Friday, November 14, 2008
Other Documentation
I have put some documentation of the installation and a primary source of research in the EA Seniors Drop Box, it is in the folder entitled Sophie.
Sound
I decided at the beginning of this project that the sound was to be an equal element to the visual installation. I originally had the intention of using more instruments; I experimented with instruments other than the piano, like the harmonica (as a reference to Leone's Once Upon A Time in the West), the bass, guitar and different types of percussion. Working with a friend of mine, Simon Waldron we decided on a simple chord progression which would be repeated throughout the film. Once I finished the final edit of the visuals I decided to stick with just the piano and atmospheric sounds recorded when I was filming at Macraes Flat. A pair of Paradise Ducks (also often considered a pest due to there breeding ability) were there each time I was there, I decided to use the sounds they made as another instrument in the score, layering them up to work with the piano movements.
Nature Vs Nurture
Rousseau saw a fundamental divide between society and human nature. Rousseau believed that man was good when in the state of nature (the state of all other animals, and the condition humankind was in before the creation of civilization and society), but is corrupted by society.
“ The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said "This is mine," and found people naive enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody. ”
Rousseau identifies nature with the primitive state of savage man. Later he took nature to mean the spontaneity of the process by which man builds his egocentric, instinct based character and his little world. Nature thus signifies interiority and integrity, as opposed to that imprisonment and enslavement which society imposes in the name of progressive emancipation from cold-hearted brutality.
Stanley Kubrick, whose films make strong comments on human nature, rejects the idea of the noble savage:
“Man isn't a noble savage, he's an ignoble savage. He is irrational, brutal, weak, silly, unable to be objective about anything where his own interests are involved — that about sums it up. I'm interested in the brutal and violent nature of man because it's a true picture of him. And any attempt to create social institutions on a false view of the nature of man is probably doomed to failure.”
I attended a lecture given by Nigel Latta at the
"Nature versus Nurture: Are we born bad or raised bad?"
Violent crimes, such as rape and murder, often partly reflected a combination of both genetic factors and a traumatic childhood, but violent offending was not inevitable.
Even the most damaged individual still had a choice about whether to pull the trigger, he said.
Mr Latta highlighted research conducted by the
The world-first research showed that about 85% of the severely maltreated children who had low levels of a protective enzyme, MAOA, developed antisocial behaviour, including convictions for violent crimes.
However, few of those with a gene producing high levels of MAOA developed antisocial behaviours.
Early intervention to help at-risk children before the age of 5, and their families, was crucial and Government funding should be diverted to ensure this happened, Mr Latta said.
The lecture reflected in a lot of ways what I already believed regarding the Nature/Nurture debate. I don't agree with Rousseau or Kubrick's idea's on the true nature of man, I think what makes us who we are is a combination of genetics and experience. Although the cases of feral children do give some interesting insight in to the human mind; particularly the importance of language to social development, they are unique cases, and cannot be used to propagate universal truths.
I tend to side with existential arguments that there are no universal truths or at least none that we humans can know.
I see my installation as a discussion of all these idea's, through the narrative I wanted to highlight the hypocrisy of the 'mental ladder'- how we set ourselves a part from other living things. I used the juxtaposition of the rabbiter’s relationship with his dog and his relationship to the rest of his environment to emphasise this. I also wanted to suggest the importance of 'the journey' and 'the self'. The western inspired 'lone-ranger' character traverses the landscape in search of the pest or 'villain', but is his existence and task any more noble than that of which he hunts?
On first glance he is a kin to Defoe's romanticised idea of the 'natural man', surviving by necessity like Crusoe. As the story continues we see clues to societies influence upon him; the gun, the cigarette, the fire, the poison. These elements suggest he has been assigned a task by society, not simply trying to escape its conventions. The book is another important element, the character possesses language and perhaps the ability to reason, so what is behind his choices and actions?
Kierkegaard's belief in the importance of the self and the self's relation to the world being grounded in self-reflection and introspection was a particular influence. I see the characters journey through the narrative as one towards enlightenment, although we do not know whether this is achieved or not.
