Multiplicity as a growing conceptual and technical approach in Antoine d’Agata’s work
— Read on www.magnumphotos.com/theory-and-practice/accumulation-images-excess-release-antoine-agata-grids-stasis/
Tag: Artists
Artist: Douglas Gordan Feature Film (1999)
I just loved this AV project so much. The Tate tells us,
“Gordon’s installation focuses on James Conlon, the principal conductor of the Paris Opera at the time. He leads a hundred-piece orchestra playing Bernard Herrmann’s score for the psychological thriller Vertigo1958, directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Over 80 minutes, the combined length of all of the music in Vertigo, the camera never leaves Conlon. We follow his animated body, his agitated hands and his expressive face. The musicians are heard but never seen.
Herrmann’s score is an essential element of Hitchcock’s film. Endlessly circling and spiralling, the music perfectly matches the tale of duplicity and obsessive love. The original film is playing without sound on a monitor as part of the installation.” (Ladd, 2019)
I think the Artangel Youtube video has the most wonderful description, far more inventive than the Tate’s dry blurb.
“In Feature Film, Douglas Gordon arranged a divorce between sound and vision – and orchestrated an affair between what you remember and what you see.” (2016)
As a child, I was fed a diet of old movies. I loved them. And the music was always an incredibly important element – it prompted me to listen to classical music and imagine all sorts of dramatic scenarios in which I was the tragic star. I will have invented many a an imaginary SJF production playing in the rockery and tree-caves of our garden with this type of music and associated narratives in the back on my mind (or perhaps I should say the forefront). A lot of my work has aimed in some way to come to terms with this although as I write now, I do remember that child and the imaginary games with tenderness – and without the rancour I usually feel for being duped as growing up by a misogynistic society into thinking I was just a thing; a not very clever or valuable thing at that. Whatever all of that may mean or lead to, this music consequently feels a bit like the soundtrack for my own imagined construction of life, feminity and reality narrative. The title fits with this so much – as an adult I feel I had internalised these films and tried to live my life as one, then struggled when I discover it wasn’t – or else perhaps got caught up in an unhelpful script.
I am terribly interested in pulling things apart and inspecting them – and this project does just that. I lay on the floor of the gallery and watched the silent Vertigo on a small screen turning to watch the footage of the composer from time to time. And when I tried to leave the music kept pulling me back for more. It’s perfect that it should be in the huge boiler basement room and that it should be so dark. (And I loved it when it was just me in there and slightly resented the other visitors for intruding… sorry for being mean!)
https://www.tate.org.uk/visit/tate-modern/display/tanks/douglas-gordon
Artist: Nan Goldin, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1979-86)
I went to the Tate, primarily to see the Olafur Eliasson show, but in the end, found two other rooms far more satisfying. One of these was Nan Goldin’s Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1979-86). I first referenced Goldin’s project at the start of UVC when planning an essay; “I was going to discuss Nan Goldin and The Ballad of Sexual Dependency which was shown as a slide show as a well as being produced as a book. She’s really interesting to me and I like that her work grew out of the tail end of the Punk movement which has been linked to Dada, both movements utilising new technologies as they emerge – to question and subvert the status quo. I also loved the way in which the title would link back to my love of Brecht’s work, Threepenny Opera“.
Because I have seen or thought and mentioned Goldin often while studying I was immensely pleased to see the slideshow in full and in person. One of my ex-tutors said the Tate does seem to sterilise work and I wonder if that is unavoidable in this case – bringing an underground, anti-commodified piece into a highly funded gallery such as the Tate. I would very much like to have experienced it in a club in the 80s in NY where the slideshow was shown originally. The video below, where it was presented in Arles alongside live music by The Tiger Lillies (2009) who collaborated with Goldin may be the next best thing. The band’s style reflects the title’s Brechtian routes and they bring their own contemporary flavour to the soundtrack which you can listen to here (not sure how long that link will remain live as Goldin appears to be relatively robust about copyright infringement.)
Even so, I was extremely moved by the work and watched at all the way through. Like the people it depicts, the images are the antithesis of advertising ‘perfection’. And I wonder if Millenials who have grown up with phone-cameras appreciate Goldin’s energy and the alacrity with which she photographs everything. I don’t think they can possibly imagine how unusual that may have been in the 80s. (Recently I looked through some old CDs of images taken by my mother in the early 90s and noticed how much time and how many geographical miles there were between images. Like most of us nowadays she is prolific with her digital picture taking ). While trying to engage my son in something productive before the summer, I suggested he photograph his life which I had to assume wouldn’t be too challenging nowadays – he’s got a good eye and phone camera on him always. Eventually, he said, “Mum, you don’t know how hard it is to remember to ….Oh, hang on, of all the people you do know!” Yes, I do know but I hadn’t realised how challenging it would be for him. Goldin’s project is a passionate quest which only she could generate for herself. Despite the current social habit of incessant picture-taking, my son’s comment makes me appreciate Goldin’s commitment even more. It’s also interesting to see how Goldin values images that may be unlikely to published today on anyone’s social media showreel of perfection – even by people who aren’t thinking about traditionally considered ‘good-picture taking rules’.
