YOUR SPECULATIVE ARCHIVE OF THE NEVER PRESENT IS HERE BUY NOW

Maryam Jafri, Staged Archive, 2008, DVD-Video, 9 mins.

Still thinking through and around  Susan Hiller's concept of  collage cognition  I was interested to read a lucid take on this theme by the artist Maryam Jafri, in conversation with Patricia Reed in the Jan/Feb 2009 issue of Art Papers. The following is a Critical Distortion of both Jafri's answers and Reed's questions.

I definitely aim to work around documents, that is, to transform them and not just represent them. The documentary turn has meant that artists' approaches are now much more research-based. But I'm not interested in reducing the artistic process to mere research. 

Artistic research differs from research in the social or physical sciences in that art can open up a fantastical space where imprecision, ambiguity, and contradiction - the very things that the natural or social sciences avoid - come into play.

Maryam Jafri, Staged Archive.

For me, the most interesting art works are also formally innovative - even in our so-called documentary era. 

In other words, research must operate at the levels of both content and form. It must push the medium further. 

This requires an engagement with formal and aesthetic parameters, that is, research in relation to, but also independent from, content.

So, I often take visual material that is usually seen in a certain way - such as archival photographs - and present it entirely differently. 

Maryam Jafri, Mobile Cinema, 2008, installation w/archival photos and text captions. Dimensions variable.

ON STAGED ARCHIVE: Staged Archive is a film, but it is also a collage of filmic codes and conventions from film, theater, and photo history. 

This brings us back to collage, Fassbinder with Ghana and missionaries with film noir, with the difference that in Staged Archive, the collage is made up of both materials - newspapers, photographs, and so on - and ideas - in this case, genres culled from the treasure trove of film history. 

As with all processes, serendipity meets conscious effort in art making. I found the photographs while researching a different project at the national archives of Ghana. That project never happened. 

Maryam Jafri, Staged Archive. 

My research also encompassed other background material, such as actual transcripts form Ghanaian court cases and the missionary theme in English literature

ON A MORE FORMAL LEVEL: I relied on the films of Fassbinder and the neo-noir strands of David Lynch to give the work a psychological and performative dimension

           

Much of what you see in my work are the dead ends of other projects that never happen, thus I'm constantly researching all sorts of things. What makes or doesn't make it into a work depends on a host of factors, some of them conscious and others unconscious. 

QUESTION: I see your process of working/ researching as a disruption of the syntax of documents, which aims to produce potential subjectivities rather than real ones. 

Stan Douglas elegantly summarized why these moments of interruption are so interesting. He notes that we are partially fascinated by the archive, by the past, because it reminds us that things could have turned out differently. 

Moments of interruption open the way for potential subjectivities that point to other presents that could have taken shape - that still might take shape in the near future. The desire to find hidden potentialities in the present -

Maryam Jafri, The Law & Its Double, 2005, Text-image work, originally a two-page magazine spread, dimensions variable.

            - requires the use of distancing devices such as an estranged form of acting and some other element culled from the language of theater in order to create a distance to the present. 

THEATRE            LANGUAGE

LANGUAGE           THEATRE

Time naturally creates a distance to the past 

Interruption can create a similar distance 

to the present. IF YOU SAY SO. I DO SAY SO.

CODA

VOICE1: Speculative practice blueprinting of historicity malleable becoming-subject outlines aesthetic experience non-reductive non didactic way

VOICE2: The "most compelling and self-evident" narratives are certainly the ones that need to be disrupted and called into question most vocally. Contingent narratives are more interesting to me because they actualize the need to make contingent and partial sense of the world 

TEN AFTER THE SECOND OF SIX: CERITH WYN EVANS AND IAN WHITE AT LUX 28

Cerith Wyn Evans, Firework Text (Pasolini) 1999. Courtesy the artist and White Cube, London. 

SIX TUESDAYS AFTER FILM AS A CRITICAL PRACTICE: Cerith Wyn Evans and Ian White in Conversation, Lux 28,  10 Feb 2009. 