Immanuel Kant described it simply as freedom to use one's own intelligence.
I chose to display the narrative as a dual screen installation because I wanted to imply a more complex argument than the simple story of a hunter and his dog. My main aesthetic intention was to be as subtle as possible with the story telling to allow room for the audience to draw their own conclusions. I think I achieved this to some extent, but there is definately room for improvement.
I also liked the way I could separate the characters using the screens, hopefully creating tension between the human and the non-human.Pests
"an organism which has characteristics that are regarded by humans as injurious or unwanted"
My studio practice this semester has been particularly focussed on pests, what humans regard as a pest and why we do so. This poses the much wider question of 'what makes us Human?'. I have been researching the subject of feral children in relation to this, as scientists and psycologists have used these unique cases to argue what the true nature of mankind may be.
"we do not value the behavior or soul of the fly or cockroach to the same degree that we do the chimpanzee or domestic dog or cat. We human being's do have a ladder representing our judgement as to "likeability," and it is not a great surprise to learn that the species placed at the top of our ladder are those genetically most like us and those we have domesticated to behave in ways we prefer....to do so is not wrong- but it is human. That we do so merely illustrates that we design our mental universe by the use of concepts, which suggests that our first task is to develop ways to understand our own mind by understanding the concepts it employs"
-Feral Children and Clever Animals by Douglas Keith Canland.
My studio practice this semester has been particularly focussed on pests, what humans regard as a pest and why we do so. This poses the much wider question of 'what makes us Human?'. I have been researching the subject of feral children in relation to this, as scientists and psycologists have used these unique cases to argue what the true nature of mankind may be.
"we do not value the behavior or soul of the fly or cockroach to the same degree that we do the chimpanzee or domestic dog or cat. We human being's do have a ladder representing our judgement as to "likeability," and it is not a great surprise to learn that the species placed at the top of our ladder are those genetically most like us and those we have domesticated to behave in ways we prefer....to do so is not wrong- but it is human. That we do so merely illustrates that we design our mental universe by the use of concepts, which suggests that our first task is to develop ways to understand our own mind by understanding the concepts it employs"
-Feral Children and Clever Animals by Douglas Keith Canland.
Sunday, September 7, 2008
Print The Legend: The Myth Of The West, The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh
For the Victorians it was the "exotic" East, as the late Edward Said pointed out in Orientalism, which revealed how fiction so often seems preferable to fact, and how we have a need to construct a mythological place on which to project our secret dreams and fantasies.
And so with the Wild West, argues Print the Legend: The myth of the West. That, too, was just as much a construct and the Western a celluloid vision of a prelapsarian playground where men were men and women knew their place. This idealisation, argues the curator, Patricia Bickers, goes back to Bishop Berkeley's 18th-century imperialist musings, when he claimed that, from Europe, "Westward the course of empire takes its way". The visionary American poet Walt Whitman also spoke of America's "manifest destiny", writing "for these states tend inland, and towards the Western sea, and I will also" (though he never travelled further west than the Mississippi.)
The Wild West has continued to exert a powerful influence both as image and metaphor on the American psyche and on Europeans who have never visited the continent, but grew up with cowboys riding across their Sunday-afternoon TVs.
How many of us remember the mythic heroes from our youths such as The Lone Ranger with his sidekick, Tonto, or the strong silent Raw Hide, who just kept those wagons rollin' rollin' rollin'? But how does all this work as an exhibition and, as with so many ideas-led shows, is the theory more interesting than the event?
In John Ford's late Western The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, the editor of the local paper proclaims "when the legend becomes fact, print the legend". It is this line that gives the show its title. Longing and desire meld in Isaac Julien's three-screen projection about two gay cowboys meeting in a cattle market. This draws on the homoerotic backdrop that colours so many Westerns where the "true" relationships – as in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid – are between men.
