A DOCUMENTARY HISTORY OF THE CAVERN CINEMA

CS LEIGH on SUBTERRANEAN CINEMA BLUES: Underground "Memories"

Audrey Lam, Underground (2007), 16mm b/w 4:20sec. 

Normally I remember each and every detail about everything but for some reason my recollections of the phenomenon of the subterranean cinema run by the group known as La Mexicaine de la Perforation remains hazy at best. Perhaps there was something in the liquor they served: a mind-bending memory-erasing elixir mixed in with the Pernod.

I think it was Laurent Viel who first told me about it.  He said something about a subterranean cinema in Paris near the Cinematheque Francaise at Palais Chaillot. It was 2004. I guess by then we knew the old Cinematheque was soon going to be lost forever.  My producer and friend Humbert Balsan who was the acting President of the Cinematheque was behind that to some degree and we argued about it quite a lot.

The activities of LMDP were something I knew about. I had attended a concert and an exhibition underground several years before which I found quite honestly to be dreadfully boring.  This is why I never joined a fraternity, I remember saying to a friend.  There were perks of course to make up for the dreadful music and stale underground air for instance the pretty youth of both sexes wearing Dior Homme as if they were Levis.

It would be fair to say I was turned off as I am by most events that involve milling about with no purpose where the band is drunker than the audience and the art on the walls looks like something you might find in a bad hair salon in Ibiza. Still for me the idea of an underground cinema that met in secret was very much a draw.  Cinema in a new setting.

My first instinct was to invite Humbert to join me. He was always game for an adventure if you could find him. I ran this by one of the organizers of and a kingpin member of LMDP who freaked out.  He seemed to think the jig would be up if the President of Cinematheque found out about their "cell." But he didn't know Humbert like I did and I reassured him.

Humbert's reaction was as I expected.  He said it sounded like fun and he was game.  "What films are they screening?" he asked and I told him I didn't know because nobody was able to answer that question for me.  I said, "I think the films are beside the point." "Then what is the point?" he asked laughing out loud. I said, "I think the point is to take a stand for cinema and against the multiplex and that we ought to go to show support. He agreed though added it would probably be boring.

On the night in usual fashion Humbert didn't actually show up but I didn't let that get in the way. I went on my own.  The first time I went they were screening a David Lynch film and I had watched the film many times in better circumstances.  By the time I arrived the film had already started anyway as no one could answer in advance what time the screening would begin.  As I predicted it wasn't going to be about cinema. Nobody really watched the film though people discussed cinema.

Then again in Paris most things are only ever about socializing. Cinema and just about everything else is only a means to an end -  that end being getting together with like-minded partisans to destroy the reputations of others. In this way the subterranean cinema did not disappoint. I ran in to many artists and writers who I know and spotted lots of others I knew only by reputation or from watching them on television's culture circuit.

There were many young actors there who I was more or less avoiding over ground or vice versa and more model/musicians than you could shake a stick at.  I left early certainly before the film ended and I'm pretty sure I thought I would never go back down there.  It seemed silly.

The next morning I phoned Humbert and as was his way he asked why I hadn't called him the night before. I pretended that the seven or eight phone messages I left him were an hallucination and he asked about the cinema. I said something like he was lucky to have missed it and he came back with "There are limits." which was Humbert's elegant way of ending any argument or conversation that had passed its sell by date.

But funny enough each time I heard about another LMDP screening I found myself answering the call and making my way down those steps and braving the crowds to be part of what was going on there.  I must have gone about seven times whenever I was in Paris and I heard about it.

I mostly went there on my own and stayed sometimes for only twenty minutes and on occasion until the wee hours of the morning.  There was something exciting about celebrating cinema in close proximity to the spot on which Henri Langlois raised hell saving the history of cinema for future generations of cineastes to at first cherish and eventually trample over. 

The riots of May 1968 started within a stone's throw of the subterranean cinema and that in itself added a subtext that made the showings of often screened familiar films using bad prints and noisy age-old projectors and shown in the most dreadful conditions something of an act of defiance. 

