LINGUISTIC HARDCORE: ART WRITING AT THE ICA

Art Writing Beyond Criticism, ICA London, 17 May 2008



If there is a crisis in criticism, then it wasn’t the framework for this one day symposium. Art writing, suggested organiser David Burrows in an upbeat introduction, had the same energy, creativity, and self-directed means as artist run spaces in the 1990’s. He suggested the symposium as something that didn’t capture or describe but called forth practices. It didn’t, he said, create a community but sought to establish a collection.

Art-critic, suggested Jennifer Thatcher, chair of the panel “Art Criticism Beyond Criticism”, was often a dirty word, associated with male patriarchs who saw the role as one of judgement through staid, tired, pseudo-academic prose. In contrast, Thatcher suggested, younger writers saw criticism as part of a dynamic field that also included curating and making art. David Beech, for example, had started writing inspired by heroes such as Art & Language, for whom writing was a way for artists to take control of the reception of their work. Later, hid criticism came out of a frustration that work in artist-run spaces was not being reviewed; and also that reviews were limited in style and format. Beech felt his tag line as an artist gave him a broader permission to write in a variety of styles: emphasising all that he was thinking at the time, feeling free to write without mentioning the works at all if it seemed appropriate. He said that, recently, he had come to think of each piece of writing as a campaign.

Sally O’Reilly similar combines art criticism, curating, and self-published projects, such as the journal Implicasphere. Her presentation focussed on criticism as an engagement in a broader history of ideas; giving shape and focus to a love of writing and ideas otherwise almost silenced by a surfeit of possibilities. O’Reilly questioned whether the critic had any power, but she shared Beech’s desire for new forms such as the mock-interview, again because of the sense of freedom they contained. She cautioned against an over-reliance on historiography and description, seeking an act and a text of criticism possessed of “pub conviviality.”

The panel's two remaining contributors offered different models again. Cedar Lewishon traced his origins in art criticism to art school projects parodying the genre, that drew in method, style and attitude from the cut-ups of William Burroghs and the gonzo journalism of Hunter S.Thompson. He, too, had created self-published fanzines, and spoke of wanting to disrupt the conventions of art criticism - citing an interview in Flash Art with Tim Noble and Sue Webster where straightforward criticism gave way to a mock fight with Noble. Underlying all these strategies, Lewishon said, was a concept of text as a fictional way of describing the art work. Patti Hunt, meanwhile, suggested the crisis of criticism was a PR problem. She suggested replacing art critic with the term spin doctor. If her writing derived forms and influence from a range of popular culture and literature, her sense of the critics role also saw nothing wrong with being an extension of marketing, and advertising. Enamoured of the art market, Hunt felt critics exerted power through catalogue essays, positioning and shaping the context through which an artist was perceived.

Hunt’s views prompted a lot of the following discussion. Sally O’Reilly countered that it was important to fight writing as marketing, that the reason behind projects such as Implicasphere was to reposition the critic in the history of ideas, away from an endless focus on single artists and new objects. She also felt Hunt was failing to take responsibility. Instead of questions of power, David Beech talked of critics participating in “a discursive formation that determines visibility.” Responsibility thus became a matter not of the so-called truth of ones critical opinion but to a particular context and way of working. In retrospect, this was the most focussed session of the day because ideas and practices were always related to specific working contexts of magazines, catalogues and self-publishing.

The next panel – “Fictionalising Practice and Politics” - began with John Russell, who outlined a strategy of “fictioning” and of an art writing inhabiting a space “before ideas became ideas.” Russell traced how his ideas had emerged from following threads of cultural theory from J.L.Austins speech acts, through Judith Butler to Deleuze and Guattari, sketching out an attitude in which language had the substance of an action; was collective rather than individual. For Russell, art writing connected to notions of performativity, language shifting between territorializing and de-territorilizing, between a language that commands and one that replaces a concern with truth with its own presence as gesture. It was a theory for the individual writer, as it was for the broader editorial strategy behind Broken Tears, the three 900 page volumes of art writing that Russell has edited.