Adam Chodzko's photographic diptych also plays with fact and fantasy by placing hoardings describing a north London car park and Flagstaff, Arizona in their opposite locations and Peter Granser's ersatz "cowboys" never look more than their Teutonic, role-playing selves located among neat suburban German streets.
In Gillian Wearing's video we, the viewers, watch Western enthusiasts as they sit drinking and watching themselves acting a "shoot out" in the Hayward Gallery.
The white screen sited on waste ground opposite the gallery appears to be a blank canvas – on to which we might project anything – until the sun goes down over Edinburgh and an image of John Wayne comes up. Slowed to one frame every 23 minutes and running 24 hours a day, the length of Douglas Gordon's work corresponds in real time to the five-year search that is the subject of John Ford's classic 1956 western The Searchers. Images of longing weave through other works, such as Salla Tykka's adolescent rite of passage choreographed to the swelling score of Ennio Morricone's music from Once Upon a Time in the West, while Mike Nelson's underground scarlet cavern of desire, hidden like something illicit in the basement, references Clint Eastwood "painting the town red" in High Plains Drifter.
Thursday, 13 March 2008
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/reviews/print-the-legend-the-myth-of-the-west-the-fruitmarket-gallery-edinburgh-794846.html
Salla Tykka
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QvoLE7B7v4YThe films of Salla Tykka, another Finnish artist also have a certain air of cinematic auteurism. While these are usually single screen projections they share the same non-traditional form of narrative. In the same way Akerman and Ahtilas installations seem form a continuous loop, Tykka’s films give the viewer the opportunity to enter at anytime and still evoke a similar feeling.
Common to many of Tykkä’s short films is the moment of emotional and physical metamorphosis experienced by young women in a combination of natural and constructed settings. The situations are intentionally ambiguous, highly charged emotionally and sexually, and utilize cinematic devices in order to heighten tension.
This building of tension is particularly relevant to her recent exhibition Cave and Zoo, which spent three months at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery in 2007. Cave is a trilogy consisting of Lasso (2000), Thriller (2001) and Cave (2003). All of which work with ideas of contemplation and vigilance building to a climax of revelation or confrontation. Lasso was seen as part of the Venice Biennale in 2001 and is set to Ennio Morricone’s score for Western classic ‘Once Upon a Time in the West’. It begins with a young Finnish girl in track pants coming to a window of a suburban house to watch unnoticed, a young man performing an intricate lasso routine inside the lounge. Tykka also plays with the notion of hyper-reality, exposing a moment in a young woman's life in which ‘one's inability to face the other - or oneself, even - is squeezed into a powerful sensation somewhere on the edge of the unreal.’[1] The significance of spectatorship is also evoked in Lasso, we the voyeur, are seeing in the Girl a reflection of ourselves, this is even more pronounced when the camera reveals the Girl’s own reflection on the window she is looking through.
This idea is also explored in her more recent 2006 piece, Zoo which follows a stylish female protagonist who explores the animal enclosures at a zoo with a camera in hand. Here the relationship between subject and object is teased out and complicated. Tykka uses the camera angles and the musical score to suggest that while the woman observes the animals, she herself is being preyed upon. The film is punctuated by scenes of an underwater rugby game, ‘creating moments of frenzied, violent activity.’[2]Twelve minutes after we meet the main character she commits suicide, the many missing rungs on the ladder towards her end are what make the film so thought provoking. Like Akerman, Tykka employs an almost unconscious detached symbolism to form the narrative, using props laden with meaning (such as the Canon camera) and the zoo’s inhabitants (an owl and a tiger) as crucial supporting roles. It is not until the end we discover the true meaning to the camera, we watch as it scouts the location unaware of its search for the perfect death scene. Over and over again the female character played by Finnish actress Terhi Suorlahti, holds the viewfinder to her eye, but never releases the shutter. We get the sense that she is not there to view the animals. Often compared to the auteurism of Hitchcock, Tykka also uses a staccato score to build the tension, this coupled with the use of camera angles and cuts to underwater rugby make the trajectory towards self-harm less obvious.
