short films Lye was commissioned to make for the UK
postal service, for example, he merrily played with many techniques: animation,
graphic design (printed words and overlaid shapes) in motion, the rhythmic
fusion of image and music (often an eclectic mix of popular musical styles),
and the vibrant exploration of colour. (15)
There are, logically, many ways such works can be
combined and exhibited today. One can, for instance, imagine Lye (if he were still
alive) being an enthusiastic explorer of public screens and urban projections –
a topic that has garnered much specialist attention in recent years. (16)
What
does it mean to introduce a no longer living, sanctified (or: hopefully one day
to be sanctified) art cinema auteur – and Lye, with a little bending and
stretching of the categories, can fit this label – into the gallery, and more
particularly into the museum context? The distinction between gallery and
museum needs to be kept loose, but the everyday observation anybody would make
holds good: the museum trades in turning things into history, sanctifying them,
inscribing and legitimating their significance and importance.
Although
the space in which ACMI displayed the Lye show is technically a gallery, it
tended more to a museum, in that the project inevitably took on museological
dimensions: in some senses, it was now or never that Lye could be introduced
into the artworld of the 21st century.
One
of the most intriguing researches on the passage of a cinema auteur into the
museum or gallery has been carried out by Thomas Elsaesser [1943-2019],
collaborating with a team of curators and artists, in relation to Ingmar
Bergman. In his crucial essay “Ingmar Bergman in the Museum?”, Elsaesser
defines the challenge to the art world in these terms: “Not to find a home for
the homeless artist, nor to make the museum take over the task of a
cinémathèque, but to bring about a different kind of event and encounter”. (17)
Echoing the line of Steiner’s critique of the
Documenta art institution, but finding something potentially redemptive in it,
Elsaesser diagnoses the museum as a physical and cultural space which marks
itself “as deceptively open and fiercely bounded, which is to say, as both
liminal and territorial: to be crossed and entered only by guarded acts of
negotiation and agreed terms of mutual interference” – and hence (in an
invigoratingly paradoxical turn of mind) a “valuable gift” to cinema, since “it
forces [cinema] to double itself, and in the process also divest, divide or
subtract itself”. (18)
A
comparison is instructive here. At the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in
Paris in 2006, Johan van der Keuken:
Photography and Cinema brought alive its central curatorial premise – that
the Dutch artist’s work in these two media constantly crossed over in decisive,
fruitful ways, to the point where he could continue exploring certain aesthetic
problems by switching from one to the other – in an ingenious sequence of
displays and projections. Van der Keuken’s work in film and video partakes of a
hybrid form that seems to be peculiarly Dutch: beginning from a documentary
pole, passing by way of the chronicle, diary, travel-report or essay, he ends
up at the severely rigorous, formal structures of avant-garde cinema. Or vice
versa. (One of the only comparisons to this particular fusion or hybrid that I
can think of is the aforementioned Dirk de Bruyn – a Dutch-Australian.)
Inspired and open at the moment of filming the world (and especially its poor,
struggling and dispossessed castes and classes), van der Keuken was equally
brilliant at creating interrogatory forms and structures on the editing table.
The
ideas evident in the presentation of the exhibition were simple and elegant,
and nowhere more so than in this salutary dispositif:
a multi-monitor assemblage of three screens stacked vertically, the top screen
collating movements-to-the-left in van der Keuken, the middle screen featuring
static tableau shots, the bottom screen gathering movements-to-left. Three
separate montages, almost scientific or statistical (“data driven”) in nature,
and an overall montage between the three elements: a mesmerising, even surreal
analysis in images that literally makes us see any further work by this
filmmaker in a different, more perceptive light. It is Comolli’s youthful dream
come true: in the well-lit space of the exhibition, this dispositif “brings both the
film character and the spectator out of the shadows and sets them face to face
on an equal footing”.
Let
us return to the case of Lye. As I took in the Melbourne exhibition, I found
myself regretting that – despite its extensive nature – it lacked the sense of
scale that Lye himself might have liked. I kept wishing that the films,
paintings and drawings could be projected over the vast, black ACMI walls,
rather than being sequestered in intimate viewing booths or arranged
forensically in glass cabinets. As the effusions of a true 20th Century Man,
Lye’s œuvre throws down the gauntlet to gallery exhibitors: what’s more
important, finally, the Real Thing beautifully preserved – or should it be,
rather, dramatised, extended in all its technical reproducibility?