Maria Fusco, editor of Linguistic Hardcore, said she had talked too much recently, both about the Art Writing MA she organises at Goldsmiths College– she hoped someone in the audience could suggest a different term – and her practice of fiction as a critical strategy. So she read a story. It was simply and directly written, evoking allegory and fable, and as she read I was reminded of Borges or sections from Calvino’s Invisible Cities. In this context, however, I felt a tension between experiencing the story as story and translating it into an art writing methodology. Fusco herself was aware of these tensions, of the vulnerability in choosing to communicate through story telling. In the discussion she spoke of the danger of producing “crap fiction and crap theory,” but asserted that fiction was the best tool for a cultural activism of “prodding.” In an article in Fillip 6 Fusco relates her interest in fiction to a stategy of “anti-suspense” which breaks with expectations of character and causal connection, replacing them with a “cruising the surface [of text or artwork] in whatever combinations prove to be the most satisfying, useful, and most importantly precise at any given reading”.

Finally Simon O’Sullivan spoke of art writing needing to avoid Lyotard’s “interpretosis.” O’Sullivan’s texts for artists Cathy Wilkes and DJ Simpson wrote with and parallel to the art work, not interpreting but finding an appropriate style through which the writing could have some of the “affective charge” of the work itself. O’Sullivan’s theoretical framework positioned art writing as an example of Deleuze and Guattarri’s minor literature, which, like Russell, saw art writing as engaged with a collective, political sense of language undermining and defamiliarising dominant forms and styles. Particularly interested in nonsense, stuttering and stammering, O’Sullivan also saw art writing converging on performance as it sought to operate on the edge of what is see- and sayable.

The third and final panel – “Speeding, Cutting and Correction Fluids” - pursued art writing to the point where it dissolved almost unidentifiably into an eclectic range of cultural and artistic practices. Paul Buck offered his artistic autobiography in which, as a writer, he became frustrated by the lack of opportunities to practice a writing attentive to the visual and spatial properties of language, turning to the art world as a space where “you can do anything.” He suggested that engagement with a diverse range of artistic practices – Buck cited Victor Burgin, Leo Kosuth and Pina Bausch – could produce a more direct, engaged, immediate writing. Embodying this, Buck walked around the space as he spoke, scrawling notes on large sheets of paper, tearing up newspapers and sellotaping them to the doors. He wanted to write on the wall, but didn’t feel it was permitted at ICA.

John Cussan presented an introduction to the work of Bughouse, an artists’ collective much interested in intersections of technology and spiritualism. As regards art writing, Bughouse highlighted issues around the generation of masses of material and the difficulties of collective editing; between the desire for crafted, finished objects and texts remaining open, whose status as collectively produced makes them resistant to such desires. As an example Cussans presented a project in which Wikki page served as a forum for a synchronous reading of Deleuze's Difference and Repetition. During Cussan’s talk I noted a whole set of productive ways of thinking about art writing that none of the days other speakers had mentioned: a practice based around key words such as obsession, surveillance, addiction, the play between “real politics” and “fantasy politics” and, erm, insects.

Finally, Neil Chapman read a text similar in tone and presentation to Mario Fusco’s, around an invented person entitled Jimmy Chism. Comprising number sections, its sections offered a variety of forms: fable like stories; quotes from George Perec and Alain Robbe-Grillet; extracts from the diary of Jimmy Chism; re-workings of found text; proverbs. It was an engaging form, constantly moving between language situations, demonstrating a fluidity between experience and commentary; observation and self-reflection. Such movements were also those of the day as a whole, which was provocative but deliberately left unanswered awkward questions concerning the viability, possibility, and desirability of the diverse collection of practices its contributors called forth.

GREGORY CREWDSON: A VOCABULARY

Gregory Crewdson Untitled (Kent Street)'Beneath the Roses'2007Archival pigment print58 1/2 x 89 1/2 in. (148.6 x 227.3 cm) (incl. frame)© the artistCourtesy Jay Jopling/ White Cube (London)

White Cube Masons Yard, 23 April-24 May 2008

There is a moment when the arrangement of objects within a street form a narrative. But who, or what, in the street, a part of it, sees or knows? What position do we have to reach to make seeing or knowing possible?