Had I known then that only four years later the very act of projecting films would be subversive I suspect I would have gone more often.

I'm not going to try to cover the history of the subterranean cinema or the actions of the LMDP here because I don't think I could. I only know what I experienced there.  Among the films I remember watching/experiencing there are APOCALYPSE NOW, SONATINE, LA HAINE, and experimental films by Maya Deren. At least I think that's what I watched.

The history of cinema will always be tied up with myth.  The scenes from films I believe I've watched but don't exist make up the most exciting pocket of my cinematic memory.  No matter how many times I watch ALL ABOUT EVE I still wait for the flashback scene of Eve working in that factory that doesn't exist but is described so vividly it exists for me.

In the same way the things I remember about that subterranean cinema in Paris seem to exist most vividly when I try to recall details that don't come easily to mind.  What I am quite certain of is that it always seemed to rain on the nights I went there. But I never knew until the end of the night when I walked up the steps to go home because the sound of dripping water was so much of a part of those nights spent underground.

MAT COLLISHAW

Matt Collishaw, Shooting Stars (2008). 45 gobo images, hard drive, 3 rotating projectors and fluorescent paint. Copyright Matt Collishaw 2008. Courtesy Haunch of Venison.

Mat Collishaw, Shooting Stars, Haunch of Venison, 11 July-31 August, 2008

Works and approaches can form into categories in the mind, and it's good when a show comes along that shakes those up a bit. Matt Collishaw's Shooting Stars show did that, in numerous ways, but mostly in its use of a strict formalism - foregrounding the materials, and processes by which works and effects were achieved - in the interests, not of critique, but of creating ever more fantasy and illusion.

Take the series of works entitled Ultraviolet Garden (2008). Here the Cottingley Fairy photographs have been appropriated by Collishaw and placed in light boxes lit by ultra-violet bulbs. The images - photo's staged in 1917 and 1920 by Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths which, they claimed, proved the existence of fairies - are much reproduced, and thus any claim to interest the objects here might have depends largely on the form of presentation Collishaw finds. The visible ultra violet bulbs foreground the sense of staging and theatricality, but, in the darkened galleries, they also recreate the images as convincing representations of some other reality. 

Ultraviolet Garden (1). Light box with UV tubes. 41 x 51 x 10cm. Copyright Matt Collishaw 2008. Courtesy Haunch of Venison.

Alongside their delicate presence is Throbbing Gristle (2008), a two metre wide circular sculpture comprised of an abundance of animal, bird, human and mythological figures. At intervals the whole sculpture begins to rotate, and a strobe light turns the static figures into a bacchanalian scene, where Bosch meets the Chapman brothers in an orgy of drinking, bestiality and baroque excess - topped by  a circle of angelic eagles flapping their wings. Then the strobe lights cease and the model returns to its static position. 

Matt Collishaw, Throbbing Gristle (2008). Steel, aluminum, plaster, resin, stroboscope. Diameter 200cm. Copyright Matt Collishaw 2008. Courtesy Haunch of Venison. 

Watching Throbbing Gristle I found myself thinking less of histories of the moving image and more of the works relationship to commonplaces of gallery going and audience involvement, to notions - often evoked by critics, galleries and artists alike - of works as completed by the audiences involvement, or open to whatever interpretation the viewer may bring. The works here seemed to stick two fingers up at this homily. Moving between two states of moving and stillness, Throbbing Gristle is itself acting out both object and interpretation, absorbing the processes of meaning making into its own operation. All the viewers in the gallery can do - and it's a pleasurable task - is watch and accept and, like some circus audience, marvel.