Today when questions surrounding ethics, quite rightly, play an important role in any documentary project, it’s hard to know whether this work may have been made at all, or if so, in this way, despite Goldin being at the heart of the community. And as stated on the Tate site, they “now stand as a time capsule of a community and culture that would soon be lost due to the AIDS crisis.” (Allen, 2019) This, of course, adds to the rage, anguish, and desperate sadness the project contains. And might make us consider how we navigate ethics and judge those who breach evolving boundaries. (I am not in any way saying we should encourage or accept certain situations such as photographing and then promoting the rape of a child) but I am suggesting ethical concerns are fraught with complex questions and the fact Goldin is a woman taking some of these images adds to the complexity. Some stories need to/must be told, some situations should not go unrecorded – finding ways to do it can be difficult.)
I hope to return again.
https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/1651
Allen, A 2019 Nan Goldin, Tate Website, Available at: https://www.tate.org.uk/visit/tate-modern/display/nan-goldin (Accessed 3/9/19)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUCht5iYYK8
Artists: Walter and Zoniel
I was fortunate enough to have an opportunity to chat with collaborative artists, Walter and Zoniel recently. They work together using alternative processes to create images which are both conceptual and representative.
Here, saltwater prints are made with the actual sea water in the image:
https://walterandzoniel.weebly.com/the-nature-of-interdependence.html
Here, photographs of chairs burning in the darkest forests are printed on material which is created by pulping down the burnt chairs and turning it into paper. The light of the fire which illuminated the darkest forests where the images were made is truly captured in the print.
https://walterandzoniel.weebly.com/life-with.html
The pair have been working together for several years and their collaboration seems to have emerged out of a genuine relationship with came about organically. Their work is therefore uncompromised by any form of ‘blind-date’, contrived or engineered collaboration, the likes of which I’m beginning to have my doubts about. Collaboration is fashionable nowadays, but perhaps only as we admit that this is probably how many people always worked. I wonder if the couple would have been described as Walter AND Zoniel had they been making work in the same way at the beginning of last century.
It was interesting to hear from both of them separately. Walter was so enthusiastic as he described his journey from physics-major to artist, as he became obsessed with alternative processes. Initially, he had to write to the Eastman Gallery and ask for the collodion recipes as it wasn’t possible to obtain it ready-made here in the UK. (I suspect he may have had to play around with them too as chemicals react differently in different environments.) Mark Osterman and France Scully Osterman, the resident Kodak Eastman alternative process experts, who I have done a course with, gladly helped them. I think I recall them telling us about Walter, and there were apparently a few disagreements about what might be possible. When Walter suggested making large prints, they said it couldn’t be done as there were no big enough cameras, so he made one! There was a portable replica of his original construction at the venue and I was able to walk around inside it. Quite the opposite to our phones!
It was a good opportunity for me to think about the relationship between physics, material, and the digital, quantum world. I am, for now, firmly invested in the digital and committed to it – for me exploring the tensions between these different points is far more interesting than any regressive, romanticising about old processes – but I didn’t get that sense from the couple at all. They just seemed to be having the most fun. Their work was very beautiful and worth seeing when the opportunity arises.
Artists: John Clang – Being Together
Thanks to Dawn Langly for remembering John Clang for me – I was certain I’d kept a record of this work but couldn’t find it. I wanted to send it on to a group of people I have been working with via Pic London, as technology will be integral to how we are able to keep in touch, in much the same way I do with various OCA people.
Clang writes on his site “In this series, ” webcam was used to do live recording of my family in Singapore. The recording was then transmitted via Skype to New York City and projected onto my living space. This is how families, dis(membered) through time and space, can be re(membered) and made whole again through the use of a third space, a site that is able to reassemble them together within the photographic space that we call a family portrait.” (2010)
clangart.com/artwork/beingtogether.html
I am reminded of Virilio’s comments/arguments about the perils of making it possible to put time and space on top of each other in this way.
“Speed is violence” (45)
“The obscenity of technology” (46)
Virilio also speaks of heading towards worldwide consciousness. “the fragmentation of historical reality is the dawn(were still being metaphorical) of an identity, a worldwide consciousness.” (50)
(I was minded to think about Santiago’s theory of cognition and what Virilio might have made it – however, the idea of worldwide conscious consciousness, as I think Virilio describes, is rather different from the idea of Santiago’s theory of cognition. COgnition and consciousness are not the same thing at all. Although they do appear to be related. We, humans, have a symbolic system into which we can pour our cognition – thereby construct ideas and express ourselves. it distances us from our basest cognitive activities (unconscious drives))
“Living systems are cognitive systems, and living as a process is a process of cognition. This statement is valid for all organisms, with or without a nervous system”. This can be applied to the smallest system to the largest – i.e. the entire universe.)
I have written NB next to the following in my copy of Virilio’s Pure War (2008)
“At the same time it’s the death of intimacy. All the reflection of these last years on an exploded ‘schizophrenic’ model of subjectivity corresponds to the great aesthetic of the collage. The ego is not continuous, it’s made up of a series of little deaths and partial identities which don’t come back together; or which only manage to come back to together by paying the price of anxiety” (51)
Ref:
Virillio P & Lotringer S, 2008 Pure War, Pasadena CA, Semiotext(e)
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