SelfSelector

‘Tell me: how long could you spend looking at this sticker? And at this other one? Do you remember? And this little detail over here? Years…centuries! A whole morning…! It’s impossible to know… You were in full flight, ecstasy. Suspended in a pause. Raptured! Look!’¹

The opening sentences of this text come from the film Arrebato (Rapture), by Iván Zulueta (1979). In this scene the character played by Will Moore conveys to the one played by Eusebio Poncela the tremendous power of fascination (or ‘rapture’) that an image charged with certain meanings and personal memories may have over its beholder. This fetishism, a celebration of the semiotic power of images and of the technology which records and plays them, is something which David Ferrando Giraut shares with the recently deceased Zulueta, an essential reference point for him for various reasons which we shall explore below.

The work of Ferrando Giraut (Negreira, Spain, 1978) captures the tension experienced by an artist with a Romantic spirit who must create his work in a highly technological, postmodern and post-structuralist environment. And when I say ‘Romantic spirit’ I do so with a full awareness of the clichés associated with this 19^th-century art movement. If one could synthesize the three major themes in the work of Ferrando Giraut, they would be death, desire and memory. Essential themes in the works that make up this exhibition: Journeys End in Lovers Meetings (2010), The Fantasist (2011) and Loss (2011).

The image, objet petit a  

But death here is something far more complex, with many more layers of meaning beyond the idea of “ceasing to exist.” For Ferrando Giraut death is a powerful symbol, an exquisite metaphor to speak of man’s drive – of his own drive, above all – to freeze changing realities into fixed images:

“When an object or idea seduces us, in an immediate and unconscious way we turn it into an image, which allows us to grasp and assimilate it. When what seduces us is a person, the strategy is the same: we turn it into an image, whether mental or physical (through a photo or any other type of recording). In this way we can reconstruct that person exactly as we wish. Thus can we also remember the person when they are not present. The problem is that, in this way, this live and organic person is converted into a fixed image, something inorganic. It is as if we were in some way killing the person as an autonomous and constantly-changing entity, turning a life, which is something organic, into an image, which is inorganic.”

David Ferrando Giraut²

The “death” which cinema inflicts is also portrayed by Iván Zulueta in Rapture, where the camera is, metaphorically, a vampire: an entity which absorbs and denaturalizes the protagonist, converting his life into images to the point where his life disappears, exhausted. That fatal attraction to images – symptom of a death drive³ – as well as a collision of two cinematographic genres, horror movies and arthouse cinema, also draws these two visual artists together.

The dead woman, so present in the work of Ferrando Giraut, thus takes the shape of a metaphor for the image. And the image, in turn, is revealed as a metaphor of desire, perhaps even as the very essential object of desire (Lacan’s objet petit a⁴) of an artist for whom the image, more than a mere instrument through which to work and present his anxieties, is the anxiety itself, his dark fetish. The image/death binomial, so present in the work of cinema theorists such as Laura Mulvey and Raymond Bellour, tends to be associated with psychoanalytic theories, in this case the aforementioned Freudian concept of the “death drive” being particularly pertinent: the drive towards death, self-destruction and the return to an inorganic state.

Returning to the previous idea, a cinema fetishist is, according to Christian Metz, “one who is fascinated with what cinema is capable of doing, and also by its technological tools.”⁵  And, indeed, a reflection on the use of the image and sound recording technologies is another of the cornerstones of Ferrando Giraut’s work.

Recording technologies: ways of seeing, ways of remembering

The idea of ghostliness or immateriality as something inherent to recording technologies is fundamental to Ferrando Giraut’s conceptual lexicon. It is an intimate and indissoluble association, with a special predilection for the record player and its inseparable vinyl record.

