PIRATE'S GALLERY: SUSAN HILLER'S HOMAGE TO MARCEL DUCHAMP

Susan Hiller, Homage to Marcel Duchamp (detail), 2008. Six from a series of 25 digital photographs. Each: 12 x 12 in. /30.4 x 30.4 cm. Overall: 60 x 60 in. /152.4 x 152.4 cm. Copyright Susan Hiller. Courtesy Timothy Taylor Gallery, London

 

ARTIST'S STATEMENT

According to a belief originating in ancient times, the aura is radiance from energy fields emanating from and surrounding each living thing, as individualised as a fingerprint and detectable only by clairvoyance.  

 

Walter Benjamin described loss of aura as symptomatic of the artwork in modern times. He knew that the word ʻauraʼ would be widely understood, either as a visible reality described by mediums and clairvoyants and researched by certain scientists, or as an imaginative paradigm familiar from images of halos in traditional religious paintings. The concept has also become closely linked to radical developments in the visual arts.  

 

In Marcel Duchampʼs 1910 portrait of his friend Dr. Dumouchel, vibrating colours follow the contours of the doctorʼs body and a luminous white band radiates from his healing hands. I think this painting can be understood quite literally as an aura study in the clairvoyant tradition. For Duchamp and other artists, the anatomy of the visible was to be the starting point of a new art and a new function for art.  

 

Alongside numerous ʻsubjectiveʼ representations of human auras by painters and psychics, as far back as the 1890s there were attempts to document the phenomenon by the ʻobjectiveʼ means of photography. Today there are various cameras that produce images of auras, apparently demonstrating the existence of what the eye canʼt see.  

 

This work is my collection of photographic portraits of people surrounded by amorphous, shifting clouds of coloured light. The radiant emanations or auras are created by liquid crystal arrays triggered by electrical frequencies measured from the subjectʼs hands and translated into colour equivalents by a computer attached to a special camera.  

  

Presented to us as visible traces of the phantasmal, [these photographs] are the most recent manifestation of a desire to experience, record, and classify spectral phenomena, a desire that coincides with the history of science as well as the history of art, and has complicated connections to both. 

In these images the camera becomes the equivalent of a clairvoyantʼs specialised vision, and the subject of the portrait dissolves in a cloud of electronically produced coloured light.  

The full sequence of images can be seen as part of Susan Hiller, Proposals and Demonstrations, at Timothy Taylor Gallery, 15 Carlos Place, London W1K 2EX. 30 Oct– 20 Dec 2008.

CHARLES ATLAS

Charles Atlas, Tornado Warning (2008). Courtesy the artist and Vilma Gold, London.

Charles Atlas, Tornado Warning, Vilma Gold, 14 Nov-7 Dec 2008.

"Five channel video work installed through the gallery", promised the blurb for the new Charles Atlas show at Vilma Gold. Which was true, although it was the arrangement rather than the number which was key. One screen in the main space which grew beyond its frame as if conceptually keen to experience space beyond its borders; four crowded into the back room that overlapped and moved about as if parts of some shared brain.

Restlessness and stillness, singular and plural, are some of the immediate impressions of this show. Tornadoesque, indeed. Only it's not some essence at core but some basic geometry of lines and squares, swirls or grids of letters and numbers. This, at least, seems the message of the single screen Plato's Alley, which serves as preface. Whilst looking at it, a somewhat small and lonely projection in the gallery's main space, the other pieces can be heard but not seen.

So lines become a grid of white squares, then a grid of smaller squares, expanding beyond corners onto the side walls. Then a clearing appears in the grid, like a door, and the numbers 1-6 appear in succession. Then there is a horizontal letter-box kind of shape and those numbers 1-6 appear again, horizontally, all at the same time. A swirl of letters and numbers follows  before the space starts again. Blocks become lines, horizontal and vertical, that refract, alternately shimmer and define, deliberately rudimentary.

In some ways the piece seemed a minimalist essay on the concerns waiting in more complex fashion in the next room. Lines respond to the space, fitted to its walls and corners, making and stretching some hi-tech proscenium arch, but don't seem to be specific to it. Similarly, there is in the loops unfolding a certain exploring of the potentials of video, certain formal properties of shape and line. Yet this too doesn't seem to describe the core of what's going on. 