Or maybe there are a hundred narratives, one for each of the multitude of sight lines. The camera, person or bird, suddenly assumes a position aligned with the particular stories they are susceptible to.

But I don't think so. Everything is staged. I saw the photo's that show this place being built, whole towns as if they were illusions.

Story? I'm equating story with suggestiveness, as if a combination of elements equates to character and motivation. By suggestiveness I mean something I recognise as meaningful. Or, perhaps, meaningless. The enigmatic that comes from an absence. But, again, I don't think so. It's suggestiveness is very constructed.

Bed. Light. Body. Car. Snow on a tongue with cat paw tracks.

Why do I recognise such events as meaningful? Having noted a single detail, why does the whole street acquire form and composition, whilst the detail itself becomes excessive, unreal, and monstrous.

Could I explain this, even if you were listening, or here? There is a level of familiarity to such places connected to art history. This is like Edward Hopper, Walker Evans or David Lynch. It is this familiarity, this deep echoing, love, that enables the image to be seen, an emotional relationship to begin on the part of the viewer who is as far away from what is depicted in the image as you are from me now.

In my mind the ground for this image-street has been prepared by other images. This makes recognition possible as it threatens to kill it. It is the responsibility of the details - and, beyond their control, of the composition they make - to erase the references that bring them into being. Or, at least, having made them seeable to ensure them sublimated to experience.

And in the space that is left, examine your body, lay turf, suddenly a shaft of light, staring upwards. All of which induces a crisis of the skin. Both the skin of the person who appears in the street and the way that skin is the surface of the photograph

Normally there is a quality, close up, to the grain of the photograph that is reassuring as to the reality of what is seen. To come close to this surface, however, is to plunge into fiction. It is to approach a person and to experience the certain, nightmarish vertigo that actually they are painted. This is a space as the details form into narratives as the references are subsumed as the surface nightmares

the skin in crisis the space about which it is only possible to say: EMOTIONS ESCAPE WORDS and ENVIRONMENT ESCAPES EMOTION. That's what happens when you build everything for yourself. Nobody rests here. No one stands thoughtfully in a doorway. That river is not blue but you could swim in it

Gregory Crewdson Untitled (Secret Liaison) 'Beneath the Roses'2006Archival pigment print58 1/2 x 89 1/2 in. (148.6 x 227.3 cm) (incl. frame)© the artistCourtesy Jay Jopling/ White Cube (London)

in Ameria and anonymity both. Never trading in monuments, in symbols of itself, in iconography. Not unless such things are trading on the level of the smallest phenomenological impulses a place prior to definition that nonetheless has a convenient catch all name.

Instead of the news there is a way of sitting naked in a chair where there is a suspension between your own self-awareness and that of the chair, through which at that moment your identity must be constructed.

The people in these photographs are without breath, mostly still, and they have learned to express their needs through the whole, however that is conceived, secret even to themselves

Because needs are the stuff of narratives and unperceivable wholes, streets, and lots of small jobs to do around the house but of which the house disaproves. This a film set, remember. Through each door and window - that's where those old, killed off representations are hiding.

Not hiding, telling what they saw.

ANDREI TARKOVSKY AT TATE MODERN

The Art of Andrei Tarkovsky, Tate Modern, 9 May 2008

There have been numerous retrospectives of Andrei Tarkovsky over the last year – at the Barbican, French Institute, and Curzon Mayfair – and each has presented a different Tarkovsky, revealing his mutable and elusive influence. Take the Curzon Mayfair events in December 2007: featuring talks by actors and collaborators it presented Tarkovsky as Russian Genius, filmmaker of the spiritual world, preferring anecdotes and narratives of his films transformative potential to critical discussion. Layla Alexander-Garrett, translator on The Sacrifice and one of the organisers of that event, was in the audience at Tate Modern for The Art of Andrei Tarkovsky, several times intervening angrily at this latest re-working of Tarkovsky, which foregrounded his influence amongst contemporary artists.