(1)

The conversation takes place in the dark. A lamp is turned on when someone needs to read. There they are, A and B. When they start talking a projection of Tony Conrad's The Flicker begins, lighting their faces and the wall behind with its black-white pulsing.  Later in the evening, the projection will be Paul Sharits Ray Gun Virus. 

How to write about this event?  Take, for example, B's love of gossip, implied or direct put-downs, and arch one liners.  How to capture their tone and avoid offending their subjects and demonising the speaker? Maybe stage directions.

Not that B would particularly mind the demonic aspect: he ended the session by asking us all to praise Satan, Lord of Darkness. I think this was unplanned, but the rest was a deliberate set of choices about how to engage audience, career, biography and ideas (demonically).

(2)

Nothing is planned about this conversation. If there's a pedagogy  of the flicker, it is how the interesting emerges in the interstitial. The evenings structure is about finding this space through conversation, rather than it being solely in the flow of film frames through the projector. 

Or, as A said to B, lit in the flow of Conrad-flicker: you are all face and no body. 

                             

(3)

Such improvisation, however, always needs some structure. B began by reading Changing Light at Sandover, a James Merrill poem composed through the Ouji board. 

We're being lit by a flicker film. Everyone should make one. It creates an uncertainty about your room and your body. It critiques structuralist materialism. Those radical old Marxists were witches... P is a witch and works according to his own magic...

... The loss of the body is a serious issue. I'm interested in wilful difficulty... The intention is to make a film that is only shown once. It's a mass reproducible media, but I'll just make one. Obviously this is perverse - like making a silk screen in an edition of one... 

... This has a troubling relationship to democracy...

Cerith Wyn Evans, In Girium Imus Nocte et Consumimur Igni. Installation view, Tate 2006.

(4)

B didn't want to just be asked questions. He wanted to do some asking. What's the purpose of these evenings? he said, suddenly, the film over, vanished into darkness once again. 

A: Does there need to be a purpose? No objective. Just a desire for a continuing conversation. 

But, said B, the image is so virulent, standardised, out of our hands. I feel old and fusty... it's like a witches covern at Lux 28. So I'll talk to you about personal history.  When I was a student all these people at St. Martins were welding one beam to another beam to make a right angle... 

.... I always felt life was somewhere else...I was terrified of P. Everyone hated P. He was like white noise. Look at the moving image now in relation to alchemy. To Deren and to Jean Cocteau. Where are we now in relation to cinema? Personally, I'm all for terrible recidivist nostalgia... 

(5)

Maybe this was a novel in which A and B were both question and answer, storyteller and theoretician, thesis and antithesis, print-on-demand and The Folio Society. Which meant tension. B, for example, was most verbose when telling familiar when-I-was-at-the-Royal-College-of-Art-with-P anecdotes. To which A would respond: Yes. But. And?

B never committed himself to any sustained investigation.

 

B knew theory was but a light switch away. Why sit in the dark if you didn't have something to hide? Lots of reasons. 

Perhaps B wanted to keep in flux, like Yoko Ono at Tate Britain, measuring her academic interlocutor with a tape measure. But sharp wit, please, not New Age mumbo-jumbo, or we will never find the light switch. 

(6) 

B's phone rings. It is Anselm Kiefer's wife, again, and he reads us the message - lunch on Thursday? Then B played us a song off his i-phone to illustrate the concept of duende as it applied to flicker films. 

The song ended. It was followed by a highly inappropriate medley of Joni Mitchell material that it was impossible to turn off without first evacuating the building. 

 

(7)

Ask me a question. Go on. 

Ask me about class.

This question. Am I respond to it conceptually or biographically?

Cerith Wyn Evans, Cleave 01, 2001. Neon systems, halogen lamp, shutter, PC, text of Pier Paulo Pasolini. Dimensions variable. 

I respond biographically.

I respond angrily.

I respond rudely. 

And you say I should think about it conceptually.

About class and how it relates.

To objects and non-objects.

About class and spaces.

Ask me a question.

The space of the film and of the gallery.

A Welsh working class family. 

(8)

Is our talk itself a work of art? Don't get me started. The Channel Five weatherman now calls what he does Live Art. We'll just have to wait and see if this turns up as a Tate installation in next years Turner Prize exhibition. Sorry Mark. 