In the second room - entitled Institute for Turbulent Research - nothing is slow and measured, or viewable from a single point. There are immediate decisions to be made about where to look. Two facing images offer different kinds of tornado - one a black and white rorschach test of a dervish spiral; the other like a spinning DVD set loose within the Tornado of an effects programme,  oftentimes the tornado manifested in a literal or metaphorical roulette wheel.

Tornado Warning (2008). Courtesy the artist and Vilma Gold, London.

Across the room a fixed screen shows a variety of objects spinning slowly in space: a chair, a crate and a spade. A roving image moves from wall to floor to ceiling. The imagery moving between the screens mixes old black and white movies, abstract patterns, with images taken from television and the internet that present war, environmental disaster, basketball playing, or...

The specifics are a bit vague in my memory, you can't see all the images all of the time and, actually, I don't think it matters. The piece sets up its whole experience, and seems to be actively cultivating a kind of inspecific seeing, where individual details work less as individual images to be contemplated than as hints, glimpses in peripheral vision(s), contributing a note or tone to the overall impact of the four screens. 

It's all very not-contemplative. The floating objects are a point of stillness,  but their gravity defying rotations seem deliberately to present a crude, stupid, but not unpleasing, magic.  Nor is the effect one of struggling for orientation amongst a flood of imagery. For all its varying activity, Tornado Warning approximates an old fashioned reading experience, linear and measured.  If the whole is what is important then the whole ends up as a rather self-negating parody of itself, and involvement, and installations.

As I headed out the image on the first screen was slowly counting to six yet again. The precise tone of this piece is illusive and perhaps it hinges on how you perceive the relations between the two rooms. Is the first a kind of code generating the second, or some simplistic parody of a world view countered by the engagement of the second room? Are the two rooms as provocatively daft as each other? Should we return to the first screen as a measure of hope, reason, nightmare, or joke ? Or should we just read the press release which divides the two rooms into order and chaos, childhood and adulthood.

I'm clinging to that sense of cultivating a kind of inspecific seeing, although I don't know what that means either and as I write there's a spade and a plastic crate rotating in the air outside the window.  

Actually, having written  and posted this, I was thinking, well, really, what is a "self-negating parody of a video installation" when it's at home? I mean, what does it look like? How can one tell? How does it act? 

Then I was thinking: how does the "very not-contemplative" art work behave? Maybe it prefers to be capitalised, with acronym potential.  Actually, what I was thinking of there was the process of sustained looking at an object. I think Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons is the best example here because it is both very precise but the relationship to objects isn't descriptive in any conventional sense. 

Stein's writing also demonstrates that something obtains through that act of sustained looking. And I don't think that is the case here. I don't think that is the way this piece is looking. It's slippery. So how does one construct a relationship to it? How does it construct its meaning? 

And when an everyday object is rotating in mid-air does it have to be wondrous? Are there ways it can begin to defy both wondrousness and gravity but keep its sanity?

ON MAGAZINES: FOUND

There was an unfortunate clash last week between an art writing night, sponsored by Book Works, and the final night of a European tour by Found magazine, who organised an informal cabaret at the Foyles bookstore cafe. Unfortunate because an expanded culture of art writing and magazines would have combined these events into one almighty cacophony of the highbrow and the vernacular. As it was they played to very different audiences, and those straddling both camps were faced with a choice: art writing or sword swallower. 

Decision made, I headed off to the Found night in Foyles. Found have been touring Europe, performing largely in bookstores, coffee shops, and bars, selling their CD's, magazines, and books. The core of the show is the magazines co-founder Davy Rothbart reading from some of the thousands of found texts - love and hate letters, receipts, notes, misdirected faxes - that people around the world have found and sent to the magazine. Found finds people, too, and their show kicks off with sword swallower Brett Loudermilk. 