This usurping of the audience was also evident in Shooting Stars (2008), an installation filling the whole first floor space. Here, images of children are projected on the walls, in flashes and blinks of light, at different locations in the room, so that you often turn and miss the image. I gathered many of the children were naked, that the photo's were early twentieth century, but I'm not sure without the handout I would have realized that these were child prostitutes, nor that some of the photo's were re-staged by Collishaw with an older model.I rarely perceived a concreteness of image as shown in the installation photographs at the top of this review. That said, many do linger on the wall in a faint, blurry projection that seems to represent the audiences own perceptual processes of after-image, whilst others meander across the dark walls in literal shooting star like patterns, slow enough that I could see the flash of light, turn and process something of the contents of the image.   

Again, I found the work a curious mix. I'm tempted to talk of its fragmentary nature, its eluding of the viewers perceptual processes, but actually its a pre-programmed whole, easily sold as such by the gallery. Similarly, Collishaw's notes in the program suggest the piece is to be considered as a critique of the sexual exploitation of children. But this has to sit alongside the fact that a lot of the piece (and maybe all of it in a gallery situation where people walk quickly through) is a pleasant, enjoyable spectacle of light and colour- largely because the images are too fleeting and ephemeral to trouble with their content. More troublingly, post- Barthes writing on the striptease, the piece seems to mimic the very processes whereby the striptease depends on a constant deferral of disclosure. All of which may be the point, and the piece certainly has its troubling, nagging elements. But I disagree with the notes on my handout. I think the work itself makes no worthy claims, and looks for its effects in a more difficult, illusive and amoral territory.  

The Island of The Dead (2008) LCD screen hard drive, baroque frame, two way mirror. 114x 67x 15cm. Copyright Matt Collishaw 2008. Courtesy Haunch of Venison

The same can be said for The Island of The Dead (2008). Within its opulent, baroque  frame, Arnold Böcklin's eponymous painting is turned into an animated video, showing the movements of light and shadow on the island over the course of a day. The image is projected on a two way mirror, all of which makes a work inhabiting a number of contradictions: from thematic plays of life and death, objective and subjective, to issues concerning the objects own status as art commodity, offering a critique of representational traditions - video, painting, elaborate framing - whilst reconstituting them as a new opulent object. 

I enjoyed this show, but if the works here are a critique then I don't think they enact that criticism by adopting an oppositional position. All the pieces here inhabit an emotional and aesthetic territory that posits the image as uncertain, but is also supremely confident about the completeness of the experience it offers. It leaves less a sense of outrage or engagement than a combination of enjoyment and numbing meaninglessness. What kind of critique emerges from such an endpoint? 

BOOKNOTES: BOB NICKAS' THEFT IS VISION

Bob Nickas, Theft is Vision: Collected Writings and Interviews (JRP Ringier & Les Presses du Réel, Zurich, 2008 ISBN 978-3-905770-36-0)

Some books prompt initial over enthusiasm, and this collection of essays by Bob Nickas is one of those. Reading it, I couldn't help wishing I'd had copies to hand at one of the many recent debates on art criticism: to distribute, to discuss, to turn to in solace, even to hurl. Gathering writings from 1995 to the present, it offers a valuable case study of many of the themes of those discussions: the production of new forms, the contexts of critical writing, the relation of criticism to the work it discusses and to the broader social reality. It offers a powerful example of how a writing based on the occasion - of an exhibition, a record, an artist - can be edited to form a novel like accumulation of themes, motifs, dialogues, plots and - perhaps - resolutions. 

This notion of the essay collection as "novel" is central to the books organization and structure. Texts are arranged into four chapters, whose broadly chronological structure is also subject to the more non-linear time lines of personal memory and career, seeking a balance between the moment in itself and the moment as remembered. Each chapter then emerges as a careful chronology of moods and tones. Hence Chapter 2 is largely  a chronicle of the work , monetary excess, and political context of the eighties New York art world. It captures the alienation, pleasure and ridiculousness of this by offering first hand testimony in articles and interviews written twenty years later, and also includes a piece on Laurie Parson, an artist much heralded by the art press and galleries who abandons both the art world and the term "artist" as a self-description. Chapter 3 builds a similar complex of tones and experiences, focussed more on performance art and music scenes, with pieces on Leigh Bowery, The Fall, Jamie Reid, and Johnny Vomit and the Dry Heaves. 