Ideas made into space but not objects. Objects made into space but not ideas. Exhibitions without physical form. Lectures that are actually trees in drag. Yeah yeah. 

Maybe if you dream Jay Joplin likes it then it's a work of art. 

(9)

Maybe B relaxed as the piece went on. Or, he realised curfew was approaching at Lux 28, and there wouldn't be time for starting any new strands of serious questioning. I think the later.

B could move along the surface, never catching on sharp stones, shrapnel free, worrying about his teeth. B enjoyed the challenging of being in public, and being private, but being public privately. This he guarded: 

I think of myself as outside the class system. I'm extremely privileged. I loathe class as an idea... vulgar idea... trade unionists are vulgar... as bad as the aristocracy...

Cinema is an errant space. Could be possible to cause some trouble. Culture is personal. I would be devastated if I heard Las Meninas had been destroyed, or the high heels of Genesis P. Orridge, or that someone had stolen the toggles off Gustav Metzger's duffle coat. 

If someone had left a banana skin on Lou Reed's doorstep and he broke his ankle... what is the best case scenario for these evenings? Anything better than conjecture? 

I don't feel I've said anything interesting at all. (ASKING THE DARKNESS) Why are you here? 

 

(10)

No art needs money. The credit crunch is not the problem of artists. 

Witchcraft and cinema are about a spell. The ingredients to make a spell. It's alchemical, about light and dark.

Witches and magicians were demonised and set aside. 

And the robes look great, of course. 

LINDSAY SEERS: IT HAS TO BE THIS WAY

Lindsay Seers, It Has To Be This Way, invitation, image, Matt's Gallery, 2009. 

Lindsay Seers, It Has To Be This Way, Matt's Gallery, 21 Jan- 15 Mar 2009.

There are various levels - literal, metaphorical, visual, textual, architectural, temporal - to Lindsay Seers It Has To Be This Way. One could start writing from the position of either, producing a set of quite different- even opposing - responses. Or maybe they would all end up much the same, I'm not sure. It's like reading a novel by randomly opening it at different places (an appropriate analogy for a show that comes with its own free novella).

Shown into the space by a gallery assistant, I encounter a large geometric construction - hexagon maybe, but I didn't count the sides. It's rough built, like a life-size maquette. Enter it and you find a looped thirty minute film projected. Enter at one particular moment and an animated version of the shape in which you sit is rotating on the screen.

Should that be screen or screens or neither? There are two round discs of identical projected image, like looking through binoculars or the two images of a  stereoscope. Although, of course, these images don't align to make a third - or, if they do, that trick 3D is the space in which we sit, the conceptual constellation of the whole piece - which includes the novella and a further video piece on the shapes exterior. 

Not, as Seers work seems to emphasise, that is anything less of a trick. It's the trick of tricks, and her work has often sought to deepen, absorb, and internalise that trick, not lessen it. Take earlier work in which her own body can be camera or projector, or a narrative in which she was mute until encountering a photograph of herself, whereupon language arrived in a rush (both part of her contribution to the current Tate Triennial). 

Don't, the suggestion seems to be, confine the activities of projection and recording to that thing-called-screen, its comfortable, deluded separation of subject and object, research and experience. 

Key to the film inside the maquette is a voice over by S. Because the whole things on a loop, and you enter wherever, it might be more useful to list what I remember rather than trying to re-construct some narrative:

S is narrating his relationship with Christine. There is a motorcycle accident in which she suffers memory loss and ends up in hospital. 

Christine is obsessed by the Swedish Queen Christina. S encounters her as a mix of lover, mother, and sister. After their relationship is over she comes to him in an astral dream and makes love to him as a man, which he finds strange but accepts because of their previous intimacy. 

Stringberg's Dream Play, in Colin Wilson translation, Yates' The Art of Memory, and Bergson's Matter and Memory.

S is an actor, who is taught an intense version of The Method that acquaints it to trance. The intensity becomes too much during a performance of Stringberg's  A Dream Play, and he has a breakdown.