I wasn't, unlike my friend, a pre-existing Found devotee. Sometimes, seeing found material in books or exhibitions,  it all seems over fetishized. But Found Live does tend to win over any doubts, partly because the show is hugely entertaining but also because of the contagious conviction Found have about the value of collecting, preserving, and sharing these texts. There is a potent emotional mix in the way such texts can use annonymity, mystery and extremity, to prompt feelings of connection and compassion. 

Although the culture of Found magazine is more bands, zines and open-mic nights than art history, I soon found myself making connections, from Kurt Schwitters through to the collage work of Joseph Cornell, Ray Johnson and Jess. Like Cornell and Jess, Found emphasis the domestic, home-made nature of the collage practice: they talk of the sackfulls of mail that turn up at their parents house, full of found letters, receipts, scraps from around the world. 

But unlike these other examples, there own working with the material is more a relational one to do with making it available to a world wide network of people, than absorbing it into some artistic universe. Several times at Foyles, Davy Rothbart referred to Found as a "community arts project," one whose community is both local and global, like mail art for an internet age. Presenting the magazine live fits this ethos, aligning the magazine with folk nights, open-mic poetry readings, and stand up comedy. With the sword-swallower there is an older tradition of vaudeville, circus and state-fairs. 

I'm avoiding listing specific examples of found texts, apart from this one, found attached to their car, and with which the whole FOUND project began:

It highlights some basic themes about how such texts work that emerged from the evening as a whole. An element of mystery is good, and found texts that were both familiar and elliptical seemed particularly resonant. Some have an excess of emotion whilst others were notable for switches or combinations of different emotions. In truth, although most texts were highly specific to certain situations, they also offered a primer in experimental writing techniques as revealed in till receipts, love letters, hate letters, and the bizarre personal taxonomies of to do lists. 

Two other points linger from the night that concern some  broader practice of the found. One concerns the level of transformation. Part of the show comprises songs on guitar by Paul Rothbart, that develop out of particular found texts. I found it hard to connect to these at first. As language events the original texts are so strong and lean, that it's odd to encounter them transmuted into someone elses language, in this case a kind of well executed, semi-serious boy band pop-folk. But if you can get into it, it is another layer of response, another part of how to develop relationship to this material. Perhaps it is a part of absorbing these fragments into a celebrating community, which seems part of the FOUND project.

The other lingering question is about what comprises a found text. At one point, Davy Rothbart cited a friend who was "a purist" and said a found text must be blowing down the street. Others assert a right to take any text encountered anywhere. 

Trying to think more about the Found aesthetic led me to John Robert Colombo's introduction to his anthology of found poetry within Ronald Gross and George Quasha's Open Poetry: Four Anthologies of Expanded Poems (1973). It's a fascinating collage text of quotes, definitions, and explorations of the found. It was a story of Kurt Schwitters that seemed most relevant here:

 

"Kurt was at the very back of the streetcar," Hans Richter wrote about the German artist of collage Kurt Schwitters. "He was standing with his hands behind him. Accustomed as I was to his peculiarities, I was nevertheless curious as to why he kept wriggling so. He looked like a shimmy dancer. Suddenly he leapt off the car at a stop. I followed. After the car had gone on, he showed me a 'No Smoking' sign which he had removed from the streetcar with a small screwdriver he always carried. Nothing could stop the man once he wanted some small piece of material for his work." (431) 

WAKE MYSELF UP: A DISORIENTATION MASSAGE FROM RICHARD FOREMAN

London's Royal Academy of Arts has made an unexpected lurch into the experimental with GSK Contemporary, an exhibition and performance series, part one of which is entitled Molten States and runs from now until 7 Dec.  An opening performance by Rene Pollesch, and an ongoing installation by Catherine Sullivan explore the boundaries of film and performance.

The following is an intervention in that dialogue: a re-construction from my notes of Richard Foreman's dialogue with Jennifer Parker-Starbuck that took place at the ICA, London as part of The Accidental Festival, 24th May, 2008.  Foreman's talk explored, amongst other things, his early engagement with theatre through experimental film, and his more recent shift to working with moving images.