Organised by Nathan Dunne and Vlad Strukov, in collaboration with the London Consortium, the day had begun with a presentation by Evgeny Tsymbal, director's assistant on The Stalker, which attempted to shift the idea of Tarkovsky from Romantic, spiritual genius-prophet to a collaborative, process-based, slightly conceptual artist more amenable to an age of relational aesthetics. Tsymbal himself, of course, didn’t have this framework, but he did want to return Tarkovsky to the everyday, focussing particularly on a sequence in The Stalker where there is a slow pan over a number of sand covered objects under water. Tsymbal emphasised that he himself had chosen the objects with minimal interference from Tarkovsky. He showed the auteur’s vision falling prey to practicalities of film making: Tarkovsky wanted to include images of Giotto and Piero della Francesca, but Tsymbal could only find Rembrandt’s Three Trees and Van Eycks’ Ghent alterpiece; Tarkovsky’s own contribution to the scene was to introduce a live frog, but it always jumped out of frame too quickly to be included. Tsymbal also emphasised the way Tarkovsky thought through film making: starting work on the film three times with different camera men; the final film needing a change of conception of the stalker himself from hard, decisive strong man to something more elusive and emaciated before the rest of the film could take shape.

The space that Tsymbal opened up was occupied by scholar Robert Bird, who sought to understand why Tarkovsky has been so influential to contemporary artists. Bird’s observations were rooted in his own phenomenological experience: that he experienced the same emotions and sensations in, say, Douglas Gordons 24 Hour Psycho as he did watching a Tarkovsky film. This he related, as did many of the days speakers, to Tarkovsky's sense of time, particularly its unfolding through long takes. Bird saw this as Tarkovsky inhabiting the material of his media, in a way related to, for example, Man Ray’s photograms. Furthermore, in a Tarkovsky image different regimes of representation – from icon painting, to the fireworks evocativie of revolutionary celebration – were reinscribed in individual memory and body. Indeed, Bird's sense of the long takes were in part that they offered spaces where a variety of different times, experiences and confluences are imprinted. This explained the particular atmosphere of Tarkovsky’s films, as well as – and this point was repeated by many of the presentations – creating an openness for the viewer to reach their own understandings.

The artist Hannah Collins showed two works that positioned themselves in different ways in relation to Tarkovsky: an extract from a work in progress that featured a long tracking shot through an abandoned factory in Lille, followed by extracts from A Current History (2006), a double screen work juxtaposing life in the Russian village of Beshencevo and the city of Nizhny Novogorod. More broadly, she outlined a model of both the specificity and vagary of influence, noting she had seen Tarkovsky movies as a student but not watched them again until recently. She noted how images and moments could stay in the mind and appear in a work years later; that one could only access parts of a work, meaning influence was always a matter of shadows and echoes. Indeed, Collins was the first to emphasise the alien historical circumstances of Tarkovsky’s films and the possibly unbridgeable distance from which, gathered in Tate Modern's Starr auditorium, we were thinking about them. During Collins’ talk I first experienced what was probably the days dominant sensation: excitement at the workings of Tarkovsky’s influence; disquiet at the ease with which he was being absorbed into the language and attitudes of contemporary art making and viewing.

The afternoon began with James Quandt, Senior Progammer at Cinematheque Ontario in Toronto, who offered an overview of Tarkovsky’s infuence in a range of contemporary art-house film makers, including Bela Tarr, Lars Von Trier and Carlos Reygadas. Quandt, admitting both the range of forms influence could take and that in the end it was always ineffable, was adept at showing Tarkovsky’s influence at work both literally through a range of motifs – dogs, rain, ruins, trees – and through their related attitudes of spiritual anguish and nature mysticism. He sought to distinguish between artists who could absorb the influence into their own film making – such as Bela Tarr – and those who got lost in the endless production of “Tarr-clones,” most notably Andrey Zvyagintsev's The Banishment. Admitting the endless and elusive characteristics of the game of influences, Quandt concluded with a number of questions: is it the most singular style that proves the most influential and easy to emulate? How - thinking of Tarkovsky's influence on Asian film makers such as Tsai Ming-Liang and Apichatpong Weerasethakul - do traits transmute in different places? What role do film schools play in the dissemination of style?