S leaves acting, getting a job helping to archive Queen Christina's collection of alchemical manuscripts of Queen Christina. 

Which, as a change of life direction, must really make you feel the universe is trying to teach you something.  But such recollections of plot points always feel frustrating, as if I wasn't paying attention. In It Has To Be This Way this inevitable audience amnesia suits the piece. S's narration has an authoritative tone, which Seers undermines by manipulating the recording, creating slight hesitation, emphasising mispronouncing of words, punctuating with silence the white noise of the recording.

Lindsay Seers, It Has To Be This Way, 2009, video still. 

A similar mix is evident in the images. Too literal a connection of image and text is usually death for the moving image installation. Seers "trick" seems to be to respect that rule,  but also to produce something which approaches that quality of illustration, so that image and text become one. But what would that be? For all that it seems illustrative, take away the narrative and the likelihood of reproducing S's narration in images would be like monkey's typing the bible in one take. 

The film inside the maquette is preoccupied with oneness, often through sexuality and gender: S's fantasy of lover, sister, mother in one; or Christina's hermaphroditism. A second video on the external wall of the maquette takes the form of an explanatory, contextualising documentary. Over animated images of the maquette itself, subtitles note the meeting of Seer's parents that brought Christine, the artists half-sister, into her life; confirms S as Christine's boyfriend; reiterates Christines motorcycle accident, memory loss, and disappearance. Extra layers make this a kind of art world meta-fiction: the film historian Rachel Moore recalls meeting Christine at Gasworks and discussing the Renaissance.

It's appropriate that such discourse is physically positioned on the margins of this piece. For Seers, the informational is working on an emotive, associative level. For the alchemically-clueless this is also where the maquette shape is revealed to be an alchemical crystal, an alternative end point to the turning into gold, representation of oneness. This crystal shape makes the piece like a Russian Doll: the shape itself, it also appears projected inside it and outside, being fact and memory, original and copy. 

Lindsay Seers, It Has To Be This Way, 2009, video still.

This second video also explores the role of Queen Christina, with scholars offering thoughts on her manuscripts, her interest in alchemy, spiritual practice and hermaphroditism. This culminated in the excavation of her tomb to retrieve her skeleton and see if there was something unusual about her anatomy. Christine - the half-sister - dresses up as Christina (as Seers did when making the piece in Rome). One C becomes a way of discussing the other C becomes the S that is Seers and the S that is Strindberg becomes all pretty much indistinguishable.

The physical presentation of all this information involves giving both family trauma and the promises of alchemy a rough, DIY materiality. It's present in the rough, plywood construction of the crystal-cinema, and how its benches are uncomfortable, slightly too wide to either sit or lay out on. As, too, it comes back to that binocular like projection: promising a close-up, but producing something far more enigmatic, highlighting the close-up as where the enigmatic works its molecular magic. 

Don't worry what's true or false, this piece says, but accept the textures of fiction. This way of inhering in the world is encapsulated in the properties of the still photograph (Christine, according to S, becomes terrified not of the image but of the act of photographing). Projected and moving images in It Has To Be This Way seem to be partly refusing that status in order to hold to the disturbed, still, and erratic resonance of the punctuum. As, too, for all the extension into book, film, and installation, the pieces meaning is also forever condensing into some glyph-icon.

Photographs, for Seers, become the key example of that alchemical momentum towards oneness. A chemical fickleness ties them to any story that comes along, destroying history, place and time, and, like Christine/Christina herself, mesmerise us in(to) acts of getting lost.  

LIGHT READING: BRENT COUGHENOUR

Brent Coughenour, I Pity the Fool (2007). 

Light Reading: Brent Coughenour, no.w.here, 4 Feb 2009.

For no.w.here's first Light Reading of the year, the Milwaukee based artist Brent Coughenour combined two performance pieces - where projected image was accompanied by live soundscapes - with two screenings of recent work. All of which he prefaced by saying that he was interested in exploring the relation of sound and image, trying to give them both equal weight. 