Given that Foreman's Ontologic-Hysteric theatre company has only performed once in the UK in its forty year existence - when Laurie Anderson programmed Meltdown on the Southbank in 1997 - what follows can be understood as the latest in a series of attempts by UK writers and artists to imagine Foreman's theatre, testing its influence and presence against a range of contemporary practice, reliant not upon the performances themselves but upon images, texts and gossip.   

SCENE 1

An ambivalent relationship to one's chosen medium. Exploring the chosen medium - theatre - through engagement with film, philosophy, psychology. 

... although I do go to the theatre. I see everything waiting for one moment - moment of presence -

and then I stopped going to the theatre. Fifty moments for one good moment. The odds weren't worth it. And I was famous in New York so I couldn't leave.

SELF OBSERVATION (1)

"Developed my hopelessness into my own art"

(hopelessness felt when faced with theatre)

FORMATIVE MOMENT (1)

My teacher said I was talented but if I found a strong moment I just repeated it again and again. A failure, they thought, but I exploited it never liked navigation of daily life. 

SCENE TWO

 

KEY QUESTION: What would you really like to see if you went to the theatre tonight? 

... and so that was when I started to write in a different way. The physiology of the body. Not daily life - other ways of using this mechanism. Me, you, the environmental envelope. To force the perceiving mechanism into a different place when watching a play so i put lines on tape and performers repeated them but at different speed. 

SCENE THREE

make it myself like a painter paints a painting

provoke myself as a fallible, stupid, limited being WAKE MYSELF UP

Robert Wilson's theatre is a dream world you disappear into. Foreman always wakes up, wanting a seduction but interrupting it to see what is really present on the stage tonight

THE CHALLENGE (1): How to make all elements present on the stage.

and this relates to how I lit the space, even for a talk like this one. The light where you are as you read this. Theatre is the determination to always have the blue back light and the audience in darkness. I want the flourescent lights on. Yes, the video is washed out -

ON THE WALL BEHIND HIM AS HE TALKS THERE IS A VIDEO PROJECTION OF SHORT SCENES FROM VARIOUS THEATRE PRODUCTIONS

... but it captures nothing anyway. It's best washed out. 

SELF-OBSERVATION (2):  I am a religious writer. What is this thing [TOUCHES BODY] how do I use it?

...and so, too, this essay, its ventriloquism...

SCENE FOUR

SELF-OBSERVATION (3): What's really there in. the. context. of. this. speaking. I was going to not direct again, but a  friend asked me to direct Lorca. I could only enjoy the play when I began altering the syntax of all the lines

Brecht was a key influence, because of his notion of distanciation. But I began to have problems with his desire to be understood [and I have only read about your plays] whilst using polluted language

WHAT I WANT (1): Training in ambiguity

WHAT I WANT (2): Lucid confusion in language

Think of Morse Peckham's Man's Rage for Chaos. It introduces you to disorientation. It is a disorientation massage

... and have we all begun inevitably to move towards film?

SCENE FIVE

My intellectual grounding is in philosophy. Peter Kingsley's book on the Pre-socratics. I read that 4 or 5 times working the disjunction of a practice in one discipline grounded in the study of another

... I believe in a perennial philosophy of thought, knocking on the door of what we cannot very easily conceptualize and that is also the role of the avant-garde, conceived not as a provocation but as a spiritual thrust whose role is to take off the blinders you need in daily life

SELF-OBSERVATION (4): Art is about crossing the street without worrying about cars, all of one's attention focussed on watching light particles. It's about getting hit by a car and it doesn't matter.

THE CHALLENGE: A diversity of practices is possible from this standpoint but BE AWARE OF WHAT YOU DENY YOURSELF

This morning when I woke up the radio news said I had retired. I would never make theatre again. I shouted at the radio: you're misunderstanding what I meant by "ambivalence." 

Nonetheless, there had been a shift:

A theatre involving film.

A theatre impossible to reproduce on film.

A theatre involving film. 

A theatre based on large projected images. Actors don't partake of them but harmonize with them in some way.