Quandt’s informative presentation was oddly paired with the novelist Toby Litt, who began by claiming to speak as post-MTV watcher of Tarkovsky and concluded by being the one speaker to directly explore and affirm the spiritual nature of Tarkovsky’s films. Litt focussed on the slowness of Tarkovsky’s films and how the viewer could shift from being very bored to fascinated by changing their expectations. Like Bird, he was interested in how Tarkovsky offered a “re-configured screen”, allowing the audience openness in how to respond. For Litt, this focussed on how, during these long takes, we could choose what to look at amongst the multiple “field “ of the screen, coming to accept what was there rather than impatiently searching for visions – a notion Litt drew from Tarkovsky’s own observations of living in the countryside in contrast to the city. Central to this, for Litt, was the way the viewer could look at an image, experience a lapse of concentration, but then come back to it, the pace of the film slow enough to allow this pattern of concentration-lapse-return to be repeated three or four times.

Litt's talk was entertaining and illuminating but such notions are inevitably a gross simplification of the perceptual process and the relation between looking and understanding. A similar criticism could be made of the bizarre last part of Litt’s talk which interpreted these aspects of style as a morally improving good, the products of the film makers own moral intergrity, Litt even observing that liking Tarkovsky’s films made one “less angered, more considerate and capable of self-control.” Litt presented all this in a self- aware, post-modern style, seeking and getting laughs from the audience, but ultimately using his authority to present a hugely reactionary, conservative, and ungrounded model of creativity and reader response. In the discussion afterwards, Quandt seemed, understandably, a little bemused, questioning the connection of long takes with spiritual import, and observing that Bresson’s own trajectory into a spiritual film making, for example, had seen an opposite development into shorter edits.

Finally, Hannah Starkey and Jeremy Millar offered two further models of contemporary artists engaging with Tarkovsky. For Starkey, her new found relationship to the film maker had developed from Nathan Dunne’s suggestion that her photographs had something of the Tarkovsky spirit, prompting a month of research. Starkey began by presenting her own work from 1997-2007, and the connection was apparent. She described her work as “a process of observation and consideration,” building up layers to create multiple relationships and a meeting between "outer world and inner experience." Her work focussed on the single image – that “holds” and exists in time “for as long as the viewer is interested” and where “compositional movement creates the illusion of movement.” Starkey was interested in the image become “inexplicable,” a quality she saw as partically explained by Roland Barthes’ notion of punctuum. As for effect on the viewer, Starkey sought for a balance of pleasure and criticality and to “seduce by aesthetic… [then] move into a deconstruction of the image.” In Tarkovsky, Starkey said, she had found confirmation and illumination via his example of attaining the almost impossible through sheer will, seeing his films as the products of entering an inspired working space of flow and connection that "allows chance and serendipity."

For Millar, the relationship to Tarkovsky was revealed in his own video footage of the locations of Stalker, part of Ajapeegal (2006-), an ongoing project motivated also by Tallinn's function as a popular location for English stag weekends. Millar's deliberetely flat, video images of peopleless landscapes contrasted with the highly stylised, atmospheric Stalker and outlined Millar’s practice of obliqueness, delay, and displacement, something he identified as characterising Tarkovsky’s oeuvre. In Millar’s work, Tarkovsky took his place alongside other obliquely viewed artists: Marcel Duchamp making notes on the large glass during three weeks in Herne Bay, or Robert Smithson at Hotel Palenque. In the fragmentary way it was presented here I found it impossible to get a sense of the rhythm and scale of Millar's projects. Instead, his presentation had the rather unfortunate effect of focussing some of the disquiet that had built up during the day in which Tarkovsky himself rather vanished amongst the contemporary artists' sense of their right to wander freely, composing out of an intoxicating mix of art history, contemporary reality, personal experience and memory. Such a practice may be a rewarding one, but at the end of a long symposium day, I felt it raised the danger of mis-appropriation and - at the risk of sounding like Toby Litt! - wrong relationship.