Already in works such as Road Movie (Perpetuum Mobile) (2008), we see how a video piece is combined with the presence of obsolete technologies, creating a tension of signifiers and offering a far more complex interpretation of the works. Road Movie presents an accident on a small roadway in the artist’s hometown (Negreira, Galicia) in a disturbing and obsessive fashion, through a dense and suspended temporal space reminiscent of the films of Tarkovsky. A vitrine contains the work Storyboard, a series of vinyl whose covers feature different scenes of cars in wild settings, creating narratives about their degradation. The vinyl seem to anticipate the future, portending what we will later see. In his seminal novel Crash J.G. Ballard created an ode to the fetishist power of the automobile over the bourgeois citizen, with the traffic accident as the maximum sexual expression of that perverse relationship. For Ferrando Giraut the choice of the accident represents a question of fetishism too, but in this case it is linked to cinematographic conventions and to the symbol of the traumatic event, of Romantic implications. This idea is reinforced by the beautiful and ominous landscape and by the presence of the vinyl, analogical (or indexical) and obsolete containers in a world that is veering towards the digital.

This obsession with vinyl as a paradigm of technological ruin repeats itself again in subsequent works such as Ruin Builder (2008), where audiences are invited to play an album on which an eerie voice makes us conscious, in a calculated meta discourse, of the temporal fragmentation experienced between the moment of the recording and the moment we listen to it. On a nearby wall another collection of vinyl, in this case referencing architectural ruins, adds to this sensation of decay.

In Journeys End in Lovers Meetings each and every one of the pieces is brimming over with technological ruin. The film work was shot in 16 mm, while the collection of Polaroids of kisses from horror movies speaks to us of a dead, and later revived, photographic format. Even the record player, where a broken Kate Bush vinyl is playing, is vintage. Journeys End… can be interpreted as an elegy to the technology which the artist grew up with, and to the audiovisual products with which he built his understanding of the world, of love, and of the image.

In Loss, his most recent work, we are shown a selection of ads for image and sound recorders and players that were widely used between the 60s and the 80s. Nearby, we find another record player, now almost a trademark item, but this time hidden in a coffin-shaped piece of furniture that Ferrando Giraut copied from a similar one he grew up with at home. The persistent appearance of obsolete technological objects reveals a nostalgic vision of bygone elements of the artist’s life which, as he himself recognizes, form an essential part of his creative process. The repetition of strategies throughout different pieces, in addition to the seriality of the elements contained (series of vinyl, ads, record players) may be understood as a subjective use of the archive: accumulations of objects and documents that speak to us of the societies which produced and consumed them.

The sociological aspect of these ‘archives’ – belonging to the mass media – offer Ferrando Giraut the possibility of taking these personal questions over to a universal level, laying down bridges for the audience, using a system of signs which is recognizable for the vast majority.

“My understanding of an artist’s work is that, although he has to be conscious of the history of Art and its traditions, he also has to be capable of creating and offering something new, related to a personal point of view on the world. My work arises from personal anxieties and emotions, but I also seek common ground with the audience. Themes such as death and desire are universal questions that affect everyone, but nobody has been able to fully explain our relation to them. I think that this tension between the unknown and the will for knowledge creates a favourable place for communication.”

David Ferrando Giraut⁶

Nostalgia: textures from the past and invented memories

We have already mentioned the important role which nostalgia plays in the work of Ferrando Giraut. For him it represents a powerful mechanism which functions on two separate but connected levels. On one hand there is intimate nostalgia, related to memory and individual remembrances. On the other there is a kind of collective nostalgia in which personal memories meld with the visual and mental tracks left by a sort of cultural memory – especially during the last century, due to mass media and the cinema. Thus, the human need to experience films and stories is linked to the process of generating and reliving memories.

In the work of Ferrando Giraut – and this is especially patent in works such as Natural Scenes (2006), Journeys End in Lovers Meetings and Loss– the involuntary memory (so vividly described by Proust in the passage on the muffin in In Search of Lost Time) may prompt us to conjure up our own memories, but may also evoke in us “learned” memories such as, for example, the landscapes and heroines of Twin Peaks, triggering in the artist memories of his adolescence in the lush forests of Galicia, where an encounter with Laura Palmer might not have been so surprising, but something desired.

The writer and film director Alain Robbe-Grillet – author, along with Alain Resnais of the script of the masterful study of memory entitled Last Year in Marienbad⁷, as well as of exquisite visual essays on eroticism and the masculine gaze – is another staunch defender of the organic and creative potential of human memory:

“Memory belongs to the sphere of the imagination. Human memory is not like a computer, which stores things. Memory is part of the imaginative process, at the same level as what we understand as invention. In other words, inventing a character or recalling something real is part of the same process. This is very clear in the work of Proust: for him there is no difference between the experience one lives – his relationship with his mother and others – and his characters. They represent exactly the same kind of truth.”