In addition, there are several overarching themes which unfold over the books duration, principally the legacy of Warhol, both as a set of representational possibilities - appropriation, response to cultural phenomena, sense of death and disaster - and as a social phenomenon. Theft is Vision begins with a biographical piece that places On Kawara and Warhol as the foundations of Nickas' sense of artistic possibility.  These two artists, both complementary and contradictory, unfold through the articles and decades that follow, although Warhol is by far the most prominent. The biographical, too, remains a viable writing strategy - particularly in several pieces of music journalism - but Nickas' strategy is to place works within a range of contexts, not solely the personal. 

Working mostly by example rather than theory, the book articulates Nickas' particular sense of the critics role. Early on in his career he rejects the writing of straight forward reviews and the writing of well-paid catalogue essays for artists he doesn't respect, preferring a criticism that is:

more free-associative than analytic, more poetic than polemical, that moves almost promiscuously from one idea to another. At the same time (while you're having all this fun), I think you shouldn't lose sight of the fact that you want to have a serious engagement with the works themselves. (206) 

Criticism emerges as a form of detective work, sometimes literally as when Nickas tracks down the elusive Laurie Parsons, but also, in one of the books most lucid pieces, in tracing the iconography of the American flag from Jasper Johns and Faith Ringold to Candy Noland and Tommy Hilfiger.

Other critical strategies include the listing of global events contemporary to a particular art work, or interviews that function as a form of social archaeology, keen to assuage artists assumptions about the world they live in, the decisions they make in relation to politics, and in the workings of the market. The collection also includes several image-text pieces, where Nickas provides found or original text to accompany artists and photographers. Throughout there is a contentedness to Nickas' writing, a clear sense of its purpose, its context and its limitations - he tells a critic who thinks they are more important than the art that they are deluded. Like any good detective - and in another connection to Warhol - Nickas is also chameleon like, to a degree emptying himself to be filled in regard to particular encounters. His own critical position is theorized in a conversation with Jeff Wall, whereas in an interview with Wolfgang Tillmans he articulates a social and political ambiguity present both in Nickas' writing and in Tillmans' photographs. 

The latest in JRP Ringier's excellent Documents series, this is a beautifully produced and purposefully edited and designed book. Each piece is prefaced with the original circumstances of its production: Purple, Afterall, and Artforum are where Nickas' writing has most often found its home. A number of both essays and interviews are unpublished, suggesting the books paradigm only participates occasionally in the agendas of other publications. It also enables  certain encounters, like the Tillmans' interview, to remain rough and draft-like, avoiding strategies of chronology and comprehensiveness that publication or commission might demand.

The use of the novel form evokes a certain expectation as one nears the end of Theft is Vision and encounters Nickas' most recent work. Here - in discussions of artists including Steven Parrino, Gregory Crewdson, Kelley Walker and Gardar Eide Einarsson - interests in appropriation, for example, that have been present throughout the book, are now part of "an art that is increasingly covert, rather than obvious or confrontational, in terms of its message; politically-charged subject matter is more of an undertow, pulling you in from beneath a calm or welcoming surface." (225)

Nickas never claims to have stumbled on some spirit of the age, but the strength of Theft is Vision is how it allows any conclusions to emerge out of an accumulation of individual case studies. More Henry Fielding than B.S.Johnson, if it's a novel about anything, its about freedom, its complex identity and machinations, be it in art, revolution, or the rambles of Central Park; the moment and its representation; the something made and the something participated in. 