A rewarding day had thus followed a trajectory whereby Tarkovsky, freed from the tyranny of his own prophetical myth, ended up, strange and mutable, partially transformed into a Russian Robert Smithson, reading Relationship Aesthetics on a stag weekend in Tallin. If this was an exciting and informative process to observe, it also risked historical amnesia, as two powerful interventions by Lithuanian audience members highlighted. What was it like to watch these films in Russia in 1979? Unconsciously The Art of Andrei Tarkovsky had become less about bridging that historical gap than about removing it as an awkward question.

DANNY WILLIAMS AND A WALK INTO THE SEA: 10 NOTES ON DOCUMENTARY

After dropping out of Harvard in 1965, Danny Williams moved to Manhattan, where he worked as a film editor for the Maysles, and became involved with Andy Warhol’s Factory. As well as being on Warhol’s lover for a while, and working on lighting designs for the Velvet Underground shows, Williams made a number of 16mm films, shooting people and events at the factory, often the same events as featured in Warhol’s own films. In 1966, visiting his family in Massachusetts, Williams went out for a walk and was never seen again.

His films were found thirty years later by Callie Angel, archivist of the Warhol film collection. By coincidence, Warhol’s niece, the film maker and producer Esther B.Robinson, shared an office with the Warhol foundation. A Walk into the Sea: Danny Williams and the Warhol Factory chronicles this re-discovery of his films, seeking to explore his life and film-making through interviews of those who knew him at the Factory juxtaposed with interviews of Williams’ – and Robinson’s – own family. The result is a powerful juxtaposing of two groups and families, and of their complex and unknowable relationships to an individual who was part of them.

Making a film about such a subject is a powerful way to explore the cultural presence of Williams, The Factory, and family dynamics. It also produces a number of points relevant to documentary film making more broadly:


1.The absent and present subject. So the film is about Danny Williams, but Williams’ himself is an illusive presence within it. There is a power to a film whose central figure – whose purpose for being – is such a provocational absence. This creates a shifting presence like Peter Gidal observes of Warhol’s Blow-Job:

An antaogonism in Blow Job is, for example, your being looked at by the subject and being avoided by the subject and, through time, a transfer taking place, so that you the viewer are the subject and he in Blow Job is no longer such but re-becomes the object. This extends to the point where the language in the perceiver's (your) head cannot decipher the line where subject and object are delimited. Such a process is to be defined here not as ambiguous but as a process of the antagonisms between the material and the metaphysical...


2. The forgotten and unknown. There are lots of cheap laughs to be got from A Walk Into The Sea about ageing interviewees being unable to remember what happened at The Factory. But think of this instead as a structuring principle - a film punctuated by amnesia, like the white space between and around words.


3. The shock of time. A film dynamised by a juxtaposition of two time periods forty years apart. There’s the shock of ageing, the shock of survival, that shows how each individual's story is itself challenged by its own body in a process of ageing and that time is working against all the conventions of legibility in the filmic image. Allowed an active part in this way, time refuses the film resolution. When time collapses – as when Brigid Berlin phones a friend to ask if Warhol and Williams’ are a couple – it seems funny and slightly obscene.


4. Struggle and contestation needs a space of rest. Amidst absence and amnesia, there is a battle for control, for the right to tell the story and have one’s account seen as authoritative. An absent subject denies its speakers authority; unsettles rather than confirms even as they are speaking. Their knowledge is always tested against death and losing.

Given this struggle, contestation and acrimony it becomes important to find within the film a space of rest that is without such psychological tension. In A Walk into the Sea that is obtained through the film maker Ron Nameth, who views and discusses Williams’ films with an impassioned criticality – commenting particularly on Williams filmic imagination, editing in camera, building up and layering of complex sequences of images.


5. The evidence of objects. Counter these misrepresentations by focussing on objects. Two examples:

(a) Ron Nameth holds up an exercise book with a rough, biro drawing that he explains, animating its scrawl with his careful attention, is Williams’ drawings of his light designs for the Velvet Underground.

(b) Williams’ mother looks at photographs of him. In one she says he looks too fat and like he could be pushed around; in another strong and confident. She prefers the second.

Objects take on the qualities of those who hold them and remember nothing if asked.