Alain Robbe-Grillet⁸

This involuntary memory is, again, the “rapture” sparked by the cards in the scene from Rapture with which this essay begins. This being “frozen in a complete pause,” in a suspended time, is inseparable from the alchemy of image and memory, produced by the human (organic) memory’s encounter with the recorded image (inorganic memory).

Horror films and mad love

In the visual and cognitive world created by Ferrando Giraut terror and love go hand in hand. His pieces at times borrow signifiers from horror films to explore questions (both aesthetic and content-related) more typical of arthouse cinema. These themes of love and desire are the bridge which the artist employs to unite the two genres, as they are fundamental questions in both. In the first part of the essay we have seen the use of the iconography of the dead woman as a sign of the act of image making. But the woman, even when dead, also represents the “beloved” in the narratives which Ferrando Giraut presents in two of the exhibition’s pieces.

Journey’s End was developed at a difficult time of personal transition full of uncertainty, and this is why the strategy of repetition is employed in the two feminine characters, and why one of them is “murdered,” thereby becoming inaccessible and rendering change impossible.  In Loss, nevertheless, the heroine is unique. Her presence, or absence, to be more precise, permeates every part of the piece, appearing in different objects and characters.

“Man […] shall discover, in all the faces of those women, a single face: the last face loved. And how many times I have noticed that, under totally disparate appearances, an exceptional trait resurged, along with an attitude which I thought had been wrenched from me forever. However alarming this hypothesis strikes me, it could be that in this territory replacing one person with another, or several with several, leads to a clear definition of the loved one’s physical aspect, through a growing subjectivization of desire. The beloved, then, is she who features a series of particular qualities, considered more attractive than others, appreciated separately, successively, in all the beings who have loved each other before.”

André Breton⁹

André Breton wrote his treatise on mad and surreal love during the period in which he fell in love and began a relationship with Jacquelin Lamba, who would become his second wife. This quote evokes the sensation of ubiquity which the beloved in question acquires: the author sees her everywhere, every woman looks like her, but only one, Jacqueline, actually is. With a less hyperbolic and certainly more melancholy tone, Loss also explores amorous obsession and the images which said obsession conjures up.

Though the loss to which the title refers is multiple in nature (including episodes involving family, friends and even colleagues) the essential loss leading up to the idea behind the film is that of unrequited love, or perhaps unrealized love. Loss does not deal with the loss of contact with the loved object, but with the acceptance or assumption of the circumstances and contexts which determine that relationship, rendering it unattainable and therefore producing and thereby producing a painful but in some way enjoyable melancholy. Lacan dubbed this pleasurable pain jouissance¹⁰. In his recent study of Freud, Lacan and Barthes, Margaret Iversen for the first time introduces the idea of “anti-mourning” to refer to this intellectual process whereby the emotional wound is consciously kept open, as a catalyst for the creative process.¹¹

One of Ferrando Giraut’s strategies, as we have seen, consists of locating this “amorous-creative” process in the context of the horror genre. This manoeuvre is clearly evident, for example, in Journeys End in Lovers Meetings, in which complicated emotional narratives are linked through the appropriation and repetition of  romantic dialogues from horror movies such as Salem’s Lot, Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street.  The setting is a misty forest in which, confirming our fears as audience members, the cadaver of a murdered woman appears. But when it does, rather than sparking terror, the emotion which arises is that of tenderness, as if we were witness to a heartfelt appeal for attention, an entreaty not to be abandoned in the depths of oblivion. The dialogues, exactly the same as those spoken by the living feminine and masculine characters, take on a special pathos in the “silent” (or silenced) version of the cadaver, contributed to by Nigel Yang’s soundtrack, a progressive and highly psychological piece of music.