When Suorlahti finally hurries towards her pond and steadies her camera on the rocks above to make the first and last picture, which seem to mirror the opening scenes of the film, where we see from the tank’s floor one of the male figures at the surface of the pond mocking a dead man’s floating body.
Here Zoo shares the same deconstruction of narrative seen in Akerman and Ahtila’s films, the filmic compositions exist in varied time and space, while still retaining certain grains of the original "theme," as a sort of fluctuating loop. Akerman along with her Finnish contemporaries use the qualities of cinema to set up material clashes with idealized versions of reality. They all seem to share an underlying vision of a ‘truer-cinema’, one created by displaying the everyday as the extraordinary, and the extraordinary as the everyday.
They all seem to follow the post-Godardian need to deal differently with the referent. There work poses direct questions to the audience about cinematic language and the presence of the spectator.
Eija-Liisa Ahtila
The importance of the individual visitor in forming a narrative is also relevant to the video installation work of contemporary Finnish artist Eija-Liisa Ahtila. Her works examine the processes of perception and the ascription of meaning, deconstructing the story and dividing it across the exhibition space. Her work since1990 has been more deeply concerned with themes surrounding ‘individual identity and the limit of the self and body in relation to the other.’[1] According to Ahtila, what interests her in films and photos is above all the story. Her stories are based on interviews and research transposed into material for the imagination during her scriptwriting process. The impossibilities generated by the imagination are seamlessly incorporated into realistic settings, creating contrast between the extraordinary and the everyday. She calls her films “human dramas” dealing with human relationships, sexuality, the difficulty of communication, individual identity, its formation and disintegration, these ideals are also reflected in the physical design of her installations as she often uses multiple screens adjacent and opposite each other to display her films, making the visitor the final editor of the narrative, they are not simply viewing a film they become part of the process. 
This is particularly prevalent in her 1999 installation Consolation Service shown at the Tate Modern. The piece follows the collapse of a marriage fragmented between two adjacent screens, which allow a ‘dichotomized point of view on a single scene while inviting us to see beyond the illusion of fiction.’[1] And also 2001’s The Present which comprises of five films each displayed on a separate monitor, all dealing with the underlying theme of forgiveness. Here the viewer is again faced with the challenge of forming connections between the images they are able to take in across the five screens.
Ahtila, like Akerman, explores hyper-realist reality which Jean Baudrillard describes as "The simulation of something which never really existed." Her multi-screen projections seem to be a conscious awaking of auteurist cinematic tradition, rendering it momentarily strange and new while still uncannily familiar. Her work gives no privilege to time over space or sequence over simultaneity; it is in the act of spectatorship where the importance of these dimensions are decided.
Chantal Akerman
D'est
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDJ3JiSwGYg
Chantal Akerman has continued to create new and unexpected films that explore ideas about image, gaze, space, performance, and narration. Her distinctive visual style is influenced by structuralism and minimalism. Akerman is often discussed with in the context of pioneering feminist film-makers; however she does not describe herself as such, stating “I won’t say I am a feminist film-maker, I’m not making women’ films, I am making Chantal Akerman films”. Despite this her feminist status began with her first film "Saute Ma Ville" (1968, roughly translated as "blow up my city") and continued in "Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai de Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles" (1975), in which actress Delphine Seyrig exists in the world as a mother, homemaker and caretaker. The camera movements with in the claustrophobic domestic interiors are often slow and completely stable. The film places much emphasis on Seyrig's deliberate movements, and her ritualistic domestic behaviour exemplifies even the leaving of a lid off a jar as having startling significance.