6.Structure as distorted mirror. The study of Williams’ family alongside a study of The Factory. His grandmother looked at in the refraction of cinema becoming Warhol. Perhaps this distorted mirroring can be pursued over the course of the film down to the level of the individual face.

Actually, what is disturbing about the factory as family is the sense that its cultural presence was so strong that none of the participants have been able to break its familial bond. Of all the interviewees, only John Cale conveys a sense of having established a sense of distance; a way for time to continue. Or maybe he has just found a way for the voice and face to hide, to pretend change. The documentary itself emerges as a form for the setting up, preserving, and breaking of such bonds.

This is also why several interviewees are wearing sunglasses. I feel everyone in the audience at BFI Southbank hates Paul Morrissey. Distorted mirroring is how the way film expresses the notion of family, making of montage a kinship structure.


7.Everyone is connected and alone. A film is about a shared experience of an absent person. A person whose existence is how they appeared within certain groups, told through stories of people who never talk to each other, except in memory. The only linkages are the interviewers voice, subtly conveying contradictory information between interviews, and the momentum of the film itself.

8.Everyone is a documentary maker. The cultural weight of an experience that will never be adequately represented. The reluctant attempt to become one’s own documentary maker, always adopting a traditional, conservative notion of the form; asking the film to reinforce a belief not allow X to emerge from the accumulation of evidence. In an interview included on the BFI's programme notes Esther Robinson observes:

I think it is always challenging when you film your own family. I had a rule, and it was a rule for everyone in my film. I wanted everyone in the film to be recognised like I loved them, and one of the painful things that happened to my family over time was reading the Warhol books and watching films and trying to understand Danny through them. It was a really painful process, because they did not recognise the person and, in fact, most of the people from the Factory, when they are represented in the films, are not represented as themselves. They are in service to an idea.


9.Power of the unseen recorder. Every documentary should have a second person – real or imaginary – secretly filming the same things. This creates the possibility of an alternative version, that is always more shocking in reality than as an idea.

Even when this second film-maker is working more openly, his or her images will still maintain this quality of subterfuge and identity through non-presence. Hence Williams’ astonishing portrait of Warhol, backlit like changing patterns of sunlight on the outline of the moon; an eerie, x-ray quality of the image that shows the eyes, shifting and blinking uneasily behind their black sunglasses. In secrecy, holding its subjects, not in slow motion but in a rapt space of their own concentration.




10.Disturbing power of poetic happiness. Williams' Factory films are often noticeable for the happiness of those they film. But in silence, black and white, slowed down, happiness acquires a disturbing, dream-like quality. Similarly, one resolution of the unknowability at the films core, is the poetic image. Albert Maysles suggests the poeticism of the walk into the sea as an appropriate one for understanding Williams' energy, his probably tragic engagement with The Factory.

It’s important that the film opens itself to this poetic level. It establishes a presence for the motivation that led Williams to make such crafted, beautiful films. But, as Albert Maysles himself suggests, to evoke such poetry is to reveal its inadequacy in the face of Williams’ gifts and the possibility of what he might have achieved. Without this dialectic and this awareness, the documentary becomes nostalgic and barbaric.

NOTEBOOK: EISENSTEIN, MICKEY MOUSE, FINLAY AND THE GREAT TURF

In the history

of the broken

screen

Albrecht Dürer

goes to Hollywood

because that photo

of Eisenstein

shaking hands with

Mickey Mouse

got him thinking

how a piece

of "Great Turf"

could invent itself

anew

beyond the Scottish

poet-artist's

garden

and become

New Media

NOTEBOOK: REM KOOLHAAS

THE BROKEN SCREEN IS NOT FINISHED AND


THIS IS AN IMAGE OF ITS CONSTRUCTION




... the most exciting way of thinking today - the incredible surrender to frivolity and how it could also be compatiable with a seduction of focus and stillness...



NO ICONOGRAPHY FOR EUROPE

SO I USE CHINA!