NOTEBOOK: OLSON ON ALBERS or CRITICISM AS INCOMPREHENSION

Hold on for the conversational ride. This is Charles Olson on Josef Albers:

who was one of the damndest, as you know, if you know his paintings, is one of the - well, how could you - those of you who know - how do you say what Albers was, what Albers is, as a painter (he was eighty-two years old last week)? You know those damned things, those squares, and those squares and those squares, and those circles and those circles and those circles, and those angle lines and those angle lines and those angle lines, and those labyrinths of those visual optical trappings. What is that? I mean, think of it. It's one of the stiffest, dryest forms of both line and paint that still is known to me. Mondrian and he, say, - as of, say, Klee and Kandinsky who were his contemporaries at the Bauhaus and were young painters together... (Muthologos, Vol II, 75)

26 March 1968. An informal talk by Charles Olson at Beloit College, where he'd gone to deliver a series of lectures in contemporary poetry. If Robert Rauschenberg had studied with Josef Albers for the discipline of someone far removed from himself in temperament and practice, Olson's response is more one of engaqed incomprehension, bordering on annoyance and frustration. 

Perhaps I should practice this as a critical stance. But is it hard to find work so obligingly and provocatively and engagingly incomprehensible?

There's an energy to this response - it seems to be something that has obsessed Olson for a while. Indeed, he says this in response, not to a direct question about Albers, but  to a question about whether being a poet effected his administrative decisions whilst rector of Black Mountain College!

I'm intrigued that Olson, although expressing his incomprehension, actually finds an effective language to talk about Albers compositional and serial procedures, largely through the rhythm of thought and monologue. It offers me a model of critical response that balances engagement with total incomprehension...

Those squares and those squares and those squares

Those circles and those circles and those circles

with annoyance and frustration...

Those angle lines and those angle lines and those angle lines

as you know if you know well how could you is one of the well how do you say

was, is, as, one of the

THE RHINOCEROS IN THE CAVERN CINEMA: FANTASY, ENTROPY AND ALBRECHT DÜRER

Is that a rhinoceros in the cavern cinema? More particularly, is that the rhinoceros according to Albrecht Dürer? I was trying to practice an associative free-thinking in terms of the cavern cinema, looking at Smithson's drawing and trying to see where it lead me, and it led me to a rhinoceros.

The link isn't completely gratuitous. Dürer is, I suspect, an artist who has claimed a relevance for many generations of artists. To offer a somewhat random set of examples: when The Blue Rider Almanac was re-published in 1965 (first English edition 1974) it included an introduction that cited an early review of the almanac by Hans Tietze, who particularly admired the new publication for how:

it reminds us of the wonderful privilege that Albrecht Dürer claimed for the artist: to create a world out of himself which outside of himself would not exist. (44)

Mel Bochner, meanwhile - who collaborated with Smithson on The Domain of the Great Bear (1966) - reproduced Dürer's Melancholia I in his essay The Serial Attitude (1967), establshing Dürer's connection to the contemporary by observing: 

Perspective, almost universally dismissed as a concern in recent art, is a fascinating example of the application of prefabricated systems. In the work of artists like Ucello, Durer, Piero, Saendredam, Eakins ( especially their drawings) it can be seen to exist entirely as methodology. It demonstrates now how things appear but rather the workings of its own strict postulates. As it is, these postulates are serial. (Solar System & Rest Rooms: Writings and Interviews 1965-2007,45)

More recently, in Jack Pierson's Angel Youth (2008)- a collection of reprinted book works accompanying his recent show at IMMA, Dublin - I noted his own acknowledgement of a Dürer phase as he worked on his series of Self -Portraits: "At that time I was also at the height of that Dürer research, which means I had a couple of books and looked at them all the time." (434)

A Dürer phase. Every artist should have one. And every cavern cinema should have its own rhinoceros. Does it storm through? Does it appear on the walls, a combination of a projection and something emerging out of the walls itself? A simple matter of projector light working with the bumps and cavities of the cavern wall. 

Let's make Dürer's rhinoceros a trope for our explorations here. The entropic cancelling of Smithson's cinema - its film of its own creation - seems to be parallelled in the form of Dürer's rhinoceros. Let's look at it again:

Almost a conceptual piece itself, constructed by Durer from a letter and a sketch of an Indian rhinoceros that he had never seen. 