A
strange reversal has steadily happened in cinema-themed exhibitions over the
first decade of the new century, in many countries. The touring Stanley Kubrick
extravaganza, also hosted by ACMI, captured this moment in all its bureaucratic
oddness: suddenly it was more important to see (through theft-proof glass) the
real, crummy, fake old space suit that some actor wore on set (in 2001: A Space
Odyssey, [1968]) than it was to experience the metamorphosis of this
humble prop into dazzling, gleaming cinema on a big screen. So the reversal is,
often quite literally, this: the films – presumably the reason why we are there
in the first place – get smaller in projection size, while the
behind-the-scenes ephemera become magnified.
The
same trend has been evident in the Cinémathèque française shows devoted to
Pedro Almodóvar, Tim Burton or Jacques Tati: the emphasis is on the minutiae of
props, script notes, technical trinkets, design sketches, book covers, letters
or postcards from famous friends, and the like. (19) There is a simple, obvious
explanation for this bias: most such shows are based upon, and take place due
to the benevolence of, special archives devoted solely to collecting every
trace of an artist’s life and career – as is certainly the case thanks to the
Len Lye Foundation. We should pause here to wake, in fright, at the glaring
number of great filmmakers, long dead, who have yet to receive even a fraction
of such archival attention.
Is
a gallery space – and a blockbuster show – the best place to see, study and
appreciate the work of Lye? A forlorn little Reading Room – a shelf of
facsimiles of Lye documents and publications, which no visitor spent more than
one minute flipping through in the hours I was there – pointed to the
ill-fittingness between the ideal functions of Archive/Library and
Gallery/Museum.
Len Lye: An Artist
in Perpetual Motion was genre-bound and medium-bound: paintings here, sculptures there, film
animations here, how-to tools there. It was too neat and categorical –
especially given that the great constant of Lye’s career was his ability to
keep exploring the same key obsessions through every medium he touched.
Doodles, for example: Lye fastidiously kept every doodle he distractedly made
even while talking on the telephone, because he believed the results aided in
discovering forms and processes that need to bypass the conscious, rational,
conventional mind.
OK,
then: let’s, for the sake of a new curatorial vision, start with a doodle, and
try to take it for a walk through the gallery space – turn it into a wave,
tracing a transversal line through film, painting, and the rest. Since
perpetual motion is the subtitle of the show, the spectator must be allowed to
experience a living, visceral sense of how every work transforms itself into
every other work, backwards and forwards during Lye’s ceaselessly productive
life. This is what I mean, in the modern gallery context, by the concept of
immersion.
Lye’s
art strayed into many areas, including narrative and avant-gardism. The ACMI
exhibition tended to gloss over such
supposedly extraneous aspects for the sake of, on the one hand, a certain Fine
Art vision of Lye – as the marriage of abstraction and technics, magic and
science, expressionism and information-pedagogy – and, on the other hand, a
very clean, distinct, chronological-biographical layout of Lye’s achievement.
In other words, a very conventional narrative account. It was a significant
show for what it imparted and represented – the official canonisation of Lye as
an artist – but it was not such a great enactment or performance of the mind and matter
of Lye, of the kind we might have dreamt. (20)
At a Monash University conference called Time Performance Transcendence held in
October 2009, Art and Design lecturer Vince Dziekan gave an illuminating
presentation about the ACMI Lye exhibition in the context of current curatorial
practice – and specifically about the refiguring of Lye as, in a certain sense,
a key prophet of digital media culture. (21) Doubtless many experimental
artists of the 20th century will find themselves, during or after
their life, conscripted to this agenda – and those who do not fit that agenda
may be, this time around, left out of the history-making process.
But to carry through with the full weight of this
conviction in relation to Lye would have required a more full-blooded style of
curatorial gesture: less museological and more dramatic, mixing the works up
and connecting them in relation to their motifs and intensities, rather than
neat divisions of medium, genre or mode.
The ghost of Lye, like an eternal grinning Cheshire
cat, is still tempting and daring us to do him justice. And other artists of
his ilk are, no doubt, gathering in the half-light around him, clambering for
our imperfect attention.
A Spanish translation of this text – which, in part, weaves together and reworks fragments from a number of my reviews of particular art exhibitions – appeared in issue 32 of the journal Secuencias (2010). There, it was part of a special dossier commissioned and edited by Antonio Weinrichter on “Cinema in the Space of Art”. The issue can be downloaded, in whole or in parts, here.
1. Jean-Louis Comolli (trans. Diana Matias), “Notes on
the New Spectator”, in Jim Hillier (ed.). Cahiers
du cinéma 1960-1968: New Wave, New Cinema, Reevaluating Hollywood (London:
Routledge, 1996), p. 210 (translation slightly amended). Originally published
in Cahiers du cinéma, no. 177 (April
1966), pp. 66-67. back
© Adrian Martin October 2010 |