(THIS IS ALSO AN IMAGE

OF THE BERLIN WALL



I consider film to be the essential mechanism of basically everything



AND IT IS THE IMAGE

OF AN ABSENCE)



For me, the Berlin Wall as architecture was the first spectacular revelation in architecture as to how absence can be stronger than presence. For me, it is not necessarily connected to loss in a metaphysical sense, but more connected to an issue of efficiency, where



I think that the great thing about Berlin is that for me, it showed (and this is my campaign against architecture) how entirely "missing" urban presences or entirely erased architectural entities nevertheless generate what could be called an urban condition. It's no coincidence, for example, that the center of Shenzen



is not a built substance but a conglomeration of golf courses and theme parks, i.e. basically unbuilt or empty conditions. And that was the beauty of Berlin even ten years ago, that it was the most contemporary and the most avant-garde European city



because it had these major vast areas of nothingness....




SOURCE: Rem Koolhaas and Hans Ulrich Obrist: The Conversation Series 4, Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther Konig, Koln., 2006. ISBN 3-86560-077-8

MARK WALLINGER: THE LARK ASCENDING

His first work made for cinema exhibition rather than the gallery space, Mark Wallinger's The Lark Ascending (2004) was the concluding event of this weekends Sonic Illuminations event at BFI Southbank. A grey screen was accompanied by deep, murky, reverberating tones. Over the films 34 minutes the screen lightens to white, and the sounds gradually rise in pitch, both prompting a changing mass of associations and projections. Only in the last few minutes does the sound shift from electroacoustic composition to become identifiable as skylark song. Then the song stops, leaving the white screen in silence.

The Lark Ascending has many art historical resonances, from the black squares and white paintings of Malevich and Rauschenberg, to the experiments in duration of Warhol and Michael Snow. Although the change from grey to white is a gradual trajectory, programmed to be indiscernible from moment to moment, the swirl and shifting of the video field also evoked the flicker films of, for example, Tony Conrad. What links all of these references is an attention to the instability and variation of visual fields, and their perception. In this instance, the movement from black to white changes the degree to which the screen appears to be moving out or in, whilst the mere act of looking at the screen prompts a range of visual effects. As Wallinger himself observed in the post-screening discussion, the act of making the piece for cinema rather than the gallery positions the audience in a darkness and frontality where these attributes are most fully experienced in a state of intimate yet collective privacy.

If the screen evokes an experimental film history ever attentive to the materiality of its own medium, then sound is able to intervene in that formality in a way that is much more playful. Sometimes, given the pieces title, I thought I was listening to a re-working of Vaughan Williams orchestral romance, a mutating and warping of a piece long become a Classic FM staple, an attempt through manipulation to redeem it from the added nostalgia in which it has become swathed. More comically, Wallinger confirmed an audience perception that early on it also sounds like The Clangers. If the film seems to be exploring a materiality and distortion, a world mediated by electrionics and the media, then the end is counter to this, where the manipulated sound gives way to an ecstacy of bird song experienced both as a rupture into and an evolution out of the sounds and images that have preceded it.

One of the curiosities of the sound track is precisely what leads the listener to categorise a sound in a particular way. Wallinger's complex intertwining of natural and artificial emerged beautifully in the discussion when the artist was asked how he had managed to get such a pure recording of a skylark free of aircraft noise, and replied he had bought it from HMV.

The discussion also revealed how formal plays of black and white, image and sound, resonated with aspects of the films content: the pastoral as evidenced in the music of Vaughan Williams and the poetry of George Meredith; in the contrasting styles and associations of folk and classical music; between progressive and regressive notions of “Englishness”; and, most poignantly, in the bloodshed, war and social change between Williams’ completion of the piece in 1914 and its 1920 premiere. Such concerns are both absent and present in the piece through its emotional shifts, tones and textures, further informants of a space in which Wallinger combines emotion, narrative, and humour alongside and through a more austere focus on idea and concept.

For Wallinger, such a mix of concerns seems to depend for its transmission on the tighter controls of the cinema when contrasted to the gallery: the emphasis on darkness, on start and finishing times, and what Wallinger termed the “peer pressure” to stay for the duration. Expanding his sense of cinema, Wallinger talked of it as a “found object” where one could be more “self-conscious” than in a gallery, “transported… taken away” in front of the enormous presence of the screen which is “not quite a window… not quite a screen… can’t see through it…can’t look at it...”