Actually, I think there may be another reason why my mind seems inexorably rhinoceros-bound. Thinking of the legacy of Smithson's cinema I've been led to consider many contemporary engagements with the space of the cinema - from Tobias Putrih's many invented cinemas to the Printed Cinema of Rosa Barba, or to non-specifically cinematic engagements with space, which nonetheless seem to reflect something of the way we respond to moving images, such as the installations of Monika Sosnowska. 

Powerful work all, much of it, as Francesco Manacorda observes in an article on Putrih in the current issue of Piktogram, "on the cusp between rigorous research and surrealist prototype." (79) Because central to all these artists is the level of participation, whereas  Smithson's project has a whole set of associations which are out of reach, beyond reach, unactivated, self-cancelling. If a work of Putrih's such Lost Cinema Lost (with Runa Islam, 2008) invites the participant into sensory engagement on numerous levels, then Smithson offers a future of mechanical breakdown and stony darkness. What is the legacy of the cavern cinema if we stay within this realm of associations, rather than seeing it as a vehicle for fantasy and imagination? It's no cinema at all, except as a memory, or a faint sense of something strange happening deep underground.

This is where, surprised, I encounter Dürer's rhinoceros, through whose enormous armored bulk the cavern cinema can be both fantasy and participation, both a distillation of our experiences and something almost unperceivably  strange and other. Like Smithson's heap of words the Pliny derived caption on Dürer's woodcut can be seen as the source both of the drawing and of a new kind of cinema:

On the first of May in the year 1513 AD, the powerful King of Portugal, Manuel of Lisbon, brought such a living animal from India, called the rhinoceros. This is an accurate representation. It is the colour of a speckled tortoise, and is almost entirely covered with thick scales. It is the size of an elephant but has shorter legs and is almost invulnerable. It has a strong pointed horn on the tip of its nose, which it sharpens on stones. It is the mortal enemy of the elephant. The elephant is afraid of the rhinoceros, for, when they meet, the rhinoceros charges with its head between its front legs and rips open the elephant's stomach, against which the elephant is unable to defend itself. The rhinoceros is so well-armed that he elephant cannot harm it. It is said that the rhinoceros is fast, impetuous and cunning.

NOTATIONS ON A CAVERN CINEMA (READING CLARK COOLIDGE)

In thinking about how to respond to,  think about, and activate the cavern cinema, I select as one model three passages from Clark Coolidge's book Mine: The One That Enters The Stories: 

But all my dreams are color as the  caves again furl on beyond the ceaseless drenching wall. They pick up again at the god tone of the flattened stone. It calls without cease approachless since all the words are there. Each sheet transparent to the further's beat, a wetness to prevail on reception's ache. A point is always reached. Doubts in tireless process of sharpening themselves. But the sentence never ends. Whatever moons and suns and the laps of material filing that scratch in passing. The bumping of the wind in night's restless grade. Thought the dream makes a loggia of Field's stacked porches and a gift of the toy complexities there, only a tissue of the covering letter survives on waking: "Your crystallized piss..." (49)

I became fascinated with precisely where things were missing in the world. Actions after all leave gaps to ponder, the slightest empty crack as the place where something happened. If it were a move they were making, everything possible would be taken away. These rocks were filmed. That swathe of cement. Those chairs. No, not that one, these over here. Then they were taken away. Now they are here. Since that time some of my hairs have come loose. Others have stayed. You want to be the master of what you say and do, you want to be the boss of tooth decay. You want to shoot horses far from their stable. You must delay the filming of the film. (61)

Then Philip said, the stalactites felt such an urge to come into contact with each other that they filled every surface with a prickle of tiny points. Millions of men in a room scratching and shouting at each other. They do not agree that the situation truly is as it has just been described. The surface would come apart otherwise, bringing down accusations and hands full of a glassy ham.  The concert could not proceed, the wires had been removed, the listeners stitched to their seats. On the stage all that could be seen was a pair of wings, like harps constructed of moldy satin from an old sofa.(107)

Clark Coolidge, MINE: The One That Enters The Stories (The Figures, 2004, first published 1982). ISBN 0-935724-14-1