As an artist, Akerman’s goal is to explore that hidden story, one of female space and action. This goal reflects the aims of the seventies feminist movement, ‘which was struggling not just for equality, but for attention and understanding in a world of double standards and indifference.’ More recent works by Akerman have an almost documentary tone, though she rejects the documentary label. She has explored the Mexican/American border and illegal immigration (in "De l'autre côté" 2002 – "From the other side"); the Israel/Palestine conflict ("Là Bas" 2005 – "Down There") and the American South ("Sud" 1999 – "South"), she stresses that her films remain fictions describing them as still always about her. This personal significance is alluded to in the title of her movie and installation exploring post-Communist Eastern Europe: "D'est: Au bord de la fiction" (1995 – "From the East: Bordering on Fiction").
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2F9T7IdfiM
At the basis of D'Est is the concern for the daily, ‘for privileging the personal over the national or the political.’[1] The camera's "choice" of movement, which seems arbitrary at first, exposes the subjective nature of any narrative an individual could choose to recall. In D’est, Akerman uses certain shots or frames as echoes of other, past narratives, which seem to reflect the depth of our own expectations as spectators in the cinematic tradition and as consumers of different types of visual media. Though the film ostensively speaks about the fall of the Eastern bloc it disavows the de rigueur voice of the documentary. This is seen particularly in the recording and construction of the films sound.
Instead of the voiceovers and narrative structure which would customarily weave and connect the content, the sound often acts in contrast to the image. Voices are deliberately not chosen by the recording and mixing apparatus for our ear to hear as if "naturally.” Its sound was recorded live and then remixed it in its entirety; Akerman often uses the sound as the dominant element of the sequence even exceeding the image and its duration. The relentless montage of sounds and images gives a ‘sense of obsessive repetition and looping.’[2] The camera movements can be described as lateral, slow and deliberate, not stopping to focus on anything and not making exceptions. She attempts to film people, buildings, cars, empty spaces, trees with the same indifferent eye. ‘The viewer is thus led to question the origins of these sounds, as well as of the images themselves, to which the sounds both do and do not respond.’[3]
Akerman's cinema speaks of a perceived loss of the real, born of a discerning look at the raw elements that make up the medium itself. Like the films of Jean-Luc Godard and other new wave directors, Akerman explores a reaction to cinema’s ever increasing tendency to exploit developments in cinematic technology and make possible ‘a seamless cinema, inducing ever more persuasively "realistic" effects through the pursuit of technological perfection in visual and sound reproduction.’ Akerman abandons this need for technical perfection exemplified in the slick "realism" of Hollywood and instead employs a style of editing which allows the editor's work to show. This was particularly poignant in her exhibition "Bordering on Fiction: Chantal Akerman's D'Est” first shown at Walker Art Center, Minneapolism, Minnesota in June 1995.
This installation, often described as a branching out for Akerman, re-poses questions about cinematic process and the ‘construction of filmic documents through a different physical and ideational space.’[4] The viewer is taken on a three room journey which deconstructs the filmmaking process. The visitor can work backwards through the film-making process from the final product to the artist's vision of the work, and from the technologically "finished" film to the scattered pieces of its sound and image tracks. First the visitor enters a darkened room where the finished version of D'Est, a 107-minute long feature-film shot in Germany, Poland, and Russia in 1992 and 1993 runs continuously. The second gallery space contains video monitors arranged into eight triptychs simultaneously playing different looping fragments of the film. The third gallery consists of a single video monitor and two small speakers placed on the floor, from which Akerman’s voice recites passages from the Hebrew Bible, mixed with some of her own writings on the film and the process of making it. Her installations are essentially aspects of her movies, contingent art works based on her films edited into shorter segments and displayed in a variety of arrangements on monitors. This imagery shares with Godard a concern for filming the movement of the apparatus as it constructs meanings, ‘a movement that goes in both directions at once: forward toward the finished product and backward toward the conditions that made the vision of that product possible.’[5] It is this deconstruction of narrative which plays with the visitor’s awareness of their own spectatorship. The narrative is shaped by when, what and how the viewer chooses to see, and there own recollection and interpretation of the imagery.