GO SOMEWHERE IN THE WORLD FOR A FEW WEEKS AND SHOOT LOTS OF MATERIAL WAKE UP

SCENE SIX

The play is in an amorphous space between stage and screen. It's nowhere

Palpable space between stage and audience, around knee height, which is neither one nor the other

Me: (with feeling) Is this the space where theatre comes from? Is this where essays on the theatre come from? Where new technologies arise to replace the theatre?

I don't know. What did you look at? I suggest: 

            SPACE                    ELSEWHERE

RETURNING QUESTIONS (1): An ambivalent relationship to one's chosen medium, always exploring its specificities through another

RETURNING QUESTIONS (2): What would you really like to see if you went to the theatre tonight?

RETURNING QUESTIONS (3): How to make all the elements present on stage?

SCENE SEVEN

:WAKE MYSELF UP

WAKE MYSELF UP

WAKE MYSELF UP

WAKE MYSELF UP

WAKE MYSELF UP

WAKE MYSELF UP

SCENE EIGHT

I began by re-inventing the ABC's of the body. Then it became more complex within the expanded notion of mechanism

from geography to poetry to an ambivalent theatre:

                        THE FIELD

language wore out (?) MAKE ELEMENTS PRESENT AGAIN/ WAKE UP

SELF-OBSERVATION (5): Drop a phrase down a well and hear it reverberating. 

KEY QUESTION: How to make phrases heavy?

CASE STUDY A

STATEMENT: Suppose I were to postulate why is a face like another face

WAIT

REPEAT: Suppose I were to postulate why is a face like another face

WAIT

RESPONSE: If you were to say suppose I were to postulate why is a face like another face what would you do? 

.... Well I might not say anything but I'd think/. 

[ how to keep statement on level of proposition. How to always remain within distanciation. We meet Brecht again and argue. Staying longer in the distance. Extending it. ... Here I can't transcribe what is said and all I can preserve is:

"________________________"

Choose any number of the following:

suspending and framing phrases

words detached from ongoing syntax

work against their own seductiveness

this is what I'm giving you right now

SCENE NINE

If we're talking acting then Bressson's netural performance. The best example is a donkey. 

I'm sorry, Richard, I have to interrupt here. That donkey at the end of Balthazar is like some Lawrence Olivier of Donkey theatre, dying on the mountain. I can hear the someone shouting "Wonderful, darling" after that over-acting donkey sinks melodramatically to the ground. 

FORMATIVE MOMENT (2): I'd always send a donkey through London and not its cardboard representation or its description. 

My approach is different. Keep an actor in a narrow corridor and they feel free. It's not about CONVINCING. 

I look for an erotic attraction, a laser like intensity language bouncing back into me

TEST OF LANGUAGE SITUATION (1): Say to someone: I wonder what it would be like to say to someone "leave, you bastard."

And they reply: Yes, I wonder what it would be like for you to wonder...

SELF-OBSERVATION (7): People as themselves are Hedda Gabler. BE AS ARROGANT AS POSSIBLE IN BEING YOU AND BE HEDDA GABLER.

I      AM      MAKING    PARADISE

SCENE TEN

THE CHALLENGE: How to compositionally order problematic and ugly things to create a feeling of ecstasy. There's a lot of improvisation in my theatre and it's all done by me...

I can't help being a showman: 

HAVE SHTICK and WAKE UP

EXERCISES FOR STUDENTS (1): I'd have students make one three minute scene for a month

                                REVERBERATION

in a classic play the voice of the playwright bounces around between 10 characters

I make a piece of theatre to reverberate in a particular space so I don't tour

THE CHALLENGE: Not to deny any impulse that comes. But to frame it, throw it away, reveal what they really are

KEY OBSERVATION (ANY NUMBER): Theatre is vulgar.

The films comprise long takes and tableau. Hold the tableau but then find a little something that re-aserts re-glues your attention. Could be editing, wiping through, whitening out that's my task in making films

 

... because often film is what provokes me. Bresson, Bela Tarr, Oliveira...

THEATRE'S CONNUNDRUM: Often achieve effects through limitation. But in theatre the challenge is to be effective with an abundance of potentials. 

ACTOR NOT WORKING? GIVE THEM AN ACCENT.

___________________