Coughenour suggested that whatever kind of cinema you focussed on, this relationship was often imbalanced. Expanded cinema events could emphasise sound, and leave you dissatisfied with the image, whilst conventional cinema over-prioritised the image. Of course, as he was no doubt aware, precisely what is going on in each of these situations is highly complex. And what does equal weight mean in terms of how the film-experience is perceived? Does it create a viewing experience where sound and image are brought together or one where they become more separate?

Coughenour gave the sense that he asked himself such questions in a precise, disciplined manner. Each of the pieces shown last Wednesday was, as he outlined at the begining, " systems that reveal themselves over the course of the piece." So his first performance comprised a screen of computer generated coloured squares and rectangles,  their complex patterns gradually becoming recognisable people imagery. Coughenour explained how he had shot footage off the TV, before processing it through a computer programme that selected particular colours, the prescribed parameters changing throughout the length of the piece.

In both performance pieces, Coughenour produced the sound live. He said it wasn't improvisation, that most performances were pretty similar, but nonetheless it remained important to his sense of what he was doing to perform the sound. For the first piece this was a "visceral, physical interface" as he held, shook and vibrated an electric guitar. For the second piece - more long, shifting, minimalist drones and arcs of sound - Coughenour was hunched over his Mac Book Pro. 

As several people mentioned in the discussion, such a performance style was curiously related to the history of expanded cinema, particularly its 1970's London Film Makers Co-op incarnation that strongly emphasised the kit of  projector, screen  and film-stuff.  Coughenour, in contrast, seemed to assume a certain visual literacy, or complacency.  Expanded cinema via the laptop has a more immaterial materiality. As Coughenour joked, we had to trust he was actually doing something related on his lap top and not just checking his e-mail. 

For this second performance, Coughenour's presence at his lap top was accompanied by a range of images of an economically depressed Detroit. A long sequence focussed on images of a derelict building. A feeling of economic helplessness was conveyed through images whose content and length seemed partly determined by the random entry, exit and flight of pigeons into the frame, alighting on window sills or shuttling over muddy snow.

Brent Coughenour, I Pity the Fool (2007).

In a final sequence, Coughenour shot through trees at the entrance of a hospital building. The trees criss-crossed the frame, with the buildings doors beyond it. Like the pigeons, people came and entered the hospital as and when. Coughenour's camera watched it all, unmoving, part CCTV, part anti-drama, part (small part) poetic lyricism. 

How to relate all this to Coughenour's concerns with sound-image relationships?  He talked of image and sound coming together and moving away at various moments within a piece, and also of parallel motions. There were some points - the pigeons on the muddy snow, for example - when I felt the equality of sound and image was dependent on a poverty of the image. Similarly, the music - for all its evoking of minmalism, pure noise and drones - had  a rising, dramatic emotionality that the image refused. This refusal struck me as a difficult and slightly perverse state to attain - and one that imposed considerable strictures on the filmmaker's choice of images.

As for the films, Night Flight -  comprised, Coughenour said, of "rogue material wrestled into interior logic" - began with pulses of image very literally accompanied by acoustic drum beats. Sound was a flare of image, a tonal quality, and the image, likewise, became percussive. The flares of image alternated between either side of the screen (originally Night Flight was shown on two monitors). This confirmed how Coughenour's explorations were taking place within sound and within image singularly, not just in their interrelation. So, yes, literalism meets synaesthesia.

Lake, meanwhile, was a meditative study of boats and water, a metonymic portrayal of a place that also evoked a tradition of experimental films turning to water or glass for their potential to open up issues of screen, surface, reflection, and transparency. But Coughenour had a surprise in store that again asserted his difference from structuralist film making. The camera went underwater to abruptly conclude Lake with the gothic melodrama of an underwater skeleton. 

Something about Coughenour's energy as a film maker seemed contained in this gesture. Mixing absurdity and profundity, he explained, having my cake and eating it too... raising the spectre of narrative... making two pieces in one.. I come down on the side of beauty, but at the same time...

 

The next Light Reading, on Feb 24 at 7pm,  is New Work by David Rimmer. Tickets £5 on the door/ £4 in advance. Reserve a place by e-mailing james.holcombe@no-w-here.org.uk