As an artist, Akerman’s goal is to explore that hidden story, one of female space and action. This goal reflects the aims of the seventies feminist movement, ‘which was struggling not just for equality, but for attention and understanding in a world of double standards and indifference.’ More recent works by Akerman have an almost documentary tone, though she rejects the documentary label. She has explored the Mexican/American border and illegal immigration (in "De l'autre côté" 2002 – "From the other side"); the Israel/Palestine conflict ("Là Bas" 2005 – "Down There") and the American South ("Sud" 1999 – "South"), she stresses that her films remain fictions describing them as still always about her. This personal significance is alluded to in the title of her movie and installation exploring post-Communist Eastern Europe: "D'est: Au bord de la fiction" (1995 – "From the East: Bordering on Fiction").
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2F9T7IdfiM
At the basis of D'Est is the concern for the daily, ‘for privileging the personal over the national or the political.’[1] The camera's "choice" of movement, which seems arbitrary at first, exposes the subjective nature of any narrative an individual could choose to recall. In D’est, Akerman uses certain shots or frames as echoes of other, past narratives, which seem to reflect the depth of our own expectations as spectators in the cinematic tradition and as consumers of different types of visual media. Though the film ostensively speaks about the fall of the Eastern bloc it disavows the de rigueur voice of the documentary. This is seen particularly in the recording and construction of the films sound.
Instead of the voiceovers and narrative structure which would customarily weave and connect the content, the sound often acts in contrast to the image. Voices are deliberately not chosen by the recording and mixing apparatus for our ear to hear as if "naturally.” Its sound was recorded live and then remixed it in its entirety; Akerman often uses the sound as the dominant element of the sequence even exceeding the image and its duration. The relentless montage of sounds and images gives a ‘sense of obsessive repetition and looping.’[2] The camera movements can be described as lateral, slow and deliberate, not stopping to focus on anything and not making exceptions. She attempts to film people, buildings, cars, empty spaces, trees with the same indifferent eye. ‘The viewer is thus led to question the origins of these sounds, as well as of the images themselves, to which the sounds both do and do not respond.’[3]
Akerman's cinema speaks of a perceived loss of the real, born of a discerning look at the raw elements that make up the medium itself. Like the films of Jean-Luc Godard and other new wave directors, Akerman explores a reaction to cinema’s ever increasing tendency to exploit developments in cinematic technology and make possible ‘a seamless cinema, inducing ever more persuasively "realistic" effects through the pursuit of technological perfection in visual and sound reproduction.’ Akerman abandons this need for technical perfection exemplified in the slick "realism" of Hollywood and instead employs a style of editing which allows the editor's work to show. This was particularly poignant in her exhibition "Bordering on Fiction: Chantal Akerman's D'Est” first shown at Walker Art Center, Minneapolism, Minnesota in June 1995.
This installation, often described as a branching out for Akerman, re-poses questions about cinematic process and the ‘construction of filmic documents through a different physical and ideational space.’[4] The viewer is taken on a three room journey which deconstructs the filmmaking process. The visitor can work backwards through the film-making process from the final product to the artist's vision of the work, and from the technologically "finished" film to the scattered pieces of its sound and image tracks. First the visitor enters a darkened room where the finished version of D'Est, a 107-minute long feature-film shot in Germany, Poland, and Russia in 1992 and 1993 runs continuously. The second gallery space contains video monitors arranged into eight triptychs simultaneously playing different looping fragments of the film. The third gallery consists of a single video monitor and two small speakers placed on the floor, from which Akerman’s voice recites passages from the Hebrew Bible, mixed with some of her own writings on the film and the process of making it. Her installations are essentially aspects of her movies, contingent art works based on her films edited into shorter segments and displayed in a variety of arrangements on monitors. This imagery shares with Godard a concern for filming the movement of the apparatus as it constructs meanings, ‘a movement that goes in both directions at once: forward toward the finished product and backward toward the conditions that made the vision of that product possible.’[5] It is this deconstruction of narrative which plays with the visitor’s awareness of their own spectatorship. The narrative is shaped by when, what and how the viewer chooses to see, and there own recollection and interpretation of the imagery.
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