Ferrando Giraut confesses to feeling drawn to horror movies in a visceral and intuitive way ever since he was a boy. In his view, there is no intellectual artifice in that somewhat irrational attraction towards a genre which has always been considered to be mass entertainment. And yet, if we scratch a bit below the surface, a great number of congruous aesthetic and theoretical links can be drawn to the artist. First of all, we might say that the horror film is the contemporary manifestation of the Gothic novel, fulfilling a relatively similar cultural function. The Gothic has always maintained a close relationship with Romanticism, for example, in the way that both movements see Nature as a sublime and ominous setting. Both currents also share the idea of love with a tragic destiny, and so all the more desirable.

In addition, for Ferrando Giraut the experience of the sublime, that “pause” or state of suspension, is visually associated with nature, above all with the landscapes of Galicia where he lived until after his adolescence, and to which he often returns in his work, as in Loss, whose outside scenes are shot in the forests and by the rivers he roamed as a boy.

“The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature, when those causes operate most powerfully, is astonishment: and astonishment is that state of the soul in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror…No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear. For fear being an apprehension of pain or death, it operates in a manner that resembles actual pain. Whatever therefore is terrible, with regard to sight, is sublime too.”

Edmund Burke¹²

This investigation by Burke was the foundation of Freud’s idea of the uncanny, a term he coined in order to express the sensations of fear and existential vertigo produced by a patient’s repressed emotions, which were freed in an encounter with something which appears to be familiar – a childhood memory or a mental association with something known – but isn’t at all. The two concepts of the sublime and the uncanny are found, without a doubt, in the work of David Ferrando Giraut, who not only plays with present emotions but also with past memories – his childhood landscapes, his family’s Super 8 movies, or the horror genre he grew up with – to create that state of pause, both in himself and in the audience.

Despite these points of reference, however, Ferrando Giraut is opposed to a fatalistic idea of art and life. For him, art always has a social and positive use, insofar as it is to be used to come to know and improve the lives of both artists and their public:

“I am interested in sentiment as the starting point for reflection. For example, Romanticism and the Gothic, two movements akin to my sensibility, share the idea of ‘fatalism’, that things cannot be controlled or changed. But my point of view towards that fatalism has changed. Now, perhaps due to my own psychoanalytic experience, I am interested in exploring how these states of anxiety or desire can bring about understanding, and how that understanding can change one’s emotional response, altering the course of events. In this sense my work, although it does not seem so on an aesthetic level, has become much brighter.”

David Ferrando Giraut¹³

This essay was published in the catalogue of David Ferrando Giraut‘s exhibition ‘The Fantasist’, held at MACUF from October 2011 to February 2012.

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1 Sentences said by Will More’s character to Eusebio Poncela’s character in the film Arrebato (Rapture) by Iván Zulueta (1979).

2 David Ferrando Giraut in conversation with the author. London, August of 2011.

3 The concept of the ‘death drive’ was formulated by Sigmund Freud in his essay Beyond The Pleasure Principle (1920). The death drive, also called Thanatos, finds its opposite in Eros, which symbolizes the impulse to live.

4 In the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan the object petit a symbolizes the patient’s unattainable object of desire.

5 Metz, Ch.: Photography and Fetish, an essay published in the journal October. Fall of 1985.

6 David Ferrando Giraut in conversation with the author. London, August of 2011.

7 Alain Robbe Grillet was a novelist and a proponent of the nouveau roman or ‘new novel’, a depersonalized style of literary fiction characterized by the almost aseptic description of situations, places and objects. Robbe-Grillet collaborated with Alain Resnais on the film Last Year at Marienbad (1961), which marked the start of his career as a film director.

8 Alain Robbe-Grillet in an interview with Sasha Guppy, published in the spring of 1986 in the magazine Paris Review.

9 Breton, A.: Mad Love. University of Nebraska Press, 1988. First published in French (L’Amour Fou) in 1937.

10 The transgressive act is central to the Lacanian idea of jouissance. This particular type of painful or sinister pain comes from doing something prohibited, subverting some principle of symbolic order.

11 Iversen, M.: Beyond Pleasure: Freud, Lacan, Barthes. Penn State University Press, 2007.

12 Burke, E.: A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Oxford University Press, 1990. First published in 1757.

13 David Ferrando Giraut in conversation with the author. London, August of 2011.